The Twinkie Is Dead

The Twinkie is dead.  The Hostess corporation, with manufactured the Twinkie, has gone bankrupt due to a labor dispute.  I used to enjoy the occasional Twinkie in my youth,  but I probably haven't eaten one in twenty years. The Twinkie likely isn't truly dead, though.  Some other company may well acquire the rights to produce them, possibly a company in Mexico, where sugar is cheaper than in the United States, where tariffs keep the price artificially high.  

There are links for all this information, but I don't feel like going to the trouble of adding them.  Well, okay, there aren't any links about the fact that I haven't eaten a Twinkie in twenty years.  

But what is really important is that I tried to draw a Twinkie on my computer.  

I did not include a picture of a slug in this post because combining slugs and foodstuffs would be considered unsavory.

Now November Is Half Over and There Is a Slug

It seems as if I was just writing about how it was September and fall was more than one-sixth over, and now it is November and fall is more than five-sixths over.  And it is almost Thanksgiving, but it seems as if Halloween was only a week or so ago.  (Thanksgiving is on the earliest possible date this year, so there really are only about three weeks between the two holidays.)  Time passing way too quickly is a recurring theme at this point in my life.  

I notice that in my last post, I had a terrible time using AppleWorks to draw the pictures of jars, but the slugs worked out pretty well.  Maybe I should put drawings of slugs in all my blog entries.

A Helpful Hint: How to Remove a Slug from Your Home

Perhaps there will come a day when you will find a slug on the floor of a building.  If you are like most people, you will want to remove the slug.  And also if you are like most people, you won't want to touch the slug or otherwise interact with it.  Here is a simple method for removing the slug without making contact with it. 

1) Place an empty jar or other open-mouthed container over the slug.

2) Wait a half an hour to an hour, and the slug will slide up the inside surface of the jar.  

3) Pick up the jar and place it on the ground outside.  

4) In another hour or so, the slug will have slid back out of the jar and into the surrounding environment. 

(Needless to say, the container used for this should be one which you wouldn't mind coming into contact with a slug and its associated slime.)  

In case anyone is unclear on how this method works, I have included two low-quality computer drawings illustrating a slug moving from the floor to the inside of a jar, viewed from the side. 

I came up with this method by accident many years ago, when I found a slug on the floor.  I didn't know what to do about it, so I put a jar over the slug to keep it from going anywhere, and then went away, intending to figure out how to deal with it later.  (I have a tendency to put off dealing with my problems, which usually makes them worse.) When I came back, I found to my surprise that the slug had gone up inside the jar.  

Our Abnormal Halloween Season

  Much has happened in the past week that feels catastrophic, if not outright apocalyptic: Hurricane Sandy, the lead-up to the presidential election, the sale of the Star Wars franchise to Disney . . .  In a recent blog post, I said that I wanted something cool to happen for Halloween.  Instead, a hurricane merged with a cold front to form a powerful hybrid storm that devastated the northeastern coastline and left millions without power.  It makes me want to shout "Uncool!", but that would leave me feeling too much like Joey from Friends.  

(By the way, in my last blog post, I used the redundant phrase "unexpected surprise", which was due to sloppy editing resulting from me trying to get the post up before the hurricane hit.)

In light of the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey issued an executive order postponing Halloween in his state until today.  I  am surprised that a governor or any other elected official would have the power to reschedule Halloween.  I would think that Halloween would be controlled by some special Halloween Committee, at least three members of which would be required by law to have pumpkins for heads.  

Another, perhaps final, Halloween observation is that today I saw that a lot of people have left the Halloween decorations up on the outside of their houses, even though it is almost a week after Halloween.  Was this practice common in the past, but I never noticed?  Or is it part of a recent societal trend?  Or is there a specific desire this year to extend the Halloween season longer than usual to make up for Halloween being overshadowed by the hurricane?

You, Claudius

In the spirit of staying up too late, which I often do, I spent many Saturday nights/Sunday mornings in September watching episodes of the 1976 BBC series I, Claudius on WETA UK.  The show, based on the book by Robert Graves, is a false autobiography of the Roman emperor Claudius.  The characters are mostly a bunch of Roman dudes with bowl haircuts and names like Gaius Drusus Germanicus Triceratops. Many of them are at least partially insane, most of them  want to rule the Roman Empire, and all of them are being poisoned by their wives.  I found portions of the story extremely confusing, but was able to navigate much of it using knowledge left over from my high school Latin days. 

An unexpected surprise was the appearance of Patrick Stewart in the role of Sejanus, who was prefect of the Praetorian Guard during the reign of Emperor Tiberius.  

A week or two after seeing Stewart in this role, I was struck by the realization of a shocking coincidence which, I felt at the time, would rock our view of the universe itself.  Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard, earlier acted alongside a character named Tiberius . . . and Captain Kirk's middle name was Tiberius!! (Kirk's middle name was not presented as Tiberius in the original series, however, it was presented thus in the animated series, and was one of the fews elements of the animated series later accepted as canonical.)

The whole thing can be presented in a circular progression, as follows:

Captain Jean-Luc Picard --> Patrick Stewart --> Sejanus --> Emperor Tiberius --> Captain James Tiberius Kirk --> Captain Jean Luc Picard

This coincidence has a big impact on me because, due to my participation in Latin club/Certamen activities and my own inherent nerdiness, Star Trek and the Roman Empire both took up large amounts of my time in high school. 

The Word of the Day (October 28, 2012)

The word of the day is anquilosaurio.  I ran into it recently in a scientific journal, and thought that it had an interesting story.    

All scientifically-classified animals have a scientific name, and most modern animals also have one or more common names.  For example, there is a bird, common in parking lots, known by the scientific name Passer domesticus (indicating the genus and species) and the common name house sparrow.  A scientific name is Latinate in form; it is usually formed from Latin or ancient Greek roots, but it can be formed from elements of any language as long as they are rendered compatible with Latin grammatical structures.  And a common name is in whatever language is used where the animal lives.  

Non-avian dinosaurs have no common names, as they lived millions of years before any humans were alive to bestow common names. But a dinosaur is often given a sort of improvised common name by "de-Latinizing" the scientific name (or a name higher up in its taxonomic nomenclature).  For example, the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus is given the common name of tyrannosaur by dropping the Latinate -us ending.  And any dinosaur in the family Tyrannosauridae can be called by the common name tyrannosaurid, which results from dropping the Latinate -ae.

This principle, applied to dinosaurs of the suborder Ankylosauria, results in the English common name ankylosaur.  And, as I recently learned, that English common name, rendered into Spanish, yields anquilosaurio.  I had never considered the possibility of the improvised English common name of a dinosaur being changed into a foreign common name, but evidently it does happen.  A word is built from ancient Greek roots, given a Latin suffix, has the Latin suffix removed to form an English word, and then has its spelling changed to fit the rules of Spanish . . . all for an animal that lived more than 65 million years ago.  

The Convention Will Be in R'lyeh This Year

When I was writing my last post, I felt that I needed a link to explain Nyarlathotep.  I went to Wikipedia, and, as always, strayed from the path and became lost in the vast information swamp that is that website.  And somehow it became relevant to our current election season.  I ended up reading about Robert Bloch, a horror writer most famous for the book Psycho, on which the movie was based.  Bloch began his career as a protege of H. P. Lovecraft.  Bloch later worked for the Milwaukee mayoral campaign of Carl Zeidler, during which, according the Bloch's autobiography, he conceived the idea of dropping balloons from the ceiling at political rallies.  The balloon drop, of course, became a inevitable feature of every major party convention of the modern era.

And so you can see (in case you ever had any doubt) that the tentacles of Cthulhu have left a lasting imprint on the American political process.