An Amusing Game of Miscommunication: Google Translate Telephone

(First: shameless self promotion. Click anywhere on this paragraph and you’ll get to my website, www.derekleif.com. The website has links to stories--okay, one story, but there will be more, promise--and a link to the PDF of my book Revision. It also has a link to Amazon so that you can buy a Kindle version of that book, if you so desire.)

As many of your have probably figured out by now, I just have way too much time on my hands. I mean, think about it: I've actually written a blog entry in which I turned the 1973 animated version of Charlotte's Web into a horror movie involving mass insanity, devil worship, and allusions to Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm. If you should want to read that, well, my sympathies, first of all, but for what it's worth, you can find it by clicking here. 

Anyway, when I'm not blogging about things such as that, or how much I loathe the film Mr. Holland's Opus (yes, you can read that one by clicking on this sentence), I try to think of new and amusing things to do with the digital tools at my disposal. 

One such tool is Google Translate. I find Google translate way cool, and I used it in my last entry to reach out when I discovered that a couple of folks from Russia checked out my blog.

Of course, as I did this I kept my language as simple as possible. I knew that as good as the translation algorithm was, there still would be a lot that wouldn't quite make it to the other side.

I really saw this when I took what I had translated to Russian, and then translated it back to English. Inevitably, the cracks began to show, particularly if I used idioms.

Here's an example. Let's start with this bit of "The Oldest Established," from Guys and Dolls:

There are well-heeled shooters everywhere, everywhere
There are well-heeled shooters everywhere.
And an awful lot of lettuce
For the fella who can get us there.
If we only had a lousy little grand
We could be a millionaire!

Now, let's translate it to Russian:

Есть богатых стрелков везде, везде
Есть богатых стрелков во всем мире.
И очень много салата
Для парня, который может доставить нас туда.
Если у нас был только маленький паршивый великий
Мы могли бы быть миллионером!

...and now let's translate it back and see what happens:

There is plenty of shooters everywhere, everywhere
There is plenty of shooters worldwide.
And a lot of salad
For a guy who can get us there.
If we only had a lousy little grand
We could be a millionaire!

Okay, pretty good. It's actually kind of endearing, the way it turned "lettuce" into "salad".

But this got me thinking (which, as my friends can tell you is usually a bad thing): what would happen if I took a set of English sentences, and then translated them into another language, and then translated that translation into another language?

And what if I did that a few times?

What would it look like once it had completed its journey back to English?

And so, with that thought, I created a new game that I call Google Translate Telephone.

Telephone, you may remember, is the party game in which someone starts with a phrase, and then whispers it  to someone else. This person then whispers it to the next person, and so on, until the last person says what he or she heard. By this time, of course, the phrase has totally changed.

Let's give it a whirl. We will start with English:
I think that these people are lepers. I will ask them if they could please use a hand sanitizer before using the salad bar. I would not like them to contaminate the bacon bits.

and translate it to Russian:
Я думаю, что эти люди прокаженных. Я буду просить их, если они могли бы, пожалуйста, используйте дезинфицирующее средство для рук, прежде чем использовать салат-бар. Я бы не хотел, чтобы они загрязняют кусочки бекона.

then we'll take that Russian translation, and translate it to Czech:
Myslím si, že tito lidé jsou malomocní. Zeptám se jich, jestli by se prosím pomocí ruční sanitizer před použitím salátový bar. Nechtěl bych, aby znečištění slaninu.

then to Greek:
Νομίζω ότι αυτοί οι άνθρωποι είναι λεπροί. Θα τους ρωτήσω αν θα παρακαλούμε χρήση απολυμαντικό χεριών πριν χρησιμοποιήσετε το salad bar. Δεν θα ήθελα μπέικον ρύπανση.

then to Haitian Creole
Mwen panse ke moun sa yo se lepre. Yo pral mande si ou ta tanpri itilize dezenfektan pou men anvan ou sèvi ak ba a sòs salad. Mwen pa ta renmen polisyon bekonn.

To Japanese:
私はこれらの人々がハンセン病患者であると思います。あなたはサラダバーを使用する前に、手指消毒剤を使用してくださいならば、彼らは尋ねます。私はベーコン汚染を好きではないだろう。

to Arabic:
أعتقد أن هذا هو والأبرص هؤلاء الناس. قبل أن تتمكن من استخدام شريط صلاد، إذا كنت يرجى استخدام المطهر، وطلبوا منك. ولا أود التلوث لحم الخنزير المقدد.

to Korean:
이이 사람들의 나환자이라고 생각합니다. 당신이 샐러드 바를 사용하기 전에 세제를 사용하십시오, 그리고 경우에 그들은 당신을 부탁드립니다. 나는 오염 베이컨을 기원하지 않습니다.

to Hebrew:
חולי צרעת, האנשים האלה חושבים. השתמש בחומר ניקוי לפני שתשתמש בבר הסלטים, ואם הם שואלים. בייקון זיהום אני לא מתפלל.

to Esperanto:
Lepro pacientoj, ĉi tiuj homoj pensas. Uzu detergento antaŭ uzi la salato trinkejo, kaj se ili demandas. Lardo polucio mi ne preĝas.

to Traditional Chinese:
麻風患者，這些人認為。使用清潔劑之前使用的沙拉吧，如果你問。黃油污染，我不求。

back to English:
Leprosy patients, these people think. Use detergent before use salad bar, if you ask. Butter pollution, I do not seek.

What's awesome about this, of course, is that it has turned it into something that you could imagine Yoda saying while deep in the indignities of Alzheimer's.

But let's really give this game a run for it's money. Let's take a paragraph replete with idioms, and see how it comes out at the other end of a Google Translate torture session.

Hmmmm...how about this:

English:
I want to give Google Translate a run for its money, so I'm going to feed a lot of English idioms into it this time around. I think that it will strike people as funny just how much stuff gets lost in translation. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it or anything, I think that what's going to emerge at the other end of this is a nearly incomprehensible mishmash of linguistic fragments, utterly devoid of any coherence whatsoever. I really think the prospect of translating this into anything understandable is going to hit a wall pretty quickly. 

and let's really have fun with this by feeding it through nothing but languages far different from English.

Our first stop is Iceland. This, by the way, is a language in which its inhabitants are fiercely protective of it, which has resulted in the language being much the same as it was hundreds of years ago (there is actually a language board that approves of additions to official Icelandic; they had a tough time when personal computers came to the forefront, as it was necessary to have words for such things as "operating system").

This is pretty cool, really: if you're a kid in Iceland reading their epic legends, the stuff reads as if someone wrote it yesterday. At the same time, I'm sure that a number of the things I wrote are going to hit a wall when Google frantically tries to do its work:

Mig langar að gefa Google Þýða að hlaupa fyrir peningana sína, þannig að ég ætla að gefa mikið af ensku idioms í það að þessu sinni í kring. Ég held að það muni slá fólk sem fyndið hversu mikið efni týnist í þýðingunni. Í staðreynd, ekki að setja of fínn a benda á það eða eitthvað, ég held að það er að fara að koma fram á hinum enda þetta er nánast óskiljanlegt mishmash af tungumála brot algerlega gjörsneyddur hvaða samhengi alls. Ég held í raun möguleika á að þýða þetta í neitt skiljanlegt er að fara til högg a veggur ansi fljótt.

Now, from Icelandic, hmmmm....how about translating that Nordic speak into Swahili. Yeah. Swahili.

Mimi nataka kutoa Google Tafsiri kukimbia kwa pesa zao, hivyo mimi nina kwenda kutoa mengi ya Nahau Kiingereza katika hilo wakati huu. Nadhani itakuwa mgomo watu kama funny stuff kiasi gani anapata waliopotea katika tafsiri. Kwa kweli, si kwa kuweka pia faini uhakika juu yake au kitu chochote, nadhani ni kitakuja mwisho mwingine ni karibu incomprehensible mishmash ya lugha kuvunja kabisa bila ya yoyote muktadha wowote. Nadhani, kwa kweli, uwezo wa kutafsiri hii ndani ya kitu chochote inaeleweka inaenda kuitwanga ukuta pretty haraka.

And from there, let's take a trip to...hmmm...Azerbaijan. Yes. I like it:

Google onların pul üçün run, mən hazırda deyim English bir çox vermək gedirəm Tərcümə vermək istəyirəm. Mən bu stuff tərcümə itirildikdə necə çox məzəli insanlar tətil olacaq. Əslində, bu və ya bir şey çox gözəl nöqtə qoymaq üçün deyil, mən bu dildə demək olar ki, anlaşılmaz dolaşıq tamamilə heç bir kontekstində olmadan qırdı olan digər sonuna gedir edirəm. Mən əslində, qabiliyyəti olduqca tez divar edib gedən aydın bir şey bu tərcümə, düşünürəm.

From Azerbaijani, let's now take these words on a trip to....India. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Hindi translation:

गूगल अपने पैसे के लिए चला जाएगा, मैं वाक्यांश मैं अंग्रेजी का एक बहुत कुछ करने के लिए जा रहा हूँ का अनुवाद करना चाहते हैं. मजेदार कितना सामान अनुवाद में खो जाता है, तो मैं लोगों को हड़ताल करेंगे. वास्तव में, यह एक बहुत अच्छी बात पर या कुछ डाल दिया है, लेकिन मैं कह सकता हूँ कि भाषा अस्पष्ट, उलझन में है और किसी भी संदर्भ के बिना पूरी तरह से तोड़ दिया है, मैं दूसरे छोर पर जाने के लिए करना चाहते हैं. मैं वास्तव में करने के लिए दीवार बहुत जल्दी से स्पष्ट कुछ अनुवाद करने की क्षमता है करने के लिए जा रहा हूँ, मुझे लगता है.

And...well, Vickey's dad is from Portugal, so:

Google terá a duração de seu dinheiro, eu tenho um monte de frases em inglês que eu vou deseja traduzir. Material quanto engraçado se perde na tradução, por isso vou atacar as pessoas. Na verdade, é uma coisa muito boa para colocar ou algo assim, mas eu posso dizer que a linguagem vaga, confusa e quebrou completamente sem qualquer contexto, eu gostaria de ir para o outro lado . Eu realmente gosto da parede muito rapidamente some'm claro vai ter a capacidade de traduzir, eu acho.

And from there, let's visit the Promised Land:

גוגל תפעל לכסף שלהם, יש לי הרבה משפטים באנגלית שאני רוצה לתרגם. חומר כמצחיק הולך לאיבוד בתרגום, אז אני אתקוף אנשים. למעשה, זה דבר טוב מאוד למקום או משהו כזה, אבל אני יכול לומר ששפה מעורפלת, מבולבלת ושברתה לחלוטין ללא כל קשר, אני רוצה ללכת לצד השני. אני ממש אוהב את הקיר במהירות רבה כמובן some'm יהיה היכולת לתרגם, אני מניח.

I never noticed how cool Hebrew looks in italics. Anyway, it's a small world. Next stop, Japan:

Googleは彼らのお金のために働くだろう、私が翻訳したい英語の多くを持っている。ユーモラスな材料は翻訳で失われているので、私は人々を攻撃します。実際には、それは非常に良い場所か何かですが、私は、その言語が曖昧と言うことができ、混乱し、完全にマーサにもかかわらず、私は反対側に行きたい。私は本当に、非常に迅速に壁が好きもちろんsome'm翻訳することができます、私は推測する。

(I'd like to point out how "Google" has managed to survive this entire trip intact. I also have no idea how "some'm" got in there, nor do I know why it struggles to remain untranslated.)

Anyway, let's keep moving. I give you Urdu, the national language of Pakistan:

گوگل ان کے پیسے کے لیے کام کریں گے، انگریزی کی ایک بہت ہے کہ میں ترجمہ کرنا چاہتے ہیں ہے. ونودی مواد کی وجہ سے یہ ترجمہ میں کھو گیا ہے، میں لوگوں پر حملہ کرے گا. سچ تو یہ ہے کہ اگرچہ یہ ایک بہت اچھی جگہ ہے یا کچھ اور ہے تو آپ کا کہنا ہے کہ اس زبان غیر واضح، مبہم ہے، مرتا کے باوجود مکمل طور پر، لیکن میں نے دوسری طرف جانے کے لئے کرنا چاہتے ہیں کر سکتے ہیں. تم سچ میں ترجمہ کر سکتے ہیں کورس کے some'm دیوار بہت تیزی سے محبت کرتا ہوں، مجھے لگتا ہے.

...and while we're at it, let's hit the Arabian Peninsula:

جوجل ستعمل لأموالهم، والكثير من اللغة الإنجليزية التي يتم ترجمتها إلى يريد. انه مضحك لأن يتم فقدان المحتوى في الترجمة، وسوف تهاجم الناس.سچ تو یہ ہے کہ اگرچہ یہ ایک بہت اچھی جگہ ہے یا کچھ اور ہے تو آپ کا کہنا ہے کہ اس زبان غیر واضح، مبہم ہے، مرتا کے باوجود مکمل طور پر، لیکن میں نے دوسری طرف جانے کے لئے کرنا چاہتے ہیں کر سکتے و. يمكنك حقا ترجمة سريعة جدا some'm بالطبع أحب الجدار، على ما أعتقد.

...and we're clearly starting to hit a wall here, because when we try to translate it from Arabic, some characters just remain untranslated, as if Google Translate is just saying "no more, please...no more." But there will be more. Oh, yes, there will be more.

Let's go to Thailand:

Google จะทำงานเพื่อเงินของพวกเขาและจำนวนมากของอังกฤษซึ่งเป็นที่ต้องการแปลเป็น มันตลกเพราะพวกเขาจะสูญเสียเนื้อหาในการแปลและจะโจมตีคน. S چ Tu یہہےکہگ r چہیہیک B ہทีچھی J گہہے O کچھ ur ہے Tu پککہ na ہےکہ S Zaban ไม่ชัดเจน Mb ہ ม. ہےมาร์ธาکے Baugod M ک มล. พัฒนาپ r, เพื่อیک n M یںยังไม่มีข้อความที่ے Dousari พรรค ม.ค. ےکےลี่ےک RNA چہทีےہیںک R S T کے จริงๆคุณสามารถแปลได้อย่างรวดเร็วมาก some'm แน่นอนฉันรักผนังผมคิดว่า

to the Philippines:

Tatakbo ang Google para sa kanilang pera at ng maraming ng Ingles, na isinalin sa. Nakakatawa dahil sila ay mawala ang mga nilalaman na i-interpret at pag-atake ng mga tao. S چ Tu یہہےکہگ r چہیہیک B ہ t چھی J گہہے O کچھ ur ہے Tu پککہ na ہےکہ S Zaban malinaw Mb ہ m ہے Martha کے Baugod M ک-unlad ML پ r, sa یک n M یں N. ng partido ے Dousari Jan ےکے Li ےک RNA چہ ےہیںک RST کے ako ay napakabilis, maaari mo ba talagang some'm kurso na gustung-gusto ko ang wall, tingin ko.

(and still, "Google" survives.)

to Malaysia:

Google bertanding untuk wang mereka dan banyak bahasa Inggeris, diterjemahkan. Lucu kerana mereka akan kehilangan kandungan untuk mentafsir dan menyerang orang. S چ Tu یہہےکہگ چہیہیک B r ہ t چھی J گہہے O ur ہے Tu کچھ پککہ untuk ہےکہ S Zaban jelas Mb ہ m ہے Martha کے Baugod M ک pembangunan ML پ r, n M یں یک N. ے Dousari Jan ےکے Li parti ےک RNA چہ ےہیںک RST I کے pantas, anda benar-benar boleh some'm tentu saya memuja dinding, saya fikir.

to China (traditional Chinese, mind you...none of this simplified stuff):

谷歌爭奪他們的金錢和大量的英語翻譯。有趣，因為他們將失去內容進行解釋和攻擊。小號چ塗یہہےکہگچہیہیکB Rہ噸چھیĴگہہےØ烏爾ہے塗کچھپککہ到ہےکہ小號咋辦明確MBہ米瑪莎کےہےBaugod中號ک發展MLپR，N MیںیکN.一月Dousariےکے李ےےک黨的RNAچہےہیںکRST我کے快，你才能真正some'm當然，我很喜歡在牆上，我想。

And let's hit hit Iran, and make it Persian. Just because:

گوگل برای رقابت برای پول خود را و بسیاری از ترجمه انگلیسی است. جالب توجه است، چرا که آنها را از محتویات را به تفسیر و حمله را از دست بدهند. صور چ پوشش داده شده یہہےکہگچہیہیک B R ہ تن چھی J گہہے Ø تو ہے پوشش داده شده کچھپککہ به ہےکہ در بوق و کرنا قرار به روشن MB ہ سکته قلبی ماشا کےہے Baugod متوسط ​​ک توسعه ML پ R، N M یںیک N. ژانویه Dousari ےکے لی ےےک حزب RNA چہےہیںک RST I کے سریع، شما واقعا می تواند برخی از 'متر البته، دوست داشتم به دیوار، من فکر کردم.

(at this point, you'll notice Google translate is just sort of throwing up random letters, as if it's having a seizure or something)

On to Norway. We've been sadly neglecting Scandinavia:

Google å konkurrere for pengene, og mange av de engelske oversettelsene. Interessant, fordi de mister innholdet til å tolke og angripe. Hva slags ہ BR Y ہہے K ہ GCH ہ Y ہ Yk dekket Ch ھ Y J G ہہے Ø ہے du dekket ہے K ہ KCH ھ PKK ہ å sette trompeten til MB ہ Mi K ےہے Masha K D gjennomsnittlig Baugod ML c R, NM Y ں Yk N. Januar Dousari ے K ے Lee ےے K partiet RST I K ے RNA Ch ہےہ Y ں K rask, kan du virkelig ha noen 'm selvfølgelig, jeg elsket veggen, tenkte jeg.

...did you know that Google Translate also has the ability to translate into Basque? Neither did I:

Google dirua lortzeko lehiatuko dira, eta English itzulpen asko. Interesgarria, bere edukiak interpretatzeko eta eraso galtzen dutelako. Zer ہ BR Y ہہے K ہ GCH ہ ہ Y yk estalitako Ch ھ YJG ہہے Ø ہے ہے K ہ ہ KCH ھ PKK estali tronpeta jarri MB ہ Mi K ےہے Masha KD batez bestekoa Baugod ML c R, NM Y ں yk N. urtarrilaren Dousari ے F ے Lee ےے K party RST RNA IK ے Ch ہےہ Y ں K azkar, benetan ahal izango duzu 'jakina m, horma maite dut, pentsatu nuen.

And you know what? I'm getting homesick. Let's translate this back into English. Now, just to remind you, this was what I wrote before we went on our journey:

I want to give Google Translate a run for its money, so I'm going to feed a lot of English idioms into it this time around. I think that it will strike people as funny just how much stuff gets lost in translation. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it or anything, I think that what's going to emerge at the other end of this is a nearly incomprehensible mishmash of linguistic fragments, utterly devoid of any coherence whatsoever. I really think the prospect of translating this into anything understandable is going to hit a wall pretty quickly. 

....and this is what I ended up with:

Google will compete for money, and a lot of Inglesa translation. Interestingly, because the loss of its contents to interpret the attack. What ہ BR GCH ہ ہ ہ Y Y Y ہہے K Ch covered ھ YJG ہہے Ø ہے ہے K ہ ہ ہ MB KCH ھ PKK to cover the trumpet ےہے Mash Mi K KD Baugod average ML c R, NM AND ں yk N. January Dousari ے F ے ے IK Lee ےے K Ch party RST RNA ہےہ Y ں K fast, you can really 'm of course, I love the wall, I thought.

There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

So okay, let me get rid of all the stuff that just completely got lost on the way there and the way back, and see what I'm left with. To tell you the truth, there's actually a sort of haunting, poetic beauty to it (I also strained out RNA and RST, along with "Dousari," which has no meaning that I know of, but nonetheless sounds like the name of a character in Dune or something):

Google will compete for money, and a lot of Inglesa translation. Interestingly, because the loss of its contents to interpret the attack. What covered to cover the trumpet Mash average AND January Lee party  fast, you can really of course, I love the wall, I thought.

At this point, of course, I set a challenge for myself: how do I write a narrative that actually uses this, consecutively, so that it makes some sort of sense? Hmmm....let's see, let's see (okay, I'll insert a couple of words for the sake of syntax, and I think you'll see, cyberpunk sci-fi is pretty much the only avenue open to me):

"Google will compete for money," I said, as the clean coal smokestacks belched thick sulfuric acid clouds into the night sky.

"And a lot of Inglesa translation, if you know what I mean, huh?" Snix said, elbowing me as one of the plutonium mine workers lining up for their weekly pay envelope, suddenly fell on the ground, his body wracked with seizures. Poor guy. Radiation protection suits ran you at least 35 Kelzigs, and that was with the new currency. 

All around me, people spoke in two or three dozen slangs, tongues that had sprouted from language track brain implant mods that allowed kids to have their own teen speak, sort of the way they spoke gibberish back in the 21st century so as to confuse their parents, and keep their secret plans between them. 

You could actually get a euphoric rush from particular translations of great works. All across the world, programmers frantically tweaked languages, creating new dialects every day. One of the more popular ones was a grafting of the ancient romance languages into a Spanish/French/Italian/Greek/Latin/Hebrew/Aramaic hybrid called The Inglesa Translation.

But these implants led to more hacks inside a person's head than you could imagine, and that's where Snix and I came in. All across the wireless network, trolls prowled, attacking someone's mind with words as sweet as an "I love you" on the lips of a child bringing breakfast in bed to Mom on her birthday. 

Those seemingly sweet, innocent words were part of an innocent language of childhood, a popular implant. The user, with the implant, processed language in such a way that every word felt fresh and new. 

It made any user vulnerable to a neural hack attack, though. It was a simple concrete language, and in giving it the joy of childhood, the programmers realized they would have to lose something, and that something was the more sophisticated syntactical constructs, the parts that interpreted abstract ideas, which were, so many times, the foundation of duplicity. 

Because of the loss of its contents to interpret the attack, this simplistic language, with its innocence and wonder, gave its user a decreased awareness of any guile or deceit in the thoughts of the trolls that now invaded the mind.

When a joy stealer entered the mind, he first pilfered the simple joys of each day. The first cigarette. The morning cup of coffee. From there, it was a simple matter to reach back into the person's memories of single-digit-age birthdays, and holiday mornings when the family exchanged gifts.

They called it The Trumpet Mash, because it actually gave its victim a moment of pure, timeless bliss before all the joy left their mind via the neural language implant, traveling through the network to the subdural processor chip of the troll who stored those joys, and sold them on the black market at a premium. 

So Snix and I were following those signals, and every so often, we got lucky and busted some punks, and a few people actually kept their joy. For another day, at least.

But this took time, and while we covered the network, who watched the station, where the forces of good, already stretched thin, kept criminals overnight before they were arraigned the next morning?

What covered the station while we were on our daily beat, which was to cover the Trumpet Mash with a net of law and order? Did we even have four cyberdogs in front of the station house tonight? Or were they out stopping drunken fights, they way they always did?

On one of the holographic billboards, the trailer for the newest January Lee film played and repeated, played and repeated. 

Two kids, out of their minds on about a hundred different languages at the same time, were so overcome with the understanding of the world from so many viewpoints that they spoke in monosyllabic, euphoric bursts:

"Oh, man, this isn't even CLOSE to the way I felt yesterday! This is, this like, AVERAGE, AND..."

"JANUARY LEE!" the other screamed, seeing the holographic trailer.

"JANUARY LEE!" the first kid screamed back, "PARTY! FAST!"

"You can really party fast, of course," the second kid said, before crumpling up in hysterical laughter. 

I just watched them, scanning the network with my digital optics, seeing the signals as they shot here and there, looking for anything out of the ordinary as the signals went in out of people's heads, in and out. 

I leaned against the wall, sipping my coffee.

I love the wall, thought. 

...and when you think about it, don't we all love the wall?

But I digress. I'm sure you can come up with ways to mess around with Google Translate far more amusing and creative than I could have come up with. Use it. Enjoy it. Amuse yourself.

Exploring the Underside (The Secret Life of Coke Zero)

So today's writing exercise was to Explore the Underside. In other words, take a person and look at the other side of them. If there's a hero, explore their not so nice side; if there's a villain, explore the softer side.

I was drinking a Coke Zero when I was doing this exercise (my consumption from diet soda, with its vile brew of chemicals, has dwindled down the occasional indulgence every now and then). I started to think about Coke Zero, and how Coke Zero has a side no one knows.

The surface of it is chemicals that are horrid for you. I’m trying to imagine that there’s actually another side to this. If Coke Zero were a character, it wouldn’t be a cool rock star heroin addict. There would be this corporate chemical quality to it, and it would shake your hand with an insincere smile.

But maybe, if you spoke to Coke Zero, there would actually be a sensitive side. He would speak of his rich heritage, having descended from the mind of pharmacist Joseph Pemberton, and he would read about his great grandmother, who was a wild party animal with traces of cocaine in her system.

And then he would study the fashions of that decade, and though he was a ruthless chemical corporate public relations officer would could make the public believe that the BP oil spill was good for the ocean, there would actually be this touching moment where he would nostalgically long for the days when everyone wore green tinted glass, and came from machines that sold you for a nickel, when people sung about you by telling the world they wanted to teach the world to sing.

“Coke was it,” he would say wistfully, thinking of the jingles with which people remembered his relatives. “People would have my relatives, and have them with a smile. Good times, good times.”

But then the moment would pass. There would be tons of work on his desk. It would be necessary to somehow convince the public that it was a good thing that children were morbidly obese, that their teeth were rotting out of their mouths. As it always had been, as it always was, and as it always would be, people had to believe that he was good for them, or at least that he didn’t cause any harm.

"You don't know the real Coke Zero," he'd mutter to himself. "All of you just think I'm some Aspartame filled cauldron of toxicity. But I have dimensions. Honest I do."

Then suddenly, his fist would slam the table.

"I AM NOT DIET COKE'S LESSER KNOWN BROTHER!" he would exclaim "DIET COKE IS MY BROTHER!"

In Which I Contemplate Accomplishing a Literary Stunt that No One, to My Knowledge, Has Even Attempted Before (Or: "Bits," an Example of a Genuinely Insane Form of "Constrained Writing.")

My friend Jeffrey Pomerantz calls the literary something or other I created a "xanolex," which apparently means "to lose words." A friend of Jeff's a poet named Paul Jones, said that the correct term for it is a "thanatolex."

Whatever you call it, I did it, so if one of those words becomes an official word in the English language, well, maybe I'll get into the Oxford English Dictionary yet.

What I did was write a story of about 1,100 words that didn't repeat a single word. It is a science fiction story called "Bits," and you can find it on my website. Just click on this paragraph, and you'll get to it.

I'm not in the habit of bragging, but now is one of those times where I'm going to do so.

I am impressed with myself.

Think about it. The. And. By. For. But. To. This. That. You. Me. He. She. Him. Her. The. In. Out. Who. What. When. Where. Why. How. A. I. Those. These. Which. Said. Once. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Imagine writing more than four double-spaced pages and not being able to use any of these words twice.

And now imagine, as you go through it, that you find a place where you used the same word twice. Maybe you used the word "gesture" more than once. So you change one of those "gesture"s to "hand signal."

But you can't, because you've already used "hand" someplace before. So you change "hand" to "signal with fingers."

But you can't do that, because you used "with" somewhere else. So you change it to "finger signal."

But then you find out that you used the word "fingers" already.

You get the idea.

(And yes, I practically wore out the "Find" function on my word processor, hunting for multiple occurrences of the same word. And yes, I had to call the thing a "narrative processing program" in my story, because, of course, I needed to use "word" at the beginning.)

Ultimately, I blame my friend Tom Harrington for this.

Tom is a friend of mine from back in the day at UMASS. He is one of those people I have not seen in years who I still call a best friend. He's that kind of guy.

Tom has an identical twin brother, Bill. I would not know Bill if it were not were Tom, and Bill really was the one who started all this.

Yes, my friend Jeff was really the one who read Bill's comment on one of my Facebook posts and thought to himself "hmmm....what could I do to reduce my friend Derek to insane, whimpering ball of retentiveness?" But Jeff would not have done this had Bill not posted the Facebook comment that inspired Jeff to lay down his challenge, the challenge that, surprisingly, did not result in a nervous breakdown.

(Another friend of mine, my karate sensei Mike Katayanagi--who is an extremely detail oriented guy--said that he almost lost his mind simply reading it and hunting for a multiple word use.)

It began so innocently. Last Monday--March 18th, to be exact--I was proud of myself. I'd cranked out a couple of hundred words of my next book, and had passed the 12,000 word mark (12,189, to be exact). I was proud.

So I posted my word count on Facebook:

Derek Leif

March 18

Word count: 12,189.

I've been doing that as a sort of spur to keep writing. Every day that I work on the book I post the word count so that now if I slack it's going to be obvious to all of my friends that I'm not writing.

(and a quick aside, by the way: I have very few Facebook friends. Some time ago I got rid of all the Facebook "friends" who were not my friends, particularly those from high school. Okay, actually, I unfriended everybody, and then, after I'd gotten that out of my system, asked about 25 people if they'd mind being my friend again. You can read about that by clicking here.)

Anyway, Bill then posted:

Bill Harrington You say that's the word count, but I'll bet you used a couple of them more than once.

March 19 at 3:18am via mobile ·

(Incidentally, Bill does not stay up until the wee hours trolling through Facebook. He lives in the U.K., where it's five hours later.)

Bill's comment prompted me, on Tuesday, to update my novel progress thusly:

Word count: 13,494*. The asterisk is at the request of Bill Harrington, who quite rightly pointed out that fact that there are many words that I used more than once, such as "the."

Granted, Tom tried to rush to my defense with:

Tom Harrington Based on Bill's criteria, Gertrude Stein never wrote anything over 100 words.

But the damage was done, and this was the point at which Jeff decided to demonstrate what a sadistic man he can be when he sets his mind to it.

I mean, I love to write. If someone gives me a challenge, I'm going to at least give it a shot.

Jeff probably knew that when he posted:

Jeffrey Pomerantz I hereby challenge you to write a minimum of 1,000 words without repeating any even once. It would be even more impressive than writing a novel without using the letter S.

Actually, there is a term for writing without a particular letter: lipogram. For example, if I have to rewrite "Mary Had a Little Lamb" without the letter "A," I might get:

Sweet girl M, with little sheep
With pretty wool, white snow,
Wherever precious sweet M went
The sheep would surely go  

Thank you. Thank you very much.

For the record--I don't have my Book of Lists handy, but it's in there somewhere (actually, The Book of Lists 2, I think)--there was a poet who actually wrote several Mary lipograms, each leaving out a letter (The one without "I" began: "Mary had a pygmy lamb...").

Perhaps the most celebrated lipogram was the certifiably insane work Gadsby, a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. This genuinely deranged project involved writing a 50,000 word piece of fiction....without the letter "E." 

(Here's a link to the book, by the way.)

This is madness. About two-thirds of all the words in the English language have the letter "e." Check out how awkward the sentence following this one is when we leave out the letter "e." Look, if you will, at this cluster of words, and see, if you will, how difficult a task it is to tap out a bunch of words that lack this vital...um....wait...can't tap out that word, can I..so I will tap out...character.

And that was one sentence.

The author, in the introduction, claims that he actually tied down the "e" key so he wouldn't accidentally let an "e" slip in there.

To give you an idea of how awkward writing can get without that vital letter, here's an excerpt:

Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy individuality that Youth is drawn to him as is a fly to a sugar bowl. It is a story about a small town. It is not a gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry, monotonous account, full of such customary “fill-ins” as “romantic moonlight casting murky shadows down a long, winding country road.” Nor will it say anything about tinklings lulling distant folds; robins carolling at twilight, nor any “warm glow of lamplight” from a cabin window. No. It is an account of up-and-doing activity; a vivid portrayal of Youth as it is today; and a practical discarding of that worn-out notion that “a child don’t know anything.”

...you get the picture.

With this stunt of mine, I have joined the ranks of people who have written a piece of "constrained writing;" that is, writing that has some sort of strict rule. Jeff (him again) sent me the Wikipedia link, which is here.

I am proud to now be a member of such a club (I was also pretty impressed with the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" thing too, if you want to know the truth). At the same time, however, it's mighty nice to once again be back in the world of multiple uses of the same word, and all 26 letters of the alphabet. Suddenly, all the rest of my writing seems a lot easier.

Conjuring Hugh Jackman (Or: Why the Film "The Prestige" is, Alas, a Bit Hard to Swallow) (Or: An Amusing Lesson in Physics)

(First off, a warning: if you have not seen the film The Prestige and would like to avoid spoilers that will basically give away the entire film, then stop reading. Go see the film, and then read this. I have now warned you.)

Okay, time for a glib science lesson that is nonetheless pretty cool. 

It all involves Einstein’s legendary formula E=MC2, and the film The Prestige.

To set this up, let’s make E=MC2 really simple (physicists probably won't like this, but so it goes). Then we’ll get to The Prestige.

Trust me, it will be amusing. I found it amusing. Admittedly, I wrote this, but I still found it amusing.

So okay:

E=MC2…

…Means, as we all know:

Energy=Mass x The Speed of Light Squared

Which means…

Energy=mass x a really, really big number

Which means….

The amount of energy you can get from something= its mass x a really big number

Which means

The amount of energy you can get from even a small amount of something=a really big number, as in, a whole lot of energy.

In order to really see this formula in action, you need to have atoms either break apart or fuse together. When this happens, there’s a certain amount of what was there before that simply….isn’t there anymore. 

To repeat: yes, when atomic bombs blow up there’s a certain amount of uranium (or plutonium) that simply…isn’t there anymore. 

The thing that makes this mind blowing is that if you can convert matter to energy, the reverse is true. If you have a huge amount of energy kicking around you can actually create matter from it.

So to simplify this (and physicists, I know that this is a gross simplification; be kind, or just…I don’t know, go play with your Higgs boson particle):

1 gram of stuff can get you the energy equivalent of about 20,000 tons of TNT (that was the destructive power of the Little Boy atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima).

…So if you have the energy equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT kicking around, you can make a gram of stuff.

Okay. The next thing we’re going to do is convert those units of energy from tons of TNT to an energy unit called a joule. We need to do this for the other stuff that comes later in this post (and I’ve just about gotten to the point where I’m going to explain what this has to do with the film The Prestige).

Now if we consult Wikipedia (which I’m consulting, in spite of its notorious unreliability, due to the fact this is a blog entry, and not a physics paper), we find out that 1 gram of explosive plutonium (okay, not uranium, but just bear with me) will yield 89.9 terajoules of energy. 

Once again: considering that this is a blog post, let’s just say that 1 gram equals 90 terajoules, or 90 trillion joules.

So you need 90 trillion joules of energy to create one gram of something.

(Remembering, of course, that 90 trillion joules of energy was the yield of the Little Boy atomic bomb.) 

So now let’s get to The Presitige.

In The Prestige, a key element of the plot involves a fictional device of Nicola Tesla’s that allows people to create duplicates of themselves. It just conjures these duplicates out of thin air; there’s no need, for example, to gather large clusters of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. All you need is this device. 

Hugh Jackman uses this device to create many, many copies of himself. 

Okay.

Let’s talk about how much energy it takes to create even one Hugh Jackman. 

Now, admittedly, I’m not using the Hugh Jackman from The Prestige as my model. Instead, I’m using Wolverine Jackman, became Jackman gained an insane amount of weight in pure muscle to look as jacked as he did in those films, consuming about 6,000 calories a day. 

Now. To make the math clean, let’s just put his weight, fully clothed, at 220. He weighed a bit more than 210, and clothes can weigh a few pounds.

(And anyway, the film makes it clear that anyone can make a duplicate of themselves. So I’m making a duplicate Wolverine Hugh Jackman. It’s my right.) 

I say 220 because that easily converts to 100 kilograms.

In other words, Hugh Jackman Wolverine weighs about ten thousand grams.

Now, let’s remember that it took about 90 trillion joules of energy just to create one gram of something. 

But if we want to create one Wolverine Hugh Jackman, we need to create  one hundred housand grams of something.

If we multiply 100,000 by 90,000,000,000,000, we get 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 (nine quintillion) joules.

Now, considering that there are many other things that we see created in this film—rabbits, top hats—let’s make it easy for ourselves and just round it up to ten quintillion. That allows us to simplify it, in scientific notation, as 10 to the 18^th power. 

So…how much energy is 10 quintillion joules, the amount of energy necessary to conjure one Wolverine Hugh Jackman (and some top hats and rabbits) out of thin air?

Put it this way: 10 quintillion joules, according to Wikipedia (and there’s a way cool diagram at http://circlon-theory.com/HTML/joules.html) is the yearly electricity consumption of South Korea.

Wait, there’s more. One element of the plot concerns the fact that Hugh Jackman creates copies of himself frequently, which means that it’s entirely possible that he’s created 100 copies of himself (a concept with which, no doubt, many women have no problem whatsoever).  

To create 100 Hugh Jackmans, you’d one sextillion joules (10 to the 20th), which is the entire annual energy consumption of the world. Again: this is all energy, not just electricity.

Now, to mess with your mind even further, here’s a sobering fact:

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a lot of energy at all. 

In a day, the earth receives 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 22^nd, or 100 sextillion) joules of energy from the sun.

That’s enough energy to create 10,000,000 Hugh Jackmans.

And that, of course, is only a fraction of the total energy that the sun puts out in a day, which is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 32^nd, or 1 dectillion) joules of energy. 

This is enough energy to produce 100,000,000,000,000,000 (100 quadrillion) Hugh Jackmans.

And this is small potatoes compared to a supernova (an exploding star), which gives off so much energy, that it’s just a lot easier to express it in my new unit of energy measurement, The Jackman (which, as you may remember, equals 10 quintillion joules of energy). 

A supernova is 1 septillion Jackmans. That is, you can create 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 23rd) Hugh Jackmans from a supernova.

And a supernova is just one star. It is estimated that there are about 100 sextillion (10 to the 20th) stars in the universe.

This effectively means that if every star were to spontaneously explode and devote all energy to creating Hugh Jackmans--if, in other words, it were Jackman's Universe, and no one else (and nothing else) lived in it--there would be 10 to the 43rd, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Hugh Jackmans in the Universe.

The science lesson is over. Go have a donut. And watch The Prestige. It’s a great film.

On Consulting the News for Something to Write About (Or: The Adorable Little Higgs Boson Particle)

(First, shameless self promotion: I have a website, and I wrote a book that you can read on said website. To get to all these things--along with a bevy of essays that are snappy and witty, thank you very much--click here.)

An update: I've had, honest, 102 views of my blog from the Ukraine. And yesterday, I got two views from Saudi Arabia.

Anyway:

When I need something to write about, I turn to a wonderful book called The Observation Deck that offers fifty prompts for writing. (Writers take note: you can get a copy of it by clicking here).

One of the prompts is "consult the news."

In "consult the news," you go through news stories and write about something. For example, this prompt says, a small New York Times article was the spark for Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I was not aware, until I read this particular prompt, that the book--the true story of two miscreants, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who murdered the Clutter family in rural Kansas when a burglary went horribly wrong--began with a one column piece buried deep inside the paper.

It other words, the smallest thing can get you writing. And as I think about the smallest thing, my mind turns to the discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle that physicist Leon Lederman called "The God Particle (many other physicists hate this term, by the way, because it sensationalizes the whole thing; still, it's way cool)."

Without getting too technical, the search for the Higgs boson is one of the reasons that, a few years ago, they built a massive, multi-billion dollar particle accelerator underneath Switzerland (and parts of France, I think). Deep beneath Switzerland (and France, I think) subatomic particles travel 17 miles in an instant, and hit each other. When this happens, the particles break open, revealing even tinier particles.

In 1964, Peter Higgs, along with five other physicists (Robert Brout, Francois Englerts, Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble) first theorized the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle that is, to particle physicists, what Hydrogen is to chemists...that is, the building block of, well, everything, the "something" that gives everything mass (and thank you Wikipedia, and I apologize if I got any names or details wrong). Since then, scientists have tried to get a "sample" of this particle with a particle accelerator.

And yesterday, it seems as if they did just that. I loved reading about how 83 year-old Peter Higgs got to see, in his lifetime, the confirmation of a theory he formulated almost 50 years ago.

(And also, by the way: here's an article that explains this way better then I did.)

(A disclaimer: the discovery of this particle is still tentative, by the way, but still, the team of scientists are almost certain that they were successful.)

Instantly, as the news kept churning out with information about the "search for the Higgs boson," I could not help but imagine physicists reduced to subatomic size, all of them wearing pith helmets, accompanied by a subatomic camera crew for a subatomic Discovery Channel special.

"Ah, the Higgs boson particle," the voice over in my mind said, as I imagined watching subatomic television, "since a team of physicists first theorized its existence in 1964, it has been camera shy. But now, for the first time, we're able to record this particle in its natural habitat."

Instantly (for I'm afraid this is the way my mind works), I saw these subatomic naturalists parting subatomic reeds, and gasping as, for the first time, subatomic cameras caught this subatomic particle that sort of looked like a subatomic koala bear, munching on subatomic eucalyptus.

Then I imagined these same scientists domesticating these particles, and imagined subatomic families going to subatomic stray particle shelters, adopting little bosons, quarks and leptons. I imagined these families spoiling those particles, so that they ran all over the subatomic house, chewing on subatomic furniture and barking so as to keep subatomic neighbors late at night.

Then it became necessary to call a subatomic Caesar Millan, "The Fermion Whisperer," who said stuff like "just because he gives the universe mass does not mean that you can let him push you around. You must be the atom, the particle leader, and realize that your fermion is in YOUR orbit, not the other way around."

"You must exercise your particle every day, and show him who's boss" this subatomic Caesar Milan said, "or else the particle will get angry, and enter the red zone, where it will feel as if it must fight. And this is when I get calls from people who say 'my little pet is destroying the fabric of the universe.'"

Finally, this subatomic Caesar Milan looks all thoughtful and reflective, in a Heisenbergian sort of way:

"Buy there is something even more important to think about," he says. "If you're not there to observe your little darling misbehaving, is he even misbehaving at all? There's so much uncertainty here."

So this is what happens when I consult the news. This is my problem.

Any enterprising readers/writers who wish to consult the news will, doubt, come up with something far less glib, and--appropriately enough for a post that's all about the mass of the universe--far more substantial.

(Speaking of which, I just thought of a joke:
Q: What did the Higgs boson particle with self esteem issues say to his therapist?
A: "I just don't feel like my existence is substantial in any way.")

(And an old Higgs boson joke that I just came across in that article to which the link above takes you:
A Higgs boson particle walks into a Catholic church. The priest says "we don't allow hypothetical particles in here." The Higgs boson says "but without me, you can't have mass!")

I gotta go.

Why I have a notepad in my back pocket

Since I was 19, I've pretty much written every day. I always carry a notepad with me, usually in my back pocket. I like Moleskines, because they have a little pocket in the back cover in which I can stash a few three by five notecards for when I have to leave a small note for someone.

This has often come in handy. There are things that I would have lost forever had I not scribbled them down, sometimes in the jagged scrawl of someone who had been asleep ten or fifteen seconds of earlier.

A sample of one page:

"What'll it be?" asked the waiter.

"That's just it," she said, sobbing, "you always ask me 'what'll it be' or 'what'll I have,' and I don't KNOW what it will be, or what I'll have."

Such things, of course, can lead to:

"I'm so alone," she said, dabbing at the corner of her eyes in a futile attempt to stanch the flood of tears that were making her mascara run, "and the worst part is, I don't know my future. I mean, I have a B.A. in Art History. ART HISTORY, for God's sake! What am I going to do with that, become an art historian?"

And now I wonder: what if Art History were the hot, up and coming major of the 21st Century? What if suddenly people's lives depended on the knowledge of Rembrandt's chiaroscuro technique? What if the dialogue at a job interviews included:

"I don't see any Mondrian on your resume; I'm sorry, but we're looking to design a rotary engine according to the aesthetic specifications of his work, so I'm afraid you need some more experience. You might want to try Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; RPI has an excellent program devoted to De Stijl."

With this said, wouldn't it be awesome if there actually were a program in, I don't know, Abstract Expressionist Engineering? Wouldn't it be great if there were a class where a professor said "so...what exactly was Gottlieb Daimler trying to tell us in his design for the internal combustion engine? And where do we see the influences of Nicolaus Otto in Daimler's work?"

Then I could see this same professor turning to his class, and saying:

"And how will you make your mark in the art world? What engine will you design that will make someone simply sit in a museum for hours as your work makes them transcend their very existence, and rise to a higher plane of consciousness?'"

Similarly, wouldn't it be great if engineering teachers taught art? Then you would have classes where the professor would turn to the class and say "remember Richard Serra's massive Skullcracker sculptures?"

"....Well, who's to say we can't design one that flies?"

Thanks for devoting over 3,000 years to reading this...

So here's the thing: I know my cousin Angela and my friend Jim read the last blog post, in which I discussed baking cookies with your children. I figured I'd hit a pretty large demographic with that one, because a lot of people bake cookies with their children.

Or, maybe, actually, outside of my cousin and Jim, I hit a different demographic: the people who don't bake cookies with their children at all. Maybe there's someone out there I don't even know, someone who spends so much time at work that they have no time for their children.

Maybe, yesterday, they were sitting there, glass of wine in their hand, reading my essay and crying while Harry Chapin's "Cats in the Cradle" played for the twenty-fifth time.

(I realize this begs the question: if said parent had time to drink wine and listen to "Cats in the Cradle" twenty-five times, couldn't they have found some time to bake cookies with their children?)

The point I'm making here is that I just checked the analytics of yesterday's blog post, and in addition to my cousin and Jim, there are three other people who read what I wrote yesterday. I wonder who they are.

I've actually had a few posts in which my readership has drifted into the hundreds. Some time ago, I wrote an essay about Phineas Gage, the guy who lived on after a pole went through his head (it's actually on my website's essay collection, and you can find it here). That one actually got hundreds of readers, and is probably my most-read piece of writing ever.

And yesterday, besides Jim and Angela, there were those other three people. As I sit here at the beginning of the day, cup of coffee by my side, I think of how grateful I am to all these people.

I look at it this way: we're not on the planet for a whole lot of time. In fact, when you think about the age of the universe, it gets kind of depressing. Time is a precious thing.

And yesterday, five people devoted some of that time to reading what I wrote.

It probably takes something in the order of ten minutes to read these blog posts. That means that if a person who reads my blog posts lives to the average age of life expectancy in the United States, they gave up ten minutes out of the seventy-eight years that they will be on this planet. That means that they devoted 1/4,099,680th of their lives to my writing.

This is a lot, relatively speaking. If the universe--which is about about 13.7 billion years old--devoted the same proportional amount of time to reading my writing, it would be giving up 3,341.7 years of its life, or 5.56 years for every second it spends reading my blog post.

And I tell you, if I were a universe and a parallel universe read my blog posts--let alone five parallel universes--I'd be grateful. Furthermore, I'd want to tell those other parallel universes that often things that seem trivial to them might be interesting to me.

24 hours is the same proportional chunk of our lives as 481,208 years is to the universe. If the universe had a blog, it could conceivably have thought that yesterday just wasn't all that exciting.

I could see the universe saying to me "man...I have nothing to write about. I mean, I'd like to go back to the old days, back to the Big Bang, when things were really happening. Yesterday was so lame. All that happened yesterday was that Homo Erectus evolved into Modern Humans."

"Of course, at the beginning of the day, humans didn't have a name for them or anything, but now they do. Of course, if I told you about yesterday in detail, it would probably bore you. I'm sure you don't want to hear anything about Neanderthals; they got there at, like, 8AM, and were gone a few hours later."

"You know," I'd say, "instead of drinking wine and listening to 'Cat's Cradle' like, two billion, six hundred and thirty four million, six hundred and fifteen thousand, three hundred and eighty four times, you could have devoted 20,0050 years (one hour, proportionally speaking) to baking cookies with your kid. I mean, Crikey, man, don't tell me that, when you look at all those stars, you don't see a little bit of yourself in them."

Anyway, if you've gotten this far, thanks for staying with me. It was, like, The Bronze Age when you started reading this (and I'm sure it felt that way).

Why I Wish You'd Update Your Blog, My Friend

Here's why, if you're one of my (very few) friends, that you owe it to me to update your blog.

First, I know it's dispiriting. I write, I post, I get, like, five or six pageviews.

But still, I write.

I do it because I love it when my friends write.

There's something about a friend's updated blog that always seems puts me in a good mood. North Korea is important news, but for me, the most important news of the day concerns how my friends are doing.

"You have a dog," I can say to a friend with a smile, "I've been keeping up with current events."

Yes, there are Facebook posts, but I'm greedy. I want more.

I don't just want to know about those chocolate chip cookies that you baked with your kid, I want to know that you do this because when you baked cookies with your mom you kind of felt like it was one of those special times where one of your parents had set aside this chunk of their life just for you and only you, and that now you're baking cookies with your kid because you want to keep that tradition going, and want your kid to know that they're always going to be the most special and perfect thing in creation to you, no matter what happens.

Anyway, in the news of Derek Leif's life, I can tell you that right now, at this moment, he is listening to Russ Borris's show The Alternate Side on WFUV, specifically the song "Ceremony" by New Order. It is a good song. It makes him think of how this band rose from the ashes of Joy Division after lead singer Ian Curtis took his own life, two months shy of 24.

And such songs make Derek Leif think of the good things that rise out of the most devastating tragedies. This, in turn, makes him think of the fact that each and every one of his friends probably has had, by this time, one or two certifiably tragic events in their lives, probably more.

And yet they bake cookies with their kids, or, in the case of Derek's friends, make french toast with their daughter, put powdered sugar on it, then raspberries on the side, and then, after putting a cup of coffee on the right side of the tray and a mimosa on the left, take a picture of their daughter bringing Mom breakfast in bed.

That is the news at this time. Good Night, and Good Luck.

Musings on a Starbuck's Coffee Stirrer Thingee

To the left of me is one of those plastic things that they put in the opening of the lids of Starbuck's coffee cups so that the coffee doesn't dribble on you when you're bringing it back to your table. Years from now, someone will clean out their house and come across one of these stirrer things, and say "remember when Starbuck's used to put these things in the opening of the lids of the coffee cups?"

Maybe, for someone, that green stirrer thingee might be a keepsake from their lives that means more to them than anything else in the word.

Perhaps it reminds them of a time when they bought a cappuccino for a person they had a secret crush on, and how the object of said crush dipped the stirrer into the cappuccino so that it had a dollop of foam on it, and then drew a mustache on the person who had a crush on them, causing that person to feel all tingly and feel like the must lucky person in the whole wide world.

And then I could see fate separating these two people for some reason, and then I could see them meeting, like, years later, and totally hitting it off, and at some point, the person who had a crush on the other person would talk about how they were going through this box of stuff from years and years ago, and how they came across that Starbuck's stirrer thingee, and how, for a long while, that was this person's most precious possession.

For all I know, perhaps it still is.