Mangled English

Part 5 of a Potentially Infinite Series

As we understand it, sir, there are indeed other options, but we suspect that they wouldn’t interest you either.

Mangled English

Part 4 of a Potentially Infinite Series

 Please be quite what? Quite charming? Quite loud? Quite drunk, and singing
quite off-key in slurred German at two a.m.? Yeah, we can manage that.

And we shouldn’t even bother pointing out the redundancy of “surrounding neighbors.”

Drunk History: Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison

“More Drunk History!” you said, a little too loudly and with an awful lot of slurring.

“You’ve got it,” we replied, albeit a bit reluctantly. We wish to make it clear that we do not in any way condone drinking, onscreen vomiting, or learning. But hey, what the hell, here you go anyway:

Drunk History vol. 6 w/ John C. Reilly & Crispin Glover from Drunk History

Drunk History: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass

We at Bowling in the Dark take some pride in our 100% semi-original content. While other bloggers may shamelessly regurgitate other people’s material, we do our best to pretend it all comes straight from us. That’s the Bowling in the Dark Guarantee.¹

Sometimes, though, our hectic work schedule gets to be too much, and we find ourselves with nothing of our own to post. Unlike other websites’ jokes, manufactured by the thousand in dismal third-world sweatshops, each one of our jokes is painstakingly hand-crafted by dedicated sub-Saharan African artisans in clean and sanitary working conditions, and while we love their work, sometimes they struggle to keep up with demand.

So while we wait for our latest shipment of attempts at humor to arrive, please enjoy this American History lesson narrated by a drunk person, courtesy of Funny or Die.

Drunk History Vol. 5 w/ Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle & Zooey Deschanel from Will Ferrell

NOTES
1. Guarantees not legally binding in this dimension.

Mangled English

Part 3 of a Potentially Infinite Series

We’re pleased to see that these good folks are willing to look after their premise, and hope they’re just as willing to protect their conclusion.

 

 

You’re Quoting Shakespeare, and You Probably Don’t Even Know It

 

 

you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise—why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then—to give the devil his due—if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then—by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts!—it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare. 

—Bernard Levin, from The Story of English

A Sincere Apology to our European Friends

It has been brought to our attention that our previous post, “How to Correctly Negotiate a Roundabout,” with its clear and narrow focus on distinctly American right-side driving, may inadvertently insult our vast European readership, many of whom are described provincially¹ over here as driving on the “wrong side of the road.”

We meant no offense, and sincerely apologize if any was taken. We here at Bowling in the Dark are big fans of Europe—“where the history comes from”²—and certainly don’t want to alienate some 830 million potential readers, even if most of them probably speak some sort of funny foreign language instead of American.³

To make things right with our potential European readers, and also to the kind of Americans who insist on being easily offended on behalf of complete strangers, we have rewritten “How to Correctly Negotiate a Roundabout” to be more inclusive and international, not only redesigning the graphics from the ground up—a staggeringly expensive process, we might add—but also carefully translating the text into a tongue more familiar to a Continental audience. It is with pride, then, that we present to you

How to Correctly Negotiate a Roundabout: European Version

Wir können uns nur ein paar Deutsches Wörter von unseren Sekundärschulenklassen erinnern. Heutzutage sprechen wir nur einen begrenzten aber nützlichen Dialekt bekannt als Amerikanischer Film Deutsch, der besteht hauptsächlich von Phrasen wie—zum Beispiel—“Ruhe, bitte! Wir sind in einen Unterseeboot,” “Autsch! Kugeln von Amerikanische Gewehre!” und “Warum sieht dieser Archäologe wie Han Solo aus?”

Vielleicht sind Sie auch bewusst, dass Deutsch auf der richtigen Seite von der Straße, anstatt der linken Seite, und treiben, dass unsere Übersetzung dieser Spalte in Deutsch besonders nutzlos ist. Wir hoffen, dass Sie finden dieses lustige; wir sicher gemacht hat, aber unser Humor ist berüchtigt verdächtig.

Sowieso hier ist die Bilder, die wir Ihnen früher versprochen haben. Sie würden nicht glauben, wie hart es war, diese zu schaffen. Für alle Sie nicht-boshaft unfähig dadraußen, das Kegeln im Dunkeln Grafikdesign Abteilung überreicht stolz den Folgenden zwei-Teil, detailliertes Anweisungshandbuch auf wie richtig, ein Verkehr umständlich zu verhandeln:

1.

 2.

3.

Das ist alles.

NOTES

1. But, of course, accurately.

2. 2002, Eddie Izzard, Dress To Kill. How about that—after eleven months, finally a legitimate footnote. I’ll be damned.

3. Our friends from the United Kingdom, of course, speak a somewhat comprehensible version of American. Philologists believe their dialect descends from the style of American spoken by migrants to England from Australia, which is, of course, the Forty-Eighth State, just southwest of California.

How to Correctly Negotiate a Roundabout

Or,

 If This is Actually Informative, How Did You Get Your License in the First Place?

One of the main benefits of the traffic roundabout—also known in some places as the traffic circle, rotary, or those goddamned things they have in France—is that it often replaces a four-way stop intersection, thus decreasing congestion by allowing drivers to maintain speed through the intersection when safe, and calling for slowing or stopping only when traffic dictates.

The roundabout is a relatively new concept in some parts of the United States, dating back only to 1990, so I suppose I should allow for the possibility that after barely more than 175,000 hours’ worth of practice, perhaps American drivers just haven’t quite gotten the hang of it.

The other option, of course, is that the kind of folks who don’t work their way through the roundabout properly do so because they’re self-important assholes who find that the five to six seconds they save far outweigh (1) endangering other drivers’ lives in a head-on collision and (2) ensuring that every other driver on the road realizes that you’re a self-important asshole. I’m inclined to bet on this particular possibility, but Napoleon Bonaparte (unless it was somebody totally different) once advised us to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence,” and that seems like good healthy advice.

So for all you non-malicious incompetents out there, the Bowling in the Dark Graphic Design Department proudly presents the following two-part, in-depth  instruction manual on how to correctly negotiate a traffic roundabout:

1.

2.

That is all.

Mangled English

Part 1 of a Potentially Infinite Series

“You don’t want to be a draft pick that should have did something but never did nothing.”

—John Wall, University of Kentucky basketball player

While we admire John Wall’s apparent dedication to living up to his lofty status as the first overall pick in 2010’s NBA draft, it bothers us a bit that one of the somethings that he clearly should have did was to pay better attention during English class—especially the parts that dealt with verb agreement and double negatives.

It bothers us more, though, that if John Wall has even a middling NBA career—and from what we’ve read, he’ll probably be a star—his fifteen to twenty years’ worth of newspaper quotes, postgame radio and TV interviews, and locker-room or mid-game Twitter postings¹ will likely allow him to have more of an impact on American English than all his dedicated, learned, and heartbroken English teachers (past, present, and future) put together.

Sigh.

We don’t follow college or professional basketball, so for all we know, Wall is a bright, erudite young man who’s merely gotten off to a rough start as an interviewee. We suppose it’s better to be optimistic than to wonder if  perhaps Wall’s never doing nothing is the best we can hope for.

NOTE

1. We realize that Twitter postings are generally referred to as “tweets,” but for the time being, we’re going to refuse to use that word. First of all, it’s a stupid word regardless of context—stupider even than “cuddle.” Second, Twitter may well be the most pointless and narcissistic activity in the history of the human race—even more so than blogging, although the competition is closer than we care to admit—and we don’t want to show it any inadvertent support by adopting its silly vocabulary.

Guam: The Tipping Timebomb of the Pacific

“I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a Congress.”

—John Adams¹

The U.S. House of Representatives’ own Hank Johnson of Georgia recently staggered into the spotlight when, while speaking as part of the House Armed Services Committee, he announced his concerns about a possible military buildup on Guam, and its potential negative effects on that island’s stability.

Now, the influx of a large number of troops and their various support services and dependents would be a legitimate concern, if we were talking about potential environmental, economic, and sociological effects on an island as small as Guam—which is, as Johnson put it, only seven miles wide at its “least widest point.”²

Unfortunately, though, it’s not this environmental, economic, and sociological baloney that keeps Rep. Johnson up at night, but rather “[his] fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.” If you’re the last person on Earth to hear about this story,³ see it for yourself below. The payoff starts at about 1:16, and please also note Admiral Robert Willard’s simple, gracefully respectful response, which is worthy of both admiration and praise:




Johnson’s office later released a statement—perhaps best defined as a nimble but ultimately failed salvage operation—claiming that the Representative was speaking metaphorically, that adding so many troops and dependents could bring the island past “a tipping point [that] would adversely affect the island’s fragile ecosystem and overburden its already overstressed infrastructure.”

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest expert on the English language, but I’m an avid reader with an English degree and a more than passing familiarity with similes, metaphors, and symbolic use of words. And if Hank Johnson was speaking metaphorically about Guam capsizing, I will literally eat my hat.⁴

Whatever Hank Johnson’s politics are, I don’t care to know them. I don’t know whether his personal life is squeaky-clean and admirable or sordid and abominable, and as long as it doesn’t keep him from doing his job right, I’m not convinced it’s any of my business. What I do care about, though—what I feel is my business—is that he managed to get elected to one of the more exclusive and influential jobs in the country without knowing one of the fundamental differences between an island and a lily pad. That leads be to believe that there have to be other yawning chasms in his knowledge of how the world is put together, and that would affect how well he can do his job.

In case you’re not sure of the difference yourself, we at Bowling in the Dark paid famed director James Cameron $750,000 to create an interactive 3-D visual representation of the most relevant difference. Here is what he sent us:
 

Don’t get me wrong—I distinctly remember a time in my life where I genuinely believed that islands floated on top of the ocean. I recall thinking that the fundamental difference between Australia and, say, Hawaii or Guam was not its sheer size but that it did reach all the way to the bottom of the ocean, and other islands didn’t. I also remember learning that I was wrong about this—and at the time, I wasn’t a member of Congress. I was in grade school.

It seems fair to admit that there probably isn’t any regulation requiring public servants to know that islands are anchored to the ocean floor—but I figured it was the kind of thing that you just can’t not know, like how to breathe, or what word people use to describe a car.⁵ For Hank Johnson to be elected and to continue serving with such an apparent and embarrassing gap in his education is not just his failure or the American education system’s failure, but also a failure of voters to impose a reasonable standard on their elected officials.

(Incidentally, it has been suggested that at the time of his statement, Johnson may have been struggling with side effects caused by medication he’d been taking to treat Hepatitis C. However, according to Newsweek, Johnson had finished his treatments by the time of his Guam statement. So it appears that Johnson’s comments were not the result of an altered mental state caused by prescription drugs. We’re very happy about this, not only because we’re glad he’s feeling better, but also because, as the Newsweek article put it, “[we] may now resume mocking his Guam comments” without feeling like we’re mocking a man’s struggles with a very real illness.⁶)

There’s a saying that “every man rises to the level of his own incompetence,” and as if to illustrate this point, it was recently announced that Representative Hank Johnson not only remains on the House Armed Services Committee (among others), but also has been informed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he’s been added to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. I don’t know a whole lot about the latter committee, but I’m pretty sure that the House Armed Services Committee is a fairly important one. If we’re going to keep giving this guy responsibilities, that’s fine, but shouldn’t we consider awarding him something with a little less impact, like, say, the House Committee on Teddy Bear and Hello Kitty Affairs?

It’s almost certainly unfair to judge people, politicians or otherwise, for only the most colossally stupid things they’ve said at their most profoundly embarrassing moments.⁷ So I admit that I may be a bit out of line for assuming that Representative Hank Johnson is a dumb guy, simply because he said something really, really stupid that was caught on video. Even smart people make mistakes, some of them very embarrassing, bad, naughty, and/or destructive.

But come on, can you really tell me that a smart person would make this kind of mistake? I don’t believe that. Is it too much to ask the voters in this country—specifically Georgia, in this case—to elect somebody with a basic grasp on how the world is put together? Is it too much to expect that if we’re going to hire people to run this country, wouldn’t it help if they were, you know, smart? God help us all if we continue to elect people just like us. Shouldn’t we be electing people that are smarter than people just like us?

NOTES

1. I haven’t been able (or even tried) to verify whether John Adams ever actually said or wrote this, but William Daniels said it as Adams in 1776—quite possibly the single best movie musical about the American Revolution made in the 1970s—and that’s good enough for me. Also, my apologies to any Bowling in the Dark readers who are disgraces, lawyers, or both.

2. A crack team of Bowling in the Dark linguists have been working around the clock for weeks to figure out just what this means. Results so far have been inconclusive.

3. In keeping with our theme of being well behind this times, this happened in late March and I’m just now getting around to commenting on it. So when I wrote that this happened “recently,” I’m speaking in cosmic terms, rather than in internet terms.

4. That is, I will literally eat a metaphorical hat. Metaphorically.

5. That word is “car.”

6. And we will. We sincerely wish him many long years of good health, but we just as sincerely hope that his surprising misunderstanding of extremely basic geology doesn’t reflect similar misunderstandings of other subjects important to our elected officials, such as law, physics, geography, math, the Constitution, or the theory of evolution. To name a few.
7. Although this hasn’t stopped folks from doing it to Dan Quayle and Al Gore for years now, even going to far as to give them credit for all sorts of stupid things they’d never said.

Did You Know?

 
Forget what you may have heard from astrophysicists or know-it-alls about neutron stars or black holes. The heaviest substance in the known universe—to be found not out in some distant galaxy, but right here on planet Earth—is James Hetfield’s right hand.

Coming in at a close second place is James Hetfield’s weird mutton-chop/mustache combo, circa early 1990s.

A Humble Request from the Nervous Guy in the Car in Front of You

Hi there.

I know plenty of people who tend to talk with their hands. I don’t do it myself, but it doesn’t bother me; I see it all the time. In fact, the future Mrs. Some Guy does it pretty often, and it can be really entertaining and even (in her case, at least) awfully endearing.

However, if you can’t help but talk with your hands while you’re on your cell phone, maybe you shouldn’t use your phone while you’re driving. Because from what I can tell from my nervous glances into my rear-view mirror, the only thing keeping you in your lane is the good work done by the dude who must have aligned your tires not too long ago. For future reference, “hands-free” refers to a kind of cell phone you can buy, not to your steering wheel. Thank you for your time, and best of luck sorting things out, soon or someday, with your insurance company.

Is Is What Is Is

The unusually long drought between my last column and this one—brought on by technical computer difficulties that, to some degree, are still being ironed out—has given me the opportunity to ponder deeply about the myriad of problems plaguing our nation, our culture, and the broader world, and to focus on my own role in making the world a better place.

Luckily for me, though, that opportunity was quickly and utterly ignored. I didn’t ponder deeply about diddly-squat. Deep thinking is hard work, better left to people who can actually handle it. I’m better suited to shallow thought, the kind that lends itself to TV sitcoms, fart jokes, and making fun of people who probably don’t deserve it.¹

In my regrettably extended time off from Bowling in the Dark, with my hours upon hours freed up for deepless thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion (reached when I wasn't searching online for audio and video drivers I couldn’t name for hardware I couldn’t identify) that the most difficult-to-understand word in the English language is is.

This may seem a little silly to you now, but stick with me, it’ll get much stupider. No other word since supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (which, if spoken softly—according to expert linguists and chimney sweeps—can have a hynpocious effect) has led to so much consternation and confusion as the wily, deceptive, mystical is.

Exhibit A: “The thing is, is . . .”

I won’t speak for anybody else—no matter how much I’d like to—but I’ve been hearing this strange little verbal fart more often lately than I used to. I can’t figure out whether the speaker has lost track of the first is or the second, but nobody seems to notice that they’re obviously redundant. Re-arranged into the form of a question, Jeopardy-style, this statement becomes “what is the thing is?” which doesn’t qualify as grammatical even for Yoda.² Do me a favor: next time you hear this, please correct the speaker immediately and harshly, even if he’s the keynote speaker at your annual board meeting. Your willingness to sacrifice your job for good grammar will be duly noted.

Exhibit B: “It is what it is.”

While I haven’t studied this scientifically, it seems like I most often hear this bit of nonsense coming from professional athletes who probably don’t realize they’re not actually saying anything at all. The statement basically cancels itself out of existence; it’s as informative as saying that all bachelors are unmarried men, or Napoleon’s white horse was a horse.³ Stating that “it isn’t what it is,” while as logically impossible as saying “the Oakland Raiders will make the playoffs someday,” would at least be an interesting start to a discussion, rather than an admission that one has nothing intelligent to say. It can’t possibly be anything other than what it is. I suppose I should probably give pro athletes a bit of a pass for this. For good reason, they’re not generally known for their deep thinking (although this does little to deter them from talking about anything and everything at great length).⁴ Pro athletes are better known (for example) for their willingness to change their names to their jersey numbers . . . in a language they obviously don’t know how to speak, so maybe we should focus our efforts towards preventing things like “it is what it is” from crossing over into the general population.  

Exhibit C: “It’s it.”

And, of course, Exhibit B begs the question: if it is what it is, what is it? While philosophers/rap-metal pioneers Faith No More explored this question to epic lengths in 1990, not only could they not come to a definitive conclusion, but they ended up seemingly running in circles: It’s it. What is it? It’s it. What is it? The band was able to determine, through dogged research, that even if it can be felt, seen, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted, it doesn’t matter anyway, because the speed at which it occurs will render it impossible for you to understand. The mysterious “it” also apparently knocks you off your feet—suggesting the possibility that it is some kind of explosive, or perhaps a kangaroo with boxing gloves. Since the late 1990s, however, Faith No More has been silent on the issue.   

Exhibit D: Ayn Rand.

The novelist and verbal diarrheticist’s Atlas Shrugged—a book that, to borrow a phrase from Futurama’s robot devil, is as lousy as it is brilliant—spent around 540,000 words and 1,168 pages describing her philosophy of objectivism, a fundamental part of which could be summed up by the very pithy and obvious phrase “A is A.” Seriously, that’s three words. Three. Or, if you want to get technical, a single character—repeated twice—and one word. It somehow takes Rand another 539,997 words to explain, mostly by way of long-winded speeches by characters with no idea how English is spoken on this planet, what “A is A” means and why it matters.  

Exhibit E: A guy we actually elected President.

While George W. Bush is probably most folks’ go-to president for examples of mangling the English language, this isn’t who I’m talking about at the moment. It was that other guy:

Yes, you heard that (and probably remember it) correctly: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” That’s Bill Clinton—described by supporters, the disinterested, and even many of his detractors as a brilliant guy—desperately trying to suggest, on the air and in front of any number of people with recording devices, that there’s more than one meaning to the word “is.” Dude—ahem, I mean Mister President—if it weren’t several years too late to make a difference, I’d suggest that you stop before you embarrass yourself. Put quite simply, is = is. Or less mathematically, is is is. There’s already a word in place for what isn’t is—that word is isn’t.

So if the most powerful guy in the most powerful nation on Earth can’t comprehend the meaning of the word “is”—or even if he’s merely playing dumb because he didn’t have the sac to admit that he cheated and lied to approximately 260,000,000 people, and got caught—what chance to the rest of us, mere shallow-thinkers or millionaire athletes, really have? Is there any hope but to go with the flow, and admit that the thing is is what the thing is is?

God, I hope so. Just typing that out right now gave me a tiny little brain aneurysm.

NOTES
1. The good news for them is that they have something like a ten in six billion chance of ever knowing I’m making fun of them.
2. Although actually, when you get right down to it, Yoda’s pattern of speech, while sometimes a bit hard to follow (and, in the more recent movies, a bit forced, so to speak), is pretty consistently grammatical. Yoda, you have taught us all so much.
3. No shit! I literally couldn’t make something like this up.
4. Which makes them a lot like movie stars, except that for some reason we’re willing to believe—or at least somebody is willing to believe—that movie stars can occasionally be smart. How else to explain Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough?

Knowledge is Power

One of the many intriguing observations Carl Sagan makes in his bestselling 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is that slaves in the pre-Civil War United States of America were not permitted to learn to read. This in itself is not exactly a revelation—I imagine that it’s more or less common knowledge—but how Sagan relates this fact to modern-day America, where most of us were told from a very young age that knowledge is power, is keenly insightful and more than a little disconcerting. As Sagan put it, quoting Frederick Douglass along the way, this

was a most revealing rule: Slaves were to remain illiterate. In the Antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. “[To] make a contented slave,” [Douglass] wrote, “it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.” This is why slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reason and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.

Now, it’s probably fair to say that being fined or whipped—or even both—isn’t as harsh a penalty as being, say, sent to prison or killed (or both), but it’s also fair to say that these punishments are exceedingly vicious given that they were meted out for teaching someone to read, an activity so contemptibly familiar that distressingly large numbers of unashamed Americans don’t even bother with it anymore.

According to a poll released in 2007 by Associated Press–Ipsos, 27% of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2006. Now, reading at a pace of a single page per day would be enough to get through an average-length book in a year. That’s less than five hundred words a day—maybe five minutes’ worth of work for a slow reader—but roughly 80 million Americans either couldn’t do that or didn’t bother to try.¹

Granted, this statistic applies only to book-reading, so it’s very possible that some or all of those 80 million people read something else over the course of 2006. American readers have thousands of magazines to choose from and at least five or six surviving newspapers to read, not to mention millions of street signs, cereal boxes, and insightful billboards.

And some of this decline in book-reading could be attributed to the Internet, where the staggering volume of free and easily accessible reading material at least somewhat compensates, one could argue, for its dubious relevance, quality, or sanity. But be honest: do you really think that folks who don’t read books (or magazines, newspapers, or cereal boxes) go online to find reading material?

Neither do I.²

And granted, that AP-Ipsos poll is from three years ago; it’s possible that since 2006, some of those millions of non-readers have turned things around. Given how easy it is (or, at least, should be) to go from reading zero books a year to reading one—by my math, a net increase of just one book—a measurable improvement here should be a piece of cake. But it seems at least likely that reading in the United States of America—much like common sense, common courtesy, the 33⅓ RPM record, the barbershop quartet, and the leprechaun—runs the risk of continuing to dwindle into insignificance. That’s dangerous, Sagan tells us, and while he’s focusing mainly on scientific literacy in The Demon-Haunted World—rather just on literacy in general—I’m inclined to agree with him.

An illiterate society is an ignorant one; an ignorant society is an illogical and superstitious one, easily swayed by hucksters, tricksters, charlatans, demagogues, and dictators. Knowledge really is power, and ignorance is slavery.

In The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan draws connecting lines between laughable (and sometimes horrible), obvious superstitions of our past to their surviving descendents, the superstitions and pseudoscience of today. As he sees it, Dark Ages humanity’s belief in demons (specifically succubi and incubi),³ astrology, and witch-burnings don’t differ significantly from modern humanity’s fixations on the “face” on Mars, alien abductions, astrology (still alive and kicking, for some reason), the healing powers of crystals and magnetism, the Bible Code,⁴ Ouija boards, the “lost continents” of Atlantis and Lemuria,⁵ and pretty much every word ever printed in the Weekly World News.

There are plenty of ways to have your mind taken away from you—you could trash it with drugs and alcohol; you could be struck by an anvil or a falling piano, Tom and Jerry–style; you could, like Phineas Gage, have a giant metal rod explode through your skull; you could have your head ripped off by bloodthirsty Care Bears.⁶ But don’t just give it away for nothing. Our abilities to learn and to reason are what makes us human—that and some crazy genetic bullshit I won’t even try to understand⁷—don’t let ’em take them from you without a fight.

NOTES

1. Some time ago—probably right around the time the AP-Ipsos poll came out, in fact—I had a brief conversation with a woman who claimed, without embarrassment, to have read only five books in her lifetime. She was probably in her early thirties, and had had to read a couple of the books for school—two books in (presumably) twenty-four semesters being not a particularly bruising pace—and one of the other three on her list was a book on the Atkins Diet. Call me picky, but I don’t think that counts.
2. To be fair, I suspect that readers and non-readers alike go online for roughly the same things: a. porn, b. shopping, c. porn shopping, d. fantasy football, e. porn . . . x. to settle bets, y. to check e-mail, and finally z. for insightful reading material.
3. Sagan makes a very convincing connection between the Dark Ages’ succubi and incubi (horny little demons who, although their existence was commonly accepted, went completely undetected by anybody except the humans they seduced in the night) and today’s alien abductors (horny little bald aliens who probe their victims quite thoroughly and rudely). These aliens have apparently mastered space, time, travel across impossible distances, and the ability to slip silently and undetected from the exosphere through skies blanketed by radar by a watchful military, all the way down through solid walls and into your bedroom . . . and they're sex-obsessed but haven’t the faintest clue what’s going on with human biology. If it's generally (of not universally) accepted nowadays that these demons were mere myths, why are we any more willing to give credence to their little grey-skinned descendants?
4. Sagan doesn’t mention the Bible Code in The Demon-Haunted World; that addition is mine. I hope sooner or later to share my thoughts on the subject, once I figure out more or less what they are.
5. Think Atlantis, but in the Indian Ocean. Or possibly the Pacific. An old roommate of mine once told me, at great length, about the “serious” book he was reading about the search for Atlantis. I still don’t know whether to cringe at the subject matter and at how ready he was to believe it, or just be happy that he was reading.
6. Don’t even try to tell me you don’t think this could happen.
7. I’m using irony here. Get it?