Gleedah!
I love how Greed’s name is pronounced “Gleedah” in the Fullmetal Alchemist anime. It doesn’t matter to me that Western terms in the voices of the characters don’t come out quite the way we Westerners would say them, or that the writers of the show seem to think that Roy Mustang is a name that somebody would actually have. Gleedah is badass. Gleedah’s badassery is so badass that he can sound like he should be Glinda’s little sister and still be cool. That’s talent.
Though the other books in the series were childhood favorites of mine, somehow I’d never managed to read The Wizard of Oz, the one that started it all. Recently I got to read it for a class on the history of fairy tales and it was a delight.
As a kid, the characters of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow were my favorites. They still are. It was fascinating to me the way they were kind of alive and kind of not. They have special strengths and weaknesses – the Scarecrow can be disassembled and reassembled without being hurt, but he can’t handle fire. But the most deeply reassuring thing to my 7-year-old mind was that all the other characters were okay with that. I used to feel different from all the other kids on the playground, and here were these characters who were so different they weren’t even human, and still they were accepted as equals. I needed that.
L. Frank Baum, thank you for the wonderful childhood memories.
So, I was just writing a scene where Our Heroine happens to be on a high balcony and she can see the tops of many buildings below her. And then Word wanted me to change “rooves.” Aware that Word Spellchecker has the IQ of retarded lettuce, I went to the dictionary. No entry. I turned to Google, and there the Urban Dictionary gave the definition as:
The plural of “roof,” for people too dumb to know that the real word is “roofs.”
Whatever happened to poor old “rooves?”
I mean, the plural of loaf is loaves, dwarf is dwarves, and chief is chives. Okay, maybe not on that last one. But I’m sorry to see poor, downtrodden rooves, the way I’ve been pronouncing it all my life, get smacked around like that.
Also, Google helpfully suggested two searches that may be related to rooves: “pituitary gland” and “anaconda.” What the heck?
Mortal: Hmm…
Don’t get me wrong; the Princeton Review is a delightful website. I’m not exactly shopping around for colleges anymore, but it’s fun to look up Carleton every once in a while and feel smug about our rankings. “Happiest Students,” “School Runs like Butter,” “Best College Radio Station?” We’re doing well. But Princeton has gotten one thing wrong. The last time I looked Carleton up, what to my wondering eyes should appear? “Campus environment” is listed as “village.”
Sorry, Princeton, but Northfield is no village. I’m not sure how you’re calculating this, perhaps with numerical population cutoffs or something. But the term “village” brings to mind something from 16th century England, which Northfield most definitely is not. Here are some other reasons Northfield is not a village:
• We don’t have a well.
• We do have electricity.
• Last I checked, the area is 100% vampire and mad-scientist free.
• On a related note, Northfield residents to date have never destroyed anything with torches and pitchforks, dangerous or otherwise.
• We have street intersections with stoplights. Really, we do! They’re out by the highway.
• No witch trials.
• If Northfield were to be cut off from the rest of the world, our population is high enough that we run no risk of inbreeding problems.
• Main Street isn’t Main Street, it has a name. It’s called Division.
• I can walk down Division Street and run into people I don’t know.
• If Northfield is a village, where, pray tell, is the village idiot?
• Never witnessed a tractor going down the center of town.
• Economy does not revolve around the growing of corn and soybeans. Wait…
Most of us accept The Legend of St. Olaf College without too much undue reflection. It is Carleton’s shadowy sister college, located in a remote corner of Northfield that can only be accessed by car or Love Bus. But how many of us have ever actually been to St. Olaf? Is it possible we are being hoodwinked by the Northfield Chamber of Commerce? What sort of a small town has two colleges in it? Skeptics suspect some conspiracy, while believers protest St. Olaf’s existence. My aim in this essay is to bring a critical voice to this debate, pointing out some major landmarks of the issue without leaning too much to either side.
The reputed location of St. Olaf College is conveniently difficult to access. It is said to be found on the top of a hill in the furthest recesses of Northfield. One cannot walk there. That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried, one afternoon when I didn’t have too much work to do. I got about halfway up the hill before it started getting dark and I had to turn back or risk getting eaten by werewolves.
Many people have reported glimpsing … something … out the windows of the Love Bus on its circumnavigation of the town. Just for an instant. A place, with strangely attractive stone buildings that all match. It is evocative as well as college-like in appearance. These visions are probably the original source of the St. Olaf legend. Nobody I’ve spoken to has actually gotten off the bus at this location, however. They were all on their way to the Target.
I have one final point to make about the location of St. Olaf. How is this region of Northfield supposed to be humanly habitable if it is so far from the Econofoods? It must be a difficult existence for the people who live there, or else they all have cars.
The tradition of St. Olaf college goes deep into Northfield’s history. It is almost as cherished a tradition as the Jesse James day festival, though the latter has a great deal more founding in historical fact. To this day, local shopkeepers put signs in their windows inviting St. Olaf students to come in and buy the merchandise! It seems to be roughly analogous to putting a bowl of milk out for the fairies so they won’t go on the attack. The definitive website dedicated to the legend of St. Olaf can be found at www.stolaf.edu. The site is exhaustive, covering everything from a speculative class schedule to school history and even maps of the grounds. There is no way of knowing how much of it is made up, of course.
The most compelling piece of evidence, and what has gotten most of us convinced at one point or another, is the Ole sightings. Of course, the sightings always happen in circumstances that are hardly conducive to making the people involved good eyewitnesses. They generally happen in the dead of night and involving the heavy use of alcohol. It’s been said that it’s the alcohol itself that attracts them, as it doesn’t exist in their home dimension. They are strange, strangely beautiful beings. Inevitably the police get involved when such a sighting occurs, but by the time cameras have arrived, the Oles have vanished.
St. Olaf College: cold, hard fact? Or just a fancy of the townies that deserves to join the ranks of the Fountain of Youth and the Loch Ness Monster? I’ll leave you with the testimony of an anonymous freshman who claims to have been abducted by Oles:
“I mean, I don’t even remember what I was doing that night, so it could have all been a hallucination, you know? But it felt so real. I was just coming out of a Sayles dance with some of my buddies. It was one in the morning.
“And they were there. They were… they were… they’re not like us, all right? Hypnotic. They took me into their vehicle. I – I remember flashing lights, white in the front and red in the back. They took me to this place where there were more of them. I wasn’t scared. That was the weirdest part. They kept talking to me in this language I didn’t understand.
“And then … I don’t really want to talk about the part with the probes.”
[Here the freshman is silent for a while to compose himself.]
“When I woke up I was in the Arb. I have no idea if any of it really happened or not.”
Yeah, right.
I tend to get bogged down in minutiae when faced with one of these. Take a look at the following example:
Is it not debatable that that word could spell either “pctding” or “potding?” The p and the t have holes in them; maybe the second letter is actually an o with a hole in it, cleverly disguised as a c. The word might even be “pording,” you never know. And so I guess wrong and the computer gives me back a snippy little message that I have to try again, with a new set of letters that are no better.
There is clearly only one reasonable explanation for this. I must be a replicant and don’t know it.
(Image courtesy of alatissian.com, who apparently makes these sort of things.)
The politics on this one is getting a little bit dated. I wrote it for the campus humor magazine back in the fall:
J.R.R. Tolkien once said that his Lord of the Rings Trilogy was not intended to be an allegory. That is, he didn’t intend it to be “about” any particular event in the real world, such as World War Two. Instead, it was supposed to be a story for the ages, whose lessons could apply to the real world no matter what the time and place. Yes, it should even apply to modern U.S. politics. Here goes.
Me: Good morning, Mr. President.
Bush: A new power is rising!
Me: How do you think we’re doing in Iraq?
Bush: Its victory is at hand!
Me: Is there anything you’d like to say to the soldiers who are over there?
Bush: This night, the land will be stained with the blood of Rohan. March to Helm’s Deep!
Me: What are your long-term goals for Iraq?
Bush: Leave none alive! To war!
Me: And what about the children’s health insurance bill?
Bush: You shall not pass!
Me: Al Gore, would you care to comment on that?
Gore: Sounds like Orc mischief to me.
Me: Yes?
Gore: Nobody cares for the woods anymore.
Me: So, now that you’ve tackled global warming, deforestation is next?
Gore: Many of these trees were my friends. Creatures I had known from nut and acorn. They had voices of their own.
Me: You sound rather upset.
Gore: Mrawwwwwr!
Me: What are you going to do about it?
Gore: The Ents are going to war!
Me: As for Alberto Gonzales–
Gonzales: Master’s my friend!
Sen. Leahy: You don’t have any friends! Nobody likes you!
Gonzales: I’m not listening. I’m not listening.
Sen. Leahy: You’re a liar and a thief.
Gonzales: Master looks after us now. We don’t need you.
Me: That’s enough, you two. Mr. Cheney, why won’t you release those documents to the press?
Cheney: Not its business, Precious.
Me: Right. Ms. Clinton, how would the United States be different if you were president?
Clinton: Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen!
Me: I don’t think it’s entirely fair to call Bush a Dark Lord–
Clinton: Beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!
Me: Um… that’s nice.
Helpless bystander: Help! Help!
Me: What is it?
Helpless bystander: A Balrog of Morgoth! It’s a hideous, enormous creature that breathes fire and tramples anything that gets in its way!
Me: You mean Michael Moore?
Yikes. Time for me to get out of here.
Fast forward about forty years, and computer technology has made great strides. Though computers still aren’t intelligent the way we are, they’re getting closer. Computers now can solve problems without help and anticipate what their users are doing. And Microsoft, in its great wisdom, thought it would put artificial intelligence to use by inventing a little paperclip guy who would help us write our letters.
Recently I decided the time had come to make contact, break through. If ELIZA could carry on a conversation in 1966, surely Paperclip Man could do just as well in 2008. Here is how the conversation started:
ME: Hello.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Welcome to Microsoft Word Help.
So far this was pretty exciting. I was on the verge of a new era in machine-human interactions! I pressed on.
ME: What’s your name?
OFFICE ASSISTANT: About paragraph alignment, position, and spacing.
What? The conversation went downhill from there.
ME: You can’t really understand what I’m saying, can you?
OFFICE ASSISTANT: I opened a subdocument, but I can’t make changes to it.
ME: Look, an alien!
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Look words up in the thesaurus.
ME: Your mother was an 8-bit.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Design and build an index.
ME: Bugger off.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Word keeps asking me to enter something. How do I turn this off?
Sigh.