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.

Ad multos annos

Today is the traditional anniversary for the founding of Rome. If the recognized authorities on the subject can be trusted, the city was established on 21 April 753 BC. That means that this is year 2761 AUC – ab urbe condita: “from the city having been founded.” Interestingly (at least to me), Rome’s special distinction as Urbs, that is, “The City,” comes from the early Latin word urvus, which denotes a furrow cut by a plow.

The story behind the plow business starts with Romulus and Remus. They have an entire early history involving being abandoned bastard god-children raised by a she-wolf, but I’ll focus on the city-founding part. Each had a different idea for where their city ought to be located. They determined that the best way to decide was to prophecy using vultures. Romulus saw six more than Remus and won the contest, so he started digging a furrow to mark the outskirts of the city, but Remus wasn’t happy about being an inferior bird-watcher, and started jumping over the boundaries to mock his brother.

Romulus decided the best way to handle this situation was to crush his brother’s skull with a spade and name the city Roma after himself (this is also what happens when you line-jump in grade-school dodge ball). You’d think two kids who grew up suckling the same wolf’s milk would have been more mutually attached, but who am I to judge? This is apparently the best way to found a city if you want to take over the world.

John Edwards drops out

Here’s the truth – I have no opinion on the presidential race, election politics, politics in general. I was having a brief discussion earlier today with Joseph, wherein we agreed that politicians are completely insincere – I mean, really, who can pretend that they’re really “in it” for the public good?

That the realm of politics belongs almost solely to certain prestigious and/or wealthy families of this country, and that even on the most local level it’s a profession rather than a vocation: both these facts serve to alienate me completely from the entire process (oh, and the Electoral College; not really the image of a real democracy, you know). I hope it’s not because I’m an apathetic teenager, but I can’t pretend that I have much faith in the business of elections in the first place. Don’t get me wrong – don’t believe in not voting, it’s just that I can’t get really jazzed up about it. That’s why I registered as an independent voter. I care about specific issues, but not about specific candidates or specific parties.

Anyway, that Edwards business – interesting, I suppose. The Democratic nomination will end up going either to a woman or a minority, both exciting options insofar as one thinks that says something about our country. (But wait, I forgot Mike Gravel! Or do you agree with me that just the idea of a “President Gravel” begs for four years of bad late-night puns and worse political cartoons? Actually, a better question… have you even ever heard of Mike Gravel?)

Apollonia

Saint Apollonia was a martyr in Alexandria; she was tortured by having all her teeth ripped out or shattered. After that completely horrible ordeal, she was presented with either renouncing Christ or being burned alive – she chose to jump into the fire. Whoever decides which saint gets to be the patron of so-and-so had a pretty sick sense of humor – Apollonia is commonly shown holding her own teeth in pliers and is prayed to for tooth problems.

I was thinking about Apollonia when I went to the dentist today (because my suffering was completely comparable to ancient Roman torture). The dentist injected three shots of novocaine – I didn’t feel anything at all. In fact, I didn’t regain feeling in the lower leftmost fourth of my face until five hours later. Then I noticed that I had been chewing my tongue up since attempting to eat my dinner in half bites.

The worst part of “the dentist” is smelling your enamel burn as they shear down the sides of your filling (is that enamel, or whatever they make fillings out of?). I’m aware some people aren’t prone to cavities, such as G. Staltari, who achieved his first serious tooth decay during his freshman year at the University of the Holy Ghost. My brother, on the other hand, had TEN cavities a few months ago; he must have been trying for a record.