A Dude's Guide. . . to everything

Let’s All Be Careful Out There

by Richard

The sergeant on an old TV show called Hill Street Blues used to end every roll call and pre-shift meeting with the phrase, “Let’s all be careful out there.” That, dudes, is some pretty sound advice.

And never more so than right now. This is one of the most dangerous days of the whole year. And I don’t just mean that because it’s the last day of the year, either.

Well, right, it’s dangerous because it’s the last day of the year and people are celebrating. And by celebrating, I mean they’re going out on New Year’s Eve and getting gut-slobberingly drunk, inebriated past the point of being able to even coherently think about where the shore of sobriety used to be, own-name-forgetting blotto,  lost beyond hope of ever finding your friends, and then they’re getting in a car and driving on to the next bar or to their home.

That, dudes, is a recipe for pure danger. Drinking and then getting behind the wheel, as you know being the good dads and dudes and moms and dudettes you all are, is not something anyone should do. Unfortunately, not everyone on the roads tonight or any night is going to be as wise or as sober as you when you’re behind the wheel.

New Year’s Even can be fun, but it’s even more fun when you have a designated driver and no-one else has to worry about how they’re going to get to the next place without wrecking the car. That’s never fun. Remember, if no one else will step up, you can go ahead and volunteer to be the dedicated driver. It’s not like missing one night of drinking will ruin your life. Whereas, drinking and driving can do a lot worse than just ruin your life. It can end it. It can end the lives of other people who never even heard of you.

It’s just a plain stupid thing to do.

The hard part is I know my young dudes won’t drink and drive. But I don’t know if they’re with it enough to not get into a car with their friends when someone else has been drinking. We’ve repeatedly told them that if anyone in their group has been drinking and they don’t feel safe, all they have to do is call us and we’ll come get them wherever they are, no repercussions. Now we just have to hope they’re smart enough to feel unsafe.

So it’s time for the New Year’s Eve celebration. Go out and have fun. But, dudes, let’s all be careful out there.

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It’s Like They Have A Different Word For Everything

by Richard

There’s an old Steve Martin bit, where he complains that when he went to France it was hard to talk to the France-ians because of their language, in that it was almost as if they had a different word for everything. Laughter ensues. Move on with the show.

That got me thinking, though, dudes. It’s true that other languages have a different word for everything, but it’s equally true that not everything has a word for it in English. Here’s one of my favorite quotes about that by James Nicoll: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

But sometimes we’re not quick enough to chase that specific word down an alley. Take, for instance, Schadenfreude. It’s a German word that means satisfaction of pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune. I’m sure you’ve all heard it, but that word is still German. We need to make an Americanizing of it to really make it ours in English.

So perhaps it’s time to be thinking about adding others to the lexicon. Malay, for instance, has gigi rongak – the space between the teeth. The Japanese have bakku-shan – a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front. Then there’s a nakkele – a man who licks whatever the food has been served on (from Tulu, India).

English seems like such a prosaic language, so very pedestrian. I mean, the Dutch have uitwaaien, which means walking in windy weather for fun. If we wanted to say that, we’d have to say he enjoys walking in windy weather for fun. Sorta long-winded, that.

It’s Albania, though, that has my interest captured. If only because of it’s people’s fascination with facial hair. There are no less than twenty-seven words for mustache in Albanian. I mean, really? That’s awesome.

What’s your favorite word or phrase in a foreign language that we need to import to English? Let’s get an internet petition going because you know how effective those are. What do you say, dudes?

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It’s Really, Really Big

by Richard

As we’re all still recovering from the Christmas holidays here at the Jones Compound, I thought I’d drop in with a little something to blow you dudes’ minds.

I’ll let the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy take it from here for just a bit. “Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. . .”

The point I’m trying to get at here, is that space is, wait for it, really, really big. It’s bigger than you can imagine.

Take, for instance, the photo below of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft which is even now still orbiting Saturn, the giant ringed planet.

This image shows, of course, the ringed planet itself, with the rings seen edge-on and their shadow cast across the planet’s southern hemisphere cloud tops. But look to the left, just below the rings; see that half-lit disk? That’s Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. It’s about 500 km (310 miles) across, which may start to give you an idea of how much area this picture covers. Even though it’s as big as my home state of Colorado, it’s positively dwarfed by the looming presence of Saturn behind it… and we’re not even seeing very much of the planet here! Saturn is over 120,000 km (75,000 miles) across, nine times the diameter of Earth.

That’s right. That little ball there is a moon, more than 300 miles across, just about twice as long as the state of Florida is wide across its widest bits. That, dudes, is a long way to travel. And still that moon is positively obliterated, size-wise, by just being next to Saturn.

So, I guess what I’m really saying here is that space is, well, big.

Kinda puts the time you spend driving to the store to return that scarf into perspective, don’t it?

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