bookups

people is always accosting me at the mall (usually when i’m getting my hollister on) and axing me how i got my abz to be so 3d. “anyone can get length-width definition,” they intimate, but what exercise was i rockin’ to pop each sixth pack in the field of depth?

in situations like these, i usually pretend to receive an urgent phone call from the acting town fire chief (a passing acquaintance) and slip into a changing room to try on some pastel pocket t’s while my interrupters find someone else’s muscles to admire (as if).

but now, because i am so sick of people rubbing my abs unsolicitously like i’m some teenager who is pregnant with twin babies, i will reveal one of my trade secrets—bookups.

you start by crunching your shorty books (think: the old man and the sea and heart of darkness). you then work your way up to the lesser dickens and d.h. lawrence. most people tap out when they get to pynchon level or anything michener, but raynor ganan is not most people. i am proud to admit that i have been camera-phoned crunching the ten volume kathasaritsagara, an 11th century indian fairy tale that contains 20,000+ sanskrit verses.

so now you know my trade secret but there is one final thing that…hold on, i’m getting an urgent call from the acting town fire chief who is a personal friend. i need to take this…

elektro & bass man

you guys—MY BAND IS GETTING BACK TOGETHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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from the nypl digital gallery

for bestiary: a squonk

for the first time in my young life, i DID NOT spend my new year’s eve blasting power ballads from my fender stratocaster on the stone head of the sphinx. eschewing tradition, i instead decided that on 12:59:59 i would try parachute bungee jumping, a new extreme sport that i am pioneering whereupon i jump out of my gulfstream 250 executive jet, yank my parachute cord in a haho manner and just when the chute deploys, i bungee off of it, yo-yo-ing to the earth at terminal velocity while listening to primus on my microsoft zune.

anyway parachute bungee jumping was ok, but—in typical the-grass-is-always-greener mindset—i longed for my stratocaster and the legendary sphinx. and by way of powerful segue: do you know another legendary creature whose name starts with an ess, has 1 syllable and is useful for scrabble battles? the answer is the squonk—a pennsylvanian forest creature so ugly that it spends most of its time weeping and can evade capture by dissolving entirely into a puddle of its own tears » 

The legend holds that the creature’s skin is ill-fitting, and covered with warts and other blemishes, and so it hides from plain sight and spends much of its time weeping. Hunters who have attempted to catch squonks have found that the creature is capable of evading capture by dissolving completely into a pool of tears and bubbles when cornered.

i pledge to ring in 2012 while standing on the head of one of these crybabies, maybe at terminal velocity or maybe—and this is a big maybe—while standing in an inflatable hamster ball 30,000 leagues down, at the bottom of the mariana trench.

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art credit: richard svensson

the great escape

can you believe it?!?! i was “visiting” my “lover” last night when all of the sudden we hear my “lover’s” “lover” fiddling with keys in the hallway. so i calls up my “bros” and devise an escape. it was a great escape, everything went according to plan.

4 is the magic number cont’d [spoilers]

yesterday, i made it my bidness to clue you into 4 and why it’s the magic number. today i will tell you why. i will also discuss at length my unabatable zeal for charting the mathematics behind its magic—in a crowded jumbo jet, sipping on campari & o.j., whizzing through the air at an altitude of 39,000 feet, and watching a brendan fraser movie where he can communicate with raccoons.

the solution is frustrating at first but very gratifying once you yourself get to make someone else figure out how every number leads back to 4 just as every road leads to rome. i played a little trick on you yesterday by not writing out the numbers (despite what the chicago manual of style says). if i had, you might have realised that each number is the amount of letters it contains. thus: 3 (three) is 5 (five) is 4 (four). doh! 4 is magic therefore because it has the unique property of being spelled with its own amount of letters.

for every number to be reducible to 4 however, there needs to be additional magic—all numbers have to lead to it, and no other number can be “magic”. if 5 were spelled with two letters, 5 would be 2, 2 would be 3, and 3 would be 5 again— creating an infinite loop that never gets to 4. additionally, only one number can be spelled with its own amount of letters. if 6 were spelled “sihcks”, then the whole delicate balance explodes and the puzzle loses its appeal.

these are the things that were whirling around my brain as woodland creatures were flinging rotten fruit at brendan fraser’s gonads. and as the captain made an announcement in three languages, i realised that 4 is only magic in the english numberverse, who knows what mysteries were yet to be uncovered in foreign alphabets. perhaps 9 was magic in mandarin, maybe 13 in romanian. or maybe—and this is what really revved my turbines: maybe english was the only language which held these three magic properties. maybe english and its numbers are the center of the matho-linguistic universe!

i did some quick counting in different languages and soon realised that cinco was cinco and vier was vier. but did all numbers in spanish lead to cinco? were there other numbers in german that were magic? i mapped out a few languages in my counterfeit moleskine journal.

spanish, it seems, is magic only half the time. 50% of the numbers 1-100 will get stuck in a 6-4 infinite loop. german, like its grandnephew english, has 4 as a magic number (and only 4). what about french? french, like france itself, gets tangled in a vast web of bureaucracy. 6 leads to 3, 3 leads to 5, 5 to 4 and back to 6 and so on and so on to infinity. just by sketching out these four languages, i could see how each chart structure was wildly different than the last. i needed more! i became a data junkie!

i made fast friends with the vietnamese government official sitting next to me. “can you spell out the numbers 1-100 in vietnamese,” i asked over another round of campari & o.j.?”

“huh?!?” he said (the question mark-exclamation point-question mark i added)

but weirdly, he wrote them down without further questioning. “do you know any other languages?” i asked. perhaps he anticipated what i was going to ask him to do and responded in the negative. so i set about the plane querying people on what languages that they knew and then prodding them to write out every number in that language from 1-100. it was actually a pretty good icebreaker and people were oddly compliant. perhaps everyone was bored with watching brendan fraser tongue kiss brooke shields, or perhaps people were just excited to showcase their language. for whatever reason, i soon had myself a dozen cocktail napkins with over 1,000 handwritten numbers scrawled all over them.

as i always do when overwhelmed with a sudden influx of correlatable data, i got out my laptop, closed my redtube.com tab, and opened up my charting program so i could chart the tar out of these numbers and their relationships.

the images above are from this feverish, 39,000 foot high charting session. you will notice how the structure of numbers and how they are spelled in each language is as different as the languages themselves. and yet similar languages do have similar structures. the longest number in portuguese, spanish, and italian is 54, yet italian has a magic number, spanish is half magic and portuguese is only a quarter magic.

consider also vietnamese in which half of all numbers are ten letters long. in malay, not a single number is spelled with 6 letters. in polish, it takes 24 letters to spell out the number 99. in typical german efficiency, it takes just four maximum steps to arrive at the magic number while it takes 7 steps in italian. these are just a few of the highlights, the rest i leave in your intrepid hands.

in the end: english’s four, german’s vier, and italian’s tre were the only fully magic numbers in my pool of 10 languages but that does not take away from the other languages and the beauty of their relationships in this odd intersection of number and letter and language and math.

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props to my fellow passengers on thai air who answered my out-of-nowhere request for written numbers (and now know why i was badgering them): mr. binh, hugh, almas, weronika, jordan, that guy with the jason mraz hat who was reading the entertainment section of usa today, and phillip—you guys, please consider yourself members of the mile high club for polyglots.

disclaimer: i couldn’t read everybody’s handwriting, and don’t know every language (yet), so there will doubtlessly be some mistakes in these charts—perhaps even some large and embarrassing ones.

4 is the magic number

before i clue you in on 4 and why it’s the magic number, let me first digress a little bit and tell you about the river of 1,000 penises.

on my last full day in cambodia, i thought it would be a real gas to tour phnom kulen and explore the linga 1,000—a gushing stream which flows over hundreds of stone phalluses. the problem was that nobody wanted to go on the 2 hour drive with me to see such a marvel, “we don’t want to see 1,000 stone phalluses,” they said.

finally, i bumped into a german rugby player named otto who was receptive to my invitation. before he had a chance to second guess what he was signing up for, i hailed us a tuk-tuk and we were soon speeding down a 50 kilometer stretch of dirt road and screaming rugby hakas into the dust.

in the end, the stone phalluses weren’t really phallusy enough for either otto or i, though that is not the point of this post. the point of this post is to clue you into 4 and why it’s the magic number, and i’m getting to that.

we spent our time on the return voyage giving eachother puzzles to solve. i busted out this classic, which otto made short work of before i had really finished asking. then he told me about 4. “4 is the magic number,” he said. “5 is 4 and 4 is 4.”

“huh?”

“give me another number,” he said.

“6”

“6 is 3, 3 is 5, 5 is 4 and 4 is 4” he said. “give me another.”

“13”

“13 is 8, 8 is 5, and 5 is…”

“4 and 4 is 4. so every number can be reduced to 4 in some way? how about 4,032?” i said, ever the smartass.

otto rolled his eyes in his head as if under a voodoo jinx. a few seconds later: “4,032 is 21, 21 is 9, 9 is 4 and 4 is 4.”

“scrotumburgers,” i thought, “this is a grand puzzle.” by the time that we got back to homebase, i had cracked it, though the insidious mathematics behind the thing soon drove me to complete mania as i spent an 11 hour (11 is 6, 6 is 3, 3 is 5, 5 is 4, 4 is 4) plane ride from bangkok to rome haranguing 9 (9 is 4, 4 is 4) passengers about their thoughts on the puzzle and charting the output to a ridiculously obsessive degree. that story, the charts, and the answer to how 4 actually is the magic number, i shall reserve for tomorrow.

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

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.

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

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

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.