eureka2814

For anyone who still follows this blog, I'm letting you know that I am about to bid a tearful farewell to Livejournal and move The Fearless Fox to Wordpress.

The blog is now at http://thefearlessfox.wordpress.com/ .

Stay awesome, foxers.

College is, at this point, considered the next logical step in a person's education. If you don't go to college, then everyone tells you you can't get a job, which means you can't pay for a house, which means you have nowhere to live, which means you end up sleeping in a box in an alleyway until you die tragically of pneumonia or get eaten by rabid dogs, just because you were too cheap and/or untalented to attend a university.

What they don't tell you is that this guy is a rocket surgeon.
There's not much of a demand for trauma surgery on munitions.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, throughout high school I used this blog exclusively to avoid homework. Then, I acquired something of a social life, and I discovered more interesting ways to avoid being productive, such as:

1) Singing drunkenly in public without ever actually being drunk,
2) Playing silent football, which is neither silent nor football. It is also scientifically proven to be the best game ever (people in India think it's cricket. They're wrong).
3) Going on walks around campus at midnight in twenty degree weather, then waking up my roommate when I get back at three in the morning. (She thinks I go partying. Actually we walk around and talk about comic books and Call of C'thulhu. Same difference.)
4) Creating ever-more elaborate plots to facilitate the acquisition of copious amounts of caffeine.(By the way, I just discovered that Red Bull "temporarily raised the cardiovascular risk in [drinkers] to a level comparable to that of an individual with established coronary artery disease" (Wikipedia). It also tastes faintly like cigarette ashes and sugar.)
5) HOLY CRAP IS THAT SLENDER MAN?!



As finals week approaches, however, I realize once more that all my friends are Honors Students, and we all actually need to study.
That includes me, by the way, but I have no particular urge to acknowledge that right now.

College, by the way, is the time in which you're supposed to figure out who you are and what you want to do with this big gigantic thing called "your life". I'm not sure what this "life" thing is all about, but since college soul-searching seems to be the chic thing to do, I sat down the other day and tried to figure out what I was going to do with my "life" (which I believe to be entirely fictional).

I've always been something of a writer, but I resisted this fact with all my being. In fact, I have this really annoying inner-writer type chick, who never shuts up.

At some point in my eleventh grade year, I ambushed her with a bludgeon and dragged her out into the woods somewhere, hoping that she'd get lost so that I could actually establish some semblance of a productive  livelihood. She escaped, and we repeated the process for something on two years until I eventually decided that the only way I was going to get a respectable job was to drug her and put her in the Land of the Lost, along with all the dinosaurs, dragons, and werewolves from my childhood.

This worked for longer than usual, about four months, and then she showed up again, spitting mad about being stranded with alongside Jerry the Stegosaurus Werewolf (my imaginary friend from when I was six). She looked suspiciously badasser than I remembered.

Fuuuuuuuu-

"Oh, hey," I said, with a nervous laugh, feeling around behind me for my nightstick without breaking eye contact. "Long time no see."

The worst part about all this is that the last time I saw this chick, she was this bouncy, nonchalant kind of person who would occasionally pop into my head and cheerily suggest something. Maybe she'd strong-arm me sometimes with her annoying insistence, but she was otherwise pretty agreeable.

But now I had the nagging question - where the hell did she get the sword?! And how was she planning on using it?

"I LEARNED TO FIGHT VELOCIRAPTORS," she shouted at me, in a voice that said I am undoubtedly a complete badass now.

"That's nice," I replied, "But I'm a biology person now... so go away."

"VELOCIRAPTORS," she repeated. I was beginning to sense some resentment. "AND TYRANNOSAURS."

"Oh yeah, I've got a lot of those. Inner Tyrannosaurs. Sorry about that," I said, "But for reals. You have to go back."

You can imagine how well this worked out.


Too close. Too close.

To make a long story short, I have since resigned myself to the fact that I am, in fact, a writer, in spite of the knowledge that it would be so much cooler to solve murders or botch genetic experiments (resulting in a Jurassic Park-like scenario, in which I could actually fight velociraptors).

I ask myself sometimes, "Damn, what am I going to do with my life?"

"You're going to starve," I always reply, pointedly.

Really, I had no idea. Thank you, me.

You're welcome, me.


Writing is one of those things you only do for a living when you can't live with not doing it. It's not like there's a huge market for it. Ninety per-cent of writers are profoundly irritating, egotistical people.

Not me, of course. I'm too awesome to be egotistical. I mean, come on.

It's all right, though. I've got a friend of mine who's a writer, but also has the foresight to get a degree in geophysics; she's invited me to live in her totally lavish and awesome backyard after we graduate, along with the rest of our destined-to-starve friends (a psychology major, a film major, a fine arts major, and a classics/linguistics/philosophy major).

This will likely result in a miniature, slum-like tent city.


This, you see, is the ideal.

Homelessness! It's like the ultimate survival camping trip, but with dumpster diving and sleeping on newspapers. Homeless people are secret badasses.

I am a secret badass... I am a secret badass...

Blimey, who am I kidding? I'm a starving writer destined to live in a box.


.

I'm not even going to bother apologizing. Instead, I will throw myself at your feet, and beg for mercy.
Pleaseohpleaseohpleaseforgivemeeeee.
...now that that's out of the way, I'm going to launch into this like I never vanished off the face of the planet.

Video games!
They say to write what you know. And since I'm out of school and have done nothing productive for the last several months, what I know right now is games. And sleeping. But I'm saving my post about sleeping, for when the world ends and everyone suddenly starts caring.

It's no small secret that I'm an avid gamer. Unfortunately, it is also common knowledge that I suck at video games, which would make you think that I'd find a different hobby.

I haven't.

Most of my time playing video games is spent staring at screens like this:


Subtext: You suck.

And this:


And this.

At least they're straightforward.


As such, I tend to stick to single-player games - that is, games in which nobody is affected by my imminent failure but me. That way, when I fall and die in a pit of acid forty times in a row, at least I'm the only one who knows about it. Online games , on the other hand, have this tendency to make all of your shortcomings blindingly obvious - somehow, because I can't hit a target four times my size, I am a failure as a gamer (I like to think of myself as "alternatively gifted"). When I do play online games, my favourite role is "the person that gets everyone killed." Others like playing healers; I like playing the idiot. This can get tiring, however, so the only online game I really play is Left 4 Dead, and only with people I know personally.

Still, our sessions end up looking like this:

Friend 1: "Boomer!"

Me: "There's no Boomer here, you... HOLY CRAP I CAN'T SEE."

Friend 2: "OH MY GOD! HUNTER! GET IT OFF GET IT OFF SHOOT THIS THING!"

Me: "...Am I still being attacked by zombies? I can't see."


I'm not sure what I'm looking at because my eyes are covered in puke, apparently.

Before I begin, I would like to say that I have a totally valid excuse for failing to post for nigh on a month.

Actually, I don't. Of course, there were finals, which are terrifically stressful when you're applying to high-end colleges that want midyear reports before they'll even consider you. Then there was a series of days in which I was required to spend time with my extended family due to a once-per-year obligation, and then I left town to go skiing, and then there was New Year's Eve, and then shortly thereafter was New Year's day, and then school started again and I've been doing homework ever since.

 By the way, happy new year, Foxers.

Which, now that I think of it, is what I should currently be doing (homework, I mean), but I'm fairly certain Toni Morrison can wait.

The problem is that I don't particularly have anything to write about. Like, recently, I figured out that the gene for seeing colour is located on the x-chromosome (explaining why males are more prone to colourblindness and why they cannot for the life of them see the difference between scarlet, crimson, and carmine - it's all red, good grief), but after a quick draft I realised that this was something I could only elaborate upon for about a paragraph and a half.
What do you mean, you don't see a boat?

Humans have more than five senses, apparently. Depending on the estimate, according to Wikipedia, we actually have between nine and twenty, but I really only buy into equilibrioception (the ability to sense speed and acceleration, which doesn't technically fall into the "touch" category) proprioception (the ability to know where one's limbs are located without seeing or feeling them ) and chronoception (which is a word I made up meaning having a sense of time). However, I suspect we are not told this in elementary school because 1) it is likely beyond the grasp of a five-year-old and 2) The Twenty-First Sense would be a terrible name for a movie, as would The Nth Sense (because we're not sure how many humans acutally have). Once again, however, I could only continue the terrible M. Night Shyamalan jokes for about a paragraph before they grew stale as stale cookies.
They'll give you gonorrhea.

Also, my analogies are really, really off today.

Lemmings, apparently, "do not engage in mass suicidal dives off cliffs", but "they will, however, occasionally, and unintentionally fall off cliffs when venturing into unknown territory". This is, of course, according to Wikipedia, which also notes that the misconception stems from the Disney film White Wilderness, which shot many of the migration scenes on a snow-covered turntable of some kind. The article also noted that the "photographers later pushed the lemmings off a cliff". (Another Wiki entry notes that the lemmings of White Wilderness were "launched off a cliff using a turntable", which conjures up images so bizarre and hilarious that I can't help wondering who thought this up).
I will take great delight in correcting people's misconceptions about lemmings, and I look foward to telling them that Disney enjoys launching innocent animals from high precipices. (this, by the way, is inexcusable, even if the lemmings are incapable of noticing such precipices for themselves when in new territories)


A member of the species Lemmus lemmus, A.K.A the pseudo-suicidal rodent.
Now that I'm on the topic of lemmings, I can't stop thinking about the word "lemming". It's so funny-sounding. Even their scientific name is goofy. Lemmus lemmus - can't we get any more creative? Maybe Lemmus autodefenstratus, or Lemmus disneydefenestratus, or Lemmus adorableus, or Lemmus precipitatus (according to Wiki, it was once believed that Lemmings fell from the sky). Perhaps even Lemmus lemon, just to confuse people. But Lemmus lemmus? That's about as creative as the scientific name for gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) -  it just seems like the scientsits ran out of ideas.
(Perhaps it's a joke. Say "Lemmus lemmus" five times fast and see how you do.)

All I can find on the word is that it means "small arctic rodent" and is from Norwegian. In fact, the word for lemming is the same in a lot of European languages - Lemming is the word for lemming in Norwegian, Dutch, German, Armenian, English, Irish, Italian, French (and maybe a few others, including - get ready! - ICELANDIC). Even the Russian word for lemming - лемминг - translates into Roman script as "lemming". Many other European languages that lack the word "lemming" use the word "leming" - which is the same, but missing the second m. Lemmings, lemmings, everywhere! (By the way, this is all from Google Translate, so if I have somehow managed to maim your language, please correct me. Unless, of course, your language happens to be Icelandic, in which case I will solemnly apologise and continue to make fun of you.)

So perhaps it's not from Norwegian at all. Like, seriously. How much influence did Norwegian really have on the word for "lemming" in basically every other European language? I've almost come to the conclusion that the word "lemming" has some sort of deeper meaning... that it has penetrated European languages and remained almost unscathed... that the world... nay, the universe... is ruled by lemmings, perhaps created by lemmings, watched by some whiskered, adorable, lemming deity...

But no. The fact that the word is the same in a lot of languages is simply due to a terrible lack of lemmings outside of Norway. The Norwegians arrive, talking about these suicidal snow gerbils, and calling them lemmings. And the rest of the world has no concept of such things. They have not seen lemmings. They  have not touched lemmings. They have not even vaguely thought of lemmings before the Norwegians arrive gushing about them. (hvað á jörðinni er lemming?)

So they don't have a word for lemmings, and rather than calling them "snow rats" (or the Icelandic equivalent thereof, which, by the way, is snjór rottur), they just decide to save themselves a lemmingload of work and just use the Norwegian word. Hence, we have the omnipresent lemming, which is essentially unchanged in a whole slew of European languages.

But where did the Norwegians get it?

The mystery remains! 
 

Oh, and by the way, until I wrote this post, I was convinced that lemmings were a variety of small,  grey, flightless bird. Shows you what I know.

No, really.



 

This is so incredibly vague that you could make a horoscope out of it. What is the problem with these people and not sticking to one story? First it's from Celtic, then it's not, then the Celts had to exist in Spain, but maybe they didn't, or maybe it was the Gauls, (damn those Gauls), oh and by the way Arabic is really important but who cares, perhaps it all just sorta happened and who knows why?

(Random sidenote: I find it amusing that the Wiki page says that the Visigoths inhabited Spain for a century or two, but that their influence was rather limited. After all, the only thing they did was add an entire verb tense. But the Moors, they were really important, they just kinda heaped a bunch of words and sayings onto the language but didn't add any grammar, by the way, so let's focus on them even though all they did was add words, words, words. And funny-sounding words at that. Words like almohada and alfombra and asesino and cifra and alhaja (pronounced al-ha-ha by the way),  meaning pillow,carpet, assassin, cipher, and jewel repectively. These are words that are exceptionally fun to spit angrily - imagine swearing "carpet" at someone and having it sound awful.

P.S. This won't work in Spanish-speaking countries. You'll get committed to an asylum if you're not careful. )

Further research is leading me to believe that it's not actually from Celtic, but nobody is offering any other theories to explain where the heck ajo comes from. Read: NOBODY KNOWS. It's the mystery leek. It's the enigma onion. Not a single person has any clue why spear-leeks are called ajos in Spanish.

Or perhaps it's a conspiracy and they're all trying desperately to confuse me. If this is the case, it's working splendidly.

Thinking that perhaps other languages may be able to clear up the mystery, I discovered that garlic is aglio in Italian, l'ail in French, knoblauch in German, allium in Latin, garlleg in Welsh, garlic in Irish (go figure), hvítlaukur in Icelandic,  ثوم in Arabic, 大蒜 in Chinese, чеснок in Russian, σκόρδο in Greek, ニンニク in Japanese, and שום in Hebrew.

Even after careful consideration, this certainly didn't clear a lot up for me. Aglio  and allium are the only ones that even sound vaguely similar to ajo. The Arabic word is pronounced "thwm", which isn't even close (no vowels, no vowels, I think I'll go cry in a corner).


Moral of the story: garlic's name is one of fuzzy origins at best. Ajo is apparently a complete bastard word. Icelandic puts v's after h's, which is, well, Icelandic. Even the English/Irish word is bizarre. I mean, come on. "Spear leeks"?
 
What the heck was wrong with the Angles?


Anyway. I set out to write this with no idea what I was going to talk about, decided to educate you about garlic and the Spanish language, and now I am leaving with absolutely nothing accomplished.

C'est la vie, je suppose que. At least I can say "garlic" in Icelandic now.

(My full Icelandic arsenal: "Ég get ekki talað íslensku .Hvar er salernið? Ég er að deyja úr hræðilegt sár stunga. Hvítlauk." or, "I don't speak Icelandic. Where's the bathroom? Ah, I'm dying of horrible stab wounds. Garlic.")




...Although quite honestly, I'm not sure what purpose that would serve, even if I could pronounce it.

Another one - impale - "to fix upon, or pierce through with, anything pointed" - usually, this involves putting a person on a giant spike, if you happen to be a medieval monarch. Root im (meaning not) and pale meaning (basically, although this isn't an exact definition) "pointed stick". This didn't make any sense, until I realized that im and em can be basically the same prefix, meaning "to put into". Assuming that impale does not mean "not a sharp pointy stick",  I can assume it means "to put into a sharp pointy stick".  I'm not sure I want to envision how you would literally impale someone, especially using something like a toothpick. Wince.


We also have huge lists of other bizarre words with no apparent reason to them: impignorate, meaning to pawn or mortgage something, or floccinaucinihilipilification, meaning to estimate things as worthless. The only thing I can find on either of these words is that they come from Latin. (Apparently, the latter is a combination of four Latin words-  flocci, nauci, nihili, pilifi - which I actually suspect to be a quartet of evil rhyming garden gnomes.) The fear of long words is, as I'm sure you've heard, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which I'm not even going to try to pronounce. The mulligrubs is a slang term for a depressed state of mood, despite its sounding like a word for a maggot with a mullet; nudiustertian is not a term for clotheless mermaid, but a word meaning "the day before yesterday". (Mermaid itself is a strange word, when one thinks about it.)
 



Oh words, how I love thee.


 

Weirdest crayon name you've encountered?

Favourite crayon flavour?

Why are you eating crayons?

Should Fearless Fox keep doing vlogs or keep to text?

I'm very crunched for time, so I must apologise for the sorry state of this post. Laugh if you can, but if you also find it prudent to throw rotten vegetables or tie my shoelaces together, I will accept said punishment with naught but a bowed head.

(Upon later reflection, I realise that this may mean that I have an abusive relationship with my readers.
Perhaps it's time for us to see a counselor?
Though not is good too. Perhaps not is a better idea.
Please don't throw another tomato.)




I would give you the life-story that I generally give before bashing on historical figures, but I'm not really sure how to preface this. So I guess I'll dive right in.

Long story short: I believe Daniel Webster was part toad. 

 


Were people just less attractive in the 19th century, or something?
 

I've obligated myself to two entries per week, and since my week begins on Tuesday (for those of you saying "Since when?!" the answer is "Since now"), I still have four hours left to post!

But the problem is this: I have nothing to post about.

I could talk about the living history event I attended on Saturday, during which I nearly got heatstroke and ingested a few grams of gunpowder, all while crossdressing and carrying a big gun. I could discuss in detail my driver's test on Friday, which I took using a car that was proably older than the eighty-year-old administering the test, or the hour-long wait at the DMV and all the interesting people ahead of me in line, half of whom apparently didn't know their own full names. I could talk about how I pwned a bunch of freshmen at wiffleball today, or how campaign commercials in this state don't really tell me anything about the candidates besides the fact that they hate splatter commercials and that they shower with their clothes on. I could discuss the number of freckles on my left arm. I could share my plan to steal my brilliant friend's brain whilst he sleeps in order to get a better score on the SATs, but I don't actually know if he reads this or not and I'd rather not be met with a sharp weapon when I sneak into his dorm with surgical tools.  I could chatter on about counting lines in the centre of the road, or running around in circles making airplane noises.

The truth of the matter is, dear readers, that writer's block is a really horrible thing that affects all who dabble in wordcrafting. There's some malevolent god of writer's block who sits upon a giant paper brick and points his stick of uninspiration at people. It's his only job. It's the only thing he know how to do. He loves it, and he is SO VERY EVIL.

Also, he's nailed to the brick, so there's not much else he can do. 

 Wikipedia even defines it as a "condition". Usually, I reserve the term "condition" for really serious things like illness and mental disorders, but I suppose writer's block qualififes as both. It's a debilitating condition that has ruined many of my hats - fedoras don't take kindly to being thrown at peevish felines, even when their owner is incredibly frustrated.

A teacher once gave me a tip on how to deal with writer's block.
"Roll your head back and forth on the desk," he said, sagely, "And shriek, 'Narrrheeearrrreaaarrrreaarrrarrhearrrrr.' It works like a charm."

This didn't actually do anything for the writer's block. However, it did reduce a classroom of thirty or so teenagers to rolling their heads around on their desks and wailing incomprehensibly.

At this point, however, I am not above such advice, which just may explain why my dog is currently hiding under my bed with a look of utter terror in his eyes.

I was told, once, to envision writer's block as a literal block of wood or similar material, something that could be pushed or shoved or worked past. So now I'm sitting in front of a giant bloody dam, and, lacking dynamite, I decide instead to roll my head back and forth on my desk and make guttural noises. Because I have no other ideas.


If only I could find that dam inspiration...


 

During my last audition, I did not see the people who were to decide my fate. Instead, my playing was taped, to be sent off to them.

This is in some ways much worse. Rather than seeing the stern musicians who were to judge my worthiness, I was left to imagine them.

Somewhere in Greeley, Colorado, there is a sinister board string musicians sitting in a semicircle around a stack of tapes. The room is lit only by torches set upon the cold, stone wall. They number seven, for the seven deadly sins, and their eyes glow yellow in the half darkness.
"PLAY THE FIRST TAPE!" bellows the one in the centre, and holds a fist up in the air.
"OH NO IT IS A VIOLINIST." cries another, obviously horrified. "BURN THE TAPE!"
"BURN THE TAPE!" echo each of the others, and the tape is disintegrated by a magic missile before the first scale is even played through the second octave.
"PLAY THE NEXT TAPE!" bellows the first, again, and holds up his fist again.
"NEXT TAPE!" echo the others. A bassist begins to play.
"I LIKE THIS PERSON'S TONALITY," says one.
"YES," agrees another, "HE IS HITTTING THE NOTES QUITE WELL."
"THE TEMPO IS QUITE STEADY." observes a third. "HE'S NOT RUSHING."
And then the bassist misses the seventh degree on the third octave of his minor scale, and fourteen eyes flash red as the torches flare up. A volcano erupts somewhere in the distance, burying an Italian city. Lightning arcs from the sky and strikes the centre of the town. A hurricane slams the coast of Florida. The bad note has wrought destruction amongst the people of earth.
"BURN IT! BURN IT!" they crow in unison, and this tape is disintegrated as well. They all chuckle wholeheartedly and the earth shakes.
"NEXT TAPE!" the first roars again, and puts his fist up in the air.

This would all be fine and good, except for two things.
1) I paid twenty-five dollars for this damn audition.
2) I spent an hour of my life every day for the past three months preparing for this damn thing.
3)  After destroying the tapes, the sinister council tracks down the failed musicians and burns their house down as punishment for sucking.

Auditions in person are worse. Because then, there's no tape to disintegrate.

 

"I really don't want to go to gym class," I groaned to my left-handed artist friend today. "Gym is agony."

"I could take your place," she suggested. "We could switch third period classes. I could substitute for you in gym class and you could to to my art class."

"What are you doing in art class?" I asked, wary.

"Painting my sister," she replied.

Here's one thing you have to understand about me: I can't draw. Well, I can, but my abilities are limited to dinosaurs and a few lumpy variants of pac-man. If I had switched classes with my friend, not only would her grade have dropped by a few letters, but her portfolio would have been filled with gloppy paintings of neon yellow Pac-man figures devouring small cartoon dinosaurs. 
 
Perhaps I'd add a speech bubble for effect. Waka-waka-waka.

I'm sure this would have been fine for a second-grade art class, but this left-handed friend of mind just happened to be in AP Art. Maybe I could pass it off as surrealism, but that doesn't mean I could explain to her art teacher why her sister had suddenly been polymorphed into a lumpy, carnivorous arcade character.
Perhaps I could pass it off as a side effect of being a second violinist.

I briefly considered it, and after a long silence, I finally said,
"Maybe switching classes isn't such a great idea."

"No," she concurred, thoughtfully, "Maybe not."