PC Runnamok, that is. A discussion on a lost hat in Park Slope. It’s simultaneously hilarious, and sad.

So I was looking at this map of how people pronounce things in the US, and I noticed that very few of them showed any distinct regional differences. The most striking of the few that do are what people call sweetened carbonated beverages, that thing you drink water from, and what you call Halloween eve. Bubbler people seem to reside mostly in Wisconsin, and Devil’s Night seems to be a mostly Wolverine thing. I also notice that while they ask what people call drive-through liquor stores, they don’t ask about liquor stores in general. An appellation that’s apparently unique to Michigan (I didn’t realize this until others pointed it out to me, having grown up with it) was “party store.”

Most of them just showed that the distribution of people who called them different things was pretty evenly distributed (that is if 80% called it one and 20% another, that would be as true in the deep south as in New England).

I wonder to what degree mass media and migration has been wiping out regional dialects? How different would these maps have looked a hundred years ago?

The new Battlestar Galactica (not the old one) has won a Peabody Award, a well-deserved first for the Sci Fi Channel.

I think this is a good sign of the mainstreaming of this important genre of literature, for too long ghettoized, when it’s becoming more and more relevant to the technological future rapidly closing in.

Other studies (one in New Jersey, I believe) have shown this as well. HOV lanes increase traffic congestion. This carpool lane thing was always more about social engineering than it was about improving traffic flow.

This is also no shocker:

A report released last year also shows that the most common form of HOV lane, where general and restricted traffic is not separated by a physical barrier, causes a fifty percent increase in accidents.

Car pool lanes with no barriers are nuts, and single-lane carpool lanes are pointless, because one slowpoke can hold up everyone behind. Get rid of them all. Now.

We aren’t doing a very good job of it:

Nearly three-quarters of Americans questioned last week

Here’s a list of the top ten (rock) guitar solos. I’m only familiar with about half of them (I largely quit listening to pop music in the eighties), but as the post title indicates, I think there’s a notable absence there.

Here’s a list of the top ten (rock) guitar solos. I’m only familiar with about half of them (I largely quit listening to pop music in the eighties), but as the post title indicates, I think there’s a notable absence there.

Here’s a list of the top ten (rock) guitar solos. I’m only familiar with about half of them (I largely quit listening to pop music in the eighties), but as the post title indicates, I think there’s a notable absence there.

They’re at it again:

A small Easter display was removed from the City Hall lobby on Wednesday out of concern that it would offend non-Christians.

The display – a cloth Easter bunny, pastel-colored eggs and a sign with the words “Happy Easter” – was put up by a City Council secretary. They were not purchased with city money.

Tyrone Terrill, the city’s human rights director, asked that the decorations be removed. Terrill said no citizen had complained to him.

This is getting ridiculous.

John Derbyshire says that Peter Sellers isn’t funny any more:

We all know, of course, that humor is perishable, and that what made our parents — or even our younger selves — laugh can leave us stone faced. There are degrees of perishability, though, and the very best humor can stay funny for decades. I thought Sellers was in that league. Nope. His repertoire was narrower than I’d remembered — really just two or three funny voices and a couple of facial expressions.

Yes, I’ve noticed that things that I thought uproariously funny when I was younger (and I don’t necessarily mean a child) no longer so. I don’t know if it’s a difference in my sensibilities as I’ve matured (or at least grown older) or that humor has its own fashion and milieu. I haven’t lost my sense of humor, but it’s clearly changed. I wonder what would happen to it after a couple hundred years? What will I find funny then?

Anyway, as further recent illustration, on a flight back from California a couple weeks ago, I saw The Bellboy, Jerry Lewis’ directing debut, and thought by many to be his greatest work. I have vague memories of my parents taking me to see it in the theatres (the only way one generally saw movies then) as a little kid. I don’t remember particularly enjoying it at the time, but I can say that on the more recent viewing, I not only never laughed, there was only one scene that even elicited a smile from me. I can’t remember what it was, now.

I kept watching, hoping for something actually funny to happen, and when the plane landed before it was over, I had no sense of disappointment, because I’d given up. I was astounded in fact at how unfunny the movie was. I’d always thought that he was overrated, but I hadn’t previously comprehended just how much so. One more reason to think that the French are not just a different nationality, but a different species.

[Update a few minutes later]

Just to show I haven’t lost it completely, this joke (found over on Free Republic) got a chuckle out of me:

An old sergeant once went up to an attractive young woman.

“Ma’am, can you please help a lonely soldier? I haven’t made love since 1955.”

“Oh, you poor thing!” The young woman took the sergeant back to her apartment, where they enjoyed a more-than-mutually-satisfactory romp. Afterwards the woman leaned back and purred at the sergeant:

“For a man who hasn’t had sex since 1955, you certainly haven’t forgotten much!”

The sergeant checked his watch. “No reason why I would have, Ma’am; it’s only 2130.”