Are these 7 couples REALLY still together?

Yes.

Click-baited again. No ad revenue for me again— just the satisfaction of a hit on my stats counter. Onto the honest title and real article.

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7 Funny Overlapping Acronyms

1. BM = Bowel movement; British Museum
The arts editor of The Economist delivered a public lecture at the LSE, and I fought back laughter each time she said, "I know BM best," or "BM solved the problem of overflow on weekends...." I don't go in for toilet humor, but I live to juxtapose high and low culture. Nothing is lower culture than material evacuating through colons, slumped prostrate on hospital bedsheets. I will spare you a picture.

2. DD = Bra size; doctor of divinity
If braziers fit any theological study, they must form revisionist exegesis of the (X-Rated) Song of Solomon. But if buxom concubines in ancient Israel did wear bras, they were probably fitted according to ephahs or cubits or something, not the un-invented Roman alphabet.

Perhaps I think small thoughts. Plenty of women are DDs, and many women are vicars. Statistically, someone must have both a pair and a parish.

(nothing to proportion, scale, or good taste)

3. LBC = Leading Britain's Conversation; Long Beach, California
London has a radio station called Leading Britain's Conversation. Every Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg answers listeners' questions live on air, and the mayor of London does so on the first Tuesday of every month. These are called LBC Phone-Ins.

Snoop Dogg often informs his listeners that he hails from Long Beach, California, e.g. "With so much drama in the L-B-C. It's kinda hard bein Snoop D-O-double-G". British politicians are many things, but cool is not one of them. I die like 5-0 every time I hear that they're on the LBC.

"I'm as concerned as anybody about the chronic unemployment figures in east London."

4. NHK = Japanese news network (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai); Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk)
This is the most obscure acronym in the list, but I think the world needs a Calvinist Hello Kitty.

Five points to whoever gets the tulip. Not everyone will get the tulip.

American TV viewers can find NHK in the valley between PBS and C-SPAN. It's the same channel that airs Al Jazeera and BBC World News. There was no NHK on the island of Japan until national broadcast radio launched in 1925. Back when the country isolated itself from the world (1641–1853), the Dutch were the only foreign power allowed to run a trading post into the country, partly because they made no missionary efforts to reform the Japanese.

5. PRC = People's Republic of China; file format extension of Amazon Kindle books
China or Amazon – which one really allows for freedom of speech? Wake up, sheeple, to the Amazonian wolf at your door. First they put predatory prices on print books out of pure malice for small bookshops, and then they addict us to Prime digital books that, it turns out, we don't even own! What will Amazon do next? I think they should show their true colors: claim islands in the South China Sea.

That's right. Jeff Bezos wants Manila.

6. SA = Salvation Army, Nazi brown-shirts (Sturmabteilung)
I make no comparison. Just giving a fun fact!

7. STD = Sexually transmitted disease; Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society
The acronym STI (sexually transmitted infection) is used more than STD, but I want to get it out there that the organization of student wordsmiths is, in abbreviation, venereal disease. To be fair, STD was not in use as a medical term until World War II. But coincidentally, Sigma Tau Delta formed the same year (1924) as the first World Health Organization multilateral treaty "respecting... the treatment of venereal diseases."

I've read that many college students experiment with drugs, sex, and alcohol, so there must be some who are in STD with an STD. Whom can these bookworms model? The pantheon of writers abounds with alcoholics and drug-addicts, but I'm not aware of any authors mythologized for copulating unto the point of illness. Like sophomore English majors, we can speculate without research nonetheless.

Going way back, we know that Shakespeare sired a child out of wedlock and spent his career hanging around a theatre frequented by groundlings. Looking at the last century, I bet The Beats didn't carry prophylactics on the road with them, and Arthur Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe. She couldn't even sing "Happy Birthday" without trying to seduce someone. Also in the pantheon is Hunter S. Thompson. QED.

You may enjoy my five other Sevens:
_{7 things you do that YOU WON'T BELIEVE you used to hate
7 Reasons/Ways I celebrate Black History Month
7 People who should, but never ever will, work together
7 Things I Lost Escaping My Uncertain Fate (of '07 or '08)
Christmas List in July [7 items]}

Three Rs: Robotic Robots Review

The only music review I have ever written was for Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, an album whose first four tracks I then looped for the next four months. This music review is for a very different album, one crafted by the enigmatic Ethan the Robot! during his 2008 summer in Heidelberg. But while it is nearly five years old it is, in many ways, still sealed in plastic. (Plus, I only got it in like September, so it's new to me.) If you want to listen to this album, you can download it off Dropbox here. What follows is my track-by-track analysis capped off with a summary, one I imagine quoted on the album's packaging.

1. My Electro Intro

The album starts with familiar enough Garage Band sound, but soon escalates into a full-fledged diddy— a microwave warm welcome to the album. It would be easy to write this track off as little more than an intro, but by its end it sounds more more like an Introitus to a Requiem than what it claims to be.

2. Mr. Cricket and the Wildflower

This song wins for best title and best story. Clearly a quirky, single man in his early forties has found himself in the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog and, rather than racing through the technicolor landscape, has decided to take a pleasant stroll to enjoy the scenery, even the wildflowers.

3. Blood Red Summer

The title invokes the blood red sun of the Japanese flag, but its sound is more of a lazy summer day on rural Honshu as in scenes of Ponyo rather than the seizure-inducing speed of Tokyo life. Picnicking atop a green suburban hill with a view of the Sea of Japan, the listener can almost taste the Sapporo shandy.

4. A Song I Made

An opaque title for a piece with a wide berth. Background chatter complements the plodding beat nicely as co-workers unwinding at the happy hour of a piano bar. This song is not boring, but is definitely ambient. The evening after a long summer day is preparation for a dark night ahead.

5. I Saw One Bird Eating Another Dead Bird

The cannibalism in this piece is largely psychological and ex post facto. You'll find no flesh rending in the bass clef piano licks, but guilt steadily growing louder. A sapphire light shines through in the end by way of treble piano play.

6. Underwater Radar Gun

While other pieces also spin-off Final Fantasy and Zelda soundtracks, this piece in particular feels like the inside of the Deku Tree in Ocarina of Time. But the Water Temple is also inside the tree, and all the overhead lighting has been updated with clean, white LED bulbs.

7. Morning Rainbow I: The Life of a Baby Dinosaur

You can hear the small triceratops trotting gleefully through the same landscape Mr. Cricket explored in track two. But to this little dino, the land is not to be admired for its detail but rather romped through as an open playground and breathed in rigorously, euphorically.

8. Morning Rainbow II: Rhythm and Instinct

This is mostly a straightforward rock song, even complete with guitar and drum solos. It gets back into the flow of the album near the end, squawking and beating home its electronic point.

9. Morning Rainbow III: The Attack of 2212

I don't know what the world will be like two hundred years from now, nor who would be attacking whom then. But this song foretells swift cavalry, in all their nobility and savagery, descending upon an isolated town. I'm unsure of the exact nature of the force — podracers on laser horses? — but the townsfolk are in deep doo-doo, especially because they can't decide whether to tarry to collect their valuables or to flee immediately. Either way, I don't think it ends well for them.

10. Morning Rainbow IV: Colored Rain

This title truly speaks for itself, and the song unfolds as a fine dessert to what has been a meal of fruit cocktails, raisins and marshmallow fluff.

This album is not only perfect to take a drug-induced mid-morning nap to, but is also a great soundtrack for several hours of data entry. It’s what they played when spring rolled round in irradiated Nagasaki, and it will one day blare proudly from the loudspeakers of Disneyland Mars.

A History of the Engrish-Speaking Peoples

UC Irvine is a fine institution, and it’s predominately Asian. Take for instance the Ayala Science Library. Its art deco exterior screams “Murcah!” loudly enough for the nearby Ayn Rand Institute to hear, but inside sits a disturbingly stereotypical number of Asians doing what Americans believe they do best — studying. I’m well aware of the studious Asian stereotype, and I’m not interested in blindly perpetuating stereotypes. But I went to Ayala and it is, in fact, filled with Asians.

Very white — and not a smoker, cellist or online gamer — I definitely stuck out when I went to the library one Friday in June to play sudoku and listen to folk rock. But there is an art to blending in by sticking out, and I was able to use my whiteness as a cloak under which I could spy on some Asians.

Holed up in a carrel with my headphones in but my Zune on mute, feigning interest in a box that seemed to hold an irrational number, I spied three students playing a board game at the adjacent table. They had backpacks with them and a few textbooks open, but these sat undisturbed. Evidently, they still had to bring study materials to the library on a Friday night, even to play a board game.

What bode ill for my progress through my sudoku book became the night’s entertainment; I was familiar with the board game they were playing. It was Klaus Teuber’s The Settlers of Catan, a fine game that’s a blend of Risk and Monopoly. Players build settlements and cities on hexes of different resources and reap them according to the dice, connecting their properties with roads. Between the sheep, ore, wood, brick and wheat available on the board, Catan has a diverse political economy. Throw in the resource-stealing and production-blocking robber, special development cards — many of which are knights that can move the robber — and the straightforward objective to get to 10 points, and you have yourself a game.

Imagine this, but instead of two white boys in a kitchen think three Asians in a library.

I started watching their game at about 6 pm, which as an Anglophile I prefer to express as 1800, and got the sense they had all been there quite a while. One guy, who I heard the others call Peter, was dominating the table.

Peter, an average-sized man with glasses, had positioned himself brilliantly at the start of the game. That much was clear to me. He was settled on diverse resources and good odds. He reaped often and was able to negotiate the terms of his trades. Plus, he already had the Longest Road, which is worth two points. Things were not so good for the other two players.

The only woman at the table, Christiana, was living off the fat of Peter’s lands, and appeared happy to just be in the game. Or maybe she was just generally an optimistic person. I couldn’t tell.

The third player, a lanky guy with bleached hair called Michael, seemed to be trying to replicate Peter’s winning strategy. Nevertheless, he kept squandering all his resources on buying knights to protect from the robber. He definitely had the two points for having the Largest Army.

But the 1800th hour of that Friday passed quickly, and just after 6:30 the board looked shockingly different. Despite having been so well-positioned at the start, Peter had lost the lead to Michael. Both particle physicists and sociologists know that observing a phenomenon alters it, and I fear I may have affected the game by my longing gaze: I do love to settle Catan.

For, by this time, I was not the only other person watching these three settle. I noticed a surprising number of other Caucasians walking around Ayala, some even butting into the game. I didn’t realize the game was popular enough that these strangers would know how to play it, but they seemed very confident.

Michael listened to everything any passerby might say. One guy in a Rammstein shirt stopped for a moment and casually said, “You need more ore,” before walking off. Just like that Michael built a new settlement, quickly upgraded it to a city and began reaping even more ore.

Peter seemed genuinely troubled by the outside activity around the game, and I can’t admit I blamed him. Anyone could just walk right up to the game and speak their minds. One debonair but silent blond walked by the table, took a stack of Peter’s cards and left a box of cigarettes in its place. Peter, in that wide-eyed but stoically tight-lipped Asian expression of great discomfort, promptly lit one up. I was shocked to see someone smoking indoors, in a public building in southern California no less! Peter didn’t look like a smoker, but he now had more cigarettes than resources. What was he to do.

But this guy looks curious. Peter looked defeated.

Passing the seven o’clock hour, the game only grew more lopsided. Now Michael was really gouging Christiana on trades, and he occupied some of the ports on the coastline adjacent to Peter’s properties, encouraging him to continue smoking and causing him great distress besides. Each turn Peter pursued a new strategy to regain his lead, and each turn the dice dashed his plans to bits. Because Peter’s lead had been so great in the beginning, his stagnating position at this point was even more dramatic. Christiana had not yet led the game that I had seen.

And things got worse before they got better. Though Michael’s knights had gone by the wayside in the six o’clock hour, his interest in amassing them had not. Each turn, his knights would move the robber to one of Peter and Christiana’s most precious spaces and block it. He would then take the card owed him and continue progressing to that now very real possibility of game’s end.

It was about 7:30, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. Giving up all pretense of completing my puzzle and appreciating Beck’s early work, I removed my earbuds and walked over to the table. I immediately told Peter how I thought he could get back at Michael, and then I set to work on Michael. I know it was against the rules, but I quickly removed two of Michael’s cities. This set him back four whole points and seemed to crush the spirit that had driven his expansion since about 6:45.

The game now looked far less lopsided, but it wasn’t to my liking. Peter had stopped smoking, which was definitely good. But he had abandoned the brilliant strategy I had devised for him, allocating his resources in ways I would never. Pacifying Michael really boosted my confidence, so I decided to help out Christiana. (Really, I just didn’t want anyone else to get involved.) But as soon as my plans for her began to unfold, Peter struck back. He did not like the idea of me being there at all; and I, on Christiana’s behalf of course, played many knights back and forth with Peter. In the end I decided it wasn’t worth the effort and left Christiana and Peter, the former of which started buying many knights herself.

It was now 7:45ish, and the game looked new once again. Everything I had said in passing to Christiana and Peter was gospel to Michael. He began quizzing me on strategies I had used in the past, and even though he still bought knights when I had told him not to he was mainly focused on building up his side of the board. He wasn’t interested in building the longest road, but he definitely wanted the most extensive network of roads.

And even though I disagreed with how Peter was playing the game, we were at peace. Christiana’s settlements near Peter’s property were not reaping anything at all, but her more distant cities were doing nearly as well as Michael’s.

Just after eight o’clock, everyone had at least seven or eight points. Michael had not built anything in quite some time, and Christiana’s adjacent cities looked as prosperous as his now aging ones. But the other half of Christiana’s pieces, those by Peter’s, were still not reaping. And for reasons I still don’t quite understand, Peter’s strategy had put him back in the lead, edging out Michael. Christiana and Michael’s strategies made sense to me, maybe largely because they were so similar to my own. But I've never seen anyone settle Catan like Peter and do so well.

Having spent far too much time in the library doing far too little, I left. It was a Friday night after all. I had to get home to browse Wikipedia and listen to NPR. Those three are still settling so far as I know.

A Haiku-storic Day

Besides being the birthday of Philip Davies MP's former Parliamentary researcher, Grainne Magee, 21 June is a rather historic day. Perhaps noteworthy events and hours of daylight are directly related, in which case Norwegian summers must rock. I posted twenty five haiku on this day last year and called it the Longest Day in Haiku-story. Here are five more.

1900
China fought the world
to protect its own borders.
Failed. Silly China.

1942
Japanese sub shelled
Oregon, the turning point
of the war for sure.

1957
Johannes Stark died,
lesser Nazi physicist.
Totes not Iron Man.

1997
Rebecca Black born
on her most favorite day—
Saturday, of course.

2009
Greenland rules itself.
Mercator Projection says
that really matters!


Happy solstice, everybody.