Before I start, I'm not entirely sure if I've used the correct word. Allusion may in fact be one of many special cases of the phenomenon that I'm thinking of. What I'm trying to describe is when you come across something in a text that reminds you of another text, perhaps even to the point of stirring a desire to go back and read that other text. This can be explicitly intended by the author, as when shklee quotes/cites/references someone else, or mentions another text or author by name; or it can be more subtle or even unintended, ie. simply using a turn of phrase, trope, or theme that conjures up the other author.
Allusion drives me crazy, especially in recent works. I cannot sit down and read a book without getting two or three pages in and being prompted to go pick up another text and read it. As I begin to collect more books in my personal library, the opportunities for me to go and actually get a physical copy of the work being alluded have become more frequent.
But I won't say that all allusion is bad. I just find it badly done even in works that I otherwise consider quite good. Let's see if I can't outline my beef in this blog post.
First, it bugs me when an author mentions someone as influential or inspirational to them, but doesn't actually quote any example of the inspiring work. They just say "as a student I read a lot of X [X typically being just the author's surname], and it was really inspiring." As a reader, the effect this usually has on me is that I have to go to the computer, look that person up, and add some of their work to my wish list. Or, if I already have some of their work, I put down whatever I'm reading in order to pick up the work and refresh myself on it. Maybe this is a good thing, but it's not a good sign for whoever I was trying to read in the first place, although the chances are that I got there by being referred by yet another work.
When they do mention someone, but include a quote, or an example of what they find inspiring, this usually sates my curiosity, and I'm able to go on reading without getting up to search for some other book. Lately, it's been sufficient for me to search my brain to at least see if I have any examples of the alludee on my bookshelf.
Another problem I have though, is when educated writers use the surname of a thinker as a kind of shorthand for a whole bunch of ideas. Sometimes I have no idea what this means, and I have to watch it whoosh over my head. Other times I've read some of the name in question, but the reference doesn't make sense, or is a different reading of the texts than what I know. Sometimes a different meaning is good, because I like to hear a different perspective on something I've read, even if I disagree with it. When I read opinions with which I disagree, this tends to strengthen my original opinion.
I would prefer though, if the writer would just address the specific idea or theme. I realize that this might be too much to ask, since you can break down almost any issue or idea into constituent parts, ad infinitum. At some point, short words have to be able to stand for complex ideas.
And now, to undermine myself, as is my style, I guess this kind of allusion might also be called intertextuality, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe books should be read this way; read straight through, only until a reference to something more interesting comes up. Why should texts be self-contained?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
What is the Nature of Pain?
I asked myself this question when I was feeding the cat today. Socks has a plaintive and pitiful meow when he's hungry. However, he always seems to get hungry before his food dish is empty. Sometimes he won't be satisfied with dry food, and he insists on wet food, which I started buying for him as an occasional treat. Whether he wants a top-up of dry food, or a new helping of wet food, he makes these awful noises which I cannot resist. He makes me believe in my heart that he is suffering from some immense pain which can only be alleviated by a new serving of food. After this, he takes about two bites, and then he, apparently contented, goes on to do his other catly activities.
This makes me wonder though. What about the poor cats out there in the street who don't have a human around to feed them when they're hungry? Objectively, they must have more pain than my cat. Sometimes they won't be able to find food, and some could even die from hunger. Or possibly from cold during the winter. What is it about my own cat's pain that makes it so intolerable to me, that I have to find a solution immediately?
My cat expresses his pain a lot more than the strays out there. He probably does this because he has learned that it tends to get results. The more pitiful he sounds, the faster I get up from the computer to go and feed him. Still, I can't help but wonder if he really believes that his own pain is so horrible that it necessitates crying out the way he does. I guess he doesn't believe anything, doesn't even think about it. "This is what you do when you feel that funny feeling in your tummy, and after you do it, the big hairless, two-legged kitty gets the food out, and the funny feeling goes away, and I can go sit by the window and watch the birds."
I know too, that there's something about fresh food that's better than food that's been sitting in his dish overnight. Heck, the stuff from the sealed bag smells better even to me. But I also know that he's eaten the stale stuff before. It's not like it's completely inedible. So I can tell that there are degrees to his hunger. If he was really truly starving, the first place he would go would be to his stale food, because at least it's food.
This brings me to humanity. Actually, never mind. I won't talk about humanity, because that's too depressing. I'll just leave this as a blog about my cat.
This makes me wonder though. What about the poor cats out there in the street who don't have a human around to feed them when they're hungry? Objectively, they must have more pain than my cat. Sometimes they won't be able to find food, and some could even die from hunger. Or possibly from cold during the winter. What is it about my own cat's pain that makes it so intolerable to me, that I have to find a solution immediately?
My cat expresses his pain a lot more than the strays out there. He probably does this because he has learned that it tends to get results. The more pitiful he sounds, the faster I get up from the computer to go and feed him. Still, I can't help but wonder if he really believes that his own pain is so horrible that it necessitates crying out the way he does. I guess he doesn't believe anything, doesn't even think about it. "This is what you do when you feel that funny feeling in your tummy, and after you do it, the big hairless, two-legged kitty gets the food out, and the funny feeling goes away, and I can go sit by the window and watch the birds."
I know too, that there's something about fresh food that's better than food that's been sitting in his dish overnight. Heck, the stuff from the sealed bag smells better even to me. But I also know that he's eaten the stale stuff before. It's not like it's completely inedible. So I can tell that there are degrees to his hunger. If he was really truly starving, the first place he would go would be to his stale food, because at least it's food.
This brings me to humanity. Actually, never mind. I won't talk about humanity, because that's too depressing. I'll just leave this as a blog about my cat.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
What Will A Human Presence in Space Look Like?
Okay, that's a pretty broad-reaching question in the title of this post, but one of the things I wanted to say was that it probably won't look like what most of us picture in our mind when we try to think about it.
Star Trek gives us gargantuan space stations and faster-than-light space vessels, made of metal, or at least made of atoms bonded together through the electromagnetic forces. Yes, there are a few exotic materials powering these ships, including anti-matter and something called Sub-Space. (Isn't it weird how Star Trek uses Sub-Space, meaning "under space" or "below space" or "less than space" or "falling short of space", while Star Wars uses Hyper-Space meaning "over space" or "beyond space" or "exceeding space". Make up your mind, you geeks. Is it going to be over or under? Above and beyond or under and in?) But the other thing Star Trek brings us is massive empty spaces. Basically the Star Trek Galaxy is a featureless ocean, dotted by the occasional star system, and crossed by tiny ships. And if we were to be able to look at a map of the galaxy produced by Starfleet, we would probably see a few well-established shipping lanes between inhabited systems, surrounded by a lot of empty space.
Okay, maybe this is what humanity in space will look like for the next few centuries. Even then, we're not realistically going to be exploring much beyond the Solar System. At best, we'll have gotten a probe to the nearest star. As far as Galactic colonization, as depicted in Star Trek, I think this will take quite a different kind of paradigm than what we see in that show. In order to colonize other star systems, we'll need a kind of infrastructure in order to get there. That is, we can't think of the Solar System as being mostly empty space, even though it kind of sort of basically is. When we're thinking of the universe, we need to start envisioning it as a place where gravitational forces have a kind of objective presence. That is, gravity doesn't just emanate from objects; gravity is those objects. This is because in space, gravity is all there is.
Just as a tiny electron has an incredibly powerful electrical charge that can affect its own atom as well as nearby atoms, despite having a size on the order of millions of times smaller than that which it can affect; so the machines that will eventually take us to the stars will have a similar reality. Indeed, objects in space could do away with the concept of volume or objective existence entirely, as long as the concept of gravity (and mass, and speed) are retained. Any given object in the universe can be defined entirely by its mass and its speed.
Now that we have this picture though, we can begin to make it more complicated. For example, what about galaxies? Galaxies are incredibly complex collections of objects, and yet can often be mathematically treated as individual objects. So on one hand you might predict some fairly straight-forward gravitational effects in the vicinity of a galaxy, but in observational practice, you might see some totally bizarre effects, in which the laws of gravity seem to be violated.
In a way, this is kind of like how it is with manned flight. People observed that they were stuck to the surface of the planet, and they believed that they couldn't fly. But they learned something about the effects of the atmosphere, including the fact that you could treat air, or gas, or the atmosphere, just like any other kind of matter, manipulating it, and causing it to support solid objects. The flight of birds was no longer a mystery.
So essentially, if you could manipulate the forces of a galaxy, you could create almost automatic shipping lanes, or currents, leading in and out of that galaxy. I don't know, something like that anyways.
I don't know if anything like this could work on a scale smaller than a Solar System, but if it did work, the technology required would be mechanical, not necessarily involving exotic particles or rare materials. You'd just have to know how to correctly position whatever material you need to generate lots of gravity. Instead of self-contained space ships, you'd have widely-spread systems, containing a vehicle in the core, several orders of magnitude smaller than the whole system.
So the human presence of space would look like, to outside observers, massive gravitational systems, conduits throughout the galaxy, through which pass objects so small they are virtually undetectable. At least, you couldn't use the same instruments to detect the conduits as you would use to detect the vehicles. There might be no evidence at all that the system was designed by an intelligent species, unless you happened to be located at one of the exits of the gravitational conduits.
In conclusion, a human presence in space wouldn't look like anything we'd be able to recognize as human, or possibly even as intelligent. You wouldn't be able to "see" our vessels at all, because our systems would move from the visual to the purely gravitational and theoretical. Sure, at the very core, there would be tiny human vessels, maybe even made out of metal. My point is that "structure" in space is not something made of struts and girders, but of gravity and mathematical predictions. We will need to leave behind the world of the electromagnetic, in favor of the world of the gravitational.
Anyways, I'm not the first to have such ideas, I just wanted to kind of share these thoughts. There are much more developed ideas in Carl Sagan's Contact, for example, though I have only seen the movie; I haven't read the book.
Star Trek gives us gargantuan space stations and faster-than-light space vessels, made of metal, or at least made of atoms bonded together through the electromagnetic forces. Yes, there are a few exotic materials powering these ships, including anti-matter and something called Sub-Space. (Isn't it weird how Star Trek uses Sub-Space, meaning "under space" or "below space" or "less than space" or "falling short of space", while Star Wars uses Hyper-Space meaning "over space" or "beyond space" or "exceeding space". Make up your mind, you geeks. Is it going to be over or under? Above and beyond or under and in?) But the other thing Star Trek brings us is massive empty spaces. Basically the Star Trek Galaxy is a featureless ocean, dotted by the occasional star system, and crossed by tiny ships. And if we were to be able to look at a map of the galaxy produced by Starfleet, we would probably see a few well-established shipping lanes between inhabited systems, surrounded by a lot of empty space.
Okay, maybe this is what humanity in space will look like for the next few centuries. Even then, we're not realistically going to be exploring much beyond the Solar System. At best, we'll have gotten a probe to the nearest star. As far as Galactic colonization, as depicted in Star Trek, I think this will take quite a different kind of paradigm than what we see in that show. In order to colonize other star systems, we'll need a kind of infrastructure in order to get there. That is, we can't think of the Solar System as being mostly empty space, even though it kind of sort of basically is. When we're thinking of the universe, we need to start envisioning it as a place where gravitational forces have a kind of objective presence. That is, gravity doesn't just emanate from objects; gravity is those objects. This is because in space, gravity is all there is.
Just as a tiny electron has an incredibly powerful electrical charge that can affect its own atom as well as nearby atoms, despite having a size on the order of millions of times smaller than that which it can affect; so the machines that will eventually take us to the stars will have a similar reality. Indeed, objects in space could do away with the concept of volume or objective existence entirely, as long as the concept of gravity (and mass, and speed) are retained. Any given object in the universe can be defined entirely by its mass and its speed.
Now that we have this picture though, we can begin to make it more complicated. For example, what about galaxies? Galaxies are incredibly complex collections of objects, and yet can often be mathematically treated as individual objects. So on one hand you might predict some fairly straight-forward gravitational effects in the vicinity of a galaxy, but in observational practice, you might see some totally bizarre effects, in which the laws of gravity seem to be violated.
In a way, this is kind of like how it is with manned flight. People observed that they were stuck to the surface of the planet, and they believed that they couldn't fly. But they learned something about the effects of the atmosphere, including the fact that you could treat air, or gas, or the atmosphere, just like any other kind of matter, manipulating it, and causing it to support solid objects. The flight of birds was no longer a mystery.
So essentially, if you could manipulate the forces of a galaxy, you could create almost automatic shipping lanes, or currents, leading in and out of that galaxy. I don't know, something like that anyways.
I don't know if anything like this could work on a scale smaller than a Solar System, but if it did work, the technology required would be mechanical, not necessarily involving exotic particles or rare materials. You'd just have to know how to correctly position whatever material you need to generate lots of gravity. Instead of self-contained space ships, you'd have widely-spread systems, containing a vehicle in the core, several orders of magnitude smaller than the whole system.
So the human presence of space would look like, to outside observers, massive gravitational systems, conduits throughout the galaxy, through which pass objects so small they are virtually undetectable. At least, you couldn't use the same instruments to detect the conduits as you would use to detect the vehicles. There might be no evidence at all that the system was designed by an intelligent species, unless you happened to be located at one of the exits of the gravitational conduits.
In conclusion, a human presence in space wouldn't look like anything we'd be able to recognize as human, or possibly even as intelligent. You wouldn't be able to "see" our vessels at all, because our systems would move from the visual to the purely gravitational and theoretical. Sure, at the very core, there would be tiny human vessels, maybe even made out of metal. My point is that "structure" in space is not something made of struts and girders, but of gravity and mathematical predictions. We will need to leave behind the world of the electromagnetic, in favor of the world of the gravitational.
Anyways, I'm not the first to have such ideas, I just wanted to kind of share these thoughts. There are much more developed ideas in Carl Sagan's Contact, for example, though I have only seen the movie; I haven't read the book.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Why Haven't I Posted Anything About D&D?
Uh, I guess I haven't really had any great insights lately. I'll let you know when I do. I still love the game, but I'm coming up dry as far as new ideas go.
Not that anyone is reading this blog, because I still haven't told anyone about it. So no one is asking that question. So for now, it doesn't even need an answer.
Not that anyone is reading this blog, because I still haven't told anyone about it. So no one is asking that question. So for now, it doesn't even need an answer.
Province Names
In my last post, I mentioned that the names of some provinces are really cool, while others are lame. I thought it might be fun to go through some of the reasons why I think that of each name. So let's start with my home province of BC.
British Columbia. First of all, the name is too long. We need to shorten it down to about 2-4 syllables at the most. Second of all, the British Empire is gone. I am still a monarchist, but I don't think we need to advertise our allegiance to the British Crown on our flag, in our name, and everywhere else. Queen Elizabeth II is the Queen of British Columbia (or whatever new name we might decide on) in addition to being the Queen of Britain and a bunch of other places. We like Britain, but I don't see any reason why we still need to depend on them for our identity. So British anything is out. Columbia, however, is a fine name. We're lucky enough that no one else uses it, except for Colombia, which spells it differently. One problem I have with using Columbia as a name is that it is also the name of one of our major rivers, which we share with the United States. I love the Columbia River, and I'm happy to share it, but I also happen to think that our province should be named after something distinctly us. I'd advocate renaming the province Fraser, but it lacks the poetic ring of Columbia, and I'd rather trade up than down. Not to mention, Fraser sounds like a ten-year-old piano prodigy. Still, there's something to be said for a province with a name that rhymes with razor, and brings to mind a million-square kilometer freezer. For once I'd like to see some honesty in naming a place [I'm looking at you, Greenland!]. Except not the entire province is freezing, and we're actually for the most part, balmier than Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of Ontario, not to mention the Territories. No, most of BC is probably more like the freezer sitting out in the back yard gathering mold and rust.
Anyways, enough about BC. Let's move east.
Alberta. I have no problem with the name Alberta. Except that I'm pretty sure I have an aunt named Alberta. In fact, I'm pretty sure everyone has an Aunt Alberta, and well, actually I was going to say that Aunt Alberta is never a very physically attractive image, and you wouldn't associate a country that's supposed to evoke pride with such a name. However, I think the name is particularly suited to Alberta. Still, if she had a prettier name, maybe we wouldn't be so quick to dismiss her natural heritage, destroying her sensitive environment, and such. Maybe if she had a classier name, or at least a more common, youthful name, like Christina.
Saskatchewan. I like this name. It's cool and fun to say. Four syllables is pushing it, but it's poetic and alliterative, so I don't mind. I also don't mind, in this case, that it's hard to spell. The only thing I would change about Saskatchewan is the shape of its borders. They're so darn boring. Saskatchewan is the only province in Canada that's a complete, perfect rectangle (or close enough). Actually, scratch that. That kind of does make Saskatchewan interesting in its own way. Here's what I'd rather see: change the borders of Alberta and Manitoba so that they're less square-shaped, but leave Saskatchewan the way it is, so that it's the only province with a flat, square shape in the whole country. I guess it would be mathematically difficult to do that, since it has to share borders with some other provinces. Ah well, one can dream, can't one?
Manitoba. Okay, we're talking about names, not borders or flatness, or personality, or anything like that. So Manitoba has a pretty cool name. You could shorten it to 'Toba if you wanted to. The one complain I have about the name is that it might be considered sexist. Why not Womanitoba?
Ontario. As much as I dislike Ontario [mainly on account of Toronto], I have to admit it has a pretty cool name. I'm also happy with Ontario for losing Upper Canada as a name. Way to go Ontario, for taking one for the team and giving up your name for the good of the whole country! I mean, Upper Canada? Who did they think they were? Archangels? Besides, if any province is Upper, it's BC, because we have the most, highest mountains. Hey, I guess I just thought of the perfect new name for BC!
Quebec. It doesn't really make a difference whether or not I approve of the name of Quebec, since I'm an Anglophone.
New Brunswick. Now we're getting into the names I don't like. Minus 10 points for having "New" in your name. If you liked Brunswick so much, why the Hell did you leave? And did you ever consider the feelings of the poor people of Old Brunswick, who get stuck being yesterday's news? I know I wouldn't like it if someone decided to call themselves "New Josh", implying that I am now Old Josh, and somehow outdated. Anyways, you have a lot of history, so you could easily find a fitting name. I hear "Acadia" isn't even being used right now. At the very least, steal an Indian word. Why not Micmac?
Nova Scotia. Minus 10 points; you're not fooling me with your fancy Latin; I know it means "New Scotland." Go back and read everything I said about New Brunswick: that applies to you too. Plus, shame on you for changing your name from Acadia, which was ten times as cool as Nova Scotia. In case you didn't read my entry on New Brunswick, I'm offering them the name Acadia. However, I will award plus 3 points, because you are impressing me with your fancy Latin. Nova Scotia is pretty fun to say. Just try it: say Nova Scotia over and over again, let's say, one hundred times. See? It just doesn't get old. Now try doing it on a cross-country drive all the way from BC to Nova Scotia.
Prince Edward Island. Any province that frequently has to use its initials as its name is in need of a change of names. Just like BC, PEI is just too long to say in its normal format. Plus, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I don't approve of royalist names with the actual title in the place name. If you must name the place after Prince Edward, just call it Edward Island [admittedly boring, another ten-year-old piano-playing prodigy, methinks]. Or Augustus Island. That would be cool. One thing I'm glad for though, is that you didn't stick with John's Island, or St. John's Island. We have far too many places named after St. John in the world. I like him too, but we don't need an island and a town named after him in every country in the world.
Newfoundland and Labrador. Or is it Labrador and Newfoundland? Seriously guys, separate into two separate provinces already! You're confusing the rest of us in Canada. [No one else in the world cares.] In fact, I'm going to discuss each of you separately.
Newfoundland. Okay, we get it. New found land. You were the first part of Canada to be "Found" by Europeans. Whoop-di-freaking-doo! Except, that was 1000 years ago [if we're counting the Vikings, which we probably shouldn't be]. 400 if we're talking John Cabot. I think it was pretty obvious, pretty quick, that you weren't the only new land to be found in the region at the time.
So why did the name stick? Why couldn't you come up with a better name? Labrador did. Canada did. Acadia did. Quebec did. Listen up people! Can't you realize you need to stop putting "New" in your countries' names? It will just make you look stupid in 400 years (still calling yourself "new"? ha!), and it will piss off the Oldfoundlands who don't think they're really that old at all. But all right, one thing I have to grant you, Newfoundland, is that you've managed to slur your name right beyond recognition as a series of English words. This does, I'll admit, make Newfoundland a little fun to say. Even worse than Newfoundland as a name, would be "The Rock". As if you're the only place in the world with rocks. Or maybe I should feel sorry for you because all you've got is a big rock. But that's not true either. I know for a fact that you have a rich cultural tradition you could draw a suitable name from.
Labrador. Awesome name. Sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings. Sounds like a powerful nation that doesn't need fancy long, complicated names. Just Labrador. Reminds me of Rus. Not that you live up to such a name, but I can't ask for everything, can I? While I'm in the asking business, please ditch Newfoundland until it finds a better name.
The Northwest Territories. Congratulations, you've won! The worst name of any Canadian province or territory, and you did it without even having "new" in your name. Your prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to Nunavut! Seriously, when are we finally going to carve this piece of land up and make it into interesting-sounding territories? How many years has it been since Confederation? Okay, I'll admit we've made a heck of a lot of progress in shrinking this disgrace to toponomy over the years, carving more interesting bits out of it. But, annoyingly, it's still there! And it's gotten worse: the Northwest Territories used to be made up of actual territories that had cool-sounding names like Franklin, Keewatin, Devlon, and Butterberg. Okay, I made some of those up, but that's because I can't find them on any map of Canada I own anymore. Now it's all just the boring old Northwest Territories. What are these territories? Well, we couldn't be bothered to name or describe or bound them. They're just loose territories. Out there. Kind of vague and you have to sort of squint to see them. Even Rupert's Land, which is a pretty stupid name, was better than the Northwest Territories. Not that you don't have any interesting names. Yellowknife, for example, is a name I can get behind. It's kind of badass, almost like Rusty-knife, or Bloody-bone-that-I-cut-out-from-a-still-breathing-elk-Knife. You have to be badass to live in the Northwest Territories, or just batshit insane, so maybe they're just not the kind of people concerned with nomenclature, but rather the kind of people concerned with not freezing or starving to death. That doesn't exactly explain things though, since they do happen to have the Yukon Territory and Nunavut, both creatively named, right next to them. I don't know, I guess I can only hope that the NWT gets a name change within my lifetime, since it's already taken several lifetimes just to get to where it is today.
Yukon. Ah, much better. Although, like the Columbia mentioned way back in BC, I dislike naming territories based on stuff that they share with neighbouring states. After what I've seen in Atlantic Canada, I think my standards have been lowered quite a bit, so I might be willing to let this one slide. Yukon is another fun one to say. I wish BC had a name as cool and quirky as Yukon.
Nunavut. I guess I've saved the best for last. Nunavut is a pretty sweet name. Ignoring the fact that it sounds like "none of it," which I've been able to do since about three years after I learned about the new territory, everything else about the name is awesome. It comes from an indigenous language, and it wasn't stolen or bastardized any more than it had to be in order to be pronounced by Anglophones. There's no needless qualifications like "Canadian Nunavut" or "East Inuitland" or "North Canada". Just three syllables. Nunavut. As in "none of your damn business." Okay, I guess I never did get over the fact that the first two syllables sound like "none of." You know, I really don't know how they did it in Nunavut, came up with a creative name, and a whole writing system that isn't based on the Latin alphabet, when they should have been doing what the NWTers were doing and trying not to starve or freeze. If I were cynical, I might suspect that it was a ploy by the federal government in order to solidify Canadian sovereignty over Arctic waters. NWT just doesn't have the same access to all the islands that Nunavut does. And if the Canadians hadn't courted the Inuit, perhaps the Americans would have done so. [I don't think the Inuit would have gone for anything offered by the Americans, but I do think the threat of such events would be sufficient to motivate the Canadians to take action.] I just honestly hope that Nunavut doesn't follow the American model of various Indian territories becoming states, becoming farms for European immigrants, forcing Indians into smaller reserves.
Well, that's it.
British Columbia. First of all, the name is too long. We need to shorten it down to about 2-4 syllables at the most. Second of all, the British Empire is gone. I am still a monarchist, but I don't think we need to advertise our allegiance to the British Crown on our flag, in our name, and everywhere else. Queen Elizabeth II is the Queen of British Columbia (or whatever new name we might decide on) in addition to being the Queen of Britain and a bunch of other places. We like Britain, but I don't see any reason why we still need to depend on them for our identity. So British anything is out. Columbia, however, is a fine name. We're lucky enough that no one else uses it, except for Colombia, which spells it differently. One problem I have with using Columbia as a name is that it is also the name of one of our major rivers, which we share with the United States. I love the Columbia River, and I'm happy to share it, but I also happen to think that our province should be named after something distinctly us. I'd advocate renaming the province Fraser, but it lacks the poetic ring of Columbia, and I'd rather trade up than down. Not to mention, Fraser sounds like a ten-year-old piano prodigy. Still, there's something to be said for a province with a name that rhymes with razor, and brings to mind a million-square kilometer freezer. For once I'd like to see some honesty in naming a place [I'm looking at you, Greenland!]. Except not the entire province is freezing, and we're actually for the most part, balmier than Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of Ontario, not to mention the Territories. No, most of BC is probably more like the freezer sitting out in the back yard gathering mold and rust.
Anyways, enough about BC. Let's move east.
Alberta. I have no problem with the name Alberta. Except that I'm pretty sure I have an aunt named Alberta. In fact, I'm pretty sure everyone has an Aunt Alberta, and well, actually I was going to say that Aunt Alberta is never a very physically attractive image, and you wouldn't associate a country that's supposed to evoke pride with such a name. However, I think the name is particularly suited to Alberta. Still, if she had a prettier name, maybe we wouldn't be so quick to dismiss her natural heritage, destroying her sensitive environment, and such. Maybe if she had a classier name, or at least a more common, youthful name, like Christina.
Saskatchewan. I like this name. It's cool and fun to say. Four syllables is pushing it, but it's poetic and alliterative, so I don't mind. I also don't mind, in this case, that it's hard to spell. The only thing I would change about Saskatchewan is the shape of its borders. They're so darn boring. Saskatchewan is the only province in Canada that's a complete, perfect rectangle (or close enough). Actually, scratch that. That kind of does make Saskatchewan interesting in its own way. Here's what I'd rather see: change the borders of Alberta and Manitoba so that they're less square-shaped, but leave Saskatchewan the way it is, so that it's the only province with a flat, square shape in the whole country. I guess it would be mathematically difficult to do that, since it has to share borders with some other provinces. Ah well, one can dream, can't one?
Manitoba. Okay, we're talking about names, not borders or flatness, or personality, or anything like that. So Manitoba has a pretty cool name. You could shorten it to 'Toba if you wanted to. The one complain I have about the name is that it might be considered sexist. Why not Womanitoba?
Ontario. As much as I dislike Ontario [mainly on account of Toronto], I have to admit it has a pretty cool name. I'm also happy with Ontario for losing Upper Canada as a name. Way to go Ontario, for taking one for the team and giving up your name for the good of the whole country! I mean, Upper Canada? Who did they think they were? Archangels? Besides, if any province is Upper, it's BC, because we have the most, highest mountains. Hey, I guess I just thought of the perfect new name for BC!
Quebec. It doesn't really make a difference whether or not I approve of the name of Quebec, since I'm an Anglophone.
New Brunswick. Now we're getting into the names I don't like. Minus 10 points for having "New" in your name. If you liked Brunswick so much, why the Hell did you leave? And did you ever consider the feelings of the poor people of Old Brunswick, who get stuck being yesterday's news? I know I wouldn't like it if someone decided to call themselves "New Josh", implying that I am now Old Josh, and somehow outdated. Anyways, you have a lot of history, so you could easily find a fitting name. I hear "Acadia" isn't even being used right now. At the very least, steal an Indian word. Why not Micmac?
Nova Scotia. Minus 10 points; you're not fooling me with your fancy Latin; I know it means "New Scotland." Go back and read everything I said about New Brunswick: that applies to you too. Plus, shame on you for changing your name from Acadia, which was ten times as cool as Nova Scotia. In case you didn't read my entry on New Brunswick, I'm offering them the name Acadia. However, I will award plus 3 points, because you are impressing me with your fancy Latin. Nova Scotia is pretty fun to say. Just try it: say Nova Scotia over and over again, let's say, one hundred times. See? It just doesn't get old. Now try doing it on a cross-country drive all the way from BC to Nova Scotia.
Prince Edward Island. Any province that frequently has to use its initials as its name is in need of a change of names. Just like BC, PEI is just too long to say in its normal format. Plus, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I don't approve of royalist names with the actual title in the place name. If you must name the place after Prince Edward, just call it Edward Island [admittedly boring, another ten-year-old piano-playing prodigy, methinks]. Or Augustus Island. That would be cool. One thing I'm glad for though, is that you didn't stick with John's Island, or St. John's Island. We have far too many places named after St. John in the world. I like him too, but we don't need an island and a town named after him in every country in the world.
Newfoundland and Labrador. Or is it Labrador and Newfoundland? Seriously guys, separate into two separate provinces already! You're confusing the rest of us in Canada. [No one else in the world cares.] In fact, I'm going to discuss each of you separately.
Newfoundland. Okay, we get it. New found land. You were the first part of Canada to be "Found" by Europeans. Whoop-di-freaking-doo! Except, that was 1000 years ago [if we're counting the Vikings, which we probably shouldn't be]. 400 if we're talking John Cabot. I think it was pretty obvious, pretty quick, that you weren't the only new land to be found in the region at the time.
So why did the name stick? Why couldn't you come up with a better name? Labrador did. Canada did. Acadia did. Quebec did. Listen up people! Can't you realize you need to stop putting "New" in your countries' names? It will just make you look stupid in 400 years (still calling yourself "new"? ha!), and it will piss off the Oldfoundlands who don't think they're really that old at all. But all right, one thing I have to grant you, Newfoundland, is that you've managed to slur your name right beyond recognition as a series of English words. This does, I'll admit, make Newfoundland a little fun to say. Even worse than Newfoundland as a name, would be "The Rock". As if you're the only place in the world with rocks. Or maybe I should feel sorry for you because all you've got is a big rock. But that's not true either. I know for a fact that you have a rich cultural tradition you could draw a suitable name from.
Labrador. Awesome name. Sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings. Sounds like a powerful nation that doesn't need fancy long, complicated names. Just Labrador. Reminds me of Rus. Not that you live up to such a name, but I can't ask for everything, can I? While I'm in the asking business, please ditch Newfoundland until it finds a better name.
The Northwest Territories. Congratulations, you've won! The worst name of any Canadian province or territory, and you did it without even having "new" in your name. Your prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to Nunavut! Seriously, when are we finally going to carve this piece of land up and make it into interesting-sounding territories? How many years has it been since Confederation? Okay, I'll admit we've made a heck of a lot of progress in shrinking this disgrace to toponomy over the years, carving more interesting bits out of it. But, annoyingly, it's still there! And it's gotten worse: the Northwest Territories used to be made up of actual territories that had cool-sounding names like Franklin, Keewatin, Devlon, and Butterberg. Okay, I made some of those up, but that's because I can't find them on any map of Canada I own anymore. Now it's all just the boring old Northwest Territories. What are these territories? Well, we couldn't be bothered to name or describe or bound them. They're just loose territories. Out there. Kind of vague and you have to sort of squint to see them. Even Rupert's Land, which is a pretty stupid name, was better than the Northwest Territories. Not that you don't have any interesting names. Yellowknife, for example, is a name I can get behind. It's kind of badass, almost like Rusty-knife, or Bloody-bone-that-I-cut-out-from-a-still-breathing-elk-Knife. You have to be badass to live in the Northwest Territories, or just batshit insane, so maybe they're just not the kind of people concerned with nomenclature, but rather the kind of people concerned with not freezing or starving to death. That doesn't exactly explain things though, since they do happen to have the Yukon Territory and Nunavut, both creatively named, right next to them. I don't know, I guess I can only hope that the NWT gets a name change within my lifetime, since it's already taken several lifetimes just to get to where it is today.
Yukon. Ah, much better. Although, like the Columbia mentioned way back in BC, I dislike naming territories based on stuff that they share with neighbouring states. After what I've seen in Atlantic Canada, I think my standards have been lowered quite a bit, so I might be willing to let this one slide. Yukon is another fun one to say. I wish BC had a name as cool and quirky as Yukon.
Nunavut. I guess I've saved the best for last. Nunavut is a pretty sweet name. Ignoring the fact that it sounds like "none of it," which I've been able to do since about three years after I learned about the new territory, everything else about the name is awesome. It comes from an indigenous language, and it wasn't stolen or bastardized any more than it had to be in order to be pronounced by Anglophones. There's no needless qualifications like "Canadian Nunavut" or "East Inuitland" or "North Canada". Just three syllables. Nunavut. As in "none of your damn business." Okay, I guess I never did get over the fact that the first two syllables sound like "none of." You know, I really don't know how they did it in Nunavut, came up with a creative name, and a whole writing system that isn't based on the Latin alphabet, when they should have been doing what the NWTers were doing and trying not to starve or freeze. If I were cynical, I might suspect that it was a ploy by the federal government in order to solidify Canadian sovereignty over Arctic waters. NWT just doesn't have the same access to all the islands that Nunavut does. And if the Canadians hadn't courted the Inuit, perhaps the Americans would have done so. [I don't think the Inuit would have gone for anything offered by the Americans, but I do think the threat of such events would be sufficient to motivate the Canadians to take action.] I just honestly hope that Nunavut doesn't follow the American model of various Indian territories becoming states, becoming farms for European immigrants, forcing Indians into smaller reserves.
Well, that's it.
Greece and Macedonia
I'm trying to wrap my mind around the insanity that is the argument between Greece and Macedonia.
I guess the argument is about heritage. Each group wants the right to be named Macedonians.
I guess I could try to imagine a scenario that might apply to me. I live on what was Carrier, or Leidli Tenneh, territory. So I can sort of imagine what might happen to me if I started calling myself Carrier. People would think I was daft, and some would actually be angry at me, thinking I was trying to steal someone else's heritage. But overall I don't think the effect would be very big. What I do think would be problematic is if we decided to separate British Columbia into several smaller provinces, and we named the Northern BC province Carrierland. Some might like it, some would be indifferent, but I think the leadership and the majority would oppose it. Northern BC isn't Carrierland, and no amount of wishing by whites or Indians will make it so. Certainly a name change won't fool anybody. Or will it?
Or what if the tables were turned? What if someone else wanted to steal my identity? What am I anyways? Canadian I guess. What if a bunch of Minnesotans suddenly decided they were going to call themselves Canadian? Well, that wouldn't bother me much, because Minnesota might as well already be part of Canada. They're so much like us already, it wouldn't bother me a bit. But the parallel doesn't compare to the Balkans. In order to have something like that, you need the infringing group to have a different language and culture. So, hmm? Are there any different linguo-culturistic groups around that might bother me if they decided they were going to take the name Canada? Well, there's the Quebecois, who I think would rather die than turn into English-speaking Canadians. There's Mexicans. What if a whole bunch of Mexicans decided to settle in Northwestern Washington, and name their new state Canada? That would only bother me insofar as it's absurd and it would be really annoying to have two countries with the same name side by side.
Part of the weird thing about Greece and Macedonia is that Greece already has a name. Several, in fact. Macedonia has none. If Greeks really wanted to be the true Macedonians, then they should rename their country Macedonia.
"But Macedonia is a region within Greece. It doesn't define the whole country. It's a sub-nation, like Quebec."
Hmm, okay, would I be bothered if a state set itself up on the border between Washington and British Columbia, calling itself Columbia? Not really.
Maybe the problem is that I simply lack a strong enough national identity to compare myself to the Greeks. What else defines me? Well, I already mentioned language. I speak English and I have white skin. I guess that makes me some kind of race. Would I be upset if a nation of Francophone black people moved into Alberta and called themselves WASP-land? What if a bunch of Koreans did this?
Nope. It just doesn't have an effect on me. I mean, I would think it was absurd, but I wouldn't feel the need to stop them from calling themselves whatever they wanted. I guess I would just have to ask them, "what's the point?" Maybe I would argue that, for their own good, they should come up with a slightly more sustainable thing to build their nation on. And perhaps that is the basis of the Greek criticism of Macedonia. It's a bad idea to just make things up in order to build your nation, because those things can then be undermined.
Still, the name itself I can find no objection in. After all, I live in British Columbia. On the opposite side of the world from Britain, and there is no such thing as any other Columbia. Colombia doesn't count; it's spelled different.
Actually, come to think of it, the name of our own province really stinks. Canada got a cool name. So did Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Labrador, Nunavut, and The Yukon Territory. (Sorry Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and The Northwest Territories, but your names are even worse than BC's.)
I think BC should change its name to Macedonia.
I guess the argument is about heritage. Each group wants the right to be named Macedonians.
I guess I could try to imagine a scenario that might apply to me. I live on what was Carrier, or Leidli Tenneh, territory. So I can sort of imagine what might happen to me if I started calling myself Carrier. People would think I was daft, and some would actually be angry at me, thinking I was trying to steal someone else's heritage. But overall I don't think the effect would be very big. What I do think would be problematic is if we decided to separate British Columbia into several smaller provinces, and we named the Northern BC province Carrierland. Some might like it, some would be indifferent, but I think the leadership and the majority would oppose it. Northern BC isn't Carrierland, and no amount of wishing by whites or Indians will make it so. Certainly a name change won't fool anybody. Or will it?
Or what if the tables were turned? What if someone else wanted to steal my identity? What am I anyways? Canadian I guess. What if a bunch of Minnesotans suddenly decided they were going to call themselves Canadian? Well, that wouldn't bother me much, because Minnesota might as well already be part of Canada. They're so much like us already, it wouldn't bother me a bit. But the parallel doesn't compare to the Balkans. In order to have something like that, you need the infringing group to have a different language and culture. So, hmm? Are there any different linguo-culturistic groups around that might bother me if they decided they were going to take the name Canada? Well, there's the Quebecois, who I think would rather die than turn into English-speaking Canadians. There's Mexicans. What if a whole bunch of Mexicans decided to settle in Northwestern Washington, and name their new state Canada? That would only bother me insofar as it's absurd and it would be really annoying to have two countries with the same name side by side.
Part of the weird thing about Greece and Macedonia is that Greece already has a name. Several, in fact. Macedonia has none. If Greeks really wanted to be the true Macedonians, then they should rename their country Macedonia.
"But Macedonia is a region within Greece. It doesn't define the whole country. It's a sub-nation, like Quebec."
Hmm, okay, would I be bothered if a state set itself up on the border between Washington and British Columbia, calling itself Columbia? Not really.
Maybe the problem is that I simply lack a strong enough national identity to compare myself to the Greeks. What else defines me? Well, I already mentioned language. I speak English and I have white skin. I guess that makes me some kind of race. Would I be upset if a nation of Francophone black people moved into Alberta and called themselves WASP-land? What if a bunch of Koreans did this?
Nope. It just doesn't have an effect on me. I mean, I would think it was absurd, but I wouldn't feel the need to stop them from calling themselves whatever they wanted. I guess I would just have to ask them, "what's the point?" Maybe I would argue that, for their own good, they should come up with a slightly more sustainable thing to build their nation on. And perhaps that is the basis of the Greek criticism of Macedonia. It's a bad idea to just make things up in order to build your nation, because those things can then be undermined.
Still, the name itself I can find no objection in. After all, I live in British Columbia. On the opposite side of the world from Britain, and there is no such thing as any other Columbia. Colombia doesn't count; it's spelled different.
Actually, come to think of it, the name of our own province really stinks. Canada got a cool name. So did Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Labrador, Nunavut, and The Yukon Territory. (Sorry Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and The Northwest Territories, but your names are even worse than BC's.)
I think BC should change its name to Macedonia.
I Gave Blood Yesterday!
Yesterday I gave blood and made it through the whole process without feeling faint or dizzy. This was my fourth trip to the blood donor place, and it was my first complete, successful donation. I was seriously considering giving up on trying, but I gave it one more shot, and it worked!
The first time I went in, I didn't even let them get the little sample they take first; I guess this is the part they send away to test for blood type and composition. It's a couple of mLs at most, but I didn't even let them get that, before I started seeing spots, getting dizzy, and I guess when a patient reports that, they abort the procedure immediately, which they did. I never actually went completely out, but I was pretty darn close. After that, they told me that some people take three or four attempts before they can get through it, so I could come back and try again.
The second time, I made it through the sample phase, so they got to the point where they were actually drawing blood, which they could use, but about halfway through that process, once again I saw spots, my vision shrunk into tiny little circles of awareness in front of me, and all the sounds got really far away, though I did manage to stay conscious, as the nurses were telling me to keep my eyes open, though it sounded like they were telling me this from miles away. One thing I should note about my second donation was that I read about how fighter pilots keep from blacking out (if they don't have a G-suit) under high G-forces, wherein they apparently have a similar problem of blood leaving the head and leading to unconsciousness. When they don't have the luxury of a G-suit, which squeezes your legs under high G-forces, forcing the blood to stay in your head and upper body, they learn exercises involving clenching of the abdominal muscles and leg muscles, in order to physically force blood up to their heads. I thought I'd give this a try during my second donation attempt, but it didn't work. I also worked out my arm a bit during the process, and flexed my arm so hard I got a bruise, which is a definite no-no.
The third time was pretty much the same as the second time. No ill feelings up until about halfway through the donation process, and then it hit me again. By the third time, it starts to feel like a pattern, and I was pretty sure this was how I was going to react to every subsequent attempt, but I thought I'd try again. Oh, and the third time I didn't even bother with the muscle-clenching.
The fourth time, I totally relaxed my arm, except for very gently opening and closing my hand. But I flexed my legs about every 10 or 20 seconds. I never once felt an onset of dizziness or faintness coming on this time. I tried to read a book, but I couldn't concentrate on the book; I was probably just too nervous to read, plus it was hard to hold the book open with just one hand.
Anyways, I'm just proud of giving blood and having finally given an entire unit without having to stop halfway through.
The first time I went in, I didn't even let them get the little sample they take first; I guess this is the part they send away to test for blood type and composition. It's a couple of mLs at most, but I didn't even let them get that, before I started seeing spots, getting dizzy, and I guess when a patient reports that, they abort the procedure immediately, which they did. I never actually went completely out, but I was pretty darn close. After that, they told me that some people take three or four attempts before they can get through it, so I could come back and try again.
The second time, I made it through the sample phase, so they got to the point where they were actually drawing blood, which they could use, but about halfway through that process, once again I saw spots, my vision shrunk into tiny little circles of awareness in front of me, and all the sounds got really far away, though I did manage to stay conscious, as the nurses were telling me to keep my eyes open, though it sounded like they were telling me this from miles away. One thing I should note about my second donation was that I read about how fighter pilots keep from blacking out (if they don't have a G-suit) under high G-forces, wherein they apparently have a similar problem of blood leaving the head and leading to unconsciousness. When they don't have the luxury of a G-suit, which squeezes your legs under high G-forces, forcing the blood to stay in your head and upper body, they learn exercises involving clenching of the abdominal muscles and leg muscles, in order to physically force blood up to their heads. I thought I'd give this a try during my second donation attempt, but it didn't work. I also worked out my arm a bit during the process, and flexed my arm so hard I got a bruise, which is a definite no-no.
The third time was pretty much the same as the second time. No ill feelings up until about halfway through the donation process, and then it hit me again. By the third time, it starts to feel like a pattern, and I was pretty sure this was how I was going to react to every subsequent attempt, but I thought I'd try again. Oh, and the third time I didn't even bother with the muscle-clenching.
The fourth time, I totally relaxed my arm, except for very gently opening and closing my hand. But I flexed my legs about every 10 or 20 seconds. I never once felt an onset of dizziness or faintness coming on this time. I tried to read a book, but I couldn't concentrate on the book; I was probably just too nervous to read, plus it was hard to hold the book open with just one hand.
Anyways, I'm just proud of giving blood and having finally given an entire unit without having to stop halfway through.
Friday, July 11, 2008
The Anti-Marketer
All the conventional wisdom in marketing says that building a strong brand is your key to success in business. In fact, building a strong brand is the key to success in any endeavor, including non-businesses, like churches.
Brands are the ultimate straw men, and quite an achievement. Basically a brand works like a word in the language. The sound by itself doesn't mean much, if anything. Everything that gets put into a brand is artificial. It's completely made up by humans communicating this idea, trying to get it ingrained in other people's minds. Generally, the more money you spend, the more people's heads you can get into. Branding success isn't necessarily sales. It's getting everybody to associate your product with an identified need. It's getting embedded in everybody's mind, that when they have problem A, they get an X. [X being the brand name, and not the generic name for the item.] Viral marketing can have a big impact for little dollars spent, but it can also sometimes backfire, creating unwanted associations with your brand, such as illegality at worse [cf. Aqua Teen Hunger Force], or illegitimacy [cf. YouTube vs. Viacom] in some cases.
A brand is like any other word in the language, but on steroids, because people want you to learn this word. No one gets paid if you learn "ignominious" (Merriam Webster's Word of the Day 11 July 2008) but someone gets paid to teach you "Bacardi Mojito."
Anyways. So much for what brands are supposed to do. Now for my idea on the anti-brand. What if there was a thing that was un-pin-down-able. What if there was a thing out there, a thing that had no set spelling, no set definition, and no way to brand it? Could it still be made into a marketing success? I have to believe that yes, it could, and once it was done, it would be amazingly successful. Essentially, this would be something totally new, something that's never been thought before. See my previous post on the name of God for some similar thoughts. But basically I want to start a brand that is never spelled the same way twice. I don't really care what product it is. It could even be a religion, for all I care, but it would be the ultimate anti-brand.
In a way, it would be using all of the traditional principles of branding. You'd pay someone to try to educate the public on the brand, but once you get it going, people would educate themselves. There's nothing people like better than being on the inside.
Here's one of my favorite examples. Take E. E. Cummings. Notice what I did there? Most people think that the "correct" way to write the poet's name is with lower-case Es. People will even take time out of their schedules to correct someone on the spelling on the internet. And yet there's not a lot of evidence that Mr. Cummings himself ever signed his name this way. He had his own opinions on capitalisation, but as far as his name went, he didn't seem to have this idea that his name should be always written with lower-case Es. Another great example is Prince. People go crazy when somebody famous changes their name. He changed his name to a symbol, and everybody was saying "what are we supposed to do now?"
Heck, maybe my great new idea isn't so new after all. I mean, look at what's been done by Sean Coombs and Jennifer Lopez. What? You don't recognize those names? How about P. Diddy and J-Lo?
Still, even these experimental artists have to stick with a particular brand for at least a small period of time. They change the brand though, and the fans go wild. I don't know if you need a huge, dedicated fanbase to start with, but I do know that this name-changing thing does fan the flames of fame. People who weren't interested in you before are suddenly asking "what's the meaning behind this change? Should I be interested in him now? Is he reinventing himself? I liked/didn't like the old Puff Daddy, but maybe I'll like/dislike P Diddy. I'd better take a listen and find out." A name change is news.
But there are practical reasons for changing your name from time to time. People love putting things in categories. Puff Daddy made one kind of hip hop music. [Is it hip hop or rap? I probably shouldn't be using him as an example so much, because I know absolutely nothing about his music, only that he's a guy who changed his name a lot.] P Diddy might make a slightly different kind of hip hop music. And Sean Coombs is the millionaire producer.
Prince, on the other hand, had his name changed over issues of copyright and ownership of his name, if I have the story correct. That's another can of worms though.
Which brings me to my blog. Problem is, people want things categorized. If I'm going to get people to read my blog (and no one has even seen it yet), I might want to categorize things so that they can find the topics that interest them. In fact, it might even be preferable to have multiple blogs, multiple identities blogging about multiple issues. As you might be able to see from the few scant entries so far, my thoughts are kind of wide-spread.
So a blog with a changing name, or a name that's never spelled the same way twice, could work, or it could be a total dismal flop. I don't even see how it could technically be done, except if I just made a new account every week and people had to go find it. I'd use a different provider every week too. No, that's not really what I want to apply this idea to. Maybe there is no perfect model product that this idea can work on, but I'm willing to watch what floats by in the stream of life to see if anything fits the anti-branding model.
Stay tuned, I guess.
Brands are the ultimate straw men, and quite an achievement. Basically a brand works like a word in the language. The sound by itself doesn't mean much, if anything. Everything that gets put into a brand is artificial. It's completely made up by humans communicating this idea, trying to get it ingrained in other people's minds. Generally, the more money you spend, the more people's heads you can get into. Branding success isn't necessarily sales. It's getting everybody to associate your product with an identified need. It's getting embedded in everybody's mind, that when they have problem A, they get an X. [X being the brand name, and not the generic name for the item.] Viral marketing can have a big impact for little dollars spent, but it can also sometimes backfire, creating unwanted associations with your brand, such as illegality at worse [cf. Aqua Teen Hunger Force], or illegitimacy [cf. YouTube vs. Viacom] in some cases.
A brand is like any other word in the language, but on steroids, because people want you to learn this word. No one gets paid if you learn "ignominious" (Merriam Webster's Word of the Day 11 July 2008) but someone gets paid to teach you "Bacardi Mojito."
Anyways. So much for what brands are supposed to do. Now for my idea on the anti-brand. What if there was a thing that was un-pin-down-able. What if there was a thing out there, a thing that had no set spelling, no set definition, and no way to brand it? Could it still be made into a marketing success? I have to believe that yes, it could, and once it was done, it would be amazingly successful. Essentially, this would be something totally new, something that's never been thought before. See my previous post on the name of God for some similar thoughts. But basically I want to start a brand that is never spelled the same way twice. I don't really care what product it is. It could even be a religion, for all I care, but it would be the ultimate anti-brand.
In a way, it would be using all of the traditional principles of branding. You'd pay someone to try to educate the public on the brand, but once you get it going, people would educate themselves. There's nothing people like better than being on the inside.
Here's one of my favorite examples. Take E. E. Cummings. Notice what I did there? Most people think that the "correct" way to write the poet's name is with lower-case Es. People will even take time out of their schedules to correct someone on the spelling on the internet. And yet there's not a lot of evidence that Mr. Cummings himself ever signed his name this way. He had his own opinions on capitalisation, but as far as his name went, he didn't seem to have this idea that his name should be always written with lower-case Es. Another great example is Prince. People go crazy when somebody famous changes their name. He changed his name to a symbol, and everybody was saying "what are we supposed to do now?"
Heck, maybe my great new idea isn't so new after all. I mean, look at what's been done by Sean Coombs and Jennifer Lopez. What? You don't recognize those names? How about P. Diddy and J-Lo?
Still, even these experimental artists have to stick with a particular brand for at least a small period of time. They change the brand though, and the fans go wild. I don't know if you need a huge, dedicated fanbase to start with, but I do know that this name-changing thing does fan the flames of fame. People who weren't interested in you before are suddenly asking "what's the meaning behind this change? Should I be interested in him now? Is he reinventing himself? I liked/didn't like the old Puff Daddy, but maybe I'll like/dislike P Diddy. I'd better take a listen and find out." A name change is news.
But there are practical reasons for changing your name from time to time. People love putting things in categories. Puff Daddy made one kind of hip hop music. [Is it hip hop or rap? I probably shouldn't be using him as an example so much, because I know absolutely nothing about his music, only that he's a guy who changed his name a lot.] P Diddy might make a slightly different kind of hip hop music. And Sean Coombs is the millionaire producer.
Prince, on the other hand, had his name changed over issues of copyright and ownership of his name, if I have the story correct. That's another can of worms though.
Which brings me to my blog. Problem is, people want things categorized. If I'm going to get people to read my blog (and no one has even seen it yet), I might want to categorize things so that they can find the topics that interest them. In fact, it might even be preferable to have multiple blogs, multiple identities blogging about multiple issues. As you might be able to see from the few scant entries so far, my thoughts are kind of wide-spread.
So a blog with a changing name, or a name that's never spelled the same way twice, could work, or it could be a total dismal flop. I don't even see how it could technically be done, except if I just made a new account every week and people had to go find it. I'd use a different provider every week too. No, that's not really what I want to apply this idea to. Maybe there is no perfect model product that this idea can work on, but I'm willing to watch what floats by in the stream of life to see if anything fits the anti-branding model.
Stay tuned, I guess.
Dogma is Fun!
[This post has been dictated to me by the angel Gehubriel. He doesn't type well, so he came to me. I may have taken some liberties with his divine words. May God strike me down in a fiery blast if anything I have typed is not in accordance with His Divine Will. A{wo}men.]
The Church of the Cough.
Some time ago I read the following:
"From some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy would transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, 'Cthulhu fhtagn'." --H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Now, there are numerous discussions on the internet, discussions which go back to the days before the internet, to the time when such correspondence was actually done through physical correspondence. Ie. with pen and paper. Discussions about how to properly pronounce Cthulhu. I won't go into them now, but you can Google it and get a pretty good idea of what's going on.
Anyways, the phenomenon here seems to be more related to the stumbling around of history and archaeology students through ancient languages. Lovecraft gave his stories a pretty blatant supernatural angle, but there is obviously a kernel of linguistic and cultural studies which provides the genesis of the musings on how this alien language is spoken. Lovecraft's idea is that there are creatures "out there" that have really different physiologies from human beings, and that therefore it is only natural that they should have different languages made up of the different sounds they are able to make. But as for examples of really alien languages, well, we don't yet have any, and naturally this makes them hard to describe in a written format.
Heck, even spoken language is often hard enough to learn. I was trying to learn some words in Arabic. I wanted to learn how to give the Arabic greeting, but I gave up on trying to make it sound perfect, because to be honest, you'd think that Arabs were from another planet, the sounds they take as phonemes! They sound more like coughs and grunts than vowels or consonants. And this, I think, is the only place that Lovecraft could take analogy. Since he throws in a professor of Semitic language studies as a character in the story, he's obviously at least somewhat familiar with the fact that these people make languages out of some pretty weird sounds.
Enough of that, what is this blog post really about? Some time ago I was reading about the ancient Jews. I can't be bothered at the moment to look up the exact period and details, but that's not important right now. The important thing is the impression it made on me, and the connection that I believe I fabricated out of thin air, but that seems to fit the facts surprisingly well. Anyways, the item in question is the fact that the ancient Jews believed that the name of God was unpronounceable. There were a whole lot of interpretations of this, and the mainstream one is an explanation that you need to be reverent when talking about God, and to even speak his name could invoke his wrath. Something like that. Anyways, this is why we have the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter word that no one knows how to pronounce. "YHWH." All consonants. Except for sometimes Y. Because they didn't believe people should be going around pronouncing the name of God, or perhaps because they didn't believe that mortals could ever get it right, and would risk offending God if they got it wrong, they came up with this shorthand, reverent version when they wanted to talk about God.
Later, people stretched the name out, added some vowels, and came up with "Jehovah."
YHWH
YeHoWaH
Yehowah
Jehowah
Jehovah
I don't know though, because I seem to recall that there is some debate among scholars as to which came first, the tetragrammaton, or the fully pronounced name of Jehovah. I actually prefer the view that the real name of God was lost, or never existed to begin with, and Jehovah was only invented later to fill in the gap that earlier prophets had failed to fill in.
In all likelihood, because languages tend to change and have funny things like vowel shifts, we almost certainly don't know exactly how they would have pronounced it. And for all we know, some of the sounds they used might not exist in any language today. Which is what connects this to the Cthulhu story.
See, an alien language from another planet is sort of like an ancient language. To the unaccustomed ear, they sound like coughs and gurgles. Cthulhu, Jehovah. They have their modern accepted spellings, but they go back to some pretty strange origins [albeit quite fictional in Cthulhu's case]. And both of them could have come out in very different ways, via the evolution of language.
What does this have to do with dogma, you ask? Well, I just wanted to say that I'm creating my own dogma, or system of beliefs, regarding God. And one of the first is that God's name isn't known. In fact, God's name was never known, and can never be known. Most religious people deal with this in a standard way: they make up a name. Okay, we don't know his real name, so we'll call him "God." "Jehovah." "Yahweh." Over time, the name gets standardized, and some iconography gets added. He becomes male; he grows a beard, he throws lightning bolts. And before you know it, he's coming down to earth, seducing virgins, getting drunk, and causing all kinds of trouble, being anything but the regal and majestic and dignified creator of the universe.
This is why I say when we name God, we need to give him a different name every time we speak of him. And this is why I propose the foundation of the Church of the Cough. See, instead of praying, "Oh God, our Father, give us our daily bread." we should pray, "dear [make a coughing noise here], give us today our daily bread."
In addition, we shouldn't get in the habit of spelling his name the same way over and over again. We need to come up with a handful of variants that we can use, and we need to be making new spellings for God all the time. We should not be nailing him down with our words. Here's a quick list of names you can start using:
Goob
Tjallbg
Tiorbk
Pefodfgu
Fwqwhgds
Howie
For inspiration, just look at the word "cough". There's no "F" in cough, so why do we pronounce it? Equally, Tiorbkjh needs stranger, less coherent pronunciations in His name. Feel free to use as many gurgles, grunts, wheezes, and quick breaths as possible when you pray. The pronunciation doesn't need to resemble the written word, since the written word is going to change every time it is copied anyways. Try to pronounce his name with confidence. He is your friend after all.
Next, I'm going to try and ween myself away from the male pronoun for God. Personally, I'm a big fan of Futurama's suggestion for the gender-neutral pronouns shklee and shklim.
Finally, why is this blog titled "Fun with Dogma" [or whatever I called it, I don't remember]? Well, because this is what all the great dogmatists love to do. They love to create coherent systems and claim that this is the right way to do it. I would be thrilled if everyone started using my system, but I can't claim that it's the best way to do things. In fact, it's probably inconvenient for worship; which is kind of the point. Put a little effort back into praying and worshiping, and thinking about who this God person really is anyways, is a good thing, in my opinion.
But that aside, my point is that I see no dogmatic point as obviously correct. Besides the fact that the angel Gehubriel [Gabriel's annoying cousin] personally came down to my apartment and dictated the previous blog post to me. He just left, so I can type whatever I want now: Tjallbg! Was he ever annoying! People who come up with big coherent dogmatic systems are just setting themselves up for a fight with other people who have also come up with massive dogmatic systems. They think if they're all in the same church, they all have to believe the same thing. But for me, I can't be held down. I can read and understand a dogmatic treatise, but ask me to subscribe to it, to believe in it, and I can do it for a while, but when something new comes along, I'll just go ahead and believe that. [Not so much on the big issues, but on stuff like predestination, I sway back and forth with the winds.] I can even do some of my own thinking on why we should have certain dogmas, and I'd like to think I've created my own little piece of dogma in this post.
So there's really no guarantee that I'll adhere to the dogma I just received through divine inspiration. There's no guarantee that I'll adhere to any dogma. I can entertain any dogma for a while, but eventually it will be undercut. The only dogma that isn't (yet) undercut is the dogma of self interest. I do and believe the things that are in my interest, and that seems to be the extent of my fidelity. I've never stopped believing in God or Jesus, but I've never had a compelling reason to go either way. And I don't see myself giving up the faith anytime soon, but the dogma changes all the time.
And that's all I feel like typing now.
The Church of the Cough.
Some time ago I read the following:
"From some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy would transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, 'Cthulhu fhtagn'." --H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Now, there are numerous discussions on the internet, discussions which go back to the days before the internet, to the time when such correspondence was actually done through physical correspondence. Ie. with pen and paper. Discussions about how to properly pronounce Cthulhu. I won't go into them now, but you can Google it and get a pretty good idea of what's going on.
Anyways, the phenomenon here seems to be more related to the stumbling around of history and archaeology students through ancient languages. Lovecraft gave his stories a pretty blatant supernatural angle, but there is obviously a kernel of linguistic and cultural studies which provides the genesis of the musings on how this alien language is spoken. Lovecraft's idea is that there are creatures "out there" that have really different physiologies from human beings, and that therefore it is only natural that they should have different languages made up of the different sounds they are able to make. But as for examples of really alien languages, well, we don't yet have any, and naturally this makes them hard to describe in a written format.
Heck, even spoken language is often hard enough to learn. I was trying to learn some words in Arabic. I wanted to learn how to give the Arabic greeting, but I gave up on trying to make it sound perfect, because to be honest, you'd think that Arabs were from another planet, the sounds they take as phonemes! They sound more like coughs and grunts than vowels or consonants. And this, I think, is the only place that Lovecraft could take analogy. Since he throws in a professor of Semitic language studies as a character in the story, he's obviously at least somewhat familiar with the fact that these people make languages out of some pretty weird sounds.
Enough of that, what is this blog post really about? Some time ago I was reading about the ancient Jews. I can't be bothered at the moment to look up the exact period and details, but that's not important right now. The important thing is the impression it made on me, and the connection that I believe I fabricated out of thin air, but that seems to fit the facts surprisingly well. Anyways, the item in question is the fact that the ancient Jews believed that the name of God was unpronounceable. There were a whole lot of interpretations of this, and the mainstream one is an explanation that you need to be reverent when talking about God, and to even speak his name could invoke his wrath. Something like that. Anyways, this is why we have the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter word that no one knows how to pronounce. "YHWH." All consonants. Except for sometimes Y. Because they didn't believe people should be going around pronouncing the name of God, or perhaps because they didn't believe that mortals could ever get it right, and would risk offending God if they got it wrong, they came up with this shorthand, reverent version when they wanted to talk about God.
Later, people stretched the name out, added some vowels, and came up with "Jehovah."
YHWH
YeHoWaH
Yehowah
Jehowah
Jehovah
I don't know though, because I seem to recall that there is some debate among scholars as to which came first, the tetragrammaton, or the fully pronounced name of Jehovah. I actually prefer the view that the real name of God was lost, or never existed to begin with, and Jehovah was only invented later to fill in the gap that earlier prophets had failed to fill in.
In all likelihood, because languages tend to change and have funny things like vowel shifts, we almost certainly don't know exactly how they would have pronounced it. And for all we know, some of the sounds they used might not exist in any language today. Which is what connects this to the Cthulhu story.
See, an alien language from another planet is sort of like an ancient language. To the unaccustomed ear, they sound like coughs and gurgles. Cthulhu, Jehovah. They have their modern accepted spellings, but they go back to some pretty strange origins [albeit quite fictional in Cthulhu's case]. And both of them could have come out in very different ways, via the evolution of language.
What does this have to do with dogma, you ask? Well, I just wanted to say that I'm creating my own dogma, or system of beliefs, regarding God. And one of the first is that God's name isn't known. In fact, God's name was never known, and can never be known. Most religious people deal with this in a standard way: they make up a name. Okay, we don't know his real name, so we'll call him "God." "Jehovah." "Yahweh." Over time, the name gets standardized, and some iconography gets added. He becomes male; he grows a beard, he throws lightning bolts. And before you know it, he's coming down to earth, seducing virgins, getting drunk, and causing all kinds of trouble, being anything but the regal and majestic and dignified creator of the universe.
This is why I say when we name God, we need to give him a different name every time we speak of him. And this is why I propose the foundation of the Church of the Cough. See, instead of praying, "Oh God, our Father, give us our daily bread." we should pray, "dear [make a coughing noise here], give us today our daily bread."
In addition, we shouldn't get in the habit of spelling his name the same way over and over again. We need to come up with a handful of variants that we can use, and we need to be making new spellings for God all the time. We should not be nailing him down with our words. Here's a quick list of names you can start using:
Goob
Tjallbg
Tiorbk
Pefodfgu
Fwqwhgds
Howie
For inspiration, just look at the word "cough". There's no "F" in cough, so why do we pronounce it? Equally, Tiorbkjh needs stranger, less coherent pronunciations in His name. Feel free to use as many gurgles, grunts, wheezes, and quick breaths as possible when you pray. The pronunciation doesn't need to resemble the written word, since the written word is going to change every time it is copied anyways. Try to pronounce his name with confidence. He is your friend after all.
Next, I'm going to try and ween myself away from the male pronoun for God. Personally, I'm a big fan of Futurama's suggestion for the gender-neutral pronouns shklee and shklim.
Finally, why is this blog titled "Fun with Dogma" [or whatever I called it, I don't remember]? Well, because this is what all the great dogmatists love to do. They love to create coherent systems and claim that this is the right way to do it. I would be thrilled if everyone started using my system, but I can't claim that it's the best way to do things. In fact, it's probably inconvenient for worship; which is kind of the point. Put a little effort back into praying and worshiping, and thinking about who this God person really is anyways, is a good thing, in my opinion.
But that aside, my point is that I see no dogmatic point as obviously correct. Besides the fact that the angel Gehubriel [Gabriel's annoying cousin] personally came down to my apartment and dictated the previous blog post to me. He just left, so I can type whatever I want now: Tjallbg! Was he ever annoying! People who come up with big coherent dogmatic systems are just setting themselves up for a fight with other people who have also come up with massive dogmatic systems. They think if they're all in the same church, they all have to believe the same thing. But for me, I can't be held down. I can read and understand a dogmatic treatise, but ask me to subscribe to it, to believe in it, and I can do it for a while, but when something new comes along, I'll just go ahead and believe that. [Not so much on the big issues, but on stuff like predestination, I sway back and forth with the winds.] I can even do some of my own thinking on why we should have certain dogmas, and I'd like to think I've created my own little piece of dogma in this post.
So there's really no guarantee that I'll adhere to the dogma I just received through divine inspiration. There's no guarantee that I'll adhere to any dogma. I can entertain any dogma for a while, but eventually it will be undercut. The only dogma that isn't (yet) undercut is the dogma of self interest. I do and believe the things that are in my interest, and that seems to be the extent of my fidelity. I've never stopped believing in God or Jesus, but I've never had a compelling reason to go either way. And I don't see myself giving up the faith anytime soon, but the dogma changes all the time.
And that's all I feel like typing now.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Fuck Viacom? Why not Fuck the United States Government?
If you watch a lot of YouTube videos, like I do, you will have noticed that there's a lawsuit going on right now between YouTube and Viacom over copyright. Viacom asserts that YouTube built its business, including most of its initial revenue, on content that it had no right to distribute, and content that Viacom actually lost sales on because people were getting it for free. The United States courts haven't made a ruling yet, but what they have done is rule that YouTube has to give Viacom a whole bunch of information, in order for Viacom to build their case, and this information includes personal information about YouTube account holders. The account holders never consented to having their information shared in this way.
This, according to many YouTube users, is a violation of privacy. Thus, a great many YouTube users have got together to create a campaign to boycott Viacom. They argue that because Viacom is making unreasonable demands, it's a bad company, and in order to stop them, and send a message to other companies, the YouTube collective userbase needs to punish Viacom by some kind of boycott or something.
Here's my problem with that scenario. Viacom is a company, I presume publicly traded, but I don't have just 5 seconds at the moment to Google it. Even though I had 5 seconds to write that last disclaimer sentence. Fuck it, just hang on a second.
Yes.
Okay, I'm back.
So Viacom is a publicly traded company, and like any company with shareholders who aren't batshit insane sole proprietors, it needs to protect its own interests. This includes asking the government if it could please make YouTube give them some information that would really help them with their case.
After all, if Viacom has been damaged by YouTube, then they would by all rights deserve to get some of those profits back, which have been wrongfully taken from them.
No harm in asking, right?
Except when the government says yes, you can have access to information about users. Information which normally, due to privacy considerations, we couldn't let you have, but because we're the courts, we're allowed to break the rules and here you go. By the way, YouTube, fuck you for being a haven for dissenters and alternating viewpoints. As the government, we are officially against that.
So by now, you can probably see that it's obviously stupid for the collective of YouTube users, the YouTube Users Union, as the church of the cough predicts will soon come into existence, to try to do something to hurt Viacom. For one thing, it isn't Viacom that has done anything wrong. They just asked. For another thing, even if they manage to get Viacom to back down, there are at least one or two other Multinational Multimedia Conglomerates who will now have no legal reason not to pursue the same information, because Viacom by backing down has set no legal precedent. For another thing, Viacom finances some entertaining content which I would prefer to watch. I don't want to boycott, um, hang on again while I Google what it is that Viacom finances* .... Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.
*Note that I write "finances" and not "produces", "creates", "puts out", or any creative word like that. Viacom is too big to "create" anything. It's the individuals who make stuff. Viacom just makes channels for them to get to their consumers. That's still a very big deal, and an extremely valuable contribution, but I feel that the distinction is necessary.
Okay, so I've lost my train of thought, but I think you get the picture that the evil being done here is being done by the courts and government, not Viacom. And yet, YouTube users are all too ready to go to war against Viacom. Why not go to war against the US Government?
No, I don't mean real war, which you might lose. Plus, if you had a revolution, you would face all the same problems over again in whatever new system you set up. I mean a lobbying war.
Instead of boycotting Viacom, boycott the DMV. Boycott the US court system. Boycott the police. No, don't really do that, because that would be stupid, but it's about as smart as boycotting whatever it is that Viacom puts out.
This, according to many YouTube users, is a violation of privacy. Thus, a great many YouTube users have got together to create a campaign to boycott Viacom. They argue that because Viacom is making unreasonable demands, it's a bad company, and in order to stop them, and send a message to other companies, the YouTube collective userbase needs to punish Viacom by some kind of boycott or something.
Here's my problem with that scenario. Viacom is a company, I presume publicly traded, but I don't have just 5 seconds at the moment to Google it. Even though I had 5 seconds to write that last disclaimer sentence. Fuck it, just hang on a second.
Yes.
Okay, I'm back.
So Viacom is a publicly traded company, and like any company with shareholders who aren't batshit insane sole proprietors, it needs to protect its own interests. This includes asking the government if it could please make YouTube give them some information that would really help them with their case.
After all, if Viacom has been damaged by YouTube, then they would by all rights deserve to get some of those profits back, which have been wrongfully taken from them.
No harm in asking, right?
Except when the government says yes, you can have access to information about users. Information which normally, due to privacy considerations, we couldn't let you have, but because we're the courts, we're allowed to break the rules and here you go. By the way, YouTube, fuck you for being a haven for dissenters and alternating viewpoints. As the government, we are officially against that.
So by now, you can probably see that it's obviously stupid for the collective of YouTube users, the YouTube Users Union, as the church of the cough predicts will soon come into existence, to try to do something to hurt Viacom. For one thing, it isn't Viacom that has done anything wrong. They just asked. For another thing, even if they manage to get Viacom to back down, there are at least one or two other Multinational Multimedia Conglomerates who will now have no legal reason not to pursue the same information, because Viacom by backing down has set no legal precedent. For another thing, Viacom finances some entertaining content which I would prefer to watch. I don't want to boycott, um, hang on again while I Google what it is that Viacom finances* .... Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.
*Note that I write "finances" and not "produces", "creates", "puts out", or any creative word like that. Viacom is too big to "create" anything. It's the individuals who make stuff. Viacom just makes channels for them to get to their consumers. That's still a very big deal, and an extremely valuable contribution, but I feel that the distinction is necessary.
Okay, so I've lost my train of thought, but I think you get the picture that the evil being done here is being done by the courts and government, not Viacom. And yet, YouTube users are all too ready to go to war against Viacom. Why not go to war against the US Government?
No, I don't mean real war, which you might lose. Plus, if you had a revolution, you would face all the same problems over again in whatever new system you set up. I mean a lobbying war.
Instead of boycotting Viacom, boycott the DMV. Boycott the US court system. Boycott the police. No, don't really do that, because that would be stupid, but it's about as smart as boycotting whatever it is that Viacom puts out.
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