The Secret Lair

Another November has come and gone, and with it has again passed How Not To Grow A Beard Month. You may recall that this is the annual competition wherein participants do not shave, and document their progress in growing – in some cases, poorly – a beard, while soliciting donations to help it grow in thick and lush. These donations, sponsoring an iconic expression of manhood, are collected for a cause that helps to save an iconic expression of womanhood, namely breast cancer research.

The 2011 iteration of this saw the group of us raise an amazing $5,267.46, which eclipsed our optimistic goal of $5,000, and also welcome several new participants into the fold. As tends to happen every year, there was a large influx of donations on the final day, leading to an exciting finish. When midnight rolled around, it turned out that yours truly was sitting in the number one spot, and so HoNoToGroABeMo founder Bob Voegerl declared me the winner! However, it turns out that there was a delay in a final hefty contribution to last year’s winner, Pete DiLillo, so in the early morning hours of December 1 he accrued the most funds of all of us, and pushed us over the top in making our goal! I imagine his expression the next day to be something like he showed us with his Day 28 pic:

In the end, the true winners of this follicular competition were all of us who participated. It was an entertaining month for an excellent cause, and seeing us hit our donation goal was an awesome thing. Bob posted two recaps looking back on the experience, and as the HoNoToGroABeMo Crackling Virility Hedge Champion for 2011, I add my own humble thanks to all who donated.

That noted, it is time to bestow The Cmar Beard Awards for HoNoToGroABeMo 2011. As with last year’s awards, these have nothing to do with any donations received, and everything to do with the glorious pictography of lush face-manes:

• Best Beard Photo: This year saw a new bar raised for photographic excellence and composition, but there was only one picture the entire month that forced me to laugh out loud when I saw it. Additionally, it demonstrates in a very obvious way the principle of How Not To Grow A Beard. As such, the clear winner of the best photo this year is Kris Johnson for his Day 30 entry:



• Man Most Exemplifying How Not To Grow A Beard: In prior years, this has been a rather easy category to judge, but that turns out not to be the case. Prior hands-down winner Jeff Greiner’s jaw-thicket grew in rather thicker this year – perhaps practice does train a beard? – leaving the field a bit more open. After some deliberation, it was clear that newcomer Frederick Hurley showed us all how not growing a beard is done. Or not done, as the case might be, as shown in his final image:



• Best Time Lapse Photo Series: Creative photo composition is the order of the day in this competition, but this year only one person gave us uniformly consistent poses to show his mandibular sprouts from day to day. That man is newcomer Andrew Rothman! (Click through to view the slideshow.)
• Man Most Exemplifying How To Grow A Beard: As this competition broadens in terms of participants, we are adding some to the fold who are able to muster up incredibly dense facial carpets. This year, the mysterious Beard A. Nonymous blew us all away with his jungle-like final jaw result. Seriously, dude, that is vastly impressive:



• Best Use Of Non-Facially Generated Props: The ante was certainly upped in this category, but Pete DiLillo once again takes the prize for his colorful use all manner of headgear and weaponry. (click through for the slideshow)



• Daily Commitment To The Task: November is a busy month, and few find the time and the stamina to start on Day 1 and produce a post every day for all 30 days. Our founder, Bob, led the pack in this regard as he does each year, and finds himself co-accepting this award with Jeff Greiner, Jim Van Verth, and myself for 2011. Strong work, gentlemen!
• Best-Spun Beardy Yarns: Every participant strives to put down some good words with their hairy pictographs. This year saw a range of pithy comments, beard quotes, facial hair history, and inspirational tales, to name but a few. However, Jim Van Verth pulled out the clear and consistent win. He made every picture a clue to a certain board game or digital game, and then followed each up the next day with some fascinating history and insight into the game in question. Congratulations to Jim for spinning some beardy yarns with a gaming bent!
• Most Intriguing Contest In Follicular Bribery: Along with our mandibular shrubbery, anew phenomenon grew forth during this year’s contest, namely that several participants devised their own personal contests to bribe potential donors their way. Of all of these, Jeff Greiner’s was clearly the best. Not only did it require the most work, but it was a meta-contest that involved bribing all of us participants with Manly Points to bring our A-game and increase participation and donations. Excellent work, Jeff! Be sure to check out how the points played out.

Congratulations to all of the winners! To all the participants, it was a pleasure joining you once again in this endeavor, and to give recognition where recognition is due. To everyone else, I’ll merely note that only 314 days remain until HoNoToGroABeMo 2012, and this whole mad affair will start up again.

As the current, reigning, and defending HoNoToGroABeMo Crackling Virility Hedge Champion – even under contested circumstances from the #1 Contender to the Title, Pete – I think it only appropriate to provide some parting beardly thoughts from WWE professional wrestler and current (at the time of this posting) World Heavyweight Champion Bryan Danielson:

Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invade Britain

Previously, on History of English:

• Introduction

Last time, we covered some basic introductory material, but now it’s time to dive into our subject, as the kids say, for realz. So let’s go back to the first time English was spoken and… umm… well, hrm.

Turns out that figuring out just when a language got its start is not as easy as you might at first think. Most people don’t roll out of bed one day and say, “Y’know, today seems like a good day to create a new language. Let’s get on that, then.”¹ In fact, sometimes it can be pretty difficult to tell when one language ends and another begins, due in part to some of that murkiness with dialects that we discussed last time. So first, we need to talk a little bit about where new languages come from.²

There are two main ways that new languages emerge: language contact and language change. Language contact is when speakers of two different languages come together, usually for an extended period of time, and their languages sort of mix. This can happen in a number of different ways, on a number of different levels, but for now just note that sometimes languages can mix together and change each other, or even have new little baby languages (this will be important later).

Language change can be a little more complicated. One thing that seems to be a constant in human experience is that languages do change over time and distance. There are a number of theories as to why this is, and it happens at various rates in different languages, but in the end it seems that we sort of have to take it as a given that languages will change. In once sense, this seems perfectly obvious: we always need new words for new things, right? But the changes can go far, far beyond that, into areas of grammar and structure. As Clive Upton famously commented, “The only language that doesn’t change at all is a dead one.”

(As an aside, even that can be a little misleading, since sometimes languages don’t really die; they just change into new ones. We call Latin a dead language for example, when really it just turned into French, Spanish, Romanian, and others. In a very real way, Italian is nothing but modern Latin. In fact, as we’ll soon see, the earliest forms of English are about as different from what we speak today as Latin is from Italian.)

Imagine it something like this: a tribe of hunter-gatherers moves into a new land. They all speak the same language, of course. There’s some argument about exactly which way to go, though, and where to settle. Since the tribe is getting pretty big, half of it decides to go one way, and the other half another. Over time, the two groups start speaking a little differently, then even more differently, enough that when they run into each other again a couple generations later, they can’t understand each other anymore. Then, later, those two groups branch out into more, and so on, and so on…

As you can imagine, though, since these groups started out speaking the same language, the new languages that emerge are pretty similar to each other in many ways. They share certain root words, and though they may not sound the same in each language, they probably will end up having similar sounds. They’ll probably put sentences together in similar, though different, ways.

Linguists say that languages like this are related, and group them into families. These language families are even put into a family tree, which is exactly what you’d expect: languages are grouped into subfamilies and branches of families, all going back to a single common ancestor.³

English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. That is, it’s a group of languages that can all trace their ancestry back to a single language, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European, and which is the ancestor of the majority of the languages spoken in the area between Europe and India.⁴ Specifically, English is a member of the Germanic branch of that family, making it related to languages like German, Swedish, and Dutch. If you want to see where English falls on the ol’ family tree, Wikipedia has a great chart (I’d embed it here, but it’s huge!).

Okay, so remember what I said about language contact? Let’s get back to that.

English as a new language got started sometime around 450 AD⁵ when several groups who spoke various Germanic languages all decided to go and invade the British Isles. Why? I don’t know. Maybe invading things was all the rage back then. Maybe it’s what you and your friends did after a few too many rounds of mead. I mean, I personally think it would take more than a few pints to make “Hey, let’s go take over that cold rainy island!” sound like a good idea, but maybe that’s just me.

Prior to this, Britain had been inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages (Celtic is another branch of the Indo-European family, like Germanic) such as Welsh, Cornish, and Gaelic. The common wisdom is that the invaders pushed these Celtic languages aside, never to be heard from again in the history of English as a language (hint: we’ll be hearing about them again). As I said, there were several groups of Germanic invaders, most notably the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Each group spoke their own language (or more likely, several dialects of their own language), and though these languages were related, they weren’t the same.

Now that the new invaders had established themselves as the new guys in charge, they needed a way to talk to each other (but not those wussy Celts who let themselves get all conquered, presumably).⁶ So, like people do, they found ways to make it work. Their languages were already fairly close, as such things go, and what started to emerge were various hybrids. Over here, you got a little Anglic mixed with a dollop of Saxon. Over there, some Jute spiced up with Anglic, with maybe a little Frisian thrown in for color. These mixtures were all pretty similar, enough that you could communicate with your buddy who maybe grew up up north speaking a different mix. The mix that eventually emerged is what we call Anglo-Saxon, or Old English.

What’s important to note here–and this is really important, even down to today–is that there never was one original version of English from which all others descended. Instead, you have various different versions emerging as different groups settled and met in different places and at different times. Eventually, these all coalesced into a bunch of dialects similar enough to clump them together as a language, but it’s more of a fuzzy accumulation than a hard boundary. In England, you can still trace dialect lines today that correspond to the locations where different groups of invaders settled.

Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) language and see how, by modern standards, calling it “English” might be a bit of a stretch. Oh, and if we’re lucky, we might even get a visit from our friendly neighborhood Vikings, too! (Hint: the Vikings are not friendly.)

1. Though sometimes people actually do do this, but that’s a slightly different subject. [↩]
2. You see, when a Mommy Language and a Daddy Language love each other very much… [↩]
3. In fact, linguists use this family metaphor extensively. There are mother and daughter languages. Languages are said to be genetically related, though this has nothing to do with the real human genetics of the people who speak them. [↩]
4. In some older sources, you’ll see these referred to as the Aryan languages, but that term understandably fell out of favor following World War II. [↩]
5. Or CE, if you prefer. I’ve always been accustomed to using BC/AD instead of BCE/CE, just as a matter of habit. I intend no religious preference by this. [↩]
6. One can practically hear the high fives and fist bumps ringing across the centuries. [↩]

Image via Wikipedia

In short, LIMBO succeeds in being brutally beautiful, extraordinary, and highest quality of gaming experience.

Oh, you want more than that? Well, okay.

You wake up in a dark monotone forest as the black silhouette of a small boy with eerie glowing eyes. You don’t know who you are or why you are here, but one thing becomes clear, this world of shadow and grey is a dangerous place – beautiful, but deadly.

But, that’s okay because death is part of the learning experience on how to navigate LIMBO. And boy, does your poor character get to experience all manners of death, from giant spider like creatures who like to stab you with their huge needle-like legs, to the head maggots, who like to force you zombie-like to wander off of cliffs, to pointy things, and electrified things, and things that smash you and saw you into little bits.

Yes, it’s a short game,¹ however it is sufficiently long enough to suck you into the story as you look for the way out. And it definitely leaves you satisfied, yet wanting more. The puzzles I found were challenging, especially towards the end.² At times they were a little frustrating, but through trial and many many errors³ the solution presented itself. What helped in curbing the frustration was the exceptionally well placed check points. There’s nothing quite like finally succeeding in running a particularly horrible gauntlet only to accidentally stab yourself right afterwards and discovering you re-spawned right before the gauntlet. LIMBO may be cruel to the character, but not to the gamer; you will always re-spawn after that nasty bit you just completed. Thank the makers!

There is no soundtrack, but rather an set of ambient noises, many of which are key in achieving the correct timing for your character to navigate the various puzzles. This was one of the most effective use of sound in a game that I have come across. It forces you to listen to the game, and not to rely solely on the visuals.

Speaking of the visuals, the art for LIMBO is fantastic and completely makes the wonderful yet horribly disturbing atmosphere. I loved the little subtleties such as faint movement of the grass and the thoughtful use of light. The simplicity, I felt, did a much better job in conveying the psychological wrongness of the world than if it had been splattered in blood like so many other games. Between the world’s quiet stillness and the darkness, I found myself on edge during most of the game, always fearful of what unseen horrors lurked beneath the next shadow.⁴

Make a note, LIMBO is a huge success.⁵ This little indie game is a big winner and should be in everyone’s game collection.⁶ In fact, I suggest that this would make a fine gift for this holiday season. LIMBO is a quality game, a unique and well crafted adventure not to be missed.

1. Maybe five or six hours [↩]
2. Yes, I had to look up how to do a few – you may deduct the appropriate gamer cred. from me at this time [↩]
3. often involving dismemberment, drowning, decapitation, and impaling [↩]
4. Also, with the lights on. [↩]
5. see what I did there? [↩]
6. So long as you aren’t turned off by its morbid nature, that is [↩]

Image via Wikipedia

Devin opened the back door of the café and let the old woman shuf­fle in before clos­ing  it behind her. The bag lady, glad to be out of the Feb­ru­ary cold, smiled weakly; her rheumy eyes flick­ing about to take in the room.

“Have a seat,” Devin said, ges­tur­ing at a wooden chair with black stains on the vinyl seat. The woman did not hes­i­tate, she dropped her blue plas­tic bags to the ground with a wet thud and sat.  She con­tin­ued to look around the room, not meet­ing the young man’s gaze. Her cheek twitched;  she mut­tered some­thing unintelligible.

“Would you like some­thing to eat?” Devin reached into one of the stain­less steel cool­ers and pulled out a slice of sponge cake. He held it out the old woman. She paused, wary, then one of her pale white hands reached out from the lay­ers of old jack­ets and sweaters to take the offered food. She sat there, chew­ing the food. Small bites, chew for a long time. Get all the fla­vor. Make it last.

Devin watched; she kept her eyes low, star­ing at the ground. “She remem­bers you, Mag­gie. Do you know that?”

The woman stopped chew­ing. Her gaze darted about the room ner­vously, look­ing every­where but at the man address­ing her. Devin stood and walked over to the slop sink where the large grinder sat.  He brushed the machine, clear­ing out the remains of yesterday’s grind. “She knows how hard it must have been. With your daugh­ter leav­ing like that. And with Frank dying so soon after the trial.”

The old woman sat stock still. Star­ing at the floor. Devin took out a metal­lic artic­u­lated hose and set it in one of the stain­less steel mix­ing bowls. He took a strip of duct tape from a roll above and fixed the hose in place. “How could you be expected to take on another bur­den? The food stamps barely fed you. And Frank, well…you know the insur­ance barely cov­ered the funeral. Where was the money going to come from?”

Devin turned and smiled com­pas­sion­ately at the bag lady. He brushed a lock of blond hair out of his face. “She knows you did the only thing you could.”

The old woman started to moan. She did not speak, she did not move. Some­thing like a sob escaped her throat. Devin crouched down in front of her, using his free hand to reach out and take her chin between his thumb and fore­fin­ger. She resisted him, look­ing to the side. “She under­stands. Even though she was just a baby, she under­stands why you did what you did…why you had to do it. ”

He stroked the old woman’s cheek softly with the back of his hand. She began to cry. Softly, then with greater vol­ume until her whole frame was wracked with sobs. Devin felt the grief, watched the pain sur­face. He guided her gaze to meet his.  This time, she did not resist. Her  eyes met his.

“She under­stands,” he said. “But she does not forgive.”

Devin plunged the pointed end of the hose into the old woman’s tem­ple. She shrieked, kick­ing and knock­ing Devin back­ward. Arms flailed weakly and legs kicked. Her face was a ric­tus of pain.

Devin stood and, steer­ing clear the thrash­ing woman, looked over at the bowl. A black ichor was drain­ing from the woman through the hose. As more of the wrong­ness flowed from the hose, the weaker the woman’s strug­gles became.

After about five min­utes, she was still. Her breath came in shal­low gasps. When the ichor stopped flow­ing, he took a towel from the dry­ing rack, pulled the noz­zle at her tem­ple. It came free with a wet pop­ping noise and he held the clean white­ness to the wound. Keep­ing the pres­sure con­stant, he sang the woman a lul­laby he’d heard when he was a child. Her breath sta­bi­lized until she was calm, as if asleep.

After a few min­utes, he helped her stand. She blinked but was oth­er­wise silent, her eyes scan­ning the room in a haze of con­fu­sion. He opened the back door, put the bags in her hand, and led her out into the cold. He met her gaze once more after step­ping back into the warmth of the café. She looked at him hope­fully from the alley. He smiled and shut the door.

By the time Devin returned,  the ichor was set­ting nicely. He took a spoon and stirred the dark­ness, break­ing it into smaller and smaller pieces until it was a bowl of small black beads, glistening as if coated with oil. He poured the beads into the grinder, set the dial for auto-drip, and let it run.

Author’s Notes  I was drink­ing Star­bucks cof­fee when I wrote this. Fit­ting. I can­not remem­ber where I first heard the phrase “Black as night, sweet as sin” to describe how a per­son liked their cof­fee pre­pared, but it’s always stuck with me. (It pre­dates Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, so don’t you dare whip that quote out.).  In the fine tra­di­tion of fig­ur­ing out ways to make the world a weirder place, I wanted to write a story about where the higher-end cof­fees really come from. Orig­i­nally, the story was sim­ply called “Fresh Cof­fee” and had Devin col­lect­ing the tears of an inno­cent child to brew the cof­fee. The tone was all wrong, and did not address the the ori­gin of the beans.  Then I remem­bered that phrase, that won­der­ful phrase. What else would some­thing that the world loves as much as cof­fee be made from?  Sin, of course. The more griev­ous the sin, the darker the brew.  What did Mag­gie do, pre­cisely?  I leave that to you to decide. The best sins occur in the imag­i­na­tion, don’t they?

“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”

~ Walt Whitman

The English language is weird. In some ways, the English language is really, really weird. But if there’s one thing we know here at The Secret Lair, it’s that weird things are generally awesome. Especially when those weird things are mutant cross-species hybrids, patched and infused with alien DNA, which are then forced to stand on their heads and jump through flaming hoops while ten people shout out suggestions for what tune it should be whistling. And yes, I’m still talking about English.

Let me back up a bit. A week or two ago, Overlord Miller pointed me to a humorous video purporting to convey the entire history of the English language in ten minutes.¹ The video’s wonderfully British narrator was accompanied by cartoons,² and it was overall very funny, with a couple genuine laugh-out-loud moments. The interwebs junkie in me was sated, but my scholarly side felt it left a lot to be desired. For one thing, it focused only on individual words, while ignoring vast shifts in grammar and pronunciation. For another, it seemed to pass on (or at least gloss over) some common myths about dialect, spelling, and language contact.

Clearly, as Governor of Purposeful Obfuscation and Lateral Linguistics, I could not let this lack of information stand! While I may not be the most expert on the subject, I do know a pretty good bit about it. Back in my college days, I took a course on the history of English and found it to not only be fascinating, but also surprisingly useful. In fact, in studying the history of the English language (both in that class and in later exploration), I learned that much of what I had previously thought about English (and languages in general) was, in a word, wrong.

So in this series of articles, I hope to not only give you a little more information about where this crazy, Frankenstein-esque language of ours came from, but also to correct a few of the more common myths about English, such as:

• You can’t split an infinitive (no matter how badly you want to boldly go somewhere).³
• You can’t use a preposition to end a sentence with.⁴
• English isn’t spelled at all like it sounds.⁵
• English is being ruined and dumbed down by too many people learning it (incompletely) as a second language.⁶
• There is one pure, perfect, Standard English language, and all other dialects are corrupted versions of it.⁷
• The way I learned to speak/write/read English is and always has been the correct way!⁸
• Languages are logical.⁹

But before we can really dive in and look at these things, we need to define a few things to make sure we’re all starting in the same spot. This can be a trickier point than you might expect; you probably know most of these words, but the way they’re used in linguistics might be slightly different than you expect.

Here’s one to get you started: what is a language? We use the word in all sorts of ways–the language of love, body language, the language of flowers–but for this series, I’m going to define “language” like this:

Language: A rule-based system of communication capable of conveying a wide range of information and ideas.

The most important thing to note here is that languages are rule-based; that is, even if you know all the words in a language, you can’t just string them together randomly and be speaking that language. For example, the sentence “Store at me yesterday toward go,” is most definitely not a correct English sentence, even though every word in it is valid on its own. Instead, you’d of course say “I went to the store yesterday,” because you know the rules for putting together an English sentence.

In linguistic terms, we call these rules grammar. ((Yes, I know I’m blurring the line a bit between grammar and syntax, but for our purposes we’re going to keep it simple.)) Now, this is another tricky word, because you probably think grammar is something you’re taught in school, what with diagrams and objects and parts of speech and oh look I’ve fallen asleep. In linguistics, grammar is the rules you know without knowing you know them.

Huh?

Well, let me give you an example. In English, words can be either singular or plural, as you know. Setting aside words borrowed from other languages, we make words plural by adding one of three sounds to the end of the word. This can be a little confusing, since we represent these three sounds all with the same letter: “S.” But when you think about it, there’s three actual sounds: there’s the “hard”¹⁰ S at the end of “hats,” which we’ll write as /s/; there’s the “soft”¹¹ Z-like sound at the end of “mugs,” which we’ll designate /z/; and there’s the extra syllable version at the end of the word “peaches,” which we’ll call /ez/.

So, three sounds for making things plural: /s/, /z/, and /ez/. And you as a native (or fluent) speaker of English always know which one to use. I can give you a word you’ve never heard before, and I bet you can correctly tell me which sound to use to make it plural. So for example, which one would you put on the end of these words:

• Chrob¹²
• Frink¹³
• Mudge¹⁴

You might not be able to explain how you know which one is correct (beyond just “it sounds right”), but you’ll get it right every time. And more importantly, every other English speaker will do the same. What that means is that there’s a rule there for choosing which sound is correct. You might not be able to articulate that rule,¹⁵ but you know it and you use it. And that’s what a linguist means by grammar, those rules that you as a native speaker of a language know that just “sound right.”

One other term that we need to define is this one:

Dialect: A specific variety of a language that may have its own variations on vocabulary, grammar, and/or pronunciation.

Or, in other words, a dialect is a flavor of a language. It’s a specific way of speaking a language that may be unique to an area or group of people. It’s not just accent, though pronunciation is a part of it. For example, we know that Standard British English and Standard American English sound very different, but someone who asks for a biscuit is going to get something very different in New Orleans than in London, no matter how they pronounce it.

It’s also very important to note that the word “dialect” isn’t a pejorative term. That is, to a linguist, a dialect isn’t worse than a language; it’s not a “bad” version of a language, or one that’s “fallen away” from the standard. (In some ways, this may be especially true of English, as we’ll see next time.) Linguistically, no dialect is inferior to any other dialect, and any dialect is just as capable of conveying ideas and communication as any other. In fact, it has been famously opined that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

Now, this leads to another question: how do you draw the line between a dialect of a language and a separate language altogether? The general criterion is inter-intelligibility; that is, speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of another dialect. On paper, this seems pretty clear, but in reality the lines can get fuzzy. Scots, for example, is right on the line between a separate language and a dialect of English. Speakers of other varieties of English can understand some of it… sometimes… but maybe only just.

In the next article we’ll start looking at the very early origins on English, including where some of these dialects got there start. Come back next time for History of English: When Angles Met Saxons.

1. I’d embed it here, but it’s since been taken down. [↩]
2. It’s a well-known scientific principle that everything is better with cartoons. [↩]
3. Hint: I just did. [↩]
4. Hint: See what I did there? [↩]
5. Hint: Pronunciations change, but spellings don’t. Additional hint: silly English kuh-nigghts. [↩]
6. Hint: This has already happened–at least twice, and possibly three or four times. [↩]
7. Hint: This is akin to saying “Chocolate chip is the original cookie and all other cookies are corrupted versions of it.” [↩]
8. Hint: The person who wrote _Beowulf_ probably said the same thing. [↩]
9. Hint: You ain’t seen nothing yet. [↩]
10. Technically, unvoiced. [↩]
11. Voiced [↩]
12. /z/ [↩]
13. /s/ [↩]
14. /ez// [↩]
15. If you’re curious, it’s roughly: /s/ after an unvoiced consonant, /z/ after a voiced consonant or a vowel, and /ez/ after a sibilant. [↩]

CC BY-NC-SA image from Brandon Koger via Flickr

Anyone who is familiar with the goings-on here at the Lair knows that I tend to work with Minister Lynn on his Crackpot Schemes and Unfortunate Synergies. And by “work with”, I mean “clean up the worst of the mess after the fact, and hopefully limit the loss of life and equipment”. To wit, we recently had the following conversation:

Minister Lynn: “It strikes me that our audio podcast is better than most things that air on the radio. It’s funny. Educational. Informative.”

Bad Doctor: “Agreed. We do some seriously good work there, and I know it improves the lives of anyone who listens to it. I mean, just look at the minions! We pipe the podcast feed into their private chambers on a continuous loop, and it clearly enriches their existence. Each new episode increases their work efficiency by over 79% compared to control subjects who are forced to listen only to a constant track of ‘A Man and His Unicorn’.”

ML: “This is something that needs to be better recognized by the world at large. If only there was a way to pipe audio from The Lair out to the global populus…”

Lynn sucks thoughtfully on the tail of the reptosquirrel he has tucked under his arm.

BD: “Did… you just lick that reptosquirrel?”

Lynn stares into the distance for a moment, glassy-eyed.

ML: “Yes. Yes, I did. It helps center me.”

BD: “That explains quite a bit. And not just why the reptosquirrels in The Menagerie have been avoiding all human contact of late.”

Lynn gives the tail a final slurp.

ML: “What? I mean, right, so I have already have been putting hundreds of hours into a virus that will let us infect our podcast episodes on to every portable MP3 player in existence. It works by piggybacking on both Windows Updates and Google Ads. I’m still fighting with a few firewall issues, however…”

BD: “Or, we could just stick with iTunes, like we have been for years-”

ML: “…so I’ve decided to take another, more ambitious track. Now, I know you enjoy doing medical outreach on Doctoring, both Good and Bad.”

Doctor nods, sagely.

ML: “I’ve repurposed some of our orbital satellites that make up the communications and defense grid, and will use them to transmit audio of your pontifications to all the peoples of the world into their most private of settings, where they least expect it – into their homes, cars, and even their personal computers! It will be a grand task, and require much labor and upkeep, but in the end it will spread your sonic emanations far and wide! It will be glorious!”

BD: “Or, I could just infiltrate an established radio station as a regular guest.”

ML: “Oh, come now, doc. That’s just crazy.”

Lynn takes a slow, long lick on the reptosquirrel.

BD: “Stop that.”

ML: “I really should. It’s hypnoslime is about depleted anyway. Can you get me another from The Menagerie?”

BD: “How about this – you hand me that poor traumatized reptosquirrel, and I’ll give you this bottle of Purell.”

ML: “Oh, that’s even better!”

Lynn squirts several shots of Purell into his greedy mouth.

BD: “NO! THAT’S NOT what I… meant.. Actually, go town with that. It might be for the best.”

And so it came to pass¹ that yours truly, The Bad Doctor, is now the new monthly health guest on the Midday with Dan Rodricks show on 88.1 WYPR radio in Baltimore. My first stint will be today at 1pm EST, where I will be chatting with Dan about the Human Papilloma Virus and the vaccine that prevents the strains of it that are responsible for cervical (and other) cancer. There has been plenty of manufactured controversy in the media about the HPV vaccine, especially with the recent recommendation that it be given to young men as well as young women, so I expect there to be a lively discussion.

You can listen to the audio stream online at the appointed time here, or download the show after the fact here. Additionally, you can follow Dan on Twitter @DanRodricks, WYPR @WYPR881FM, and the Midday show @MiddayWYPR.

To quote a former Lair military advisor, I love it when a plan comes together.

1. Clearly, this is an accurate representation of events. [↩]

In this episode:

• Chris Miller, “The End” (from 2006)
• Tee Morris, “The End” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:27 — 11.4MB)