roleplaying with raynor

one of the very attractive people in my vast rolodex® of attractive people works as a guidance counselor for a local middle school. she called me on my motorola startac™cell phone the other day and asked if i would like to conduct a few mock job interviews for her students. because i am trying to overcome an irrational fear of tweens, i accepted her invitation and interviewed ten students for a fictional job at chik-fil-a®. here is the transcript of me questioning a kid who is clearly going places:

raynor: what are your short and long term goals?
some pipsqueak: my short term goal is to ace this interview. my long term goal is to retire with a giant pile of money.
raynor: you’re hired.

June 14, 2011
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being raynor $

today in intriguing german loanwords:

der lachende erbe • a relative distant enough to not feel grief upon your death but close enough to benefit from your will 

the literal translation, a “laughing heir,” (ie. an heir that laughs all the way to the bank upon learning of your gruesome death-journey through the gastrointestinal tract of the loch ness monster) has become a recognized term in the law of inheritance as well as a popular dickensian trope.

May 11, 2011
∞ 32 notes
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$ words tiigl
for wunderkammer: nábrókarstafur—lucky “corpsepants” made from the skin of a dead man that yield a never-ending supply of cash money. the first thing that you gotta understand is that you can’t just go to your closest abercrombie & fitch and ask the bro there to hook you up with a pair of corpsepants—you need to make them yourself. and making yourself corpsepants is no easy thing. the recipe goes something like this: find a homeboy of yours that is willing to let you make trousers out of his skin when he kicks the bucket. as an incentive you can promise him your own skin if you die first (see tontine). wait until said homeboy kicks the bucket. once he is buried, you must secretly exhume his corpse, flay it from the waist down, and make yourself a pair of lovely trousers. put them on. if you are lucky, you will look like this or this, but most likely you will look like this. like the great d.r.m. software of the 21st century, your corpsepants are useless until you activate them. and like the great d.r.m. software of the 21st century, activation is a tedious and humiliating process: you must steal a coin from a poor widow during christmas, easter, or pentecost WHILE her minister is reading his sermon. now all that remains to do is to place the coin in the <ahem> scrotal sack of your new corpsepants (you did keep the genitals didn’t you).  if you followed these directions precisely, a flood of new coins will continually jangle out of your pants like the payout from a vegas slot machine. you can now live the good life in a tuscan villa—but remember: once you take off your trousers, they will stop producing coins for you forever. :( __ source (enn-ess-eff-double-you-exlcamation point). see also: this wikipædia article. in addition, a (ghastly) picture of real-life nábrókarstafur can be found here.

for wunderkammer: nábrókarstafur—lucky “corpsepants” made from the skin of a dead man that yield a never-ending supply of cash money.

the first thing that you gotta understand is that you can’t just go to your closest abercrombie & fitch and ask the bro there to hook you up with a pair of corpsepants—you need to make them yourself. and making yourself corpsepants is no easy thing. the recipe goes something like this:

  1. find a homeboy of yours that is willing to let you make trousers out of his skin when he kicks the bucket. as an incentive you can promise him your own skin if you die first (see tontine).
  2. wait until said homeboy kicks the bucket.
  3. once he is buried, you must secretly exhume his corpse, flay it from the waist down, and make yourself a pair of lovely trousers.
  4. put them on. if you are lucky, you will look like this or this, but most likely you will look like this.
  5. like the great d.r.m. software of the 21st century, your corpsepants are useless until you activate them. and like the great d.r.m. software of the 21st century, activation is a tedious and humiliating process: you must steal a coin from a poor widow during christmas, easter, or pentecost WHILE her minister is reading his sermon. now all that remains to do is to place the coin in the <ahem> scrotal sack of your new corpsepants (you did keep the genitals didn’t you). 
  6. if you followed these directions precisely, a flood of new coins will continually jangle out of your pants like the payout from a vegas slot machine.
  7. you can now live the good life in a tuscan villa—but remember: once you take off your trousers, they will stop producing coins for you forever. :(

__

source (enn-ess-eff-double-you-exlcamation point). see also: this wikipædia article. in addition, a (ghastly) picture of real-life nábrókarstafur can be found here.

December 2, 2010
∞ 22 notes
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wunderkammer $

the cost of a grill in the year 600

i had to go back to the salon this morning because my bro-zilian wax didn’t take. and while maiko poured boiling wax over my exposed gonads, i pored through more medieval royal decrees. this time it was æthelberht of kent’s laws from the year 600, the earliest written code in any germanic language.

æthelberht’s code established a series of fines for all kinds of personal injuries. here is what he thinks that your teeth are worth:

for breaking a man’s front tooth: 6 shillings
for breaking a man’s molar: 1 shilling
for breaking a man’s canine tooth: 6 shillings

however, æthelberht’s people petitioned their king saying that the molar is basically a double tooth and that it is very serviceable besides. the goodly king listened to his subjects and decided to raise the price of a molar to 15 shillings.

assuming the anglo-saxon dentists categorised the biscuspid as a molar, this means that if a rowdy saxon hooligan got into the age-old quarrel with his neighbour about who was a bigger hunk—the michael j. fox teen wolf or the jason bateman teen wolf—and busted every single last one of his teeth, he would owe him £4 and 12 shillings before æthelberht changed the law and (an astounding) £18 and 12 shillings after.

adjusted for inflation and the weakening pound, this works out to just about 78¢ in modern u.s. currency.

June 30, 2010
∞ 19 notes
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mediæval history $
not worth your time when i was on my daily snow jog (making my quads look like those of a thoroughbred stallion), a glint of metal from a tarnished nickel caught my eye. here&#8217;s the thing: normally raynor ganan never breaks up his workout routine for any reason, nor does he stop to retrieve anything less than a newly-minted benjamin or a hot wheels rear loading 1969 volkswagen beach bomb—but this time i paused briefly before double-timing it up a hill to make my obliques pop. i am a consumer of luxury brands like banana republic, but what would a member of the gap bourgeois or &lt;choke&gt; the prole navy do in a similar situation*? i decided to try to correlate the act of retrieving a found coin with the value of one&#8217;s time. this chart is the result. the calculations are proprietary, so i cannot reveal them though i should mention that in order to determine the average time that it takes for one to bend over and retrieve a coin, i scattered a sack of pennies outside the local all-girls catholic school and filmed the result from the tinted windows of my van. __ *another metric that i have developed to help one determine one&#8217;s class is this: the next time that you are making stuffed peppers, observe the colour of the pepper that you are stuffing. if it is green, you are unfortunately a member of the lower class. if it is red, you have found yourself in the middle class. if it is yellow, you are an aristocrat like me and are thus eligible for a banana republic luxe card.

not worth your time

when i was on my daily snow jog (making my quads look like those of a thoroughbred stallion), a glint of metal from a tarnished nickel caught my eye. here’s the thing: normally raynor ganan never breaks up his workout routine for any reason, nor does he stop to retrieve anything less than a newly-minted benjamin or a hot wheels rear loading 1969 volkswagen beach bomb—but this time i paused briefly before double-timing it up a hill to make my obliques pop. i am a consumer of luxury brands like banana republic, but what would a member of the gap bourgeois or <choke> the prole navy do in a similar situation*?

i decided to try to correlate the act of retrieving a found coin with the value of one’s time. this chart is the result. the calculations are proprietary, so i cannot reveal them though i should mention that in order to determine the average time that it takes for one to bend over and retrieve a coin, i scattered a sack of pennies outside the local all-girls catholic school and filmed the result from the tinted windows of my van.

__

*another metric that i have developed to help one determine one’s class is this: the next time that you are making stuffed peppers, observe the colour of the pepper that you are stuffing. if it is green, you are unfortunately a member of the lower class. if it is red, you have found yourself in the middle class. if it is yellow, you are an aristocrat like me and are thus eligible for a banana republic luxe card.

January 6, 2010
∞ 122 notes
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$ cc data viz design popular
news bulletin (for immediate release): my former boy-bandmates, rafi kam and dallas penn, who style themselves the internets celebrities, have just released a new video on the topic of street vending called the vend diagram for which they approached me to concoct some venn diagrams (wordplay!). the above chart is perhaps my favourite as it deals with creole and mixed languages and ends rather absurdly where it all began—with a ginormous slice* of pie. rafi and dallas&#8217; investigation into how the economy is effing up the most micro of businesses—the street vendors, can be found here. i made the charts for it, but i will not now confirm (nor double confirm) that i made a cameo in it. __ *properly speaking, the shape of this slice is a reuleaux triangle (maths!)

news bulletin (for immediate release): my former boy-bandmates, rafi kam and dallas penn, who style themselves the internets celebrities, have just released a new video on the topic of street vending called the vend diagram for which they approached me to concoct some venn diagrams (wordplay!). the above chart is perhaps my favourite as it deals with creole and mixed languages and ends rather absurdly where it all began—with a ginormous slice* of pie.

rafi and dallas’ investigation into how the economy is effing up the most micro of businesses—the street vendors, can be found here. i made the charts for it, but i will not now confirm (nor double confirm) that i made a cameo in it.

__

*properly speaking, the shape of this slice is a reuleaux triangle (maths!)

September 2, 2009
∞ 0 notes
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$ data viz linguistics math venn video wordplay cc
fact: according to &#8220;statistics&#8221; the price of bread rises about 30% per year [TRUE] fact: &#8220;grocery stores&#8221; are in the business of selling bread [TRUE] duh: buy $500 dollars of bread now. sell your bread for more than $1,800 in five year&#8217;s time. [WALL STREET] bonus: if you can wait 25 years before cashing in your bread portfolio, it will be worth upwards of $350,000 [CHA-CHING]

fact: according to “statistics” the price of bread rises about 30% per year [TRUE]

fact: “grocery stores” are in the business of selling bread [TRUE]

duh: buy $500 dollars of bread now. sell your bread for more than $1,800 in five year’s time. [WALL STREET]

bonus: if you can wait 25 years before cashing in your bread portfolio, it will be worth upwards of $350,000 [CHA-CHING]

August 28, 2009
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observations $

if you aren’t a millionaire yet

here is another quick trick for raking in the big bucks:

  • fact: canadian pennies are only worth 91.06% (or 910.6‰) of u.s. pennies [true]
  • fact: canadian pennies LOOK ALMOST IDENTICAL to u.s. pennies [true, except they replaced abe “linkin park” lincoln with a pot leaf]

business plan: duh, this plan writes itself. [cha-ching!]

if you STILL are not a millionaire: there is also the heineman manœuver (it works best at a text prompt).

August 15, 2009
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observations $
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