This wouldn’t be a story of “the love, hope and joy animals bring into our lives”.

*

“Ph’nglui mglw’nath Cthulhu right now”, my dog said, its eyes popping, revealing expanding blood-red spirals beyond, crimson searchlights that, in defiance to all dog geometry, yawned wide enough to swallow me whole.

I fell off my chair, backwards, away from the dog.

The dog rose up on its hind-feet, forefeet spread apart like hands. Smoking blood poured out of its mouth, hitting the concrete floor with hisses, eating holes into it; holes up from which shone a flickering yellow light, and echoed an unvarying electric scream.

“The end is nigh”, my dog said, spraying smoking blood all over itself and me as it spoke. The blood burned like acid. It made the dog’s fur wilt and slough off its thin frame; what this revealed was not a dog.

“Ia!” my ex-dog said. “Ia! Nyarlathotep! The end is here!”

Namely, “That book is not in a genre that interests me; but it would be a good name for a book in a genre that does.”

That is, weird.

*

The beagle looked at me, sad in the way that only droopy-eared, long-faced beagles know.

Then it said, “That is how I died.”

I put the rope down and looked at the dog. Then at the rope, the unfinished noose. Then back at the dog.

“I hanged myself in 1294″, the dog said, its mouth hanging open, this hollow, uncanine whisper emanating from its mouth. “Before the mob came for me.”

“Dear God”, I swore, “so I’m not only suicidal, I’m having food poisoning hallucinations too?”

The dog shook its head; its ears flopped heavily from side to side like furry church bells ringing someone’s death. “They used to say I was a demon. It is not better to be bad hamburger, John.”

I sat down, avoiding looking at the dog the best I could. That left the rope, which wasn’t better, and the walls, which weren’t much to look at. The car — the less said about the car, the better. “My dog is possessed?” I wondered aloud.

“No”, the dog said dolefully. “This is just reincarnation. But only the wizards talk. I met a wizard in a pigeon, once.”

My eyes turned at the dog; it was staring at me. I stared at it.

“He had the most terrible headaches.”

I swept fingers through my hair, absently noticing the terrific amounts of sweat there. “I really should call an ambulance right now.”

“Usually”, the dog said, with pity in its eyes, “that’s done after the hanging.”

It lowered its eyes. “Not that it helps any, then.”

There was a knock at the door. “Honey! Five minutes!”

I looked at the dog, not quite finding anything to say.

“Wuff”, the dog said.

“What’re you doing there anyway?” came the voice through the door. “Something wrong with the car?”

The dog stared at me, tongue lolling out, eyes friendly and empty. It panted a bit, then began scratching an ear.

I cleared my throat, raised my voice. “Just playing with the dog, dear! I’m coming!”

I got up, the rope in one hand, went in a careful half-circle around the dog, unravelling the knot, and dropped the now un-noosed line in a bin by the door.

As the door shut after me, I thought I heard a hollow, uncanine whisper: “Not even a thank-you. I don’t know why I bother.”

Observe the Finnish word “salivaraus”. It is something that a university lecturer might mutter needs to be taken care of; or that she might wonder about (“there’s been problems with that lately”) as she’s heading out to lecture.

Now, you might think this is a word of German origins. “Raus” means away, off or out of — as in the Rammstein song title “Rein Raus” or “In, Out”, which is about rhythmic motion of that sort — and “saliva” might have the same meaning as in English. “Salivaraus” might be a weird local word for getting the phlegm out of your cheeks before going out and talking for a couple of hours.

Sadly, no.

The word breaks down as sali-varaus. “Sali” is a slightly pompous word for a lecture room; outside university circles it would be a hall as in a dance hall, the halls of a king’s castle, a high ceiling and a high possibility of fluted columns and then like; like “Saal”, the German word of same meaning. “Varaus” means a reservation, as with hotels, restaurants and the like; from the verb “varata”, to reserve.

Thus, a “salivaraus” is a room reservation for a lecture or some other teaching incident; which lecturers need to do a little practical running with, and wonder if this is the week the university’s computer systems reserve Closet 12 for everybody.

*

Note 1: For some reason I keep writing etymology as etymnology, feeling dubious, checking — as in, google the word and see if the top hits are literate or illiterate — and swearing.

Note 2: What about the word for a university? That’s “yliopisto”, as in “yli-” something that is higher, above or supreme (“Ukko Ylijumala” or Ukko the Over-God of Old Finns, a sort of a less priapic Zeus), and “opisto” a school — though I think “opisto” is only used in this word and then alone in the titles of small religious or political adult education academies. The mainstream word for a school is “koulu”, which sounds unrelated to everything, but is from Swedish “skola” and ultimately Greek “skhole”, whose descendants went “school” in other parts of the world. If you tried to put an S in front of the Finnish word, you would just get directed to the speech therapist.

Note 3: And since these are the sort of things I worry about — a (Ph. D.) dissertation is a “väitöskirja”; that should have umlauts over the first a and o. That is “väitös”, a claim or assertion, an understandable word though one that reeks of philosophy and hard-core logic, and “kirja”, the most common and basic word for a book. So your dissertation is literally an “assertion-book”; the assertion probably is that you know things now. Since graduate school is half impostor syndrome and half Dunning-Kruger syndrome, I think that’s very funny.

Note 4: What syndrome is it when you can’t remember if it’s impostor syndrome or imposter syndrome? And since it’s the former, is imposter syndrome something Internet-related? Well, now it is —

*

Imposter syndrome (note the “e”) : The result of bloggers blogging what they wanna blog; a growing distance between who the poster is, how she/he is doing and what he/she knows on one hand, and what it posts on the other hand. For example, a Finnish graduate student of mathematics might appear witty by only posting on his blog those utterances that successfully lean in that direction; the non-showing of the huge basket of function theory exposition thru dick jokes means readers think he is a better person than he is.

(The worst part is WordPress keeps all your old drafts. I don’t want to go and see what I was trying to pull off in 2007. Which means that’ll probably be the next post.)

*

Edit: When I post a post on WordPress, it whines that I should add tags to it, and suggests a few. For this post, these: videogames, gaming, science, literature, aviation, transportation.

Try harder, WordPress.

Now.

My first thought, seeing this contraption, was: “That clip can’t possibly hold a book. It’ll tear it. And you need to joggle and shift the book; it’s come undone and the book’s done then, the leash’ll whip up and take your nose off.”

My second thought was: “Wait, no. Your grip weakens for a moment, and the leash whips the book from your hands. The book ascends, boinks against the case of the leash, and detaches from the clip. The impact breaks the suction cup from the wall as well. The book falls into the bath, which you won’t be concentrating on as the leash-cup combination crashes on your head, and you drown in the tub.”

My third thought was: “It’s stupid to put a book on the end of that leash. Why not a cat? It’s much more fun to play with a cat that dangles inches above water — wait, no, I mistook ‘yowling ball of clawing pain’ for ‘fun’. This is a blind spot I really should try to get rid of.”

My fourth thought was: “Is it because I’ve never had a bath… er, wait, a bath-tub… that the idea of reading a book in the tub seems so bizarre and sacrilegious to me? Or is it because I’m the sort of a person that gasps in shock if I knock a book on the floor?”

My fifth thought was: “Wait, I’m a retracting-dog-leash ignoramus as well; never had dogs; never cared much for dogs. Maybe I’m overestimating the pull such a device has. But wait, are there leashes with different, er, levels of pull? If not, wouldn’t chihuahuas spend all their time dangling from the leash handle? And with big dogs, and strong-springed leashes, wouldn’t it be you that gets yoinked to the dog? Wait, no, maybe the mechanism is not intended for dog-yoinking.”

My sixth thought was of a female voice calling: “Honey, have you seen Jimbo’s leash? And the suction cup I bought for the fridge?”, and a male voice answering from the direction of the bathroom-toilet: “I’m using them right now, dear. Come and see, it’s clever and not a sex thing.”

My seventh thought was: “My, I’m having a lot of thoughts today.”

The Texans didn’t seem to like it.

(The original copy of the video is probably on Liveleak, not Youtube; but Youtube embeds nicely.)

(Originally saw this video embedded as a side item on the site of Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s biggest newspaper. Every Finnish news outlet basically functions like a fansite for the fandom of Finland: every mention of the F-place from outside the native/fan circle gets noted as a sign of Finland going up, up and mainstream like Twilight and Harry Potter.)

Jerking off is all I need. You know what I mean, folks? I ain’t gonna double my money; fuck that shit. I just jerk off, wipe off my chest, get up and go to work.

— so I wrote down some random observations:

• Isn’t “girl pussy” redundant?
• There can be no context where “sand” is a word you should want in the name of your product.
• Maybe this is my bias, but to me “Vulcan” means (a) Greek god of volcanism and other burning ejaculations, and (b) the Star Trek race of Spocks. Neither screams “pinch that at my genitals!”
• Some of these… things… must be gag gifts. Or something you buy, wave around uncertainly, and then leave in the kitchen drawer when you move out. Or something you hollow out, sure in the certainty that if somebody finds your monstrous latex thingumbob, they won’t be first thinking, “I wonder if it has something hidden inside?”
• There’s something called a “vibrator tuning kit”. Not tuning as in music and good vibrations, but apparently as in adding all kinds of side-wangs to it. The whole idea fills me with horror; I don’t want to know if there are glue or screws involved.
• Most of the products are easy to understand; but about one in ten makes me go “Where do you put that thing? What… do… what, ‘place your penis between the rollers’?”
• I’m not sure how to feel about the bolded claim of “200 thrusts per minute!” I’m not sure if this is how you should market these things.
• Also, glass dildoes. (Dildos? Dilda?) If I was a woman, I would not put one in myself in a million years. Nothing whose failure mode is “sharp glass slivers everywhere” would be going in my hypothetical ladyparts.

I feel like I could make a crack about the price of some of those things, but I’ve bought stupidly expensive books and lots of frivolous electronics; I’m not in a position to crow about what others buy to make themselves feel good. It’s just a whisper-thin difference of culture that you occasionally see a sneering news item about love doll owners rather than about hard-core bibliophiles. And, really, book lovers collect such greedy, overlarge harems that they go beyond any excess of sex toys. (“Books? Can’t find anyone to talk to, right? And that many books… overcompensating for something, am I right?”)

Plus, since I hate the kind of people who think life should be austere, harsh and PG-rated, I really rather like the idea of there coming, eventually, a day when the tittering has faded away and a mixed group can gab around the watercooler, not about their phones, but about the sex toys they’ve recently bought.

Partly by thesis twitchiness — it’s in the hands of the people who will say if it is worth sending to the opponent. It should be; all of the four papers are published and thus can’t be transparently shit, and the introductory part is… uh, bland and brief.

Partly I’ve been occupied by teaching; the department thought that my prolapsed schedule could be funded by making me teach: now (for the first time!) this meant actual lecturing and not just TA-work. Lecturing has been fun; I’ve been trying to channel a mixture of Extruded Lecturer Product #3 and George Carlin. (Trying to channel Bill Hicks would not work.) Time — the thirteenth of next month — will show if I’ve managed to make anything stick in the heads of the little ones.

A lot of spit, probably.

Thirdly, my mind’s been partly occupied since January by yet another Erisian holy book. As usually, weird crap is easy; weird crap of quality takes a lot of polishing. At the moment the turd is 691 pages in 6-by-9-inches size, a lot of it recycled from the previous two books, and over a hundred pages is just quotes, one per page. (One might be Sappho, and the next Ernest Kline.)

For a while now I’ve been stuck stealing mythology: rewriting Aesop’s fables and writing a really odd twenty-five-page version of Snow White (representative sentence: “This last cry was because Snow White kicked him in the head, and he himself tumbled into the empty pit.”) and, er, a really horribly id-written version of Little Red Riding Hood with too much blood, gastric juices and general deviancy for me to be blogging it just yet.

Instead, here’s a random imitation of Brothers Grimm. (A problem with this mode of storytelling is that I, as a modern reader, start getting paranoid as I write. Like, “does fairy-queen sound homophobic?”, or “wait, no, ‘she touched the children’ sounds really bad. I wasn’t going for that. I wasn’t! Rats! Hamelin! It’s all ruined now!”)

* * *

The Fairy-Queen and the Woodman’s Children

A brother and a sister, the children of a poor woodman and his wife, were playing in the forest when a fairy-queen approached them. She was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, and she wasn’t wearing any clothes at all.

“Are you the children of the man who cuts down trees?” she asked, and the children said this was so. “Tell him to cease”, she said, and vanished.

The children were scared, and told their parents nothing.

The next day, as they were playing at the forest’s edge, within sight of their hut (for they were scared), the fairy-queen appeared again, her eyes as pale and cold as her flesh, her lips and nipples red as blood. She again told the children to tell their father to cease the cutting down of trees. She vanished, the children ran inside, and could not tell their parents, for they were overcome by fear and shame.

The next day the children did not leave the hut, but stayed inside as their father went to cut down trees, and their mother went to wash laundry in the river. They kept the door shut, and the windows covered; but as they turned towards the hearth the fairy-queen was standing there, tall, pale and terrible in her beauty.

“You did not tell”, she said.

“Please”, the boy cried, “we were scared!”

“And ashamed!” the girl moaned.

“He would not believe us!” he said.

“It’s our livelihood!” she cried.

“It is more than that”, the fairy-queen said, looming over them, her hair spreading behind her like a great pair of wings. “You did not speak because I put a spell on you, a spell so you could not tell of me to your parents. Do you know why I did this?”

The children only wept.

“Because the trees your father cuts down have no voice either.”

And she touched them both, and they lost their voices.

Then she vanished.

*

Iteration 0: No solution. These problems are impossible. The lecturer is a sadist. These are his research problems.

Iteration 1: Death is the only solution.

Iteration 2: Hey, if we know “A” this problem is easily solved. Hooray!

Iteration 3: Oh, “A” follows from this problem. Dang.

Iteration 4: If we assume “B” is known, this is both easy and elegant!

Iteration 5: If we assume “B”, we’re assuming something not known or proven on this course!

Iteration 6: It’s one page if I hand-wave the hard part!

Iteration 7: It’s three pages and no hand-waving!

Iteration 8: It’s three pages, no hand-waving, and assuming holds!

Iteration 9: Hang on a minute, this is not a problem about “X”. That’s why no “X”-literature had a peep of it.

Iteration 10: This is about “Y”! And it’s an easy “Y”-problem!

Iteration 11: Three lines, easy peasy… aw crap, that inequality’s not strict.

Iteration 12: Three lines, plus eleven special cases, can this really be— (phone rings)

Iteration 13: “Misprint, Mr. Lecturer? The one in Problem 3, right? Right right. What? I meant the inequality… oh, that’s a different misprint?”

Iteration 14: It’s not an “Y”-problem. It’s an “X”-problem, and the zero was clever misdirection for infinity.

Iteration 15: I have… a solution? A skeleton anyway; let’s throw some meat on this pony!

Iteration 16: It’s a elephant. I can’t give this solution to the little ones. First thing, my wrist would break at the blackboard.

Iteration 17: I could use transparencies… Wait, no, I’d better try simplifying this. Get some jumping jacks, elephant solution!

Iteration 18: Right, I don’t need the special case where and ; silly me.

Iteration 19, the homework meeting: “Mmh, yeah. You can prove it that way too.” (crushes paper, cries a silent tear, moves to the next problem)

*

Iteration 19 can be averted by having a handout. (“Yeah, I guess you could use the obvious, elegant solution Mr. Poopypants put on the blackboard. If on the other hand you want a solution with pizazz and loxodromic Möbius transformations… well, one out of two ain’t too bad… here’s a handout… Aw, come on people, don’t you have saunas to set fire to or something?”)

And doesn’t it matter to the people who the new pope is? Are they that damned sure God will rig the vote? That God will rig the vote to support their own personal views in the important matters facing the Catholic Church?

Imagine American voters cheering the announcement that the presidential vote has been counted — I can’t imagine anyone, except the most PR-weary, cheering just the knowledge that either the Democrat or the Republican has won.

Or is the audience made of people who think it doesn’t change anything no matter who the pope is, and of people who think the Church isn’t in the business of changing anything?

The audience is pumped up, sure, but it feels to me like the actual person of the pope is almost incidental to them; they would have cheered anyone, would have cheered any speech not blatantly Satanic and un-Catholic. Because this is not the sort of irrational behavior that I get into, this all feels confusing, amusing and a little scary.

*

Left the video stream I was watching open; it keeps showing the crowd from a distance, with its roaring, chanting and screaming on the audio channel. It could be some other religion or a soccer match just as well. If I knew more about crowds, I could probably say something incisive about pope-mobs and football crowds. (I wonder if it’s a pope-mob no-no to get falling down legless drunk after an evening like this? Wild premarital sex is probably not good; but where’s the line with celebrating a pope?)

*

As for the guy the cardinals elected, Francis I of Argentina, well, I looked at his Wikipedia page and almost tweeted this:

Oh this modern world, that I can see in real time a doddering old man take up the stole of actual factual evil, discrimination and lie.

— but it would have needed an immediate footnote, something like:

Anybody that calls gay marriage “a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God” is evil. If you disagree, you are wrong.

Evil or horribly dumb, that is; and the new pope isn’t dumb.

Obviously it isn’t nice and ecumenical to call something “evil”, but I’m personally fairly certain that holding a fairly standard collection of modern humanistic values and opinions, held by people who think homophobia is bad and feminism is good, must lead, if followed, to appraising the Catholic Church as a great force for repression, discrimination, lie, and outright evil, with most of its peculiar features being better in perpetuating these bad things than in causing and upholding good ones.

Though obviously there’s room for argument over whether, say, accepting the miracles “caused” by would-be saints is lying for the sake of expediency, or some wilfully perverse and hopeful interpretation of natural probabilities, or something else — or whether treating the New Testament as basically a historical account instead of yielding to all the interesting better-understanding-of-humanity things Biblical scholars have found out really is better classified as fearful dishonesty (God’s wrath? angry crowds? neophobia? nobody asked, not interested?), or honesty out of obliviousness and unsound philosophical-historical methodology — lying after all implies that you know better.

Ah well; I seem to be getting into one-sentence-per-paragraph mode, so I’d better stop.

Thus, a superharmonic function is (generally speaking) not harmonic.

When I explained this to the teaching-of-mathematics studying fellow the next desk over, his comment was: “Are you telling me that Superman isn’t even a man?”

(To which I should have said, “He’s from Krypton, isn’t he? I don’t even know if we should call him a he! What the hell, he might have tentacles or nothing at all down there — wait, let me check, there must be fan fiction about this. Let me google for ‘superman duck penis’.”)

To which I answered, “Ja, but if ve take der Super-Man und der Sub-Man, they together make a Man!”

*

A question, from the same discussion: As is well known, a topologist is a person who doesn’t know the difference between a donut and a coffee cup. This being so because in the topological sense they’re the same thing: if they were made of clay, you could morph one into the other without destroying or introducing any holes. (A donut has one, in the middle; a coffee cup has one, in the handle.)

The question now rises, how many holes should a donut have to be topologically equivalent to a human being?

Probably more than one, as the digestive pathway, mouth to fartmaker, is not the only one. But this quickly becomes a quest into the insides of the human being; it is not clear to me if even the male and the female of the species are topologically equivalent. (Either “Physiological gender as a topological concept” or “The topological equivalence of the sexes: Towards a mathematical feminism”, forthcoming once I get the funding.)

Research into this is on hiatus because the damn biologists, who surely have the requisite expertise, are far away across the frozen waste in a different building.