How not to get your name stolen

So I’m currently reading a captivating piece of academic literature: Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing (William Irwin, Open Court, 2000). As much as I would love to describe some of the thoughts contained therein – the book contains various essays by philosophers, along the lines of “Making Something out of Nothing: Seinfeld, Sophistry, and the Tao” and “George’s Failed Quest for Happiness: An Aristotelian Analysis” – it’s really one page that concerns me for this post. I was reading Mark Conrad’s contribution, “Plato or Nietzsche: Time, Essence, and Eternal Recurrence in Seinfeld,” when I spotted this, in an explanation of how humor is different from normal conversation:

If I say, “Mary is bright, and she’s pretty,” I am saying the same thing as “Mary is pretty, and she’s bright.” If I have omitted saying who Mary is, which Mary I am referring to, I can always go back and tack on that information. “I mean Mary Stevens.” “Oh, that Mary!” you reply. The situation has been fixed; the confusion evaporates.

Try fixing a joke after you’ve already told it poorly. It’s easier to sum up Nietzsche’s philosophy in 25 words or less.

I’ve emphasized the name “Mary Stevens” because it happens that I went to high school with a girl named Mary Stevens, and so of course I had to share with her how philosopher Mark Conrad thinks she’s pretty and bright. Then, however, I got to thinking about what I am going to call “stolen names.”

How much would it suck to have your name snatched up by popular culture? It’s one thing if your name is “Bill Smith” or (forgive me) “Mary Stevens.” These are fairly generic, and liable to be used as decoy names in Math textbook word problems and essays about Seinfeld. You would never avoid naming your child “Mary” just because there’s a chance that some academic may use it in illustrating a hypothetical situation.

It’s another thing altogether be unfortunate enough to be christened with a name such as, say, “Harry Potter,” and have that name be appropriated by a children’s book author and paraded around on advertisements and movie posters for a decade or more. To wit, consider the probability of a boy being born in Great Britain in about 1990, with black hair, green eyes, poor eyesight, and named Harry Potter. The chances aren’t bad! And what’s the result? Years of teasing, resulting in an identity crisis, which can only lead to something terrible, like Capgras delusion.

I mean, look at this. I wanted to find some examples of the real-life Harry Potters out there on the Internet who were robbed of their individualities, so you could look into their sad, defeated eyes. I did a Google search for “Harry Potter,” but excluding the terms “book”, “movie”, “Rowling,” “wizard,” “Order of the Phoenix,” “owl,” “Prisoner of Azkaban,” and “Emma Watson.” After all that, still no non-Harry Potter results! There are people out there, normal people named Harry Potter, and they deserve to be found on Google!

If I were a famous author, I would make sure to name significant characters after people I despise, thereby robbing my enemies of their unique personalities forever.

The only solution for this problem is for all authors to name their characters as obscurely as possible. Examples can be found here. Take note of these real personal names; this is how to do it right: Urhines Kendall Icy Eight Special K (born in Kansas in 2003), Yahoo (a Mexican boy born in 2007, and named after where his parents met), and Depressed Cupboard Cheesecake (born in Kent, England, before 1988; no word on the sex of that child).

Terrible diseases

Okay, so I was reading Dinosaur Comics (no, I am not afraid to cite my source for this information), and today’s comic mentions some terrible diseases. These include dacryorrhea, a condition that causes you to cry all the time, and fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, which causes all your soft connective tissue turns into bone. (Apparently, a typical precursor for this disease is small big toes. Why?) However, the worst of the three, in my opinion, is Capgras delusion.

True, it’s hard for a disease to be worse than one that turns you into a living statue by middle age, but I think it’s because Capgras is psychological that makes it the most terrifying. People with Capgras delusion become convinced that their closest friends and relatives are not who they say they are, but are impostors who both look and act the same as the originals.

Not only does that score high on the Weirdness criterion for terrible diseases, but it’s also really up there in regard to the Turns Your Life Into an Episode of the Twilight Zone factor as well.

I did a little more research into this field, and discovered two more strange disorders. The first is Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which sounds like it could describe any number of bizarre delusions. It turns out that it covers a range of disorienting sensory mutations; the most prominent symptom is a “metamorphosis” of the body, wherein parts of one’s body, especially the hands and head, seem to grow or shrink. The second major symptom is altered visual perception, so that, for instance, dogs appear very small like rats, or hallways seem infinitely long. Other symptoms can include a feeling that the ground is porous or spongy under one’s feet, and distorted perception of time. It is basically like tripping on acid all the time. But without the quasi-religious transcendental experiences.

The last horrible affliction I’ll describe jumped out at me because of its name: Impossible syndrome. How would you like to hear that from a doctor? “I’m sorry, sir, but you have Impossible Syndrome.” (He could also call it Chondrodysplasia situs inversus imperforate anus polydactyly. Maybe that would be worse.) Luckily for you, only one case of Impossible syndrome has ever been reported – a premature and stillborn infant with an impossibly extensive range of sickening deformations.

Thank you, The Man

The Man gave me a job today. And am I excited! Between answering questions like “How did you deal with a situation that required you to complete a job quickly, but efficiently?” (thank you, BSing skills I acquired from high school) and driving myself to some shady, side-door Babcock Boulevard drug testing facility, the manager gave me some advice. Apparently cashiers for The Man get down on themselves since they are constantly rejected by customers who don’t want The Man’s credit card. I must not let this get to me, because it is a percentages game.

Well, The Man, you know what? I am ready. I am ready to peddle your plastic money cards. I am ready to arrange your big-deal merchandise in people’s carts “like a puzzle.” I am psychologically resilient. My sense of self-worth is not tied to my summer job. Thank you, The Man, for giving me this opportunity. You will not regret it.

However, my readers (am I to assume I have these? I don’t want to get ahead of myself, after all): keep an eye on me. I encourage you to monitor my posting for signs of decreased self-esteem that may be linked to dealing with rude customers and denied credit account pitches.

By the way, I have a Twitter account. So basically you now have all the tools you need to stalk me. If I start getting anonymous letters and phone calls at 2 am that go straight to the dial tone, I swear, I will make my twitterings private! You will no longer have the great honor of knowing what I’m doing all the time. This is your only warning.