gone til september unless you are a subscriber of my weekly email newsletter or a confirmed buddy of mine on orkut, you probably don’t know what it is that i do professionally—or even if there is a professional component to whatever it is that i do. there is, and because of a few non-disclosure agreements that i signed while buzzing on armagnac and mood stabilizers, i’m not entirely able make this part of my life explicit. but what i can tell you is that it has something to do with zinc, zinc isotopes and (my personal favourite) zinc radioisotopes. so when a vast repository of naturally occurring 64Zn was discovered in a ravine north of calgary, you can imagine my extreme ecstasy. now as far as the zinc biz goes, i’m relatively small potatoes, so i when the world’s preëminent zinc researcher called me on my iphone and was like, “raynor, will you help us study this motherfucking zinc?” i was like “dur!” and then tucked my erection into my waistband and started giving howie mandel fistbumps to everyone around me even total strangers and people who wear oversized t-shirts with giant corporate logos on them. i now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play with as much 64Zn as my pockets will hold. to put this opportunity in perspective: most people, even the super handsome and even the most zinc-gifted don’t get an opportunity like this until they are 65 and want to retire (or are lured to the darkside of cadmium study). but there is one downside to this boon—because i will be working non-stop in northwestern canada for two months, regrettably, i don’t anticipate that i will be able to update the ragbag until september 1st. what this means: i might twitter a tweet before then, i may email an email, but as far as ragbagging a ragbag, i honestly think that i will be too exhausted from all this zinc. plus: i’m not entirely certain that the information superhighway has come to the canadian wilderness yet. but don’t worry: you can still expect a word summer series entry to ooze out of this website fridayly—starting this friday with [spoiler alert] words that have the letters see, oh, and double you in them. i look forward to september first when we can again engage in our one-sided raynorcentric dialogue and i can direct you to which scholarly zinc journal will be publishing my groundbreaking *fingers crossed* study on 64Zn. until that time gentlemen and curvy womenfolk, i will remain your handsome colleague, raynor ganan

gone til september

unless you are a subscriber of my weekly email newsletter or a confirmed buddy of mine on orkut, you probably don’t know what it is that i do professionally—or even if there is a professional component to whatever it is that i do. there is, and because of a few non-disclosure agreements that i signed while buzzing on armagnac and mood stabilizers, i’m not entirely able make this part of my life explicit. but what i can tell you is that it has something to do with zinc, zinc isotopes and (my personal favourite) zinc radioisotopes.

so when a vast repository of naturally occurring 64Zn was discovered in a ravine north of calgary, you can imagine my extreme ecstasy. now as far as the zinc biz goes, i’m relatively small potatoes, so i when the world’s preëminent zinc researcher called me on my iphone and was like, “raynor, will you help us study this motherfucking zinc?” i was like “dur!” and then tucked my erection into my waistband and started giving howie mandel fistbumps to everyone around me even total strangers and people who wear oversized t-shirts with giant corporate logos on them.

i now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play with as much 64Zn as my pockets will hold. to put this opportunity in perspective: most people, even the super handsome and even the most zinc-gifted don’t get an opportunity like this until they are 65 and want to retire (or are lured to the darkside of cadmium study). but there is one downside to this boon—because i will be working non-stop in northwestern canada for two months, regrettably, i don’t anticipate that i will be able to update the ragbag until september 1st.

what this means: i might twitter a tweet before then, i may email an email, but as far as ragbagging a ragbag, i honestly think that i will be too exhausted from all this zinc. plus: i’m not entirely certain that the information superhighway has come to the canadian wilderness yet. but don’t worry: you can still expect a word summer series entry to ooze out of this website fridayly—starting this friday with [spoiler alert] words that have the letters see, oh, and double you in them.

i look forward to september first when we can again engage in our one-sided raynorcentric dialogue and i can direct you to which scholarly zinc journal will be publishing my groundbreaking *fingers crossed* study on 64Zn.

until that time gentlemen and curvy womenfolk, i will remain your handsome colleague,

raynor ganan

July 6, 2010
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being raynor
the kafka of nafka guess which of your homeys is now a card carrying member of the north american fighter kite association! hint: it’s raynor “kite daddy” ganan, that’s who. while feverishly popular in countries like india, pakistan, and afghanistan, the noble art of severing your opponent’s kite line by deftly manœuvering 300 feet of string encrusted with glass powder attached to your own kite is only now becoming a minor fad in boston, massachusetts. on windy days, you can find me training in danehy park and i will take all comers. but—fair warning—i lace my kite string with titanium carbide razors, ¼ carat diamonds from pawned patriots super bowl rings, and the ground-up vertebræ of my vanquished foes. __ here is another highly destructive world sport that we can play on days with no wind.

the kafka of nafka

guess which of your homeys is now a card carrying member of the north american fighter kite association! hint: it’s raynor “kite daddy” ganan, that’s who.

while feverishly popular in countries like india, pakistan, and afghanistan, the noble art of severing your opponent’s kite line by deftly manœuvering 300 feet of string encrusted with glass powder attached to your own kite is only now becoming a minor fad in boston, massachusetts.

on windy days, you can find me training in danehy park and i will take all comers. but—fair warning—i lace my kite string with titanium carbide razors, ¼ carat diamonds from pawned patriots super bowl rings, and the ground-up vertebræ of my vanquished foes.

__

here is another highly destructive world sport that we can play on days with no wind.

June 16, 2010
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sprots being raynor

milk and red curry paste

with my eagerness to tell you about my weekend double entendre (which did not pan out the way that i had hoped) i forgot to mention another peculiar interaction that happened at orson’s memorial day bbq.

i typically bring either a bottle of reichsgraf von kesselstatt riesling or a jar of kool-aid dills with me to summer bee bee ques but orson is a control freak with unconventional tastes. therefore, i phoned him ahead of time and inquired what he wanted me to bring. “milk,” said orson “and red curry paste.” milk and red curry paste? was he going to make white russians? thai white russians? would the curry paste be used as some sort of dry rub? perhaps milk + curry paste = a wild vegetable dip that can excite the libidos of modern man? my mind whirled. so when i finally delivered the goods to orson, i was eager to ask why it was that he needed milk and red curry paste for his party.

“i don’t,” said orson. “i was just running low.”

June 4, 2010
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i was apparently running his errands orson is a ponce being raynor food
postcard from andy andy, here is something that they might not have taught yet in your ambassador school: even though they drive on the reverse side of the road in the u.k., it is still customary to put your message on the left side of the postcard. please keep me updated on any premeditated thoughts that you had about ireland before actually traveling there. your cousin,raynor

postcard from andy

andy, here is something that they might not have taught yet in your ambassador school: even though they drive on the reverse side of the road in the u.k., it is still customary to put your message on the left side of the postcard.

please keep me updated on any premeditated thoughts that you had about ireland before actually traveling there.

your cousin,
raynor

March 26, 2010
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things to look at being raynor
a confession when i was just a semi-literate small fry, i made the honest mistake of reading the highlights magazine tagline (fun with a purpose) as “FUN WITH A PORPOISE.” and after getting to the end of every issue and never encountering the promised dolphin, i would become enraged and scream, “where is this goddamned porpoise and how come everyone but me gets to have fun with it?” when the next issue would arrive, i would begin my search anew, earnestly hoping that this time the merry porpoise would finally present itself to me. it never did. this is why i became a marine biologist.

a confession

when i was just a semi-literate small fry, i made the honest mistake of reading the highlights magazine tagline (fun with a purpose) as “FUN WITH A PORPOISE.”

and after getting to the end of every issue and never encountering the promised dolphin, i would become enraged and scream, “where is this goddamned porpoise and how come everyone but me gets to have fun with it?”

when the next issue would arrive, i would begin my search anew, earnestly hoping that this time the merry porpoise would finally present itself to me. it never did.

this is why i became a marine biologist.

March 24, 2010
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being raynor wordplay observations

frequentative flyers

it turns out that the guy who was sitting next to me on my æroplane was studying linguistics so i axed him what was the hawt new thing in his field that gave him wood every time he thought about it. he didn’t answer me outright but he did tell me a little bit about frequentatives.

according to him, there are some languages (finnish, lithuanian, and turkish) that can slap a suffix on a verb to show that that the verb happens not once, not twice, but frequently. eg. the turkish word anlat means “to recite,” you can stick a -gelmek up in there to make anlatagelmek which means “to be reciting repetitively.” he then gave me a few boring examples in finno-ugric languages and i was about to slip on my blublockers and tune him out when he pinched me hard and said, “raynor, you dope. english has frequentatives too!”

when all the dust settled, he showed me that the english suffix -le is actually an ancient morpheme that allows english speakers to construct their own frequentatives. consider:

  • when something frequently sparks, it sparkles.
  • i can be dazed once but when i am dazed continuously, i am dazzled.
  • if an object cracks without stopping, it crackles.
  • and so on with nest/nestle, crumb/crumble, tramp/trample, and wrest/wrestle. 
  • of additional interest is how some words like fondle, prattle, and scuttle preserve the verbs fond, prate, and scud which passed out of english usage many æons ago.
  • you can find out more on this subject by flyle-ing on delta and sittle-ing next to the dude that i sat next to or by visitle-ing the frequentative wikipedia page here.
March 22, 2010
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being raynor house style language linguistics
guess who’s back (itches on account of contact dermatitis)? answer: raynor’s back. now that i am safely within the borders of these united states, i’d like to thank my savvy compadre ramona for her remarkable helmswomanship this last week. thanks to her, we now know that a chicken is not carved, it is frusted; that the franglish pronunciation of bleu is blur and milanaise is mill-on-ays; and that to churn out true scottish oatmeal, one must first remove all of one’s underpants from one’s underpants drawer. moochuz grassy-ass, ramona. ehr-race day roadeeyas day lah ah-beyha. for those curious, my spring break was everything that i had hoped for. in keeping with my new year’s resolution, i have uploaded all of my vacation photos to my flickr stream. please enjoy them while i bathe myself in calamine lotion and corticosteroids.

guess who’s back (itches on account of contact dermatitis)?

answer: raynor’s back. now that i am safely within the borders of these united states, i’d like to thank my savvy compadre ramona for her remarkable helmswomanship this last week. thanks to her, we now know that a chicken is not carved, it is frusted; that the franglish pronunciation of bleu is blur and milanaise is mill-on-ays; and that to churn out true scottish oatmeal, one must first remove all of one’s underpants from one’s underpants drawer. moochuz grassy-ass, ramona. ehr-race day roadeeyas day lah ah-beyha.

for those curious, my spring break was everything that i had hoped for. in keeping with my new year’s resolution, i have uploaded all of my vacation photos to my flickr stream. please enjoy them while i bathe myself in calamine lotion and corticosteroids.

March 22, 2010
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being raynor things to look at
ganan gone wild i typically spend my spring breaks getting dirty with jakobson or bumping uglies with trubetzkoy—but this spring break is different. this spring break, raynor ganan is going wild. i have spent the last few weeks building up my alcohol tolerance on white peach daiquiris, polishing my nipples with tung oil, and (re)learning the lambada. needless to say, i will be out of posting range for the next few days, indeed due to the illusion of time + the artifice of the internet, i am already out of range (not as i type this, but as you read it). but all is not lost! i have been able to trick my savvy compadre ramona to step up to the (serving) plate and lob a few flavory morsels at your monitors for the next few days. ramona is a culinerd of the first water and a self-described magpie and international lurker. she lives (in all places) in williamsburg (the very un-colonial one) though scottish sangria continues to course through her arteries. she works (in all places) in riker’s island as a prison chef and prison larder (upon meeting her for the first time, you will find this shocking, but by the second time—exceedingly apropos). she keeps her fingers in a lot of pies (both literal and metaphoric) and, like yours truly has a taste for the timeworn and the peculiar. i am ecstatic that she has agreed to keep things fresh around these stale environs while i am girls-gone-wilding myself for the next week and hope that you will share in my ecstasy. also: because ramona will be guest editing, you may encounter an occasionally capitalised letter where you are not accustomed to doing so. i beg your pardon in advance.

ganan gone wild

i typically spend my spring breaks getting dirty with jakobson or bumping uglies with trubetzkoy—but this spring break is different. this spring break, raynor ganan is going wild. i have spent the last few weeks building up my alcohol tolerance on white peach daiquiris, polishing my nipples with tung oil, and (re)learning the lambada. needless to say, i will be out of posting range for the next few days, indeed due to the illusion of time + the artifice of the internet, i am already out of range (not as i type this, but as you read it).

but all is not lost! i have been able to trick my savvy compadre ramona to step up to the (serving) plate and lob a few flavory morsels at your monitors for the next few days. ramona is a culinerd of the first water and a self-described magpie and international lurker. she lives (in all places) in williamsburg (the very un-colonial one) though scottish sangria continues to course through her arteries. she works (in all places) in riker’s island as a prison chef and prison larder (upon meeting her for the first time, you will find this shocking, but by the second time—exceedingly apropos). she keeps her fingers in a lot of pies (both literal and metaphoric) and, like yours truly has a taste for the timeworn and the peculiar. i am ecstatic that she has agreed to keep things fresh around these stale environs while i am girls-gone-wilding myself for the next week and hope that you will share in my ecstasy.

also: because ramona will be guest editing, you may encounter an occasionally capitalised letter where you are not accustomed to doing so. i beg your pardon in advance.

March 15, 2010
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being raynor linguistics tumblr ramona

how to get in shape

people are always coming up to my booth at applebees wanting to know where i got my armani snow jogging shoes (armani, duh) and whether or not they can touch my muscles (not a chance!) and what some of my workout tips are (trade secret). usually, i just slip on my blublockers and pretend like i can’t see these people, but yesterday—because of extenuatin’ circumstances—i spilled the beans on one of my most guarded workout tips. for fairness then, here it is:

when you are on your treadmill reading voloshinov (or whatever russian formalist you typically read while running) mentally prepare yourself to run 3 miles. run for the FULL 3 MILES (no cheating). this next part is important: this whole time that you thought you were running three miles, you were really running π miles!!! this means that you aren’t done yet, you still need to run for ~.141592653589793 miles (which is like no big deal). if you follow this workout plan for the next week, you will have spent ~.991848575128551 milesworth of calories!!! who knew that there was such a correlation between irrational numbers and well-toned calves*?

this trick also works in the metric system.

__

*this is a rhetorical question—alexei, my personal trainer (non-abs) knew this all along.
February 25, 2010
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howto being raynor math

the chairman’s bowels have moved!

each time that i go to the gym, my personal trainer (non-abs) begs me to do some  freelance bodyguard work for some of his other a-list clients and i’m like, “look alexei, the only body that i am interested in guarding belongs to whitney houston and after that maybe, maybe rene russo. now hand me a ten kilo medicine ball, i’m about to get my bakhtin on.”

secretly, i had been flirting with the idea of freelance bodyguarding BUT THEN i came across this chairman mao anecdote:

For years, Mao Zedong preferred going into fields to defecate over using an indoor toilet, explaining that the toilet’s odor got in the way of his thinking. He viewed dung as a symbol of purity and peasant virtue, and branded those who didn’t want to handle it as intellectuals and parasites.

He frequently suffered constipation which made him irritable and affected his decisions. When a long bout of constipation ended for him, word would spread through the relieved government, “The chairman’s bowels have moved! He had a good shit!”  He routinely had his bodyguards pry feces from his anus with their fingers.

it’s a good thing that i keep refusing this freelance bodyguard work because i can only imagine how i would react if i were defending mao zedong from sniper fire and sluttish profligates and he turns to me and is like, “r-dawg, i’m a bit backed up downstairs, i need your famous hook finger and i need it now.”

__

from the research guide to bodily fluids by paul spinrad (1994).

February 23, 2010
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anecdotes being raynor
know your top hat styles* i rock a tilbury 24/7. just sayin’. __ *from: the whole art of dress! by “a cavalry officer” (1830).

know your top hat styles*

i rock a tilbury 24/7. just sayin’.

__

*from: the whole art of dress! by “a cavalry officer” (1830).

February 5, 2010
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1800s being raynor know your things to look at fashion

fluttering the dovecots

hot chicks and other people: i was telling my friend orson how last weekend i made the embarrassing gaffe of pairing a 2007 dutton ranch shop block pinot blanc with my meal of roasted chicken and root vegetables and the sommelier came up to me and very discreetly asked if perhaps i might want to try a heavier wine that was more suitable for the robust winter flavors of my dish. and then orson was like, “what do somalians know about wine anyway? there ain’t no no vineyards in the desert.”

indeed, orson. there surely ain’t.

however, what i lack in wine pairing, i pretend to make up for in picking out words that begin with f. therefore, in hounour of orson, please allow me to be your f-word somalian for the day. from an obscure 1922 dictionary* of “phraseological allusions”:

  • Fair Maid of February: the snowdrop which blooms in February
  • False as Waghorn: utterly false. Waghorn according to a Scottish proverb was nineteen times falser than the devil
  • Fan with a feather: to employ wholly inefficient means to achieve one’s end
  • Fanfaron: a boaster who behaves as if announced by a fanfare of trumpets
  • Felo de Se: a suicide (a felon from himself)
  • Fiddler’s news: stale news such as that formerly circulated by itinerant fiddlers
  • Fides Carbonarii: implicit faith. A carbonaro being asked what he believed replied, “What the Church believes” and being asked once again what the Church believes replied, “What I believe”
  • The Five wits: commonsense, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory
  • Flagrante Delicto: caught in the very act
  • Fleshpots of Egypt: good things of this world formerly at one’s disposal, but no longer so.
  • Florimel’s Girdle: the test of chastity
  • Flutter the dovecots: to cause a mild excitement in society
  • A Fox’s sleep: pretended indifference to what is transpiring. In allusion to the proverbial cunning of the fox
  • French Crown: baldness caused by venereal disease
  • Frozen music: architecture

__

*a dictionary of english phrases: phraseological allusions, catchwords, stereotyped modes of speech and metaphors, nicknames, sobriquets, derivations, from personal names, etc. edited by albert m. hyamson (1922).

February 2, 2010
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words f-words food being raynor
for those that observe the julian calendar: happy new year! one of my 62 new, new year’s resolutions is to be more open about myself on the information super highway. this means posting more pictures of myself (even if my eyes are overly bloodshot and my meth teeth are unseemly). so here is a picture of yours truly ringing in the new year, rocking out hard on the top the sphinx. in the end, it was a pretty meh experience because one of the lasers burned a small hole in my new nine inch nails t-shirt. thanks for nothing, egyptian ministry of culture.

for those that observe the julian calendar: happy new year!

one of my 62 new, new year’s resolutions is to be more open about myself on the information super highway. this means posting more pictures of myself (even if my eyes are overly bloodshot and my meth teeth are unseemly). so here is a picture of yours truly ringing in the new year, rocking out hard on the top the sphinx. in the end, it was a pretty meh experience because one of the lasers burned a small hole in my new nine inch nails t-shirt. thanks for nothing, egyptian ministry of culture.

January 4, 2010
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things to look at being raynor days gpoyw

a christmas calamity many years ago

many christmases ago, my kid sister and i wrote to santy and listed all of the bad-ass toys that we wanted. my list was basically the entire crate & barrel catalogue (how lovely it would be to run my hands up and down those fine linens! and all the drinks that i could sip from that exquisite glassware!) but my kid sister’s list only had a single item—hamsters. she kept annoying our folks about how cute the hamsters would be and how she and them would have tea parties (or whatever it is that girls and rats do with eachother). she even preëmptively gave them the ridiculous monikers, honey & cutie.

my dear old parents decided to go through with the hamster thing and bought my kid sister two she-hamsters from the same litter. but what they didn’t know (and the pet store chucklehead didn’t tell them) was that females from the same litter are not very friendly towards one another. in fact they are downright vicious.

24 hanging chads on our advent calender later, it was christmas day at last. my folks thought it would be a real gas to wrap up the hamsters and their cage so that my kid sister would be able to unwrap the surprise (a surprise that, incidentally, she had already gotten wind of (literally)). my kid sister and i ran downstairs and i bolted over to what could only be a kitchenaid professional 600 stand mixer!!!!!! and my kid sister ran to a rattling package shrieking, “my haaaaaaammmmsters! cuuuutie! hooooney!” and tore away the wrapping paper with childish glee.

you can guess what happened next. the hamsters, not happy with being in a cage together to begin with, started freaking out when my dear old parents entombed them with foil wrapping paper and they went cage-match berserker all over eachother. so what my kid sister got first thing on christmas morning was a pen full of bloody hamsters, one of them slain, the other writhing in a pool of blood, which thankfully was absorbed by plentiful wood shavings. cutie was no more, but her christmas spirit continues to haunt the ganans every year.

__

so long chummys, i’m off to do some traveling in a country that i shan’t name (so as not to tip off the paparazzi) but will mention that it is located on the 20th parallel north. i wish you and your affiliates an outlandish holiday season and a happy new decade.

December 22, 2009
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being raynor days
gas giants some kids dream of winning an olympic gold. some have an oscar fantasy. occasionally, a little person may pine for a nobel prize. but not yours truly, as just a wee raynorling, i lusted after the gordon bennet international aëronautic cup, the trophy of the world’s oldest balloon race. this article, an harrowing account of the first ever gordon bennet dirigible race (published in 1907) was responsible for igniting my aëronautic dreams, perhaps it will ignite yours as well. here is another thing about the golden age of balloonery.

gas giants

some kids dream of winning an olympic gold. some have an oscar fantasy. occasionally, a little person may pine for a nobel prize. but not yours truly, as just a wee raynorling, i lusted after the gordon bennet international aëronautic cup, the trophy of the world’s oldest balloon race.

this article, an harrowing account of the first ever gordon bennet dirigible race (published in 1907) was responsible for igniting my aëronautic dreams, perhaps it will ignite yours as well.

here is another thing about the golden age of balloonery.

November 23, 2009
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tags
early 1900s sports being raynor
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