polyglot conspiracy

An interesting Critic’s Notebook piece in the NYT today, by Sarah Boxer, attempts to answer the eternal question: Why are cats all over the internet, but dogs are not?

Personally, I haven’t noticed either way, except I’ve seen that “cat’s head in a lime skin” picture circulate way too much for my own enjoyment (you know what I’m talking about). But according to Boxer:

Cats are the Web’s it-animals. They’re everywhere. When you look up Devil Cats, you’ll see comics about cat owners who love too much and the cats that cheat on them. Look up Devil Dogs, and you’ll be offered apparel for the Marine Corps and information about Drake’s cakes. Under the heading “Animal Antics,” ifilm.com has four “Viral Videos” of cats, none of dogs. There are tons of badly drawn cats at www.tiddles.co.uk, but there’s no such site for dogs…

Why cats and not dogs?

She answers twofold. The first part has to do with the fact that cat owners have more time to sit around and put things on the internet about their cats, while dog owners are too busy cleaning up poo and taking the dogs outside to be online:

Cats are O.K. living in tight places and never going out. They don’t mind if their owners spend every waking hour on the Internet.

Dogs would die if they had to wait for their owners to go off line. And who wants to post pictures of a dead animal? Serious bloggers, the kind who float to the top of Google regularly, just don’t have time or space for dogs.

The second part goes something like this: when we anthropomorphize pets, we imagine cats to be the netheads, while dogs would be those people who still don’t even have cell phones and definitely, definitely do not have internet at home.

There’s a deeper answer to be had at infinitecat.com [Excellently humorous site. --PC], where users post pictures of their cats gazing at pictures of other cats already posted on the Infinite Cat site. You see an infinite regress: pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats.

Remind you of anything? Those cats are like so many bloggers sitting at home staring into their computer screens and watching other bloggers blog other bloggers. Cats, who live indoors and love to prowl, are the soul of the blogosphere. Dogs would never blog.

Here’s a fun headine from the Cavalier Daily:

Heat hospitalizes academic summer camp students
Thirty nine to thirteen-year-old students from summer camp programs sent to hospital Tuesday, nine admitted to emergency room

First interpretation: “Students from the ages of 13 to 39 were hospitalized? People as old as 39 are in summer camp? Isn’t that a little old for summer camp at UVA? And why does it go from oldest to youngest?”

Second interpretation: 39 thirteen-year-olds hospitalized, plus an extra preposition

Third interpretation’s a charm: Thirty students between the ages of 9 and 13 were hospitalized. Wow!

From yesterday’s NYT comes Sandra Barron’s excellent “R We D8ting?” (though I have to say it should just be “D8ng”), which tells the story of the writer’s string of text message exchanges with a potential date. The reactions to the messages turn from giddily excited to bitterly reviling, no doubt exacerbated by misunderstandings about what they “really meant,” as well as what they are properly used for.

She describes the first flirty “U miss me? ;-)” message she receives from Potential Date:

I like text messages. They fill an ever-narrowing gap in modern communication tools, combining the immediacy of a phone call with the convenience of an answering machine message and the premeditation of e-mail.

She hints at her negative attitude toward CMC-speak:

Before I turned out the light and snapped the phone into its charger, I allowed myself one more grin at his message and a grimace at his middle-school style (”U”? A winking smiley face?).
…
I swallowed my distaste for cutesy abbreviations and tried: LOL! As you like, then. :-) I cringed slightly as I hit send; this suddenly seemed like a dangerously clumsy way of communicating.

And my favorite is her description of the search for potential dates’ identities:

At the office on Tuesday, as the light blinked on again (Din in SoHo then drinks in the E Vil, and maybe a kiss), I wondered, Just who is this guy?

Google failed me. One time, armed with only a guy’s first name and the fact that he sold sneakers, I had found his full details and photos online. But all I had here was a cellphone number and initials, and Friendster, MySpace and Technorati - the entire digital detective squad of the modern dater - were stumped.

What a modern tale it is. And might I add that it was, ever so appropriately, brought to my attention by Jordan via Friendster (thanks Jordan!).

[Also, since Jordan said he found the article via MeFi, I send you toward the discussion thread over there, where this article is currently being ripped to shreds by sour people who can't appreciate things simply because they are entertaining and maybe even a little bit interesting. However, there are a few interesting attitudinal posts. For instance, piratebowling says:

I'm slightly bitter that I'm pretty sure I will never get a real, paper love letter ever again. I'll just have spelling error and internet abbrevation riddled IM logs, emails and text messages.

And nightcrome posts:

Jeez, do people not know how to interact with one another anymore? I can't believe people have relationships like this.

Is technology really tearing us all apart?!?!]

Last week’s Next Big Thing show contained a conversation with Indiana University’s Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist/linguist/AI expert/music translator and author of Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. He and a student talk about their work “translating” songs Cole Porter, dealing with the “transculturation” and “transtemporation” processes necessary to good translation — what go beyond the words. The piece includes a great update of Porter’s “You’re the Top”: “You’re the Worst,” with the “you” referring to current pop culture icons.

It reminds me of the first chapter from George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, titled “Understanding as Translation.” His point being that across time, different works written in what is ostensibly the same language are nonetheless subject to greatly differeng contexts, thus differing meanings (even when the dictionary says word meanings have stayed the same):

Any thorough reading of a text out of the past of one’s own language and literature is a manifold act of interpretation. In the great majority of cases, this act is hardly performed or even consciously recognized…When reading any piece of English prose after about 1800 and most verse, the general reader assumes that the words on the page, with a few ‘difficult’ or whimsical exceptions, mean what they would in his own idiom…[That assumption] is, of course, a fiction. (p. 17)

I Heart Lung. (I’m not even sure if they meant it that way, but get it? Yeah?)

I just found The GIF Pronunciation Page, proof that some people have too much time on their hands (my own website is also, perhaps, proof of that - but nevermind). The website’s mission:

The GIF graphics file format was invented by CompuServe in 1987. In the years since, a debate has been raging as to the correct way to pronounce “GIF”: like “jif”, or with a hard ‘g’ as in “gift” as a majority of Mac users seem to prefer. With this page I intend to clear this up once and for all…

It’s pronounced like “jif”. Period. The end. That’s final. End of story.

I can’t bear to read the reasoning, other than the fact that some higher-up GIF inventor people have deemed the pronunciation thus. Makes no sense to me.

[Note: I SWEAR I wrote this headline (how could I not?!) BEFORE seeing the "Choosy websites choose GIF" logo at the bottom of the site's page, or any other Jif slogan allusion on the site.]

At the same time as the NYT is finally (as Mark Liberman explains in his post at the Log) picking up the issue of Democrats’ framing problems, a reminder comes of just how good the religious right/religious conservatives are at the whole shebang. Text from Love in Action International (c/o a Salon series investigating “reparative therapy” to convert homosexuals), with what I see as particularly interesting phrases bolded:

For the past 30 years, the modern American culture has bought into a lie! We have been sold a bill-of-goods about the nature of homosexuality that is spiritually and practically untrue…. For many people, the word “homosexual” has become a noun. Many believe this is a descriptive word to help sort a certain person into a different category, a different type of gender, we might say.

Why the past 30 years? In 1975, the gay rights movement began to market the words “gay” and “homosexual” to refer to an inborn character or to the identity of men and women with same-sex attractions and behaviors. Today, they have succeeded in redefining those words to suit their agenda in our culture.… Even in the church we talk about ministering to the “homosexual,” immediately labeling an individual just as secular activists do…

As we battle with proponents [sic] over the idea that “homosexuality equals identity,” we lose ground by using their terminology. We lose more ground as we seek to put forward a solution based on the terminology of their lie. The truth is there are no homosexuals…

Satan, working behind the secenes, has succeeded in redefining the meaning of key words, and therefore we only reinforce and strengthen a false identity by calling individuals by a name that does not apply. Homosexuality involves feelings, attractions, and sexual behavior; it can be a mind set, and it can include cultural association. From these factors, one can embrace it as a personal identity…..

The first step of the process is to move away from the subtle lies of the Enemy and take back the truth in our communication and thinking….

There is no such thing as a homosexual! There are many individuals, however, who struggle intensely with homosexual temptation and addictive behavior. Once we get the message right, then we will be effective in ministering to those caught in this kind of deceptive bondage.

Wowzer. Scary. Scarier that they seem to get it, or at least that you can’t win a culture war, or a political war, on the enemy’s terms and concepts. It’s the simplest thing, really - even Satan knows!

March of the Penguins is a beautiful piece of cinema. But a linguistic issue was raised by friends after we saw the film last night.

The slogan for the movie is “In the harshest place on Earth, love finds a way.” No doubt the film tugs at the heartstrings over and over again (I almost cried, and I almost never cry at movies, even when humans are involved). And the story of the emperor penguin’s survival in the face of terrifying conditions in Antarctica, with procreation as its goal, is a remarkably moving one. But we (or I, anyway) left the theater thinking, “That’s not love. That’s not what love is!” Which then made me think, “Well, why? Why is it not love? What does this mean that love means to you?”

What the emperor penguin does each season is migrate to a breeding ground far from its normal home in the sea, find a mate, mate, then spend months caring for the egg and chick until it’s old enough to survive on its own in the waters - a burden that both the female and male parents share. It IS heartwarming. Well, it kind of is. Before the season is over, the parents leave the chicks on their own and jump back into the water that is their true home, which seems kind of like abandonment. We’ve spent this whole movie watching the delicate bond between female and male and child, the tenderness they all share in service of survival for all three, and then bam! The parents just up and leave. Is this what we think of as “love”? To find one mate one season, one the next? To rear one chick tenderly for a year, then leave it be?

Predictably I am not the first to question this lexical choice. Stephen Holden, in the NYT, writes:

Although “March of the Penguins” stops mercifully short of trying to make us identify with the hardships overcome by a single penguin family, it conveys an intimate sense of the life of the emperor penguin. But love? I don’t think so.

He doesn’t really explain why it’s not love, except for intimating that it’s just not an emotional experience for the penguins, as the film tries to get us to buy that it is - or at least get us to compare their behavior with our own, and transfer our own emotions to them. But I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that we associate love with steadfastness: love is measured in part by longevity. In our ideal images, marriage is for life, your children are your children forever, and monogamy is not just seasonal (for penguins, with each new season, “all bets are off”). Granted that love is one of the most polysemous words around, but in general, love is supposed to be everlasting, something you don’t want to let go of (cliches like “If you love me you’ll let me go!” aside).

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon notes what is perhaps the necessity of considering this “love” in order for us to understand the penguin’s life:

More than once the picture’s narrator, Morgan Freeman, notes that the emperor penguin’s saga of mating and child rearing is a love story, and while that’s an admittedly handy anthropomorphic device, when it comes to understanding why the emperor penguin would go to such great lengths to mate and have babies, the inexplicability of human love may be the only comparison we have.

But a different kind of love, one that went virtually undiscussed in the film, though hinted at, was that of the group of penguins - the love of one’s own, one could say. Indeed, what was more striking to me than the partnership of the male and female was the cooperation of the whole clan of penguins - the way they huddle together to shield one another from a windstorm, switching positions so no penguin faces the harshest treatment for long. The way they react immediately, instinctively, when a female whose chick has died attempts to steal another’s chick. This group cooperation, eyes-on-the-prize, I-got-your-back attitude could be seen as a model for some kind of “love for fellow humanity” attitude.

Anyway, see the movie. It’s good. And let me know what it makes you think about love, either the word or the concept.

[Also, in case anyone sees the movie and is also left thinking, "What happens to the spinsters?" - that is, the female penguins who don't find a mate that season - the website has an answer:

After the mating dance, and the actual coupling, several small groups take off marching towards the horizon. These are made up of females who have not found partners this season and are heading back towards the ocean before the dead of winter.

Which, to be honest, doesn't sound so bad. And definitely coincides in some ways with human behavioor as well - while the mothers are raising their young, the not-so-attached women keep on living life as they always have...Boy. This could be a whole other post.]

*Allusion to a recent post of The Tensor’s regarding the Haddaway song, with apologies for the similarity of our titles.

To add to the corpus of heavy metal umlaut usage, check out the “Director’s Cut” episode of Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s Home Movies. In this episode, Melissa and Jason fight with Brendan to produce rival Duane’s rock opera based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The opera contains a band playing music and singing such lines as:

He is Franz Kafka!
Franz Kafka!
Be careful if you get him pissed…
Franz! Franz Kafka!
He’ll smite you with metaphor fists!
Writing all he can, he’s just a man
A warrior of words taking a stand
He is Franz Kafka!
(Spoken) Oh look, but there he is, what will he say?
I’m a lonely German…a lonely German from Prague!
Kafka! Kafka! Kafka!

And the band’s name is SCÄB. Yes.

UPDATE: I just found this from Rocklopedia Fakebandica:

Scäb - A two-man alternately hard rock, metal, and New Wave-y band originally featured in the “Director’s Cut” episode (09/02/01) of animated show Home Movies. Third grader & film auteur Brendon Small (voiced by Brendon Small) is hired by long haired guitarist Dwayne (also voiced by Brendon Small) to film his Queen-esque rock opera based on Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”

[Thanks to Alli for introducing me to Home Movies, and to Chava for enabling my further enjoyment of it.]

Anyone reading this should go to this Lulu Eightball cartoon, by Emily Flake, NOW. I think we all can appreciate “The Slippery Slope into Full-Blown Word-Nerdism” (though I told someone it’d be even better if it said Werdism, since that’d finally solidify my favorite, despite being totally unpopular, portmanteau).