lol or I am the monarch of the sea, I am the ruler of the queen’s navee

To celebrate National Trivia Day, 4 January (my apologies for missing it), Mental Floss contributor Jason English (dead link) published a selection of outstanding facts and figures to ruminate over. I think that the most appealing trivia really pulls one into the circumstances behind the bald and enticing oddities and invites, demands further research and piques the curiosity.



One of the items concerned this corres- pondence between retired Admiral and First Sea Lord Baron John (Jacky) Fisher and Winston Churchill from September of 1917, which contains the first usage of the initialism (with explanation) OMG. The context of the message seems a bit tongue-in-cheek, maybe a play on the honours OBE, Order of the British Empire, and similar styles.

Curious, I learned a little bit about the writer and discovered that Fisher, perhaps only second in renown and importance in naval history to Lord Nelson, served first during the Crimean War and kept the Russian Empire from expanding further in the Scandinavian territories, and later then under his command British supremacy in the Mediterranean (the anchor locations of Gibraltar, Malta and the Suez) was solidified and the navy was significantly modernized. A lot more could be said and will require more studies into these lives and times. Fisher was a colourful and energetic character, besides—penning the interjection OMG! was just a bit of gilded (but rousing) trivia distilled at the end of a long and illustrious career.

duchenne whistle

Seventeenth French founding-father of neurology and a revitalizing force for interest in the galvanic response and bioelectricity, which was dismissed by medical science in the intervening century as somewhat of a parlour-trick beforehand, Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne made many enduring contributions to the field but is probably best known for capturing the aesthetics of a genuine smile.

Duchenne is probably also due a nod for the advancement of photography for his studies emotional expressions (also to the development of the theory of evolution and the hazards of lead-poisoning as well), which enabled him to isolate and identify the subtleties (now recognizable) that distinguish a fake, sky-waitress smile from an authentically experienced one. I hope I don’t always present a robotic smile but it is never strained or contrived—not overmuch. He did try to electro-shock subjects out of a posed grimace or a grin, occasionally, as those were the tools of his trade, but Duchenne was also able through gentler means to coax and capture natural glimpses and outpourings of emotion. His resolve to decode the masks of sentiment and passion honoured him as terminology to separate the real from the phony.

hearth and home or genie in the bottle

Authentic efforts to heal the environment and lessen human impact is always to be applauded and Germany, which has assumed a role of leadership both in better management of ecology and economy, I think has some very good intentions and cannot be accused of bullying Greece or exacerbating its financial problems and standing. Germany’s robust push towards greener energy and industry is at risk of becoming a pyrrhic victory and zero-sum-game, due in part to the malingering and knock-on effects of that other management sphere, the euro policy.

I remember watching an episode of I Dream of Jeannie that stuck for some reason from when I was little, where Jeannie waxes philosophical about the limitations and consequences of her wish-granting, which does kind of seem to violate the causality of the show, and tells Master that she cannot stop the rain (for a rocket launch—that or, Jeannie’s evil twin sister, called Jeannie II, tries to sabotage a mission with the weather) because it would cause a flood or drought somewhere else. That’s a bit like the greening of Europe, with energy borrowed and swapped and problems exported. The poor Greeks, in many cases, can no longer afford fuel to heat their homes and so aren’t ordering it—which surely sends chills through the market for suppliers, as well—and are praying for a mild winter and to warm a few rooms in the night are burning anything combustible—books, bits of furniture, trash. It is nothing wide-spread or dystopian yet, though desperate and I’m sure humiliating, but sure it is a dangerous thing to do and releases a lot of toxins into the air as well. Dirty, lazy smog is gripping the metropolitan areas and I would venture, undoes all of Germany’s best efforts. Concern for the globe, I think, demands some global-thinking.

chatter or natural infrastructure

The quietly superb BLDG BLOG has an excellent back-to-back series of articles on early improvisations and alternatives to telephony and wireless communications technology that patched together networks from features of native landscapes, including party lines with barbed-wire carriers across the Old West that was really a ranchpunk bit of cleverness, and serious proposals for a massive antenna array in the Wisconsin Dells (plus a bonus Soviet Dooms Day device) or Antarctica to facilitate correspondence with trawling submarines with the bedrock of the Earth acting as a transmitter for a Cold War worse-case scenario.
The series began, however, with an article from a science magazine on accidental discovery that a tall and living tree-trunk makes a surprisingly good aerial, complete with schematics and scheming. These were really engrossing stories and rather the opposite of leapfrogging technologies in their ingenuity. A tree, even if ill-used, is a far better sight than a cellular tower any day, and it would be really keen if the same creativity could rig hill and valley or derelict pathways to harness, passively, energy.