Quick Program Note

Hey There Fellow Logovores--This is just a quick note to let you know that on this Monday's Logovore's Dilemma (3-5 PM EDT) I'll be reading George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language". Out loud, so you can hear it, not just to myself so I'll have something to do while you're listening to the show. It's fairly short, so there'll still be plenty of groovy music, and I think you'll agree it was worth hearing, especially right now. Tune in! If you'd like to follow along at home, you can find the text at http://www.ourcivilisation.com/decline/orwell1.htm

lazy lazy lazy me & the end of the world

Lazy lazy lazy me
I'm a lazy son of a gun



Sorry I've been away so long. I wish I had a good excuse for my absense, but the fact is that I am a profoundly lazy person. As Walter Brennan as Will Sonnet in the '60s western series "The Guns of Will Sonnet" would have said, "No brag; just fact."



I am not sorry that the world did not end this week when the Eurogeeks at CERN turned on the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. I have too much unfinished business--I need at least 30 days' notice before I would be comfortable with the eschaton. I've gotta say though that I was a little disappointed that there wasn't a little something, maybe a small pucker like the scar of a bullet wound, there in the Alps on the France-Switzerland border where this science fair experiment run amok is located.



What am I on about? Well, you may have heard folks saying that, since this device is believed by some physicists to be capable of creating itty bitty black holes, maybe, just maybe a chain reaction would occur, the ultimate result of which would be that the universe, like the legendary hoopoe bird, would spiral ever inward on itself until it disappeared--poof!--up its own asshole. If this has happened, I haven't noticed. Maybe your experience has been different.



Really, I never was ever able to work up any optimism that a Trans-Europe Fundament was going to appear, though I would have surely gone to see it if it had. The problem is that people have a misguided notion of what black holes are. As Pope Benedict would surely tell us, It's all about mass. The kinds of black holes we read about and see in sci-fi movies are the result of the collapse of really massive things--objects far more massive than, say, our Sun, or even former president William Howard Taft. These celestial black holes were born huge--cosmic glandular cases whose gravitational fields are so robust that nothing, including light, can escape them. The black holes which may even now may be being created in the new collider are not nearly so formidable. In fact, they are about as massive as one (1) molecule of hydrogen (keeping in mind that hydrogen atoms, like nuns and hookers, prefer to travel in pairs). No matter how tightly you scrunch two hydrogen nuclei together, which is what this device does, their mass is the same as it was before the scrunching. And two hydrogen nuclei, no matter how buff, just don'thave the gravity to suck up Switzerland (and I say thank goodness--where would we go for our cheese, chocolate, cuckoo clocks and no-tell banking?) Much less the whole freakin' universe.

Now, I can imagine you thinking, "Couldn't you say the same thing about the big black holes? Their mass wouldn't increase either, and yet they are reputed to have a voracious appetite." Well, I think that's right. Free-range black holes (and I claim to have made up that designation to differentiate the ones out there in nature from the lab-made ones) will pretty much gobble up anything that falls within their event horizon, an invisible sphere which may be millions of miles in diameter. It's the same thing with the b.h's from the L.H.C., except that their event horizon would be smaller than a hydrogen atom; so small that it is unlikely that anything will ever come close enough to be subsumed.

"Wait a minute wait a minute--what is an event horizon?" is what I imagine you saying now. To which I rspond, "Jeez, if I knew you were going to be so picky I would never have brought this up." Sigh. OK. Only stars a lot bigger than the sun can become black holes. A guy named Schwartzschild, working with Einstein's equations, figured out how massive a star would have to be before it would end its existance by collapsing on itself, leaving behind a volume of space from which nothing could escape. Although the star itself would just keep collapsing forever, forming a singularity which (more or less) takes up no space at all, the borderline left behind, though smaller in volume than the star was before it collapsed, still describes a big big place. That borderline,is the event horizon, or suck zone. It was actually there all along, but while the star was shining, it was deep inside. By the way, Schwartzschild is German for "black shield". Heavy, huh? I don't care if you want to know about what a singularity is. What do I look like, Wikipedia? But the point is, big mass, big suck zone; small...small. So, no end of the world this week.

When I started this, I had a really pithy way to tie it all in to the coming election (something about not believing everything that sounds plausible when you first hear it), but I think that's enough for one day. I'll try to be more communicative here in future. Sigh. Used to be, when you had a radio show, you could do the whole thing on the radio. This internet stuff is interactive and fun, but it could get to be a lot of work. Listen to Randoradio. Think about the difference between what people say and the truth. Register and vote. Comment if you want.

Thanks, a plea for more,a conundrum for the 4th

Well, a great big Huckleberry Hound-dog "Howdy!" to y'all. It being flea and tick season, it would be fitting that we spare a moment's thought for Huck H's less fortunate sibling Dingleberry Dawg. Like Billy Carter and Roger Clinton, ol' Dingleberry was never able to get out from under the shadow cast by his successful brother. Who can forget the debacle that was his1993 HBO Special "Dingleberry Dawg: In a Brown Study"? He never really recovered. But that's not what I wanted to talk about--in fact, it's probably best not to think of it al all. Just too sad.

So...thanks to everybody who has sent along their secret family words. I've gotten some good ones, which I'll be sharing with you on TLD on Monday July 7. I'm still looking ffor more examples from you. Briefly, what I want is the secret words you use in your family circle; words immediately understandable among those near and dear to you, but mysterious to the rest of the world. Not surprisingly most of the submission I've received so far involve body parts and bodily functions. These are fine, and I'm glad to have 'em, but any and all your "just between us" words & phrases are fair game, so keep them coming. Like Johnny 5 (and doesn't Wall-E bear a suspicious resemblance to that bot of yore?) I need input.

Can somebody explain this to me? A close friend was making preparations for the coming Independence Day festivities. He lives in a state where private ownership of fireworks is illegal, even in the wake of the recent bizarre decision of the US Supreme Court, so he travelled with friends to a nearby state, a state very much like Pennsylvania. Just across the border he arrived at a large, well-stocked fireworks store. My goodness, they had everything, from sparklers and bang-snaps (those really annoying little wads of fun that POP when you toss them on the ground) to mortar-launched projectiles that might provoke a visit from the Dept. of Homeland Security. They also had my...oops I mean my friend's personal favorite, the dreaded Cookies of Death*, so called because they are packaged like Oreos in cellophane tubes and, when lit, fly so unpredictably as to be hazardous to life & limb. Great fun. When you arrive at this emporium, the first thing you have to do is to prove that you are not a resident of the state where the store is. And inside the place, there are prominent signs warning customers that as soon as they leave the state with their purchase, they will be in violation of the laws of the state they are entering. Convoluted enough for ya? Anyway, have a glorious 4th, and keep on listening to RandoRadio. And tell your friends and neighbors about it. I 'preciate it

*Cookies of Death, the name among my coterie for the small firework usually called Artificial Satellite or Flying Saucer, is an example of the kind of stuff I'm looking for from you. Get it?

Gosh. A Blog of my own. I feel just like Arianna Huffington. Arianna Huffington talks just like Eva Gabor. On Green Acres, Eva Gabor says "Times Square!" Eddie Albert says "fresh air!". "Fresh Air" is Terry Gross' radio program. "The Logovore's Dilemma" is my radio program. See how it all ties together?
As far as I know, logovore is a word of my own coinage. It means one who enthusiastically consumes language, as a carnivore loves his meat. I suppose a Logovore could also be one who eats his own words but...no! It's my word, so I get to say what it means. Dagnab it.
Like all the fine fine superfine shows on Rando Radio.com, TLD will be mostly music, but when it's not we'll be exploring the English language in all its glory. Grammar, usage, vocabulary, fads, follies, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia...if you can say it, we'll discuss it.
Our first project, as I mentioned on the show on 6/23, will be a discussion of what I'm calling family words--words you used as kids, or to your kids. Many of these will be words having to do with body parts or bodily functions, of course, but others will be examples of the mysterious private language that often springs up in families or other groups functioning in isolation (I'll bet they've made up some doozies at Gitmo). In my family, for instance, our first dishwasher was always referred to as Williamsburg. Made perfect sense to us, but it would have been incomprehensible to the rest of the world.
I'll tell you mine, but I need you to tell me yours. What did/do you call your dinkie, you weewee, your woowoo? Did you make a nunnie, clunk a dunker, or did you just make? The world wants to know. Really. Leave a comment on this page, or e-mail me with your secret language secrets, and I'll make sure everybody knows.
In the weeks to come, look for features based on the classic 19th century English phrasebook English As She Is Spoke, one of the most amazing little books ever published. You'll love it. More anon.