Mine’s longer than yours.

Short Fiction Titles

Tabarnak!

Years ago, I learned from a book on hockey (I think it was Ken Dryden’s The Game) that French Canadians use church words (meaning tabernacle, chalice, etc.) as offensive expletives. Here’s an article about it, from which we learn that some of the words even have cleaned-up versions. One theory the article doesn’t mention is that the approach comes from offering to excrete in the sacred entity, like the Spanish in Hemingway novels who “unname in the milk of thy….”

Thanx to Metafilter

Who be kind to

Compassion to one’s fellow beings is generally considered a Good Thing. Do it to yourself.

Thanx to andrewducker

Captions courageous

Great moments in Wikipedia

Thanx to andrewducker

A Spectrum Is Haunting Texas (a sequel)

Yesterday I did a post about the “autistic spectrum” in which I assumed that autism is defined as the lack of Theory of Mind. That is not currently the case, and I apologize to anyone I offended by passing along that misinformation. I wish to thank mrissa, kalimac, elenbarathi, and ertla for helpful comments on this matter.

I suspect that autistic may be one of those concepts on which I am followed around by an invisible Zen Master who will whap me upside the head if I say that I am or if I say that I am not one of those. (It happened with fannish.) Fifty years ago I decided that the most important Two Kinds of People is those who live in the world and those who live in their minds and deal with the world, and that I am one of the latter. I found two brilliant writers of that sort—Robert Anson Heinlein and Robert Anton Wilson—and learned much from them without entirely agreeing with either. I thought that Jung’s extravert/introvert was that distinction, but it’s more complicated than that. I keep thinking about that. Maybe we should call it allistic/autistic or externalist/internalist, but it seems to me to matter a lot.