gas giants

some kids dream of winning an olympic gold. some have an oscar fantasy. occasionally, a little person may pine for a nobel prize. but not yours truly, as just a wee raynorling, i lusted after the gordon bennet international aëronautic cup, the trophy of the world’s oldest balloon race.

this article, an harrowing account of the first ever gordon bennet dirigible race (published in 1907) was responsible for igniting my aëronautic dreams, perhaps it will ignite yours as well.

here is another thing about the golden age of balloonery.

on halloween and how it factors into my nightmares

every year at midsummer, i throw a yard game decathlon party for family and friends. on account of a successful combination of hefeweizen, kansas city burnt ends, house music, and kubb for the 4th annual tournament (2008), my parents later informed me that it was one of the top five parties that they had ever attended. obviously, this made me curious about what else was on their list:

• one of them was some idiot’s ridiculously overplanned wedding reception that did not at all go according to plan.
• one was a party in greece that they were erroneously invited to because my dad was accidentally wearing the colours of the local football team.
• their number two party involved game 6 of the 1980 world series and several thousand old city carousers.

all and all, it was a pretty tame list so i was eager to hear what they chose as their number one. it turned out that it was a halloween party WHICH THEY THREW. now wait just a second, i thought, one can’t put one’s own party on the list of all-time best parties—it’s poor decorum.

not so, argued my parents. it was a marvelous party: trick-or-drinking, bobbing for apples, animatronic zombies, and outlandish costumes—my mom had dressed up as wonderwoman and my dad was sherlock holmes.

“still,” i said, “it sounds kinda lame.”

“no,” they said, “it was spectacular. in fact, it was so spectacular that it was—as near as we can calculate—the night that you were conceived.”

so now, not only am i acutely aware of the circumstance in which my dad planted the candy coated seed that would later become yours truly—but i have an unshakable mental image of he (wearing nothing but a deerstalker hat) and my mom (clad in a glittering tiara and a skimpy leotard) having freaky cosplay sex with the savage furor of pagan gods. this is how halloween factors into my nightmares.

gif party!

i have taken a few i.q. tests in my time and none have involved pinning a fake tail (a terkin?) onto the sexy undulating derriere of a donkey. so when i saw this FREE i.q. test (it is a banner ad on thesaurus.com) i thought why not, carpe diem!

sadly the results are in and it turns out that yours truly has an intelligence quotient in the 80-99 range which apparently is the metaphorical equivalent of a donkey’s perineum. fiddlesticks!

stop referencing yourself!

hey mathletes, get this: when the above formula is graphed using a set of predetermined ranges for x and y—it produces itself! it’s called tupper’s self-referential formula and was invented by lee iacocca when he was developing the rack and pinion steering on the dodge caravan (a wildly successful minivan in its day). many years later, a minivan fitting this description ran over my neighbor’s pet snake, betelgeuse. accounts vary as to whether the minivan was swerving to get out of betelgeuse’s way or to hit him (presumably as a social service). no matter the intent, we have the rack and pinion steering to hold accountable for the result (a smear of snake guts along west church street).

see also these robo-jokers.

the ratio of horatio

an open letter to people with widescreen televisions who insist on forcing everything they watch into a 16:9 proportion (eg. my parents):

look, raynor ganan is as liberal as they come (i had a caricature of noam chomsky tattooed on a prostitute that i see occasionally)—but just cuz you shelled out the yearly wage of a tajikistani rodeo clown for a television the size of a surfboard does not mean that you should be plasmafying every last pixel on your set. the proportions of the female form are dumpy and out of whack and the ratio of horatio makes him look like a whiskerless gimli. there is nothing wrong with 4:3! indeed it is the same ratio of gin to tonic in the beverage that i am enjoying right now.

sorry for getting so political, but this topic really gets me hot and bothered.

an impressive bust -or- a little head

i received this phrenological sculpture for my birthday recently from my kid sister. you will note that the very spot on the side of my cranium where i have been having a headache for weeks is the very spot that controls my desire for liquids and is right below the ingenuity zone. yikes!

the back of the bust reads:

For thirty years I have studied Crania and living heads from all parts of the world and have found in every instance that there is a perfect correspondence between the conformation of the healthy skull of an individual and his known characteristics.

—L. N. Fowler

“in every instance a perfect correspondence”!?!?!?! this burgeoning pseudo-scientific field sure sounds like the wave of the future. i hope that it doesn’t replace metoposcopy, though or my dear old daddy will be out of a job.

my grandfather looking totally badass in front of the ruins of angkor (1969)

today marks my 94 year old grandfather’s 95^th birthday. for those interested, he is the source of my predilection for poetry (particularly gerard manley hopkins and w.h. auden) curios (numismatic, philatelic, and archaic), and adventure. he is the exemplar of who i strive to be.

occasionally, i will be coerced into a television binge where i watch many episodes of a series over a short amount of time. one of the games that i like to play with myself during these times is matching unknown actors’ stage names during the titles to the characters that they portray.

the game is more than just random matching around gender or ethnicity since many actors style their names based upon how they want to brand themselves—a decision which also involves which types of characters that they want to portray. additionally there is usually a correlation between screen time and the order in which the actor is billed.

all this being said, i was only able to correctly match 3 of the 13 characters in the show, battlestar galactica (and i already knew edward james olmos ahead of time). furthermore, i wasn’t even 1000‰ correct on matching genders. jamie bamber is a dood? i thought she was the brassy kara thrace. go figure. anyway, this game is playable with other shows besides battlestar galactica and works especially well with soap operas.

roy g. biv has a posse -or- melvil dewey has got nothin’ on me

laura, my former badminton adversary, recently linked to a very interesting guardian article on the topic of bookshelf arrangement. she then asked her readers how they chose to arrange their bookshelves. i answered that i (after a long period of introspection) finally arrived upon a chromatic system.

this drew a certain amount of incredulity from some mutual friends who impugned me privately and asked if i was goofing or being 1000‰ honest the way that i usually am. as evidenced above (and with this as precedent) you can see that my record of always telling the truth remains without pimple or blackhead. with my honour restored, let me tell you: the benefits of such a system are numerous:

1. utility: as i am a visual learner, in many cases it is the cover rather than the author (or even sometimes) title of a book that i can recall, thus a chromatic index proves very useful when i need to locate an old tome.
2. æsthetics: as exhibited by my dolce & gabana® trousers, rolodex™ wrist-watch, and armani® hair gel, i am all about looking good. and what is more visually appealing than a rainbow? answer: books arranged like a rainbow. another answer less germane: naked babes.
3. ragbaggedness: as the very soul of this blog shows, i get an extreme charge out of random juxtapositions. a system of index that eschews subjects helps to create such serendipital collisions. consider: tin tin living in the same neighborhood as lucky jim, or the new-found meaning of goya’s caprichos when they are being absorbed by bakhtin and his dialogic imagination.

in conclusion, another thing that i arrange chromatically is the drawer where i keep my underpants.

that was when…

now that citizen journalism is le dernier cri, i thought i might dust off this pulitzer-overlooked piece by [a 4th grade version of] yours truly. notice the germs of the two qualities that would eventually come to define my blogging style: my regard for animal terms and my bad-boy, tell-it-how-it-is existentialist attitude.

UPDATE: this apropos photo comic was just emailed to me.