The Secret Lair

CC BY-NC-SA image by ferlomu on Flickr

“Well, I see it’s come to this.”

The goat rose as Vinnie “Ankles” Moretti forced his way into the stable. In the next stall, Kentucky Derby winner Calcaneus rested before tomorrow’s Preakness Stakes.

“Wait. Did you just… talk?”

The goat stared back. It knew two things: Vinnie was a bookie, and he was called “Ankles” because that’s what he broke when someone didn’t pay.

“You’re not going to get me, you know.”

The goat darted aside as Vinnie lunged, sack in hand. As it struck Vinnie’s leg with thick hooves, it pondered irony and Calcaneus’s odds at the Triple Crown.

…..

The above drabble (flash fiction of exactly 100 words) is a part of a series of short fiction by John Cmar inspired by randomly discovered Creative Commons licensed images, and is itself licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Beowulf manuscript. Image via Wikipedia

Previously, on History of English:

• Introduction
• When Angles Met Saxons

In our last little chat together, we talked a bit about how English got started when a bunch of Germanic tribes decided to go a-conquerin’ (like you do). This time, let’s take a look at just what that earliest form of our crazy language actually looked and sounded like.

Without a doubt, the most famous Anglo-Saxon (a.k.a. Old English)¹ poem is the epic Beowulf.² You’ve probably been forced to read parts of it at some point in your schooling (or if you’ve been subjected to any of the film versions, God help you).

Most likely, you read it in a translation into Modern English (of which there are a number of very good ones, though my personal favorite is the Seamus Heaney translation). Now, if you’re like me, this may have seemed a little odd to you; after all, isn’t this already supposed to be a great English poem? The beginning of English literature? So we have to read English translated into… English? Well, here’s why. Here are the opening lines of Beowulf in the original text:³

Hwæt! We Gardena         in geardagum, 
þeodcyninga,         þrym gefrunon, 
hu ða æþelingas         ellen fremedon. 
Oft Scyld Scefing         sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum,         meodosetla ofteah, 
egsode eorlas.         Syððan ærest wearð 
feasceaft funden,         he þæs frofre gebad, 
weox under wolcnum,         weorðmyndum þah, 
oðþæt him æghwylc         þara ymbsittendra 
ofer hronrade         hyran scolde, 
gomban gyldan.         þæt wæs god cyning!

And through the magic of the Interwebs, here’s a video of how it sounded to its original audiences!

Um, as the Anglo-Saxons would say, hwæt? That certainly doesn’t sound (or look) like the language I’m writing in here! Even though that is, in fact, an early form of English, if you were to fire up your TARDIS and go back to the British Isles circa 800 AD you’d be just as much at a loss to understand anyone as if you were dropped into rural China today.⁴ This is so much so that scholars today who study Anglo-Saxon have to learn it in the same way they would any other foreign language.

And yet, once you get past the initial alienness of it, you can start to see some recognizable parts. Take the last phrase above, for example: “þæt wæs god cyning.” At first glance it looks and sounds like gibberish, but that’s mostly just changes in pronunciation and manner of writing.⁵ For example, that weird letter “þ” that looks like it can’t decide if it wants to be a “p” or a “b” is called thorn and is the equivalent of the modern “th.”⁶ And that weird combination of “a” and “e,” “æ,” just becomes an “a” in modern spelling.⁷ So the first two words, then, are “that was.” The next word is a little misleading, since in Modern English we’d write it with two “o”s. In the last word, you just have to remember that the “c” is pronounced like a “k” and the “y” like the modern “short” “i.” Say it enough times fast, and you’ll likely shorten it into its modern equivalent, “king.” So that line says, exactly, “that was (a) good king!”

Hey, this is easy! So reading Anglo-Saxon is just a matter of learning different spellings and pronunciations, right?

Well, um, no. Anglo-Saxon had a radically different grammar from Modern English. Anglo-Saxon was largely an inflecting language; that is, a word’s function in a sentence was determined by changing the ending of a word, as in languages like Greek, Russian, Latin, and German. In Modern English, how a word fits into a sentence is determined mostly by its position relative to the other words: “The boy hit the ball” and “The ball hit the boy” are very different ideas!

We still have a few remnants of the old system of inflections, however; for example, we add -ed to the end of (most) verbs to make past tense, we add “‘s” to make a word possessive (e.g., the book belonging to Jason is “Jason’s book”), and we make words plural by adding -s. In Anglo-Saxon, however, the system was much more complex. Nouns, for example, used a system of cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) with each case corresponding to a particular grammatical use. Let’s take a look at all the forms the word “stán” (stone) can take:

• Nominative singular: stán
  The nominative case denotes the subject of the sentence, e.g., “The stone rolled over poor Thrydwulf!”
• Genitive singular: stánes
  The genitive case is used for possession, e.g., “The stone’s weight crushed the life out of him!”
• Dative singular: stáne
  The dative case indicates the indirect object of a sentence, e.g., “Someone teach the stone a lesson!”
• Accusative singular: stán
  The accusative case indicates the direct object of a sentence, e.g., “I’m going to smash the stone into little bits!”

And then to make it plural, there was a whole difference set of endings:

• Nominative plural: stánas
  “Stones don’t crush people on purpose.”
• Genitive plural: stána
  “It’s not the stones’ fault!”
• Dative plural: stánum
  “Don’t do anything to the poor stones.”
• Accusative plural: stánas
  “Save the stones, man!”

And this was just for one type of noun! Other nouns used different sets of endings. And that’s to say nothing of verbs…

As different as it looks, sounds, and, well, works, this is where the English language began. It’s come a long way (baby), but I for one find it pretty amazing to remember that there’s a definite connective thread stretching from Beowulf to LOLcats.

Before we wrap this one up, one quick word about dialects.⁸ What I’ve presented here, and what you’ll almost certainly learn if you ever study Anglo-Saxon, is really only one specific dialect of the language. Specifically, it’s what’s called the West Saxon dialect, and is just one of four major Anglo-Saxon dialects (or more properly, categories, each almost certainly having countless variations). When people talk about the Anglo-Saxon language, they’re almost always talking specifically about the West Saxon dialect.

So why do we only look at West Saxon? Mainly it’s because most of the surviving Anglo-Saxon texts (Beowulf included) are written in West Saxon. And why is that? Well, two reasons: money and power. West Saxon was the dialect spoken by most of the kings and their courts. Books were expensive and time-consuming to produce, and writing was an extremely rare and specialized skill. Kings were the ones who could pay to have books made for them, and when they did they wanted them in the type of English they spoke. In fact, many works which students of the language read today in the “original” Anglo-Saxon are translations into West Saxon from other dialects! Also, many official records (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example) were naturally written in the “King’s English,” if you see what I mean.

Next time: Vikings invade! Then, later, the French (who were really Vikings in disguise) invade! English is doomed (to change in really cool ways)!

1. Though “Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English” are interchangeable terms, I tend to prefer the former. “Old English” often makes people think of “Ye Olde Englishe,” which is a faux-historical type of writing where extra -e’s, -eth’s, and thous are thrown frivolously and often incorrectly into current English sentences. As we’ll see later, this is really more a caricature of Early Modern English. [↩]
2. If you read only one epic Anglo-Saxon poem this year…! [↩]
3. Text courtesy “Beowulf in Hypertext.” [↩]
4. Assuming you don’t speak any form of Chinese, that is. [↩]
5. The technical term is orthography, if’n ya wants ta get all fancy. [↩]
6. Thorn actually represents only the unvoiced “th” sound, the sound at the beginning of the words “thick” and “thin.” A different letter, “ð” (called edh) was used for the voiced sound at the beginning of “this” and “thus.” [↩]
7. Anglo-Saxon orthography used “æ” to represent, roughly, the vowel in “hat” and “a” for the first vowel in “father.” [↩]
8. Can you tell yet that I find the subject of dialects really interesting? [↩]

Image via Wikipedia

I cannot claim inception of the ideas expressed in this essay, although neither can I recall with any certitude the particulars of whence I may originally have overheard them. For although I originally had the sense that the notion rose to my notice from some manner of interaction in the waking world, it occurs to me upon further rumination that these thoughts took root in my brain as I slumbered, a perverse and feverish dream, perhaps a nocturnal sending from some distant and unnatural realm.

Few are the unfortunates who have deeply pondered these matters, for once a thing is known it cannot be unknown. I caution you to continue at your own peril.

My topic begins with those creatures whom we have in modern day termed “vampires”. I speak not of those who cavort and sparkle in the sun’s light like some manner of deranged disco abomination, driveling putrid sex, cavorting and having congress with callow and scarcely nubile mortals. Rather, I refer you to vampires of the Old Blood: gothic, aristocratic, and terrible. The likes of Lestat, Vlad Tepes, and the infamous Count Dracula.

These beings enjoy a wealth come of unnatural long life, and I have yet to learn of one who has come by his fortune through honest employment. They survive through predation, by leeching the vital essence from those whom they know to be their inferiors. We most often think of vampirism in its most literal sense, as it is well-known to even the most parochial minds that a vampire’s overdeveloped canine teeth are wont to rend soft jugular flesh so as to sup upon the prey’s vital fluid. But the figurative is equally true: the vampire magnate’s business practices are as predatory as his carnal proclivities; they suck the financial life blood from hapless souls foolish enough to venture into the eldritch realms of finance. Hence do the blue-bloods feed upon the red-bloods and embody every fear that we have about the upper class.

The middle class are a more familiar folk, a people with whom many of us identify. Ask yourself: what manner of unnatural beast best exemplifies the everyman?

Whereas vampires have the resources to immure themselves daily so as to conceal their monstrous nature, blending in with the ubiquitous middle class presents unique challenges. Those of us without the fortune of inheritance needs must work to remain solvent. Thus to viably blend with the middle class necessitates disguise suitable to securing gainful employment. I present then for your examination the werewolf.

Whereas vampires remain aloof and separate from mainstream society, werewolves are directly part of it. Before having descended from mortality, a werewolf may have been your doctor, your neighbor, your brother.

So during waking hours, when God-fearing workmen toil for wages, the lycanthrope walks amongst them, and only by the dead light of the gibbous moon will its hideous curse compel transformation, and then beware! For the murderous beast slays indiscriminately, knowing no friend and no kin.

And now I reach the final point. For as even as I sit typing in the study of my rustic Connecticut home, the distant ghoulish moans and thumps at the down-stairs shutters foretell the grim revelation of my every mobid fear. If I can muster the willpower, I will upload this essay before they come for me.

For you must by now have realized what creature represents the lower class. The woe-begone creatures who trudge along hopelessly, mindlessly, endlessly. Individually, they are slow and puling lackwits, their stiffened and unbreathing faces utterly devoid of purpose. But when they band together, zombies become a threat too dire for any to stand against.

Many have asked: Can a man change his class? And only now at the end has the truth revealed itself to me. Should any of us be bitten by the unknown things of the night, we become one of them.

And now the proletariat comes for me. Lacking pitchforks and torches, they bear instead yellow rotted teeth and useless bulging eyes. Even now I hear dead feet scuffling on the steps.

Ia-R’lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia!

Recently, we decided it was time to change things up in our home.  The furniture layout of the main floor had remained essentially unchanged since we moved in almost ten years ago. Since our kids are getting to be of starting gaming age, we decided to convert the family room into a game room.

We started by moving the large sofa and new television into the front room to become our prime television watching room and removed the old computer desk from the house entirely.  We then moved the love seat and the entertainment center to the far end of the room. The addition of an unused television created a small video gaming nook.

The small table seen here was adopted by my younger minion as a “news desk”. The ‘gaming center’ is in the corner on the other side of the mural.  The mural itself was painted by a family friend and is based on the same castle as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies.

We looked at a store with “container” in the name for storage, but were notably unimpressed. Instead we purchased some press board storage which we liked better – at a fraction of the price.

Note the retro-style classic board games used as wall décor. These are fully playable games.

So we now have a room, storage, but are still in need of a table. We’ve got a friend who is going to build us a table – once we figure out what we want – but until then we are noticeably shy of a surface on which to play games.

We decide in the interim to re-purpose a couple of tables that were being under-used, abused, or both. The only problem is that they are a light wood in a room full of dark wood.

(Observe my elder minion’s disinterest in physical labor.)

I picked up some dark faux leather on clearance at a local fabric store. However, before I could upholster the tables, I needed to do some maintenance. We cleaned them both and I glued and tightened the legs. Using the round table as support for the rectangular table, I set to work. (Using the tables as support for each other both provided me a good working height and a firm surface to work on.)

In each case, I pre-cut the leather roughly to size and laid it face down on the supporting table before centering the working table on top of it. The rectangular table was fairly easy with which to work. I folded the leather over the sides of the table and secured them with the liberal applications of a staple gun.  I only needed to do creative folding, trimming and stapling on the corners.

The second table, a round one, was more challenging. In the end, I folded and stapled the four compass directions. I then worked from each of the cardinal staples toward the mid-points between the staples.  It took some thoughtful folding, but in the end, I ended up with a very smooth and symmetric table top.

My younger minion is ready to play!

I overlapped the two tables to provide a more or less continuous surface. This configuration will comfortably allow eight players to sit around the table – more if we separate the tables. Our bigger problem will be finding enough chairs.

That’s more or less it! I’m ready for our face-to-face RPG game to return from hiatus.

After I get the basement cleaned up, I will introduce you to my other (not so) secret lair – super-hero themed office space.

“Now,” said the administrator while  opening the door to the lab, “we have a practical experiment in the development of clean energy sources for the future. This is Dr. Roland Jeffers, head of the project. Dr. Jeffers, would you show our visitors your results?”

With the administrator were two official-looking people. The man wore a dark blue suit; clean-cut, clean-shaven, greying a bit at the temples. The woman was also middle-aged but quite beautiful, brunette hair pulled back, blue eyes that took in everything in the room: the control console, the man in the plexiglass chamber with the wires that led from the console to his head and chest, and the small toy monkey on a stainless-steel table, also connected to the console by another long set of wires.

Jeffers began. “My experiments have to do with developing forms of renewable energy for the future, specifically coming from biological sources. In this case, we have the gentleman in the chamber hooked up to my device, which stimulates the memory centers of the brain. The energy generated by the subject is captured and transmitted, either for use or for storage.”

Jeffers flicked his eyes to the administrator with a question, the administrator nodded. Jeffers turned a central knob on the console about half-way. The results were immediate; the man in the chamber began to smile dreamily and the toy monkey chattered and clapped its cymbals together at a moderate pace. After about thirty seconds, Jeffers turned the device back off, and the monkey stopped.

‘What you just witnessed was the device’s ability to harvest clean emotional energy from a happy emotional response. It is also possible to trigger other emotions for more or less intensity, depending on the quantity of energy desired.”

The woman asked, “The subject volunteered for this?” She looked both intrigued and repulsed by the results.

Jeffers smiled. “The subjects have been told that they will be going under a new form of therapy. We hook them up to our device and induce memories that are emotionally relevant to the energy we want to capture. As you might expect, the more difficult and complex emotions…anger, betrayal, and despair produce the strongest and most efficient energy.”

The man who looked like he worked for a branch of the government asked, “What is the most powerful?”

“Regret. Without a doubt. Regret is the most powerful.”

The government man nodded. The woman in the sharp suit asked, “Don’t you have any ethical qualms about using people this way?”

Dr. Jeffers shook his head. “No. You have to understand…these people are already destroying themselves. We find them in bars, wandering through grocery stores, sitting at playground watching their kids, in cubicles unable to work but unable to do anything else. They are already in pain. We are simply using that pain for the betterment of society.”

The woman nodded. “And does this actually help them?”

Jeffers cleared his throat. “In a manner of speaking. The brain can only handle so much. After a while, it reduces the capability to feel in order to protect itself. In many ways, we are simply accelerating the process an individual would go through naturally.”

The administrator smiled, “Well, now,”  he said, clapping his own hands together, reminding Jeffers of the chattering monkey. ” This is good work, and you can see how it will pay off in the long run.” The government man nodded, the woman in the suit pursed her lips but nodded after a moment.

“Excellent,” the administrator said. “Let’s take a look at the other labs, shall we?” With that, he ushered the official visitors out.

After the door closed, Jeffers released a long breath he did realized he was holding. He sighed and looked at the man in chamber with the electrodes attached to his head and heart.

“You poor bastard,” he said, and twisted the knob all the way to the right. The monkey on the table began to chatter away faster than before.

In the chamber, the man began to cry.

CC BY-NC-ND image by svale via Flickr

As January creeps forward from the holidays, The Lair is waking up, shaking off a bit of dust and fatigue, and getting back to the business of serving Overlord Miller’s mad genius. That means many things, but most of all, it means SCIENCE.

Science is not a “thing”, or a body of knowledge, but rather the process we subjective humans use to overcome our individual biases and make some objective decisions about the world around us. Doing our best to eliminate that subjective bias is key to both engaging in the scientific process and understanding the results of that process, and can be a challenging thing to do. Recently, physician Harriet Hall summed up three lessons she has learned about dealing with scientific studies that speak to this perfectly:

Roosters don’t make the sun come up – Also known as “correlation doesn’t equal causation”. Just because two things always seem to happen in sequence, or together, does not mean that one causes the other. While this should seem obvious, this is perhaps the greatest stumbling block for humans in terms of understanding why things happen in our world, as we are psychologically wired to interpret things that happen together as having a cause and effect relationship. Our minds do this as part of an excellent survival instinct that, sadly, doesn’t serve us well when we are engaged in higher thought than FIRE BURNS DON’T TOUCH FIRE.

Never believe one study – One key to the scientific process is that if a study shows a certain result, other people in other settings need to be able to do that same study and come to the same result to prove it’s objective validity. In science as in the whole of life, mistakes can be made and sometimes people lie. Even if a single study seems to be excellently designed, controlling for any problems and outside issues, it’s results should be viewed with some skepticism until they are reproduced or confirmed. This is something we often lose sight of in an era when new studies are often poorly reported in the popular media, or promoted by a press release.

When encountering a new or questionable claim, always try to find out who disagrees and why – This will often give one more insight into a new study result than just considering the result itself. Whether or not we realize it, all of us as people have an agenda in life, be it basic things like caring for our family or doing well at our chosen profession to protecting a financial interest or promoting a belief system. Does someone disagree with a claim because they stand to lose money or prestige if it’s true, or do they really have good data that said claim is wrong? This can sometimes be a challenging question to answer, but a very important one.

In the weeks ahead, we shall be delving into SCIENCE! As we do so, keep these principles it mind. Next time, I will answer a challenge from Overlord Miller and wade into the eternally popular and debated subject… of weight loss.

Image by @Doug88888 via Flickr

Statistic: A quantity calculated from data in a sample, which characterizes an important aspect in the sample.  In other words, a summary.

Warning: This series of articles is not about equations and formulas.  You will not find Greek letters here, except when we are mocking them in a light-hearted manner.  If you are looking for any of these things, close your browser window now and slowly back away.  No one will know – trust us.

It has been said by some that the origin of statistics lies in gambling.  A bored nobleman, tired of losing at dice and card games, sat down and tabulated the frequency at which various results came up when he rolled his dice.  He basically discovered what we all assume to be true today – that each face of a fair die (the six-sided kind that you see in board games, and every other sort of fair die – we will discuss them later) is equally likely to land face up.  Somewhere along the line, that same bored nobleman, or more likely, a different bored nobleman discovered something we don’t really take for granted – that each roll is independent – that is, what you just rolled has no bearing on what you will roll next.  But at least he could predict the odds of that next roll.

Others tie the field of statistics to academic or governmental driven definitions.  If you talk to an academician, they will tell you about the papers that inspired their work and you can trace through the bibliographies that papers that inspired that work and so on and so on until you reach “Paper Zero” which some people blame on the correspondence of Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal.  If on the other hand, you want to talk about practical application, some authors will point to the changing political climates of the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was no longer sufficient for a monarch to merely decree and it was so.  Instead, administration took the place of fiat and political bodies suddenly needed data on the people, on their economies, and on their worlds to make decisions.  Or perhaps, need is a strong word.  Fiat would have still worked, but data made the whole process more efficient and effective.  And more predictive.

Personally, I find it fairly egotistical to claim that statistics only started in the last few hundred years.  For a good chunk of human history, man has been trying to predict things.  The ‘ancient’ Mayans and Aztecs had a calendar that continue to predict events in our ‘modern’ world.  The various zodiacs and astrologies attempt to predict human behavior based on birth dates and times and other sundry details.  And it would seem those predictions are pretty good over all, because we as a species keep going back to them.  At the very least, they are providing a good summary of human behavior.

So, personally, I would argue that the concept of statistics, the desire to summarize and predict the world around us has been a part of human history since the beginning of human sentience.

Of course, then you have to ask about the Statistics they teach you in college and quote in the news and produce in business reports.  Certainly, those ‘statistics’ are newer in the sense that we are quantifying them in our own modern way.  We’ve assigned Greek letters to them and give people advanced degrees for specializing in them and have developed our own mythology around them (“lies, damn lies, and statistics”).  But in the end, they are trying to do the same thing – summarize the world and predict what happens next.

Of course, _those_ Statistics, the ones taught by dry professors to large lecture halls that require you to learn a new language, those Statistics are based on what we could do with only a pencil and paper.  And to a math guy, they’re pretty cool.  But in reality, the number of people who work out those problems, the ones that can be worked out on paper and with pencil, those people are a rarer and rarer breed in this modern era of computing.  So they have become more widely available through computer programs, more widely accepted as an arcane art and a mystic language, and, I would argue, less well understood in terms of what they really mean.

So that’s what this series of articles is about.  It’s about what those statistics really mean, or what they are meant to mean.  It’s about their impact on our world and the impact they could have on our world.  And it’s about summarizing the world around you and predicting what’s going to happen next.  Good luck!