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A Chestofdrawersful of Oddities
Jul. 12th, 2007 03:48 pmA while ago, there was a meme going round that invited the perpetrator to name six unique, strange or possibly unknown things about themselves. I actually found the idea rather interesting as it was one of those that invited intelligent commentary, but I never got around to thinking about it much for myself. Therefore, this is only not a meme because I'm saying it isn't. Do it if you like, I don't much care as long as you provide something entertaining to read while I'm waiting for a large compile to finish at work, or as I am at the moment, waiting until Firefox and Thunderbird gather up all the fragments of memory that they've leaked out like colanders.
Hands
This is actually the point that first inspired me to make this post, even though the incident I'm about to relate to you happened when we were in New Haven in January. I've got a long memory. It was when I was approaching one of the "Hit here" buttons at a pedestrian crossing, confidently strode up to it, extended my elbow and pressed the button.
"Why did you do that?" Whitney asked, indicating the body part that might have come as a surprise to you when reading the above paragraph as well.
"Because I'm not wearing gloves," I responded, confident that that would explain everything. But it didn't. It turns out that something that I had always thought was standard practice was just considered weird by everyone else. I would have just thought that it was sensible not to touch things placed outdoors and pressed by countless unwashed fingers hundreds of times a day. In particular, any toilet not in your home should be flushed with your elbow and not your hand. Was I really the only one who grew up thinking this? Evidently I was, because Whitney then offered to buy me a little bottle of handwash fluid to carry around with me on account of thinking that I was a colossal germophobe. (Sorry, I can't remember the proper word.)
Slugs
This is something that I've mentioned to people a couple of times, but just to cement it further - I am mortally terrified of slugs. I have no rational explanation for it - they're small, weak and not exactly the kind of things that can chase after you, but whenever I see one I just about freeze and have to give it a wide berth. When we lived in Cupar I used to be very scared of taking the kitchen bin out on rainy days in case I lifted the lid of the wheelie-bin and there were any underneath. The first time they were there I wasn't expecting it, and I nearly jumped all the way back up the stairway to the front door and had to sit trembling for a while before I was able to move again.
Snails are marginally better as they have some sort of form to them, but I would still rather not be within a few miles of any of them. I'm shivering just thinking about these things, so I'll have to move swiftly on.
Invented linguistic peculiarities (I did try to think of a better name for this)
I don't know if anyone will have noticed this, but I have a habit of dropping little in-jokes or asides that I think that only I can understand whenever I'm writing or talking to a certain audience. It's either as a result of me thinking that people won't notice, or not realizing that other people won't get them.
An example is the insertion of "the" in the middle of people's names. This is a habit that was possibly derived from Tony Robinson's series of Maid Marian in the early nineties, where many of the characters were plays on familiar figures' names - Margaret the Thatcher, Jeffrey the Archer and Jeremy the Beadle are three that I can remember offhand. Those made more sense than most of the ones I use it on, but it can be applied to others as well - it only works with the rhythm of certain names, though. This habit also has the advantage of obfuscating the name from Google, which is handy if I've said anything incriminating and one of my former lecturers is looking around on the Internet for occurrences of their name. Something which I discovered happens quite often, to my lasting embarrassment.
It doesn't stop there - part of what I was looking forward to at home was being able to talk to someone that was able to recognize and understand these things. I imagine every family gets to be full of in-jokes like this, and the one that has probably survived the longest time is the way that my mum, in her school days, used to pronounce the word "picturesque" as "picture-skew" (a logical assumption but a very wrong one). So that is how the word is now pronounced in our house. I also tend to curse by using random words in cod-Nordic or German, but I've no idea where this came from and I try not to do it anywhere where I might be heard, though Whitney says that I do it all the time without being aware of it.
Sadly this habit had a bad effect on at least one of us - at one point I'd seen in one of those misprint compilation books that someone had written that "a cuckoo lays other birds' eggs in its own nest and viva voce", mangling the common expression into something different entirely. I was so fascinated by this misuse that I started using the two terms pretty much interchangeably, but only around people who understood the joke behind it. Or so I thought - I stopped doing this after a time when a few years ago, after I'd used the term in a sentence to mock something or other,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quadralien asked me, quite earnestly, about when it was grammatically correct to use vice versa and when to use viva voce. I'd used it so often that he genuinely thought that there was a legitimate subtle reason behind it.
Photic Sneeze Reflex
I love photic sneeze reflex. Everyone who has it assumes that it's normal, everyone who doesn't never notices it. About one in six people, I think, have the nerves in their brain wired in a way that triggers a sneeze when they look at bright light (due to the two nerves that control these two things being placed so close together that in some people, they touch).
It was something that happened to my dad and I for ages, though my mum could never understand it and I thought that we there the only ones for a while. I first realized that we weren't when Ricky Gervais happened to mention on Room 101 that he enjoys stopping people from sneezing, and they would then go around for the whole day afterwards looking at lights. From what I've seen I think that the number of people who have it is significantly less in America than it is in Britain, mostly because of the increased likelihood of seeing the sun over here.
The Great Seal (or just walking on pavements)
This is something that I'm sure will be familiar to everyone who has even been a student at St Andrews. During our time there, along with a few things that are actually to do with our courses, we're taught over and over to avoid treading on the various letters on the roads and pavements in the city (as I must call it as it has a cathedral, even though it only has about 10,000 people in it) - the PH outside the quad, the cross on the ground near the castle, and so on. Stepping on these is meant to bring bad luck until you run into the sea at 5am on May Day, breaking the curse by causing you to die of pneumonia.
Now, I only stepped on one of these once - it was the PH stones on the way to my first year computer science exam, and as it happened I passed that with a 20, but I still couldn't help looking out for and avoiding them in the future. Now I habitually veer away from any markings, cobble seams or letters on the ground just in case stepping on them somehow brings bad luck. It's one step above still trying not to tread on the cracks in pavements.
No Favorites/Bookmarks
I don't use bookmarks in Firefox (or Favorites, as they were called in ancient times when we were all using browsers like Internet Explorer). This isn't due to any sort of aversion to them - it just seems that I forget that they're there, and I only bother to set up the sites in my regular forum cycle when I install a browser then all but forget that the ability to add things exists thereafter. Having done that, I tend to manually enter the URLs to everything regardless of whether there's a menu entry for them or not. You could have the account jjiiijiijiijiijj at http://www.zyqxxkcdqyxxyzzy.com and I'd still try and type it into my address bar every time. Happily, it seems that no one else I know uses them either, and I'm constantly asked about things like the link to the CT2 bug tracker and the quote site for the Clickteam chatroom. It's http://www.davidnewton.co.nr/clickquote, if you're wondering.
Hands
This is actually the point that first inspired me to make this post, even though the incident I'm about to relate to you happened when we were in New Haven in January. I've got a long memory. It was when I was approaching one of the "Hit here" buttons at a pedestrian crossing, confidently strode up to it, extended my elbow and pressed the button.
"Why did you do that?" Whitney asked, indicating the body part that might have come as a surprise to you when reading the above paragraph as well.
"Because I'm not wearing gloves," I responded, confident that that would explain everything. But it didn't. It turns out that something that I had always thought was standard practice was just considered weird by everyone else. I would have just thought that it was sensible not to touch things placed outdoors and pressed by countless unwashed fingers hundreds of times a day. In particular, any toilet not in your home should be flushed with your elbow and not your hand. Was I really the only one who grew up thinking this? Evidently I was, because Whitney then offered to buy me a little bottle of handwash fluid to carry around with me on account of thinking that I was a colossal germophobe. (Sorry, I can't remember the proper word.)
Slugs
This is something that I've mentioned to people a couple of times, but just to cement it further - I am mortally terrified of slugs. I have no rational explanation for it - they're small, weak and not exactly the kind of things that can chase after you, but whenever I see one I just about freeze and have to give it a wide berth. When we lived in Cupar I used to be very scared of taking the kitchen bin out on rainy days in case I lifted the lid of the wheelie-bin and there were any underneath. The first time they were there I wasn't expecting it, and I nearly jumped all the way back up the stairway to the front door and had to sit trembling for a while before I was able to move again.
Snails are marginally better as they have some sort of form to them, but I would still rather not be within a few miles of any of them. I'm shivering just thinking about these things, so I'll have to move swiftly on.
Invented linguistic peculiarities (I did try to think of a better name for this)
I don't know if anyone will have noticed this, but I have a habit of dropping little in-jokes or asides that I think that only I can understand whenever I'm writing or talking to a certain audience. It's either as a result of me thinking that people won't notice, or not realizing that other people won't get them.
An example is the insertion of "the" in the middle of people's names. This is a habit that was possibly derived from Tony Robinson's series of Maid Marian in the early nineties, where many of the characters were plays on familiar figures' names - Margaret the Thatcher, Jeffrey the Archer and Jeremy the Beadle are three that I can remember offhand. Those made more sense than most of the ones I use it on, but it can be applied to others as well - it only works with the rhythm of certain names, though. This habit also has the advantage of obfuscating the name from Google, which is handy if I've said anything incriminating and one of my former lecturers is looking around on the Internet for occurrences of their name. Something which I discovered happens quite often, to my lasting embarrassment.
It doesn't stop there - part of what I was looking forward to at home was being able to talk to someone that was able to recognize and understand these things. I imagine every family gets to be full of in-jokes like this, and the one that has probably survived the longest time is the way that my mum, in her school days, used to pronounce the word "picturesque" as "picture-skew" (a logical assumption but a very wrong one). So that is how the word is now pronounced in our house. I also tend to curse by using random words in cod-Nordic or German, but I've no idea where this came from and I try not to do it anywhere where I might be heard, though Whitney says that I do it all the time without being aware of it.
Sadly this habit had a bad effect on at least one of us - at one point I'd seen in one of those misprint compilation books that someone had written that "a cuckoo lays other birds' eggs in its own nest and viva voce", mangling the common expression into something different entirely. I was so fascinated by this misuse that I started using the two terms pretty much interchangeably, but only around people who understood the joke behind it. Or so I thought - I stopped doing this after a time when a few years ago, after I'd used the term in a sentence to mock something or other,
quadralien asked me, quite earnestly, about when it was grammatically correct to use vice versa and when to use viva voce. I'd used it so often that he genuinely thought that there was a legitimate subtle reason behind it.Photic Sneeze Reflex
I love photic sneeze reflex. Everyone who has it assumes that it's normal, everyone who doesn't never notices it. About one in six people, I think, have the nerves in their brain wired in a way that triggers a sneeze when they look at bright light (due to the two nerves that control these two things being placed so close together that in some people, they touch).
It was something that happened to my dad and I for ages, though my mum could never understand it and I thought that we there the only ones for a while. I first realized that we weren't when Ricky Gervais happened to mention on Room 101 that he enjoys stopping people from sneezing, and they would then go around for the whole day afterwards looking at lights. From what I've seen I think that the number of people who have it is significantly less in America than it is in Britain, mostly because of the increased likelihood of seeing the sun over here.
The Great Seal (or just walking on pavements)
This is something that I'm sure will be familiar to everyone who has even been a student at St Andrews. During our time there, along with a few things that are actually to do with our courses, we're taught over and over to avoid treading on the various letters on the roads and pavements in the city (as I must call it as it has a cathedral, even though it only has about 10,000 people in it) - the PH outside the quad, the cross on the ground near the castle, and so on. Stepping on these is meant to bring bad luck until you run into the sea at 5am on May Day, breaking the curse by causing you to die of pneumonia.
Now, I only stepped on one of these once - it was the PH stones on the way to my first year computer science exam, and as it happened I passed that with a 20, but I still couldn't help looking out for and avoiding them in the future. Now I habitually veer away from any markings, cobble seams or letters on the ground just in case stepping on them somehow brings bad luck. It's one step above still trying not to tread on the cracks in pavements.
No Favorites/Bookmarks
I don't use bookmarks in Firefox (or Favorites, as they were called in ancient times when we were all using browsers like Internet Explorer). This isn't due to any sort of aversion to them - it just seems that I forget that they're there, and I only bother to set up the sites in my regular forum cycle when I install a browser then all but forget that the ability to add things exists thereafter. Having done that, I tend to manually enter the URLs to everything regardless of whether there's a menu entry for them or not. You could have the account jjiiijiijiijiijj at http://www.zyqxxkcdqyxxyzzy.com and I'd still try and type it into my address bar every time. Happily, it seems that no one else I know uses them either, and I'm constantly asked about things like the link to the CT2 bug tracker and the quote site for the Clickteam chatroom. It's http://www.davidnewton.co.nr/clickquote, if you're wondering.
