conversate (v.) - to have a conversation.

As in “When I get back I’ll conversate with you”.

According to a deeply unscientific Google search this word is cropping up on UK discussion forums, often sparking a flame war over what constitutes a proper word. But I think it’s a good example of a good old back-formation, “the creation of a neologism by reinterpreting an earlier word as a compound and removing the affixes”.

In standard speech “converse” is preferred to “conversate” as the verb derived from (or forming the root of) “conversation”. But this seems to be quite different from how other verbs are derived from “-ation” nouns:
illumination -> illuminate
elimination -> eliminate
extermination -> exterminate

So for people to derive “conversate” by analogy seems fine to me. It’ll be interesting to see how much “conversate” catches on as people continue to back-formate their way through the English language!

I don’t know what to make of ‘chuggers’? Any ideas?

I quite like this from Werner Herzog:

Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species–including man–crawled, fled onto some small continent of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

More here, including farting glaciers.

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: “Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power.”

Full story here.

Huh, quite a mixed bag:

• I found the leather gloves belonging to my late dad which my mum gave me with no little ceremony and which I promptly lost
• My friends Jon and Pat went to some sort of Jamaican festival in the English countryside and found it hard to get parking
• One of my books (which seemed to be an autobiography by some kind of very minor Turkish celebrity) came alive and I tried to keep it entertained, but it point-blank refused to hang out with the Robert Crumb anthology I suggested
• Some woman tried to convince the actor Sandra Bullock that she (not Sandra Bullock, the first one) was pregnant again on the grounds that “I have an aorta in my breast”
• My mate Jim, who I haven’t seen for some time, came round and we had a laugh together

When I woke up, I was quite disappointed the last one hadn’t happened. The rest were just weird.

I usually leave the Discovery Channel on when I’m working at home on my computer. Sometimes I like to wake up to Myth Busters - it’s deadly. After that, Scrapheap Challenge is on, and that’s followed by Time Team.

Last week, with the TV shouting in the background, I was reminded of Junkyard Wars, America’s really crap rip off of Scrapheap Challenge. The show is basically a vehicle for blowing stuff up and its two presenters’ irritatingly, unhumanly loud voices.

Anyway, my stupid thought was: what would an American rip off of Time Team look like? And why hasn’t there already been one? The first answer is Americans don’t seem to be interested in history - that’s why the History Channel is dubbed the ‘Hitler Channel’. But it’s too easy to say “Mnyeh, America hasn’t any history!” It does. Thing is, if Al Gore or someone traipsed around America looking for ancient sites, they’d all be so important the Smithsonian crush him because there’s so few of them. Early settler sites are hard enough to find (I remember seeing a good documentary about an excavation in Florida) but there are plenty of forts and whatever that could be excavated for the hell of it. Most other history is considered too recent and sure you can see it in the movies anyway.

Maybe making a show like that would just raise awkward questions - and evidence - about about the white man’s behaviour back in the day which most people would rather suppress and ignore. Not that Time Team is particularly educational or revealing itself, but it’s at least as exciting and irritating as Scrapheap Challenge, but I guess Time Team doesn’t blow things up.

There’s an idea: American Time Team blows up American history!

There’s an interview (not available online) with Simpsons writer (and creator of Army Man) George Meyer in an issue I have of the American magazine The Believer. It’s a good read, and Meyer comes across as a pretty cool, thoughtful person. It includes the following interesting bit about Frank Grimes, the poor righteous sap who points out the glaringly obvious failings of Springfieldians and dies a gleefully gratuitous death:

Interviewer: I’ve heard pretty convincing arguments that Frank Grimes was a turning point for the show. Before he came along, The Simpsons had a clear moral center. The world was full of heartbreak and misery, but people were still ultimately good. Post-Grimes, there were no longer consequences. Characters stopped adhering to a shared code of humanity. Now more than ever, bad things happen to good people, and the stupid and evil inevitably prevail.

[A long and uncomfortable pause]

George Meyer: We may have gone too far.

Then they both burst into laughter. But the point might have some validity: I don’t know if it can be traced back to the Frank Grimes episode, but at some point or over some period of time the Simpsons stopped being endearingly cynical and started being careless and sometimes plain nasty. Characters started being randomly cruel and stupid, the family members sometimes seemed to have stopped even slightly caring about each other, and Homer especially became an annoying jerk. It was also a lot less funny.

Such a development demands an explanation! Maybe the writers just got bored, but Fox had them chained to their desks and they couldn’t just stop the show. Or maybe there’ s more to it. Meyer says that he has “a deep suspicion of social institutions and tradition in general”, and I’d say the same goes for most Simpsons writers. In their time, they’ve attacked pretty much every beloved institution and sacred cow in American life, and I wonder whether at some point they consciously or unconsciously began to attack one of the greatest institutions in American TV: The Simpsons. The Simpsons was loved for being funny and cynical but with a core of human generosity, and after the first eight or so series the writers couldn’t have done a better job of scooping out that core if they’d tried.

Blimey, these plans for redeveloping Battersea Power Station are certainly ambitious. From this angle it looks like a ready-made lair for the evil genius demographic.

I’d love to see the station brought back to life as an attractive part of London again, as it’s one of the city’s great buildings and that area could do with a bit of regeneration. Whether these plans will really revitalise the surrounding community or simply create a super-expensive enclave is another question.

These people don’t like what’s being proposed, with one perfectly valid complaint being the apparent lack of ‘affordable’ (i.e. subsidised) housing in the plan. I would have thought any Mayor of London worth his salt would demand a sizable chunk of affordable housing on-site, which would make for an interesting battle with Wandsworth council, who wouldn’t want to see their landmark site tainted by riff-raff.

Prank of the week
Casually remark to your friend that he looks pale. Tell him he needs a shot of B-12. Then, secretly give him a shot of Novocaine. A few minutes later, tell your friend that you’re going to drill a hole in your foot. Instead, drill a hole in his fot. Then just sit back, and in an hour or so — Yowee!

The BBC has a list of slang as spoken by the young people of today. It features the following entry:

book - cool. The first option given in predictive text when trying to type c-o-o-l.

What they don’t mention is that I invented this. Years ago! It’s been a really bad in-joke between myself and Thomas ever since then. For similar reasons, we call Conor ‘Booms’, but not to his face because he wouldn’t know what we were talking about.

I love it when my friends reveal hidden talents, but being a shallow, jealous person I love it somewhat less when they threaten to suddenly become much better than me at something I thought I was quite good at. In that vein, have a look at Lal’s photos at flickr, especially the ‘Weird stuff’, some of which is stunning.

Too bad steak isn’t considered a precious metal, because I’d like to go into a restaurant and order a steak and then pay for it with a steak. It would give everyone a chill because they would be thinking, “What kind of world have we gone and created here?”