Here we are almost at the end of 2009 and there is no clear consensus as to what to call this decade.
The most common term that I’ve seen in my own un-scientific perusal of the Internet has been “the aughts”. I should like to argue that this term is exactly backwards, as a quick perusal of the OED will show. The commonly held belief is that “aught” means “nothing” or “zero”. A common example of this is the voicing of the name of the 30.06 rifle and round; “thirty-aught-six”. “Thirty” being the caliber and “aught-six” being the year of introduction.
Unfortunately this is a misnomer, although a very deeply ingrained one. The word “aught” actually means “something”, not “nothing”. Here’s what the OED says:
A. n. (pron.) Anything whatever; anything. In interrogative, negative, and conditional sentences.
The term “naught” is uncommonly used in the United States. What Americans call “Tic-tac-toe” is called “Noughts and Crosses” in the UK. “Nought” is a variant spelling of “naught”. As I’m sure you can infer by now, “naught” means “zero”, or “nothing”. Here is the definition per the OED:
A. pron.
1. Nothing, not anything; = nought pron. 1a. Now arch. and literary.
So if your decade ends in two zeros, it seems to me that it should be called the “naughts” rather than the “aughts”.
But decades are often given additional descriptions, usually in retrospect; “the roaring twenties” and the “swinging sixties” come to mind. Being that we are near the end of this decade I believe the retrospectives can safely begin. I should like to propose that this decade be called the “supernaughts”, a term which should also please Black Sabbath fans.
The following list is actually a repeat of a post I made to the JREF back in late 2007. Being that several of my predictions came true in 2008, I’m going to stick with a winning game plan. ‘Cause a winner never quits and a quitter never wins…
1. Cell phones with amazing new features will appear on the market.
2. Early frost will threaten Florida or California orange groves, causing TV anchors to warn viewers that the price of orange juice may go up.
3. This one guy will go from total obscurity to national fame virtually overnight.
4. A well respected female Hollywood celebrity will shed her clothes for a magazine photo spread. This event will be announced as “news” and not simply celebrity publicity.
5. Large retail sales will be continue to be referred to as “clearance events” and not “sales”.
6. The United States will produce a bumper crop of a major agricultural staple.
7. A record setting pumpkin will be grown.
8. A pumpkin will be “chucked” a record setting distance.
9. Courtney Love will be in the news again.
10. And here is my biggie: A railroad tanker car laden with a noxious chemical will derail and breach, necessitating the evacuation of a small town in the deep South.
One of my earliest memories of my father was of him showing me a rope trick. It wasn’t much of a trick, but I was only about four, so it was pretty impressive. He laid out a length of rope on the floor and sent a traveling sine wave down the line.
When I was about five, I graduated to tying knots with my father. He had a book about knots that we would use as a guide. Before he went into law, he worked in the copper mines in Butte, Montana, and so had hands-on knot experience. He even showed me a knot that wasn’t in the book, a way of terminating a line with a double loop. This was a rescue sort of knot, to be lowered to a person below from someone above. The person below would put their legs through the loops and grab onto the standing part of the line with both hands, then be pulled up.
There was one knot that seemed to flummox us both; the Monkey’s Fist. Years later, I figured out how to tie it, and I don’t really understand why it seemed so difficult in the first place. But as a child in the late 1960’s my knowledge of male role models besides my father was limited. I remember gently goading my father about his inability to tie this knot; “I’ll bet Mannix could tie a Monkey’s Fist.”
I still remember that book, as it was something that my father and I enjoyed together. I remember playing some sort of made-up game by myself in which I filled a cloth or burlap bag full of things and took them into the back yard. I left the bag outside and of course it rained and the book became water damaged.
Years later my father showed me a trick he called “throwing half-hitches” which is sending a loop down a line which is secured at the other end. The idea is that if one is about to haul a timber or something heavy, the extra hitches help hold the line to the load.
By the time I got to high school I was fascinated with Houdini. The whole fascination with rope and knots was re-awakened, but by this time was superseded by my interest in locks and lock picking.
When I moved to Seattle and became a pharmacist I had enough income to indulge in bibliophilia. By and large, I would buy really unusual books, but I was also intrigued by the notion of “overstock” or discounted books which you often see at large chain bookstores. I went through a phase where I bought several books on knots. Not that I really had a genuine need for such books, just that the whole subject seemed sort of topologically esoteric. Eventually I realized that there was ONE book which really covered the subject: The Ashley Book of Knots, by Clifford Ashley. Once I had that, there was really no more need to buy any other book on the subject! Yet I would often come across other books on knots, usually at a discounted price, and it got me wondering. Why was it that there were so many books on knots?
I also played chess, mostly in high school, but it was something that I never kept up with. I began to notice the same pattern; there were lots of books on chess moves out there! Again it began to puzzle me, it seemed like these were subjects which were relatively esoteric, like knots and chess moves, in which the supply of books on the subject probably exceeded the demand.
It took me many years into adulthood to come up with a theory of why this is. My theory is simple; knots and chess moves cannot be copyrighted or trademarked! As long as you don’t directly plagiarize the text or the artwork, the fundamental content is already out there. Yes, I acknowledge that chess is vastly more complex than knot tying, but still, a great body of information has already been published, usually broken down into simple components.
For many years television had a fascination with WWII. It finally dawned on me that most of the archival footage was in the public domain, and thus the production costs of the program could be kept that much lower.
Sometimes the public domain nature of certain kinds of information is even made explicit. I remember reading the introduction to a book of ghost stories; the author had to plead with his readers not to re-sell or re-tell the stories as their own!
The Internet has changed everything, of course, and we are only seeing the beginning of what is clearly a revolution in information technology. But as far as books go, there sure are a lot of books on knots and chess moves out there…
Some years back a famous “cryptozoologist” published a blog entry in which he related an anecdote that had been forwarded to him by a reader. The story was that a woman was driving along a road late at night and witnessed a strange creature attempting to cross over a fence. The famous cryptozoologist dubbed the creature a “Fence Fiend”, as the cryptozoologist had a predilection for alliteration.
To anyone but hard-core Forteans and true believers, the notion of a “Fence Fiend” was patently ridiculous and absurd. But let’s think about this a little bit. First off, it’s entirely possible that the account is a complete fabrication, proffered for the simple motive of attention. You see this all the time on the late night radio program “Coast to Coast” where the most outrageous tales are gobbled up by the hosts like so much intellectual Jello.
When I was a sideshow performer back in the early 1990’s I came to the conclusion that I had probably traveled tens of thousands of miles, many of them in vans or tour buses on highways. I saw a LOT of North America, Australia, Europe, and Great Britain this way. When I read about the “Fence Fiend” it occurred to me that what the individual might have seen was a plastic garbage bag or tarp stuck to the fence, fluttering in the wind.
Skeptics are often mocked for suggesting solutions to mysteries that may seem to believers as too simplistic, or unrealistic. UFO proponents seized on “swamp gas” many years ago as an example of an allegedly unrealistic solution to a UFO sighting. And this may have been the case with “swamp gas.” As with all human endeavors, skepticism has a range of values; some of it is good, some of it is not so good, and some of it is really good.
So to attack something as intrinsically weak as a “Fence Fiend” may seem like shooting fish in a barrel, or picking the “low hanging fruit”.
Except that it happened to me.
No, I’ve never seen a “Fence Fiend”, but I have seen many garbage bags, tarps, or other debris caught in fences, and set to fluttering by the wind. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven by things in the roadway which I couldn’t immediately identify. Was that thing metal, cardboard, plastic, or a dead animal? Was it broken and distorted, or new and simply novel to me such that I couldn’t recognize it?
The weirdest sighting of all occurred to me several months ago, right outside my house. There is a large traffic circle at the intersection just west of me. Nine times out of ten, I turn left, not right. I think I’m supposed to go around the circle, but I’ve got a big old American pickup truck, and it doesn’t like the tight radius of the traffic circle.
One night I pulled out and began my left turn. To make sure there were no cars coming from my right, I looked right. On the ground I saw what I believed to be a small mammal. My first thought was that it was a rat, and this bothered me, as no one wants rats in their neighborhood. But it was quite dark in color; too dark for the species of rat found around here. Weirdly, it was quite wide as well. Then I thought it might be a possum, but possums aren’t dark, and don’t scurry like this thing was doing. I wondered if it might be a baby raccoon, as a raccoon would be dark enough, but the proportions were wrong, and I couldn’t see a tail. I began to wonder if I wasn’t seeing a large mole that was somehow making an unprecedented above ground appearance.
Notice how during this entire time, my mind was fixed on “mammal”. I kept searching my mental catalog of mammals to try and correctly perceive what I was seeing. And all this time, I had to keep turning my steering wheel left, and try to drive safely. The entire encounter lasted perhaps 3 or 4 seconds. What made the sighting so Fortean was that the thing was almost hemispherical, vaguely like a turtle. But it moved and scurried like a mammal, and was black.
Because I was driving, and the thing was moving, the encounter lasted mere moments. If the encounter would have been shorter by about 1 second, I would be forever mystified about what I saw. A mole? A mutant rat? A baby Fence Fiend?
No, what I saw was in fact a small black plastic bag, pushed along the ground with just enough force from the wind to create an impressive illusion. I was immediately reminded of those articulated wooden snakes that you could win as prizes at the fair. If one practiced, the serpentine movements of an inanimate object could become a highly effective illusion.
So even as a skeptic, I can say with complete honesty that I see things all the time that I can’t immediately identify, usually while driving. It’s the classic case in which brief, unexpected encounters provoke the mind to place ambiguous stimuli into known categories of previous experience. Every so often events can take on higher levels of ambiguity, and so have the potential to become folkloric, like the “Fence Fiend”.
Gilligan’s Island is usually dismissed as low-brow camp by most cultural warriors. Little do they know that this 60’s TV show was one of the first salvos fired in the Culture Wars by the gay left. The level of cunning by the “homintern” was so profound that few people are even aware that Gilligan’s Island was not really about sitcom; it was really a set of encoded gay “lifestyle” symbols.
Let’s look at this carefully and decode the encrypted message. My first clue was way back in the 80’s when mainstream society was shocked by the announcement that Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS. Few outside of Hollywood knew that he was gay, and that his “marriage“ was really a sham. I remembered back to Gilligan’s Island and how hetero sex-bomb Ginger was always lusting after Rock Hudson. With numerous Hollywood stars to pick from for Ginger to lust after why pick Rock Hudson? Surely the script writers for Gilligan’s Island were Hollywood “insiders” who must have know that Hudson was gay. If they did know, why make a joke of it? Could it be that the “in-joke” of Hudson’s orientation was funnier to gay men than to straight men? As I pondered this profound question as a college student in Missoula Montana, I was simply too ignorant of the vast and subtle “gay agenda” to decipher any more clues. It would take years for me to figure it all out.
Clue number one; Hetero Ginger lusts after in-the-closet-gay man. Hetero Ginger is a character obviously based on Marilyn Monroe. Now what kind of men have a particular fascination with Marilyn Monroe? Gay men!
Clue number two; The character of Mary-Ann is clearly based on Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. (A down-to-earth girl from Kansas who is suddenly thrust into an exotic place far from her home). Dorothy was played by Judy Garland. What kind of men have a particular veneration for Judy Garland? Gay men!
Clue number three; the strange relationship between the Skipper and his “first mate”. Remember, the skipper and Gilligan are both “seamen”. But this is just the start. Gilligan is constantly ribbing the skipper about being fat. Why? Because this gives the Skipper the chance to tell Gilligan (and the audience) that he is “big boned”. Notice that with all the space on the island Gilligan and the Skipper not only share the same hut but one sleeps above the other one! This bunk bed mentality is only needed when space is at a premium.
But Gilligan sleeping above the Skipper allows for the “comedic device” of Gilligan periodically falling down on top of Skipper. Falling onto Skipper’s “big bone”. However, some claim that Gilligan should be depicted sleeping in the lower hammock, as he was obviously the “bottom” in the relationship. The issue remains a bone of contention among analysts.
Clue number four; Mr. and Mrs. Howell do not sleep together in the same bed. This is clearly an allusion to the Hollywood practice of the gay “sham marriage”. Think Rock Hudson and that other currently famous “in-the-closet” guy.
Clue number five; Why are the sexual advances of Ginger toward the Professor and especially Gilligan always rebuffed? In the real world it’s an obviously ludicrous situation; by what tortured logic does Ginger’s sexual frustration and Gilligan’s pathological chastity become funny? For whom does heterosexual lust seem a humorous aberration?
Clue number six is the most encrypted of all; the Professor. On the surface he seems to be as straight as an arrow, even though he is never twitterpated when he’s around “the girls”. The answer is in whom “The Professor” is supposed to be, i.e. what person in real life might he represent. The clue is in the theme song. Note that the line “three hour tour” is repeated, suggesting its subtle importance. The group could be said to be “touring”. Touring is the Key! But not touring as in going on tour but Turing, specifically Alan Turing. The professor represents gay British mathematician Alan Turing!
Well there you have it, now I think you will watch Gilligan’s Island in a whole new way. Clearly this is only the first step in understanding. How many more TV shows are really just encrypted gay lifestyle symbols?
Though Gilligan’s Island is more than 40 years old, it’s clear that gays have not been passive in adapting to new media. Indeed one homosexual has brazenly stated in a YouTube video that part of the gay agenda is to “take over YouTube”.
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