Holy Shit, Ayapaneco!

Ayapaneco is a language native to the village of Ayapa in Tobasco, Mexico. It's not doing too hot right now. In fact, it's one of a growing number of languages in danger of extinction.

This happens all the time. Local dialects and whole languages sometimes have very few speakers. All it takes is a few deaths to make an entire dictionary of unique words, an entire canon of grammatical rules and nuances to completely disappear from the Earth and become lost to history. And I don't mean "nobody speaks Latin but hardcore Catholics and nerds" lost. I mean "nobody in the world can ever know what these words ever sounded like or meant anymore" lost.

Way deader than Gavroche

There are movements to keep this kind of thing from happening. Linguists are dispatched to remote areas where endangered languages are spoken, where they rudely shove a microphone into the faces of the locals until they have enough audio from interviews and eavesdropping to compose a decent primer. With Ayapaneco, the efforts of linguists have been stunted by a unique issue.

The language became endangered because Mexico made it mandatory for schools to teach Spanish. It's not a bad idea, per se. It's a lot easier to conduct any type of business if there's not a ludicrously obscure language barrier between you and your neighbor. The downside, though, is that some of the vibrant culture, customs, and even words of small, rural areas are fading away. The other downside is that it implicitly treats other languages as inferior to the European one that was imposed on the area in an unabashedly imperialistic way several centuries ago, but we won't get into that right now.

Long story short, this guy was a dick

The biggest obstacle for preserving Ayapaneco (the aforementioned unique issue) is this: There are exactly two people in the entire world who can fluently speak Ayapaneco. Both are well into their 70s and both live in the village of Ayapa. But they don't talk to each other. Because they don't like each other.

It's not totally clear why, and it seems that they just have clashing personalities. Despite being literally the last two people on Earth who can talk to one another in their native language, they choose not to. Because "Eh, fuck that guy." I don't know about you, but this whole situation makes me a little depressed. A once vibrant, ancient language exists only in two minds. If they want to have the kind of conversations they had in their youths, they have only each other to talk to. And they won't. And because of that, it's probably going to be too difficult for linguists to get a handle on their endangered mother tongue and keep it from dying with them.

An apathetic grudge will probably soon be the undoing of an entire language.

Holy shit.

Oh, and happy new year.

Holy Shit, Krampus!

Do you ever feel like there's something missing in the way we teach our children how to celebrate Christmas? We tell them that, if they behave and stop looking through daddy's browser history, Santa Claus will come to town and give them toys and presents. If not, they get a lump of coal.

And some light trauma.

I mean, either way they're getting something, right? And let's be honest, a lump of coal ain't half bad. Just wait until they learn you can set it on fire. That's gonna lead to some entertainment. And possibly tragedy.

The story is incomplete. The good news is that the rest of the story is already out there. In Europe. Alpine Europe. You know, like Bavaria, Austria, and Croatia. They have a figure who works with Santa Claus, taking up the much needed role of the menacing bad cop. And if history has taught us anything, it's that Austria knows how to produce menacing figures.

This particular menace is known as Krampus, and is utterly terrifying.

Light trauma is for pansies.

In contrast to Santa Claus, Krampus visits the home of naughty children to bring them no gifts but torment and suffering to match their misdeeds. The more you learn about him the more you wonder how anyone in Alpine Europe makes it to adulthood without deep psychological scarring.

First of all, Krampus brings a birch switch with him to whip the mildly naughty kids into shape. Corporal punishment. That's not so bad, right? And it's not! At least, not until you learn that the birch is a common phallic symbol in folklore. So in a subtle way, our story begins as a cautionary tale about a demon who will straight up dickwhip your children if they talk back to you.

While making that face.

That's just the kind-of-naughty kids. If you were really bad, your Christmas treat was to be picked up by Krampus' freakishly long, eldritch tongue, slapped into a basket, and carried off either to his lair or to Hell itself, where undisclosed horrors would be visited upon you in retribution for the grief you've caused your parents.

Gosh, Timmy, we'd love to help, but you've been kind of a dick this year...

In case you're wondering (a) where those horrifying real-life images came from and (b) whether this custom of arcane yuletide terror is a mere cautionary tale, I can answer both of those questions at once. Every year, as part of the Christmas Season, young men in Alpine countries dress up as Krampus for a festival that consists mainly of said men scaring the shit out of every child they can find.

So the next time you find that your little boy or girl is unresponsive to the idea that Santa won't bring them exactly what they want if they continue being awful, consider sweetening the pot with a casual mention that the fury of a horned, cloven-hoofed, long-tongued demon is the alternative.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

And holy shit.

Holy Shit, Oil!

Oil!

That's right, oil. Black gold. Texas tea. A number of other metaphors, not all of which are featured in the introduction of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Though I don't personally see the use in a Clampett-less oil metaphor.

More specifically, petroleum, which is one of those pesky words that mix their etymological roots. It comes from the Greek word petra (stone) and the the Latin word oleum (oil). At least it's not as bad as the scientific name for swordfish (Xiphias gladius. Greek and Latin for sword sword. Come on, science. It's like you're not even trying.)

More to the point, petroleum has been a part of human society for at least 4,000 years, when it was used in its semi-solid state (asphalt) to build the walls and towers of Babylon. In 1847, oil got its big break, like a young, diamond-in-the-rough musician impressing a talent agent at a dive bar with her moxie and soothing, soulful voice. Except instead of a talent agent, it was a Glaswegian chemist named James Young.

With a remarkably bitchin' dwarf beard.

And instead of moxie and vocals, it was petroleum's ability to turn into kerosene that piqued Young's interest. From there, it was a meteoric rise to world superstardom. Especially when gasoline was invented a few decades later.

Suddenly, petroleum became one of the most vital natural resources of all time. Like all precious resources, it moved nations to violence. Ever wonder why Japan was being such a dick in 1941 with the whole surprise attack thing? Well, the U.S. wasn't too happy about their expansion, so we cut off their supply of sweet, sweet oil.

Around the same time, Hitler went on an ill-fated vacation into Russia. He talked a big talk about living space and the evils of Communism and Slavic people, but I'm pretty sure those plump Caucasus Oil Fields had something to do with it as well.

Oh, and hey, remember how the U.S. has been involved to some extent in every major conflict of the Middle East for the past century or so? I wonder what that could be all about. Well, it starts with a dinosaur and a bunch of rock (nature's extremely slow juicer)...

Mmm. Fossily.

Except WAIT.

No.

It doesn't.

There's been an abundance of dead dinosaur jokes concerning oil lately, and I want to dispel that myth here and now. It's important to remember that just because everything we know about dinosaurs was gleaned from fossils doesn't mean that all fossils are dinosaurs. It especially doesn't mean that "fossil fuels" are dinosaurs.

The weird thing is, fossil fuels are organic matter. Petroleum is essentially made of algae and bacteria, buried under sedimentary rock and heated over millions of years by geothermal energy. The millions of years thing is a problem. In 1965, new oil discovery reached its peak. In the 1980s, oil production began to outpace oil discovery. By many estimates, peak oil has either already occurred or is expected in the very near future.

It's not gonna go back up.

That's a very, very bad thing. I mean, on the plus side we'd have to worry about climate change a little bit less. On the downside, though...we'd pretty much be looking at a thorough, worldwide economic collapse. Petroleum is in everything. On top of being the linchpin of the transportation industry, it is a key ingredient in plastic. Try to go a single day without using something that is plastic. If you're reading this on a computer, you probably already failed that challenge. If you're reading it on something that is not a computer, I'll probably have an idea for my next topic.

With that in mind, it might be time to consider investing a little bit more in alternative energy. Because oil, a foundational pillar of the global economy, is starting to crack.

Unless, that is, we can replicate a process that takes millions of years and do it in a few minutes. Which is apparently not out of the question.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, D. B. Cooper!

On November 24, 1971, 36 passengers and 6 crew members of an airliner found their afternoon flight interrupted by an inconvenient but exceedingly polite passenger who identified himself as Dan Cooper.

Cooper, after enjoying a cigarette and bourbon, passed a note to one of the attractive young flight attendants. When she took it, she looked at him, deduced that he was a lonely businessman looking for some company, and dropped it into her purse without looking at it.

Kind of like this, but a little more sordid

Cooper spoke up and told her she might want to consider how she was handling the message. So she took it out and read it, and to her surprise it was not a charming message, nor was it a phone number. It was a friendly notification that the man in the seat had a bomb and was hijacking the plane, and would she please sit down next to him and act natural. She complied, and he laid out his demands. The plane was to land, and he was to be given $200,000 and a ride to Mexico City, stopping for fuel in Reno.

Deftly setting me up for the line, "I fueled a plane in Reno just to watch it fly."

The strange part about this is that, outside of his original threat, Dan Cooper never showed even the slightest inclination toward violence. He was thoughtful, polite, and apparently concerned for the well-being of all the people he was threatening to blow up. He allowed all the passengers and most of the crew (including the one he initially told about the bomb) to leave the plane when it landed.

Then he got his money and a parachute. When the plane took off again, he opened the back door and, apparently, jumped out. When the plane landed in Reno, he was long gone. To this day, nobody knows whether his insane get rich quick scheme succeeded. Conditions were dark and rainy, far from ideal for a safe jump.

The investigation that followed the incident started with a suspect named D. B. Cooper - a long shot, as police were pretty damn sure he wouldn't have used his real name. He was quickly ruled out, but that didn't stop the media from calling the hijacker by the name D. B. Cooper for the rest of eternity.

In 1980, a breakthrough (almost) occurred. An eight-year-old kid, in the process of helping his vacationing family to build a fire near the Columbia River, found three deteriorating wads of cash. The family turned in the fat stacks to the proper authorities, who positively identified them as money paid in ransom to Dan Cooper. One of the stacks was missing a few bills, and the nature of their deterioration indicated that they had been deposited by one of the river's tributaries, making it nearly impossible to determine where they had actually fallen into the water.

Fat Stacks

Since 1980, there have been no major developments. If you happen upon any old currency from around 1971, you can actually find out in an online database whether you're holding a piece of airline history. It hasn't happened yet, so don't get too excited. On the other hand, do. Because despite being what we would invariably refer to today as a terrorist, Dan Cooper was so mysterious and well-mannered that small towns in Washington hold festivals in his honor.

It just goes to show you that a little politeness is all you really need to forgive things like air piracy and threatening to blow up a plane full of people.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Gut Feelings!

If you're like just about anyone in the world, you're pretty sure you've got a handle on the whole "intuition" thing. You can think logically about your conundrums until the cows come home, but when it really comes down to it, you have to go with your gut. It never seems to let you down.

Okay, now I want you to strap yourself in. We're going for a ride through Wild Speculation Based on Recent Research Land, and the turbulence can get a little bit rough. There are basically two points that you need to take out of this that will completely blow your mind. Or gut. Hopefully just your mind.

This is as far as I'm going with that joke.

Number one: when you get a "gut feeling," it may actually originate in your gut. As in, you are literally thinking with your stomach and basing your major life decisions on how it's making you feel.

Number two (and this one's the kicker): it may not actually be you doing the thinking. In fact, in a very real way it's not thinking at all, but a general optimism or pessimism, and it's all thanks to these fellas:

Aren't they just charming?

Well, not specifically those guys, but microbiotic organisms that reside in our tummies. Recent research suggests (not conclusively, but suggestively. Like your friend's mom making a few uncomfortably familiar remarks while he's in the bathroom so you're not sure if she's just being friendly or...anyway) that there may be a causal link between the types of bacteria in your gut and how you respond to stressful situations.

So far, all the hard evidence we have relates to mice. Scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario took a group of mice, studied their behaviors, and looked at their poo to see what type of bacteria was there. Because the life of a scientist is a life of glamour.

It's not all posing for group pencil and wash portraits

Then they started feeding probiotics and antibiotics to different mice and observing how they reacted to the changes. What they found was that, as the tiny ecosystem of their digestive track changed, so did the behavior of each specimen. Aggressive mice attained a Lebowski-esque state of calm, and lazy hippie mice began wailing and gnashing their teeth at the murine condition, taking out their newfound existential distress on their neighbors.

The reason for the connection seems to be a single nerve, shared by mice and humans, called the vagus nerve. It connects with both the stomach and the brain, and when its connection is lost, so is the influence of microbes on mouse behavior.

The implications of this research, if it turns out to be applicable to humans, could be staggering. Mental illnesses ranging from autism to bipolar disorder (and remember, speculation) could be reined in by the research that's currently looking into your stomach. It may actually turn out that the secret to living a calm, happy, and fulfilling life is contained within this:

Plus it helps Jamie Lee Curtis to poop regularly. So that's nice.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Ship of Theseus!

Many rhetorical questions do little to excite my imagination. When someone asks me what the sound of one-handed clapping is, I show them. It makes a sound. That's silly. When I'm asked whether a tree falling in the woods without anyone around to hear it make a noise, the answer is perfectly obvious to me. It's not space. There's oxygen. So yes, of course it does. That's a rather self-centered question to ask, Mr. Pretentious Philosophy Major.

I know that I'm not really addressing the point of the questions, but they just don't make me stop and think as much as they're supposed to. Not when there's actually a fairly logical answer. But there is one hypothetical that always gets into my head and crosses a few wires. They call it the Ship of Theseus.

Here's how the scenario goes according to Plutarch, who is the earliest source we have of the issue:

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same."

He had a way with words. Not a way to make them interesting, just...a way.

In simpler terms, and in the form of a question (since I established the implicit promise of a question back in the first paragraph): If you repair a ship by replacing rotted timbers little by little, at which point (if any) can you say it is no longer the same ship? Thomas Hobbes sweetened the pot a few centuries later by adding this sub-question: If you make a new ship with the remnants of the wood as you make the repairs, which ship (if either) could truly be called the original?

I believe the technical term for the result of thinking about this question is "a mindfuck." You may already be seeing why this crawls into my head and embeds itself so thoroughly. I'm sure many of you terrific, intelligent, and downright handsome readers have heard at some point that the cells comprising the human body are completely replaced every 7-10 years. That's not exactly true of all our cells, but it's true of a lot of them.

So at which point do our bodies (or at least much of our bodies) become not our original bodies? I mean...when you're born, you look really goddamn different from when you turn ten. You have the same memories and experience, but most of your body is completely new. When you're twenty, the same thing happens. Your body is more or less completely new.

Without absorbing even a little bit of the Time Vortex.

I don't even know where to go from here. Defining an object is hard enough with the Ship of Theseus paradox. Defining ourselves, though?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Donkey Kong!

In 1981, Nintendo was known primarily as a toy company that produced trading cards in Japan. In fact, they were barely known at all in the West. They began producing arcade games in the '70s, but they enjoyed limited success until Shigeru Miyamoto burst onto the scene.

He and Gaben are the patron saints of gaming nowadays.

Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, and from there went on to become the single most influential figure in console gaming history. Donkey Kong started as a licensed Popeye game, but the licensing situation didn't work out. So the team had to come up with new characters. They called the hero "Mr. Video," a name which would change to Jumpman shortly afterward. When the Nintendo of America team was confronted with an angry landlord demanding their late rent, they averted his wrath by telling him they'd name their new hero after him. The landlord, Mario Segale, agreed to back down.

That name should be familiar to you.

The villain, they decided, would be a King Kong knockoff named Donkey Kong. The name basically came from a linguistic misunderstanding. "Donkey" is an obscure, archaic slang term for a stupid or foolish person. Miyamoto found that definition, coupled it with a word he understood to mean "giant ape," and called it a day. The American team thought it was hilarious, and the name stuck.

You know who didn't think it was hilarious? Universal Studios. As they understood it, they owned the rights to King Kong ever since they fought a court battle over the issue in 1975, and Nintendo was using a blatant knock-off character to reap enormous profits without paying them one red cent. Or even yen.

I'd like to believe this is the face the studio heads made.

So they took this little toy company to court. It had all the workings of a classic David and Goliath battle. There is speculation that Universal's legal department figured Nintendo would just settle to avoid a costly battle, but Nintendo's legal team had done its research pretty well. When they got to court, they made an elegantly simple argument.

King Kong is in the public domain. And what's more, Universal knew full well that he was. That's why they won the right to make a movie about him in the '70s. The judge ruled in favor of Nintendo, citing the ridiculousness of suing over a public domain character and the fact that Donkey Kong was different enough not to be confused with King Kong anyway.

I mean, the building he climbed wasn't even finished!

This was a massive, pivotal moment for Nintendo. It came on the heels of a massive crash in the home video game market, and it gave Nintendo the confidence to start pushing for a revival of the console. The very next year, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in America, and the console market has enjoyed increasing success ever since.

If it weren't for a linguistic quirk and a frivolous lawsuit, Donkey Kong would not have served as the springboard that relaunched the game industry. We have this abused, rampaging, kidnapping ape to thank for everything from Super Mario Brothers to Pokémon, and maybe a lot more.

Holy Shit.