Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments...

I STARTED collecting examples of bizarre experiments years ago while in graduate school studying the history of science. I confess I had no profound intellectual motive; I simply found them fascinating. They filled me with disbelief, astonishment, disgust and - best of all - laughter.

With hindsight, perhaps there is a deeper message. These experiments are not the work of cranks. All were performed by honest, hard-working scientists who were not prepared to accept common-sense explanations of how the world works. Sometimes such single-mindedness leads to brilliant discoveries. At other times it can end up closer to madness. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing in advance where the journey will lead.

Here are 10 of the bizarrest experiments of all time - which, it must be said, mostly fall closer to madness than to genius.

1 Elephants on acid

What happens if you give an elephant LSD? Researchers solved this mystery on Friday 3 August 1962, when Warren Thomas, director of Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, fired a cartridge-syringe containing 297 milligrams of LSD into the rump of Tusko the elephant. With Thomas were two colleagues from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce.

The dose was about 3000 times what a human would typically take. Thomas, West and Pierce figured that if they were going to give an elephant LSD they'd better not give it too little. They later explained that the experiment was designed to find out if LSD would induce musth in an elephant - musth being a kind of temporary madness male elephants sometimes experience during which they become highly aggressive and secrete a sticky fluid from their temporal glands. One may also suspect a small element of ghoulish curiosity was involved.

Whatever the reason for the experiment, it almost immediately went awry. Tusko reacted as if he had been shot by a gun. He trumpeted around his pen for a few minutes and then keeled over. Horrified, the researchers tried to revive him with a variety of antipsychotics, but about an hour later he was dead. In an article published four months after the event (Science, vol 138, p 1100), the three scientists sheepishly concluded: "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD."

The experiment instantly made headlines. Faced with a public relations disaster, the scientists protested their innocence. They had not anticipated the elephant would die, they insisted. In their experience, LSD was a powerful hallucinogen but rarely fatal. West and Pierce helpfully noted that they themselves had previously taken the drug.

Thomas tried to find a silver lining. They had learned that LSD can be lethal to elephants. So perhaps, he mused, the drug could be used to destroy herds in countries where they are a problem. For some reason, his suggestion has never found any takers.

2 Terror in the skies

One day in the early 1960s, 10 soldiers boarded a plane at Fort Hunter Liggett military base in California on what they thought was a routine training mission. The plane climbed into the clear blue sky, levelled out at around 5000 feet and cruised for a few minutes before suddenly lurching to one side as a propeller failed.

The pilot struggled with the controls and yelled frantically into his headset. Finally, he made an announcement over the intercom: "We have an emergency. An engine has stalled and the landing gear is not functioning. I'm going to attempt to ditch in the ocean. Please prepare yourself."

In such a situation, it would have been natural for the soldiers to feel fear or even terror. But there was no need. Though they didn't know it, they were in no danger. They were unwitting subjects in a study designed by the United States Army Leadership Human Research Unit near Monterey, California. Its purpose was to examine behavioural degradation under psychological stress - specifically, the stress of imminent death.

Having created a fear-arousing situation, the researchers next introduced a task to measure the soldiers' performance under pressure. The task was something most people find difficult under normal circumstances: filling out insurance forms. A steward distributed the paperwork, explaining it as a bureaucratic necessity. If they were all going to die, the army wanted to make sure it was covered for the loss.

Obediently, the soldiers leaned forward in their seats, pencils in hand, and set to work. They found the forms unexpectedly difficult to decipher, and quite likely they attributed this to the distraction of approaching death. In fact, the forms had deliberately been written in a confusing manner. They were, as the researchers put it, "an example of deliberately bad human engineering".

Eventually the last soldier completed his form, and they all steeled themselves for the crash. At that point the pilot turned the plane around - "Just kidding about that emergency, folks!" - and landed safely at the airfield.

Not surprisingly, anticipating a crash landing did interfere with the ability to accurately complete an insurance form. The soldiers in the plane made a significantly larger number of mistakes than did a control group on the ground who filled out the same paperwork (Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, vol 76, p 1).

Quite what the soldiers thought about their ordeal we don't know, but one of them did find a way to get even. When the plane next took off carrying a new group of subjects to terrify, the researchers discovered their experiment had been ruined. One of the earlier group had blown their cover by writing a warning message on his airsick bag.

3 The masked tickler

In 1933 Clarence Leuba, a professor of psychology at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, made his home the setting for an ambitious experiment. He planned to find out whether laughter is a learned response to being tickled or an innate one.

To achieve this goal, he determined never to allow his newborn son to associate laughter with tickling. This meant that no one - in particular, his wife - was allowed to laugh in the presence of the child while tickling or being tickled. Leuba planned to observe whether his son eventually laughed when tickled, or grew up dismissing wiggling fingers in his armpits with a stony silence.

Somehow Leuba got his wife to promise to cooperate, and so the Leuba household became a tickle-free zone, except during experimental sessions in which Leuba subjected R. L. Male, as he referred to his son in his research notes, to laughter-free tickling.

During these sessions, Leuba followed a strict procedure. First he donned a 30-centimetre by 40-centimetre cardboard mask, while as a further precaution maintaining a "smileless, sober expression" behind it. Then he tickled his son in a predetermined pattern - first light, then vigorous - in order of armpits, ribs, chin, neck, knees, then feet.

Everything went well until 23 April 1933, when Leuba recorded that his wife had made a confession. On one occasion, after her son's bath, she had "jounced him up and down while laughing and saying, 'Bouncy, Bouncy'." It is not clear if this was enough to ruin the experiment. What is clear is that by month 7, R. L. Male was happily screaming with laughter when tickled.

Undeterred, Leuba repeated the experiment after his daughter, E. L. Female, was born in February 1936. He obtained the same result. By the age of 7 months, his daughter was laughing when tickled (Journal of Genetic Psychology, vol 58, p 201).

Leuba concluded that laughter must be an innate response to being tickled. However, one senses a hesitation in his conclusion, as if he felt that it all might have been different if only his wife had followed his rules more carefully.

Leuba's tickle study does at least offer an object lesson to other researchers. In any experiment it is all but impossible to control all the variables, especially when one of the variables is your spouse.

4 The look of eugh

Do emotions evoke characteristic facial expressions? Is there one expression everyone uses to convey shock, another for disgust, and so on? In 1924, Carney Landis, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Minnesota, designed an experiment to find out.

Landis brought subjects into his lab and drew lines on their faces with a burnt cork so that he could more easily see the movement of their muscles. He then exposed them to a variety of stimuli designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction. For instance, he made them smell ammonia, listen to jazz, look at pornographic pictures and put their hand into a bucket of frogs. As they reacted to each stimulus, he snapped pictures of their faces.

The climax of the experiment arrived when Landis carried in a live white rat on a tray and asked them to decapitate it. Most people initially resisted his request. They questioned whether he was serious. Landis assured them he was. The subjects would then hesitantly pick the knife up and put it back down. Many of the men swore. Some of the women started to cry. Nevertheless, Landis urged them on. In the pictures Landis took, we see them hovering over the rat with their painted faces, knife in hand. They look like members of some strange cult preparing to offer a sacrifice to the Great God of the Experiment.

Two-thirds of the subjects eventually did as they'd been told. Landis noted that most of them performed the task clumsily: "The effort and attempt to hurry usually resulted in a rather awkward and prolonged job of decapitation." Even when the subject refused, the rat did not get a reprieve. Landis simply picked up the knife and decapitated the rodent himself (Journal of Comparative Psychology, vol 4, p 447).

With hindsight, Landis's experiment presented a stunning display of the willingness of people to obey orders, no matter how unpalatable. It anticipated the results of Stanley Milgram's more famous obedience experiment at Yale University by almost 40 years (video at www.tinyurl.com/2hjyxq). Landis himself never realised that the compliance of his subjects was more interesting than their facial expressions. He remained single-mindedly focused on his research topic. And no, he was never able to find a single, characteristic facial expression that people adopt while decapitating a rat.

5 Reversing death

Robert E. Cornish, a researcher at the Berkeley campus of the University of California during the 1930s, believed he had found a way to restore life to the dead - at least in cases where major organ damage was not involved. His technique involved seesawing corpses up and down to circulate the blood while injecting a mixture of adrenalin and anticoagulants. He tested his method on a series of fox terriers, all of whom he named Lazarus after the biblical character brought back to life by Jesus.

First Cornish asphyxiated the dogs and let them be dead for 10 minutes. Then he attempted to revive them. His first two trials failed, but numbers 3 and 4 were a success. With a whine and a feeble bark, the dogs stirred back to life. Though blind and severely brain damaged, they lived on for months as pets in his home, reportedly inspiring terror in other dogs.

Cornish's research provoked such controversy that the University of California eventually ordered him off the campus. He continued his work in a tin shack attached to his house, despite complaints from neighbours that mystery fumes from his experiments were causing the paint on their homes to peel.

Many years later, in 1947, Cornish announced he was ready to experiment on a human being. He now had a new tool in his arsenal: a home-made heart-lung machine built out of a vacuum cleaner blower, radiator tubing, an iron wheel, rollers and 60,000 shoelace eyes. Thomas McMonigle, a prisoner awaiting execution on death row, volunteered to be his guinea pig, and Cornish asked the state of California for permission to proceed with his experiment. After some deliberation, the state turned him down. Apparently officials were worried that, should McMonigle come back to life, they might have to free him.

“A prisoner on death row offered to be revived, but the state turned him down”

Disheartened, Cornish retreated to his home, where he eked out a living selling a toothpaste of his own invention.

6 Slumber learning

In the summer of 1942, Lawrence LeShan of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, stood in the darkness of a cabin in an upstate New York camp where a row of young boys lay sleeping. He intoned a single phrase, over and over: "My fingernails taste terribly bitter. My fingernails taste terribly bitter..." Anyone happening upon the scene might have thought LeShan had gone mad, but he had not. The professor was conducting a sleep-learning experiment.

All the boys had been diagnosed as chronic nail biters, and LeShan wanted to find out if nocturnal exposure to a negative suggestion could cure them. Initially he used a phonograph to faithfully repeat the phrase 300 times a night as the boys lay sleeping. One month into the experiment, a nurse discreetly checked their nails during a routine medical examination. One boy seemed to have kicked the habit. LeShan remarked that skin of a healthy texture had replaced the "coarse wrinkled skin of the habitual biter".

Then, five weeks into the investigation, disaster struck. The phonograph broke. Faced with having to abandon the experiment, LeShan began standing in the darkness and delivering the suggestion himself. Surprisingly, direct delivery had greater effect. Within two weeks, seven more boys had healthy nails. LeShan speculated that this was because his voice was clearer than the phonograph. Another possibility would be that his midnight confessions thoroughly spooked the children. "If I stop biting my nails," they probably thought, "the strange man will go away."

By the end of the summer, Leshan found that 40 per cent of the boys had kicked the habit, and concluded that the sleep-learning effect seemed to be real (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol 37, p 406). Other researchers later disputed this. In a 1956 experiment at Santa Monica College in California, William Emmons and Charles Simon used an electroencephalograph to measure the brain activity of subjects, making sure they were fully asleep before playing a message. Under these conditions, the sleep-learning effect disappeared. (The American Journal of Psychology, vol 69, p 76).

7 Turkey turn-ons

While researching the sexual behaviour of turkeys, Martin Schein and Edgar Hale of Pennsylvania State University discovered that male members of that species truly are not fussy. When placed in a room with a lifelike model of a female turkey, the birds mated with it as eagerly as they would the real thing.

Intrigued by this observation, Schein and Hale embarked on a series of experiments to determine the minimum stimulus it takes to excite a male turkey. This involved removing parts from the turkey model one by one until the male bird eventually lost interest.

Tail, feet and wings - Schein and Hale removed them all, but still the clueless bird waddled up to the model, let out an amorous gobble, and tried to do his thing. Finally, only a head on a stick remained. The male turkey was still keen. In fact, it preferred a head on a stick to a headless body.

The researchers speculated that the males' head fixation stemmed from the mechanics of turkey mating. When a male turkey mounts a female, he is so much larger than her that he covers her completely, except for her head. Therefore, they suggested, it is her head that serves as his focus of erotic attention.

Schein and Hale then went on to investigate how minimal they could make the head before it failed to excite the turkey. They discovered that a freshly severed head on a stick worked best. Next in order of preference was a dried-out male head, followed by a two-year-old "discolored, withered, and hard" female head. Last place went to a plain balsa wood head, but even that elicited a sexual response. They published their results in 1965 in a book called Sex and Behavior.

Before we humans snicker at the sexual predelictions of turkeys, we should remember that our species stands at the summit of the bestial pyramid of the perverse. Humans will attempt to mate with almost anything. A case in point is Thomas Granger, the teenage boy who in 1642 became one of the first people to be executed in Puritan New England. His crime? He had sex with a turkey.

8 Two-headed dogs

In 1954 Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov shocked the world by unveiling a surgically created monstrosity - a two-headed dog. He created the creature in a lab at the Moscow Institute of Surgery by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd.

Demikhov invited reporters from around the world to witness his creation. Journalists gasped as the two heads simultaneously lapped at bowls of milk, and then cringed as the milk from the puppy's head dribbled out the disconnected stump of its oesophageal tube. Of course, the puppy did not need to eat or drink; it received all its nourishment from the circulatory system of the older dog. But it liked to drink because its mouth became dry. It also enjoyed licking candy.

Of particular interest was the extent to which the two heads shared a common set of sensory experiences. Reporters observed that when one head wanted to eat, so did the other. When it was hot, both panted. If one yawned, so did the other. Not all their emotions were identical, though. The older dog, annoyed at having the foreign head attached to his neck, occasionally tried to shake it off. This prompted the puppy to retaliate by biting his larger companion on the ear.

Demikhov's two-headed dog lived for only six days, but over the course of the next 15 years he constructed 19 more. None of these lived very long either - the record was a month - as they inevitably succumbed to tissue rejection. Demikhov seemed strangely naive about this, and frequently commented that the dogs died only because of imperfections in his surgical technique, which would soon be overcome. This attitude puzzled his western counterparts.

The Soviet Union proudly paraded the dogs as proof of the nation's medical pre-eminence, but most doctors in the west, while conceding Demikhov's skill as a surgeon, dismissed them as a publicity stunt. The western press eventually began referring to them as Russia's "surgical Sputnik". Demikhov justified his activities as part of a continuing series of experiments in surgical techniques, directed ultimately at learning how to perform a human heart transplant. Christiaan Barnard of the University of Cape Town in South Africa beat him to this goal in December 1967, but Demikhov is widely credited with paving the way.

9 The vomit drinking doctor

How far would you go to prove your point? Stubbins Ffirth, a doctor-in-training living in Philadelphia during the early 19th century, went further than most. Way further.

Having observed that yellow fever ran riot during the summer, but disappeared over the winter, Ffirth hypothesised it was not a contagious disease. He reckoned it was caused by an excess of stimulants such as heat, food and noise. To prove his hunch, Ffirth set out to demonstrate that no matter how much he exposed himself to yellow fever, he wouldn't catch it.

He started by making a small incision in his arm and pouring "fresh black vomit" obtained from a yellow-fever patient into the cut. He didn't get sick.

But he didn't stop there. His experiments grew progressively bolder. He made deeper incisions in his arms into which he poured black vomit. He dribbled the stuff in his eyes. He filled a room with heated "regurgitation vapours" - a vomit sauna - and remained there for 2 hours, breathing in the air. He experienced a "great pain in my head, some nausea, and perspired very freely", but was otherwise OK.

Next Ffirth began ingesting the vomit. He fashioned some of the black matter into pills and swallowed them down. He mixed half an ounce of fresh vomit with water and drank it. "The taste was very slightly acid," he wrote. "It is probable that if I had not, previous to the two last experiments, accustomed myself to tasting and smelling it, that emesis would have been the consequence." Finally, he gathered his courage and quaffed pure, undiluted black vomit fresh from a patient's mouth. Still he didn't get sick.

Ffirth rounded out his experiment by liberally smearing himself with other yellow-fever tainted fluids: blood, saliva, perspiration and urine. Healthy as ever, he declared his hypothesis proven in his 1804 thesis.

He was wrong. Yellow fever, as we now know, is very contagious, but it requires direct transmission into the bloodstream, usually by a mosquito, to cause infection.

Considering the strenuous efforts Ffirth took to infect himself, it must be considered something of a miracle he remained alive. The bright spot for him was that, after all he put himself through, the University of Pennsylvania did award him the degree of Doctor of Medicine. What his patients made of him unfortunately remains unrecorded.

10 Eyes wide open

Some people can sleep through anything. Earthquakes, gunshots, bright lights - nothing rouses them. But these are people who are already asleep. In 1960, Ian Oswald of the University of Edinburgh, UK, wondered how much stimulus someone could be exposed to while awake and still drop off. Would it even be possible to fall asleep with your eyes open?

Oswald first asked his volunteers to lie down on a couch. Then he taped their eyes open. Directly in front of them, about 50 centimetres away, he placed a bank of flashing lights. No matter how much they rolled their eyes, they could not avoid looking at the lights. Electrodes attached to their legs delivered a series of painful shocks. As a finishing touch, Oswald blasted "very loud" blues music into their ears.

“First, he asked the men to lie down on a sofa. Then he taped their eyes open”

Three young men volunteered to be Oswald's guinea pigs. In his write-up, Oswald praised them for their fortitude. One of the men was severely sleep-deprived but the other two were fully rested. Remarkably, it didn't make any difference. Despite the shocks, lights, music and open eyes, an EEG showed all three men to be asleep within 12 minutes (British Medical Journal, 14 May 1960, p 1450).

Oswald worded his findings cautiously: "There was a considerable fall of cerebral vigilance, and a large decline in the presumptive ascending facilitation from the brain-stem reticular formation to the cerebral cortex." The men themselves were more straightforward. They said it felt like they had dozed off.

Oswald speculated that the key lay in the monotonous nature of the stimuli. Faced with such monotony, he suggested, the brain goes into a kind of trance. That may explain why it's easy to doze off, even in the middle of the day, while you are driving along an empty road.

How much this will help when sleep eludes you while you're stuck on a red-eye flight is another question. Asking the baby in the row behind you to scream more rhythmically is unlikely to do the trick.

Alex Boese is a writer based in San Diego, California. His new book Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments is published by Harcourt

From issue 2628 of New Scientist magazine, 03 November 2007, page 49-55

A Close Shave...

THE BIG RED BUTTON OF DOOM

Think your job is stressful? Just past midnight on September 26, 1983, a Soviet satellite reported five missiles launched from a Montana base towards the U.S.S.R. In a command post near Moscow, a red button labeled "Start" began flashing.

Amazingly, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov , a former software engineer, managed to play it cool. Figuring that the United States wasn’t crazy enough to start a war with just five missiles fired from a single location, Petrov suspected computer error. And thank goodness he did. Still, Petrov went against his training when he refused to set the retaliatory strike in motion.

After the incident, Soviet investigators determined that the computer system had triggered the warnings simply based on sunlight reflection off of clouds. And while Armageddon was averted, Petrov wasn’t exactly hailed as a hero; instead he was reassigned to a less sensitive position and soon retired.

He did get some belated recognition in 2004, though, when he received a World Citizen Award plaque at a ceremony in Moscow. That honor was eclipsed in 2006, however, when he was given a World Citizen Award trophy and, presumably, a T-shirt reading, "I Saved the Earth from World War III and All I Got Was a Lousy Trophy."

ACHTUNG, FLECKFIEBER!

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, two docs hatched a secret plan to save a dozen villages near Rozwadów and Zbydniów. Doctors Eugene Lazowski and Stanislaw Matulewicz decided to create a fake typhus epidemic (a disease that, at the time, had no cure and was often fatal) by using harmless bacterium to trigger false-positives on typhus tests.

Knowing that Jews who tested positive for typhus would be summarily executed, the doctors only injected the non-Jewish population, hoping a widespread outbreak would cause Germans to abandon the area and thus spare local Jews in the process.

The ruse was nearly discovered when a Gestapo doctor arrived to confirm the tests, but clever Poles distracted the doctor with plenty of kielbasa and vodka, then sealed the deal by displaying several sickly townsfolk, claiming they were all consumed by typhus fever.

The "epidemic" was confirmed and grim signs were immediately posted throughout the region reading "Achtung, Fleckfieber!" (Warning, Typhus!), To contain the fake epidemic, the Gestapo quarantined the area throughout the World War II, and countless lives were saved. (Image of Dr. Eugene Lazowski: Holocaust Forgotten)

HOUSTON, WE HAVE DUCT TAPE

The jerry-rigged carbon dioxide scrubber unit in Apollo 13’s Lunar Module

Arguably NASA’s most famous close shave occurred during the Apollo 13 mission. After astronauts evacuated their damaged Command Module (CM) and crowded into the Lunar Module (LM), they noticed that carbon dioxide levels were dangerously high due to a failing air filter. Air filtration units in the LM had round openings, but the filter canisters salvaged from the CM were square.

Thankfully, Mission Control radioed a MacGyver solution: By rigging together plastic bags, cardboard, and duct tape, astronauts connected a square canister to the round hole, narrowly avoiding death by asphyxiation.

Duct tape, it seems, has played a pivotal role in several NASA missions. In 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts used it to repair a lunar rover bumper; in 2001 international Space Station astronauts and cosmonauts constructed a kitchen table using leftover aluminum pieces and duct tape; and in 2005, Space Shuttle Discovery astronaut Stephen Robinson crafted a hacksaw for a repair mission using a blade, plastic ties, Velcro, and—yup—the ol’ D.T.!!!!!

Last Man Standing...

On December 17, 1944, the Japanese army sent a twenty-three year old soldier named Hiroo Onoda to the Philippines to join the Sugi Brigade. He was stationed on the small island of Lubang (Philippines), and his orders were to lead the Lubang Garrison in guerrilla warfare. As Onoda was departing to begin his mission, his division commander told him, "You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand. It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens, we'll come back for you. Until then, so long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him. You may have to live on coconuts. If that's the case, live on coconuts! Under no circumstances are you to give up your life voluntarily." It turns out that Onoda was exceptionally good at following orders, and it would be 29 years before he finally laid down his arms and surrendered.

In February 1945, towards the conclusion of World War II, he was still there when the Lubang Island was reclaimed by the Allies, but Onoda, and several other men, hid in the dense jungle. Onoda continued his campaign, initially living in the mountains with three fellow soldiers, Akatsu, Shimada, and Kozuka. One of his comrades, Akatsu, eventually surrendered to Filipino forces, and the other two were killed in gun battles with local forces—one in 1954, the other in 1972—leaving Onoda alone in the mountains. For 29 years, he refused to surrender, dismissing every attempt to convince him that the war was over as a ruse. In 1959, Onoda was declared legally dead in Japan.

Found by a Japanese student, Norio Suzuki, Onoda still refused to accept that the war was over unless he received orders to lay down his arms from his superior officer. Suzuki offered his help, and returned to Japan with photographs of himself and Onoda as proof of their encounter. In 1974 the Japanese government located Onoda's commanding officer, Major Taniguchi, who had since become a bookseller. He flew to Lubang and informed Onoda of the defeat of Japan in WWII and ordered him to lay down his arms. Lieutenant Onoda emerged from the jungle 29 years after the end of World War II, and accepted the commanding officer's order of surrender in his dress uniform and sword, with his Arisaka Type 99 rifle still in operating condition, 500 rounds of ammunition and several hand grenades. Though he had killed some thirty Philippine inhabitants of the island and engaged in several shootouts with the police, the circumstances of these events were taken into consideration, and Onoda received a pardon from President Ferdinand Marcos.

After his surrender, Onoda moved to Brazil, where he became a cattle farmer. He released an autobiography, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, shortly after his surrender, detailing his life as a guerrilla fighter in a war that was long over. He revisited Lubang Island in 1996, donating $10,000 for the local school on Lubang. He then married a Japanese woman and moved back to Japan where he established a nature camp for kids. At the camp Onoda shares what he learned about survival through resourcefulness and ingenuity. As of 2007, Onoda is still living in Japan.

A Sale Of Two Titties - Is Wordplay The New Foreplay?

I hope you were not offended by the titular transaction of breasts.


A little blog humor goes a long way and wordplay has always been a shortcut to a humorous headline.

I borrowed "A Sale Of Two Titties" from a Monty Python skit which was a play on the title of the Charles Dicken's novel, "A Tale Of Two Cities". This switching of consonants in "Tale" and "City" is known as a spoonerism, which has been around since the 19th century, having been named after a Reverend William Spooner, who apparently had a penchant for transposing letters and syllables.

However, for this post, I would like to direct your attention to some more recent types of wordplay, as brought to my attention by the cunning linguists over at the delightful Language Log blog.MONDEGREENS AND SNOWCLONES AND EGGCORNS. OH MY!

1) Mondegreens

Mondegreens are mishearings of words, typically songs or popular phrases. Coined by writer Sylvia Wright in the 1950's when as a child she misheard the Scottish ballad 'The Bonny Earl of Murray':
Ye Highlands, and ye LawlandsOh where have you been?
They have slain the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
(this line should read 'And they layd him on the green')

Popular examples of Mondegreens:
When Phoebe from Friends is asked what her favorite love song is,
she sings "Hold me closer, Tony Danza" instead of "Hold me closer, Tiny Dancer".

A Bob Dylan classic:
"The ants are my friends, they're blowin' in the wind
The ants are a-blowin' in the wind."

Where to go for mondegreen inspiration: The Archive Of Misheard Lyrics





2) Snowclones



Snowclones are a subset of cliches and are described by Erin O'Connor as "fill-in-the-blank headlines".
For example, '"In X no one can hear you Y' 'In space no one can hear you scream'
















This was a terrific teaser for the first Alien movie but has since been turned into a snowclone of epic proportions.








Some other popular snowclones include:"To X, or not to X" (Shakespeare would be proud... or not)










"That ain't an X, this is an X" (Crocodile Dundee)"That ain't a mustache, this is a mustache"

"In Soviet Russia, X Ys you!"
Based on comedian Yakov Smirnoff's Russian Reversal jokes:
"In USA, you watch television, In Soviet Russia, television watches you!"

Another highly popular snowclone that can be found in episodes of Family Guy, King of the Hill, Simpsons, MST3K etc."What Would Jesus X"
What Would Jesus Link To?
Where to go for snowclone inspiration: The Snowclones Database




3) Eggcorns



Eggcorns are another linguistic figure coined by the Language Log guys. As Chris Waigl wrote:
"In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written “egg corn” instead of “acorn”. It turned out that there was no established label for this type of non-standard reshaping. Erroneous as it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don’t know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense."
This lead to the identification of many more eggcorns, including some that Oxfore University Press editor Ben Zimmer listed which could almost be considered a part of mainstream English.
Which one is the eggcorn and which is the original?
A) Free Rein or Free Reign?
B) Baited Breath or Bated Breath?
C) Just Deserts or Just Desserts?
D) A Shoo-In or A Shoe-In?
What did you choose? You'd be surprised at the answers!
Where to go for Eggcorn inspiration: The Eggcorn Database

WHAT DOES WORDPLAY HAVE TO DO WITH THE INTERNET?
Mondegreens, snowclones and eggcorns are a growing force in online writing. If you take a look at the structure of headlines at Digg or Reddit - you'll see some familiar wordplay on the front page. You'll find these linguistic occurrences are popular on satirical websites like Fark and SomethingAwful, in cartoons and TV comedies, on the radio and in movies. Custodians of grammar may frown at the decay of 'proper English' but the laziness of online writers is a boon for observing the hyper-evolution of our language. As journalist and LOLcats analyst David McRaney writes in his LOLcats expose:
"The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades."
Face it, if you're a blogger looking to appeal to the linkerati and the attention-deprived digg nation, what more could you ask for than appropriating a well known word, catchphrase or lyric and molding it into a witty headline that combines popularity, familiar recognition and humor?To end this wordplay "steam of consciousness", I'd love to share a story about my favorite eggcorn.Copywriter/editor Nancy Friedman found an error on one of mega-billionaire Warren Buffett's remarkable Berkshire Hathaway annual reports (seriously, read this PDF and tell me it's not the best annual report you've ever read). and pinged Mr Buffett, to which he promptly replied:


"Dear Nancy:
I enjoyed your letter. What we tell people is that we put one mistake in each annual report to encourage annual reading. But if you believe that ... Sincerely,
Warren E. Buffett"
The mistake?
"Vocal Chords" instead of "Vocal Cords".
Hey, I figure if Mr Buffett's turning eggcorns into jokes, we can too.
Do you have any favorite mondegreens, spoonerisms, snowclones or eggcorns?

Over and over and over again...

The lowly groundhog, often called a woodchuck in America, is the only mammal to have a day named in his honor. The groundhog's day is February 2. How did the groundhog come by this honor? It stems from the ancient belief that hibernating creatures were able to predict the arrival of springtime by their emergence.The German immigrants known as Pennsylvania Dutch brought the tradition to America in the 18th century. They had once regarded the badger as the winter-spring barometer. But the job was reassigned to the groundhog after importing their Candlemas traditions to the U.S. Candlemas commemorates the ritual purification of Mary, 40 days after the birth of Jesus.Candlemas is one of the four "cross-quarters" of the year, occurring half way between the first day of winter and the first day of spring. Traditionally, it was believed that if Candlemas was sunny, the remaining six weeks of winter would be stormy and cold. But if it rained or snowed on Candlemas, the rest of the winter would be mild. If an animal "sees its shadow," it must be sunny, so more wintry weather is predicted:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,

Winter has another flight.

If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,

Winter will not come again.

The groundhog and badger were not the only animals that have been used to predict spring. Other Europeans used the bear or hedgehog--but in any case the honor belonged to a creature that hibernated. Its emergence symbolized the imminent arrival of spring.Traditionally, the groundhog is supposed to awaken on February 2, Groundhog Day, and come up out of his burrow. If he sees his shadow, he will return to the burrow for six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t see his shadow, he remains outside and starts his year, because he knows that spring has arrived early.In the U.S., the “official” groundhog is kept in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Every February 2, amid a raucous celebration early in the morning, “Punxsutawney Phil” as the groundhog is called, is pulled from his den by his keepers, who are dressed in tuxedos. Phil then whispers his weather prediction into the ear of his keeper, who then announces it to the anxiously-awaiting crowd.Residents contend that the groundhog has never been wrong.The ceremony in Punxsutawney was held in secret until 1966, and only Phil's prediction was revealed to the public. Since then, Phil's fearless forecast has been a national media event.The groundhog comes out of his electrically heated burrow, looks for his shadow and utters his prediction to a Groundhog Club representative in "groundhogese." The representative then translates the prediction for the general public.If Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, it means six more weeks of winter. If he does not see his shadow, it means spring is just around the corner.Approximately 90% of the time, Phil sees his shadow.Phil started making predictions in 1887 and has become an American institution.
Which brings me to the reason why i wrote this post.Groundhog day has been one of my all time favourite movies.A ''romantic comedy'' with a brilliant plot, and some tight performances by Bill Murray and Andie Macdowell. On Groundhog day, Phil(Bill Murray), a TV weatherman with an ego bigger than a wide screen TV could hold, is forced against his will to report on location the prognostications of Punxatawney Phil. He kind of likes his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell) but is too superficial to even acknowledge his feeling other than to throw crass pick-up lines at her. She is sophisticated confident and compassionate. He is everything she hates in a man.
He suffers through the day not even trying to hide his contempt for having to do such a menial task. Then, contrary to his prediction, a snow storm moves in and he and the crew are stuck in Punxatawney overnight, cut off from the world.
When his room alarm goes off at 6:00am the next morning, he is surprised to hear the D.J. doing the exact same routine they did the day before. Then he sees 100's of people heading for the center of town and asks what's going on. He soon realizes it's Groundhog day again. Everything that happened happens again. People speak the same sentences word for word. And when they get snowed in again, he starts to panic.
6:00am the next day, same thing. But this time he is expecting what will happen and he reacts differently. It seems he can change things if he wants to. As the days go on, he decides to have some fun. He foils an obnoxious old school mate, he seduces a pretty young girl, he robs an armored truck, all by just knowing ahead of time what people will say or do.
How long can you do this kind of thing without getting tired of it? There is no sign telling what to do to get out of this endless loop. There is no indication that he even CAN get out. His mood turns to despair. He goes drinking and meets a few perpetual drunks who accidentally impart some wisdom. "What" Phil asks "if there was no tomorrow?". Ralph (Rick Overton) says that then nothing would matter. Phil takes that as a sign and goes on a wild car ride on a railroad track, towards an oncoming train! He kills himself!
6:00am. Not a mark on him. He kills himself over and over. He can't even escape in death!
It finally dawns on him that maybe whatever caused this wants him to be a better person. He has all the time in the world so, he learns to play piano. He makes sure each day that he is there to catch a boy falling from a tree. He meets a man with a back problem and learns enough medicine to help him. He becomes, in what seems to the town to be a single day, a good, kind, helpful, talented and popular person.
How much time has passed isn't revealed but it could be years for him. And he's still stuck. But now that he's a better person, he realizes how much he likes Rita and he realizes that now he may actually have a shot.
He asks her out and fails. But again he has forever. Every time he makes a mistake, he learns what to say or not say the next time. He learns a few lines of her favorite poem and what foods she likes. He gets to a point where he has manipulated her to the point that she is finally willing to go to bed with him. This then is his test.
Watching Bill Murray and his trademark brand of goofy lines and silly witticisms stumble through all these situations gives a great deal of expected humor. Murray rarely disappoints, but now it's time for the romance. This is Andie MacDowell's strong suit and she was a perfect choice for this role. You feel for her more than for him. You want HIM to do the right thing because you want HER to be happy.
Taken as a light comedy, this movie would rate perhaps eight stars out of ten. But it's much, much more than just a light comedy. It is, in fact, utterly unique. The character of Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, is, quite literally, a man without a future.
What do we gain from watching this movie? Different people will take away different things from it. I discovered two insights in Groundhog Day.
One was the importance of concentrating on the things that last. Phil Connors must live the same day over and over again, and is forced to realize that the only real change that will ever be possible must happen within himself. (From this it is a short leap to the realization that this is the only kind of change that really matters; for in his case, it is literally true.) It is at this point that he takes up piano, begins reading, learns to ice-sculpt. But if it weren't for his unique predicament, he never would have realized this; in his routine at the TV studio back in Pittsburgh, we surmise, there was always something changing...and not changing. (It is interesting that Phil is a weatherman: the weather is a perfect metaphor for something that changes constantly...without, in the long term, changing at all.) We can be distracted by the superficial changes in the world around us, and forget that real change in our lives must come from within. This was the great gift of Groundhog Day for Phil Connors: the chance to discover this truth for himself.
The other thing I noticed, while reflecting on this movie, is how uncertainty can keep us from charitable acts. We use our ignorance like a crutch: we don't give to charity because it may be a scam, we don't offer to help someone because they may not need help anyway, and so on. But Phil doesn't have the luxury of ignorance. He knows...he knows with absolute certainty that if he doesn't buy the old man a bowl of soup, that man will die in the streets within a few hours. He knows that if he isn't on hand at the right time, a boy will fall from a tree and break his neck. Faced with such knowledge, even Phil, self-absorbed as he is, cannot stand by idly. Nor could we, in his position. This is a powerful argument for knowledge as the most reliable foundation for altruistic behavior. What other movie can offer an insight half as profound?
Many more truths can be mined from this movie. As others have said, this is a thought experiment that went very well indeed--better than most flicks I've seen on the Big Screen. As such, I'd vote for it as one of the most underrated movies ever made.

Spaceman Spiff and the case of the mutant snowmen...

"Calvin and Hobbes" was such an exuberant, strange and metaphysical realm you wonder how it ever got shoveled into a comic strip.
I remember this when i look at "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes," a 1,456-page art-book epic of every panel ever published, in my neighbourhood landmark bookstore. It was original by sheer force of personality. Calvin sounded like a 6-year-old psychotic on steroids one day and a Yale lit grad the next. He was mad off the leash. He wondered what was worthwhile in life if death was inevitable. ("Seafood," answered Hobbes, his imaginary tiger friend. Wait -- was Hobbes real or not? Debatable.)
Calvin battled blobs of oatmeal and the bathtub suds monster. He and Hobbes hurtled downhill in their wagon and set out for the Yukon. He turned himself into a Tyrannosaurus rex , Calvin the Human Insect, Calvin the Bug, Captain Napalm,Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man and Spaceman Spiff.
In the middle of class, Calvin's teacher suddenly turns into a pig-snouted monster! The drooling blob demands attention and homework!
"Chew electric death, snarling cur!" Spiff howls, blasting her face off with his Atomic Napalm Neutralizer!
He was known to wear little rocket ship underpants. He feared nothing but the babysitter. Also the dark.And monsters under his bed(did metallica dedicate the ''sandman'' to calvin??maybe.)
The strip ran from 1985 to 1995. Thirty million people have bought earlier collections of the strip, but as of today you can buy it all in one pop. It will set you back by a cool 5 grand, but the three-volume, glossy-papered tome finally gives proper appreciation and display to creator Bill Watterson's efforts, the kind of size and color quality that he waged such epic battles for with newspapers and syndicates before retiring into silence at age 37, tired of the fray, wary of drifting into the bankrolls of mediocrity.
Flip open a page here:
"I want a grenade launcher, Mom. When's Christmas?" Calvin pipes in one panel.
"What do you think is the meaning of true happiness?" he asks Hobbes in another. "Is it money, cars and women? Or is it just money and cars?"
Here comes that cute girl from class! Calvin: "Hey, Susie Derkins, is that your face or is a possum stuck in your collar?"
All 10 years gone now.
People still remember because it was never worse than good, and was often simply brilliant. It parodied the issues of the day, the materialism, the greed-is-good cynicism, the pointlessness of television, the rampaging egos, the growing crassness of public intercourse, the bad behavior, our infinitesimal place in the universe. There was also time for snacks and a bedtime story.

"Calvin and Hobbes," worked on the concept that Hobbes was a stuffed animal to everyone in the world but Calvin, an only child. Only when he and Calvin are alone in the panel does Hobbes spring to life -- a tiger who walks on two feet, makes cheesecake grins at girls and appears to be more mature than Calvin by oh, about an hour and a half.
They wrestle, pull the covers back and forth at bedtime and make goofy faces at one another while sitting in the back seat of the family car -- best friends of the type boys no longer have after age 12. The only other kids in the strip were Susie, who lived around the block, and Moe, the school bully. Calvin's parents did not have names. They lived in a house that had a sort of American foursquare sensibility to it, in a nameless town that seemed lost on the Midwestern prairie. It all bespoke a certain Sunday-afternoon loneliness. (Hobbes was Calvin's imagination, right? His alter ego? Which means the whole thing is just Calvin talking to himself? Nobody knows; Watterson never made it clear.)

"I'd always resisted the idea of doing a 'kid strip,' partly because of the long shadow that Peanuts cast over the whole genre," Watterson writes in the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. In Watterson's first strips Calvin and Hobbes is practically an homage to Peanuts. Calvin tilts his head back, screaming, and his mouth fills his entire face, so all we see is his tongue. Calvin and Hobbes converse about a girl atop a brick wall, just like Charlie Brown and Linus (although Calvin's desire for Susie Derkins is, shall we say, more sublimated than Charlie Brown's unrequited love for the little red-headed girl). When Calvin falls off his bike, he flips upside down and looks as if Lucy had just pulled the football away from him. Calvin sits behind an overturned cardboard box with a sign that reads, "Insurance, 50¢." You half-expect it to also say, "The insurance salesman is IN."
Schulz's biggest influence on Watterson, however, is evident not in his brush stroke but in his sensibility. Watterson's Calvin talks with the wit and intelligence of an adult about a child's fears and dreams. "I've never understood people who remember childhood as an idyllic time," Watterson wrote in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, published in 1995. Like Charlie Brown, Calvin is a perpetual loser. He's terrible at school. His baseball teammates make so much fun of him that he quits the team. He's repeatedly bullied. He doesn't appear to have any real friends, other than his tiger Hobbes. Yet unlike Charlie Brown, Calvin doesn't seem to mind his fate. His main quality, other than imagination, is enthusiasm. Calvin, as befits his name, is a carefree fatalist.
Calvin's imaginative play is the central element of Watterson's strip, and the reality of his friendship with Hobbes is never resolved. The tiger's true nature is left ambiguous. Perhaps Calvin's parents just can't see Hobbes as he really is, or worse, their presence turns him into a plush toy. In a 1989 interview published in Comics Journal, the questioner mentioned to Watterson that Hobbes was a figment of Calvin's imagination. "But the strip doesn't assert that," Watterson said. "That's the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. … It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up."
Calvin, too, is more real than the typical comic-strip character. He's a recognizably modern boy, a lazy TV-watcher who would rather play inside than outside. In some strips, he's astonishingly mean, while in others he's sickeningly cute—almost Family Circus-ish. Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau called Bill Watterson "the reporter who got it right" about boyhood, a statement Watterson disputed because he has no children. But Calvin is strikingly familiar, and like any friend or family member, his hold on readers grew with time.
Watterson refused to license a single Calvin and Hobbes product: no dolls, no greeting cards, no boxer shorts, no TV shows. Without specifically naming, say, Jim Davis of Garfield, Watterson scorned the cartoonists who enlist teams of assistants to draw their strips while they dream up new products for their corporate empires.

Watterson's first job after graduating from Kenyon College was as a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post, which fired him after only a few months. Unlike political cartoons, most Calvin and Hobbes strips exist in a timeless setting, so much so that Watterson's rare references to dated popular culture (at one point, Hobbes calls himself "New Wave") are jarring. Calvin and Hobbes discuss the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the nature of free will, not the merits of the Reagan administration. This strip, however, was published in February 1991, on the eve of the first Gulf War. "It's an incredibly rare privilege to have your work read by people every day, year after year," Watterson writes in the Complete introduction. "If you're inclined to go beyond jokes and say something heartfelt, honest, or thoughtful, you have a tremendous opportunity. And best of all, because the comics are generally regarded as frivolous, disposable entertainment, readers rarely have their guard up."
Beginning in May 1991, Watterson took a nine-month sabbatical from Calvin and Hobbes, the first of two such leaves of absence during the strip's 10-year run. When he returned, he demanded that newspapers run his Sunday strips full size—one-half of a newspaper broadsheet—which allowed him to experiment with unusual panel sizes and shapes. (Typically, comic-strip artists must use the top panels of their Sunday strips for a throwaway gag, in case newspaper editors choose to save space by running only the lower two-thirds of the strip.) Beginning in 1992, sometimes he would draw a single panel on Sundays. On other occasions, his Sunday strip would be filled with 20 small squares. In this strip, the third Sunday after Watterson's return in 1992, the "assembly line" snowballs are a clear metaphor for the comics, even as Watterson pokes mild fun at his own ambitions.
In the last years of Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson used his characters more and more to complain about the state of the newspaper comic strip. The economic power of the syndicates, he felt, encouraged cautious, committee-approved comics and market-tested strips for niche demographics. Calvin and Hobbes never became cautious, but the late Sunday strips, despite the visual inventiveness, occasionally felt formulaic: Calvin starts out in his imagination as a spaceman, or a dinosaur, or an insect, only to return to the dreary reality of the classroom or his parents' car in the final frame. Watterson says the post-sabbatical strips are his favorites, but you can also see him struggling, wondering what is left for his characters to do.
When Watterson returned from his second sabbatical, the first words of his Jan. 1, 1995, strip were, "The end of the Mesozoic Era …" At the end of that year, the last new Calvin and Hobbes strip would run. At the end of the Mesozoic Era, the dinosaurs went extinct. It's difficult not to think that Watterson knew at this point that soon his strip would be, too. He tried to reinvent the comic strip, to bring back the bold and colorful illustrations that filled newspapers before Schulz and Peanuts. But today, it is graphic novels that are filled with lively experiments, and the comic strip feels more moribund than ever.
On the last day of 1995, Watterson published his final Calvin and Hobbes strip. His two characters toboggan away to forever "go exploring." At the same time, Watterson seems glad to be liberated from the burdens of daily cartooning. In the Complete introduction, Watterson writes of the collected Calvin and Hobbes strips, "Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary … I meant to disguise that better." On his last day, Watterson didn't disguise much of his delight in abandoning the "familiar" for "a fresh, clean start." Or his desire to start painting full-time: "It's like a big white sheet of paper to draw on." With this strip, the last great newspaper comic strip ended after only a decade in print. "There will always be mediocre comic strips," Watterson said in a 1989 speech titled "The Cheapening of the Comics," "but we have lost much of the potential for anything else."

Requiem for a productive day at work...

Office Work, the ceaseless toil in darkened rooms which has kept workers occupied from nine-to-five each weekday(7 to 4 in my case!!) has finally been chucked into the "out" tray of life, after being crushed by the pressure of the many other vital office activities such as gossiping, playing minesweeper,sleeping, social-networking and staring out of the window.Office Work began - in recorded history at least - in Ancient Rome, whose rulers were among the first to decide that the task of sorting facts and figures, keeping records and preparing accounts was far too onerous for the priests who had been carrying it out (a strain perhaps evidenced by the fact that - whatever had actually happened - the facts, figures and records always showed the rulers were wrong and the priests were right and the accounts always showed the rulers owed the priests another 400 goat sacrifices and half the contents of the treasury).From the time of its birth, Office Work thrived, with Roman office workers throwing themselves eagerly into the tasks of gathering data on everything from the latest building works at Ostia to fluctuations in the lark's-tongue market and the rise and fall (and rise and fall) of the orgy sector, their enthusiasm reinforced by the head of human resources frequently being also the chief recruiting officer for the gladiatorial arena.

Over the following millennia, Office Work did well in the Near and Middle East, where it was supported by the extensive bureaucracies of Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate, ensuring that there would always be a suitable workplace for hard-working scribes, accountants and a good place to keep middle-managers away from the rest of humanity. Things did not go so well in Europe, however, where Office Work proved less popular than having wars and dying of plague. It was not until the arrival of the mediaeval chancery that Office Work could find a place to go about its business in Europe and even after the Renaissance there was still confusion about the office's role, with the inhabitants of Florence foolishly deciding to fill their offices with paintings by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael(as well as other artists who were not also members of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles..) and charge people to see them.Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century, Office Work was as popular in Britain as anywhere else, with clerks happily quitting their meagre beds, bidding fond farewells to their consumptive wives and crippled children and dashing into work at 5am in order to spend the next 14 hours perched before high desks on high stools, warming themselves in the glow from their candle as they toiled away for enlightened masters such as Mr E Scrooge to keep themselves out of the workhouse.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Adam Smith's capitalistic theories were beginning to be implemented in the creation of American megacorporations, one of which was memorable for making a car of any colour as long as it was black.After a couple of debilitating wars which put Europe back by a century but created the booming American economy and the american dream,Office work became the ideal for any self respecting republican.Steadily the lot of the office worker improved and Office Work became far more popular, reaching its height in the late 1980s and 1990s thanks to better working practices and employers .True, there were distractions - lists of "50 Best Sardar Jokes" had to be passed secretly from desk to desk, clandestine affairs had to be conducted, groups of secretaries had to gather with their coffees to ogle surprisingly well-toned male colleagues- but yet Office Work got done.

It was the rise of the office computer during the 1990s that was to prove Office Work's undoing. At first it seemed a boon - doing away at a stroke with a scores of trips to the stationery cupboard for a new pen and countless hours spent struggling to insert a new typewriter ribbon - but its effects were insidious. No sooner had Office Work found a vital job to be done than the computers would fail, condemning office workers to hours spent twiddling their thumbs and having paperball fights while the heroic forces of the IT department did battle with recalcitrant servers. Even when the computers functioned, matters were no easier for Office Work: with the advent of email, workers were forced to tear themselves away from their spreadsheets to catch up with the latest round-robins from their mates about hilarious new videos on YouTube or forward urgent requests from parents of dying children, and with the advent of Microsoft Windows untold ages simply had to be spent playing minesweeper and solitaire.

With the arrival of Web 2.0 and social networking software it was all over for Office Work: there was simply no time for completing spreadsheets, drafting documents or sending out request sheets and invoices when office workers had to spend all their time scrapping their friends on Orkut, listing their cats' favourite pasta shapes on MySpace and trying to fend off enquiries from middle-aged men pretending to be teenagers on facebook.Of course, the more priveledged amongst us were already benched, enjoying all of the above services without guilt So it was that Office Work passed out of existence, unnoticed and unmourned.

The last rites of Office Work will be performed at the municipal crematorium.No one will attend as they would all be exchanging the juicy gossip of other people's love lives on googletalk..

the video actually demonstrates how productive we managers are....

Chimes of freedom..

For over 40 years, Bob Dylan has remained the most influential American musician rock has ever produced and unquestionably the most important of the 1960s. Inscrutable and unpredictable, Bob Dylan has been both deified and denounced for every shift of interest, while whole schools of musicians took up his ideas. His lyrics - the first in rock to be seriously regarded as literature - became so well known that politicians from Jimmy Carter to Václav Havel have cited them as an influence. By personalizing folk songs, Dylan reinvented the singer/songwriter genre; by performing his allusive, poetic songs in his nasal, spontaneous vocal style with an electric band, he enlarged pop’s range and vocabulary while creating a widely imitated sound. By recording with Nashville veterans, he reconnected rock and country, hinting at the country rock of the ’70s. In the ’80s and ’90s, although he has at times seemed to flounder, he still has the ability to challenge, infuriate, and surprise listeners.I wont go on much about the man because his bio would not fit into this post.However, today i'll post some interesting trivia about some of his most famous songs, songs which have inspired countless millions across the globe; songs which certainly would figure amongst my favourites...

In April 1962, at Gerde's Folk City in New York's Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan gave a quick speech before playing one of his new songs: "This here ain't no protest song or anything like that, 'cause I don't write no protest songs," he said. He then sang the first and third verses of the still- unfinished "Blowin' in the Wind." Published in full a month later in the folk journal Broadside and recorded on July 9th, 1962, for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind" was Dylan's first important composition. It is also the most famous protest song ever written. As a songwriter, Dylan was still emerging from his Woody Guthrie fixation. But in a decisive break with the rhetorical, current-events conventions of topical folk, Dylan framed the crises around him in a series of fierce, poetic questions that addressed what Dylan believed was man's greatest inhumanity to man: indifference. "Some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and they know it's wrong," he declared in the Freewheelin' liner notes. Much later, Dylan revealed more about the mechanics of writing the song to the Los Angeles Times: "I wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind' in ten minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That's the folk tradition. You use what's been handed down" -- and, of course, pass it on.

Knockin' on heaven's door :Three years had passed since his last studio album, and Dylan seemed at a loss. So he accepted an invitation to go to Mexico for Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for which he shot a bit part and did the soundtrack. For a death scene, Dylan delivered this tale of a dying sheriff, who wants only to lay his "guns in the ground."This song is a personal favourite and has been covered by eric clapton, gun n roses and avril lavigne amongst others.

"I wrote it. I didn't fail. It was straight," Bob Dylan said of his greatest song shortly after he wrote and recorded it in June 1965. There is no better description of "Like a Rolling Stone" -- of its revolutionary design and execution -- or of the young man, just turned twenty-four, who created it.Al Kooper, who played organ on the session, remembers today, "There was no sheet music, it was totally by ear. And it was totally disorganized, totally punk. It just happened."
To this day, the most stunning thing about "Like a Rolling Stone" is the abundance of precedent: the impressionist voltage of Dylan's language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice ("Ho-o-o-ow does it fe-e-e-el?"), the apocalyptic charge of Kooper's garage-gospel organ and Mike Bloomfield's stiletto-sharp spirals of Telecaster guitar, the defiant six-minute length of the June 16th master take. No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.During his British tour in May 1965, immortalized in D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, Dylan began writing an extended piece of verse -- twenty pages long by one account, six in another -- that was, he said, "just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred, directed at some point that was honest." Back home in Woodstock, New York, over three days in early June, Dylan sharpened the sprawl down to that confrontational chorus and four taut verses bursting with piercing metaphor and concise truth. "The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out," he confessed to rolling stone magazine in 1988, "and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much."The beginnings of "Like a Rolling Stone" -- and its roots in Dylan's earliest musical loves -- can be seen in a pair of offstage moments in Don't Look Back. In the first, sidekick Bob Neuwirth gets Dylan to sing a verse of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway," which begins, "I'm a rolling stone, I'm alone and lost/For a life of sin I've paid the cost." Later, Dylan sits at a piano, playing a set of chords that would become the melodic basis for "Like a Rolling Stone," connecting it to the fundamental architecture of rock & roll. Dylan later identified that progression as a chip off of Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba."Yet Dylan obsessed over the forward march in "Like a Rolling Stone." Before going into Columbia Records' New York studios to cut it, he summoned Bloomfield, the guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, to Woodstock to learn the song. "He said, 'I don't want you to play any of that B.B. King shit, none of that fucking blues,' " recalled Bloomfield (who died in 1981). "I want you to play something else." Dylan later said much the same thing to the rest of the studio band, which included pianist Paul Griffin, bassist Russ Savakus and drummer Bobby Gregg: "I told them how to play on it, and if they didn't want to play it like that, well, they couldn't play with me."Just as Dylan bent folk music's roots and forms to his own will, he transformed popular song with the content and ambition of "Like a Rolling Stone." And in his electrifying vocal performance, his best on record, Dylan proved that everything he did was, first and always, rock & roll. " 'Rolling Stone' 's the best song I wrote," he said flatly at the end of 1965. It still is

Inspired by Bruce Langhorne -- a session guitarist who played on several Dylan records -- "Tambourine Man" is the tune that elevated Dylan from folk hero to bona fide star. "[Bruce] was one of those characters. . . . He had this gigantic tambourine as big as a wagon wheel," Dylan said. "The vision of him playing just stuck in my mind." Written partly during a drug-fueled cross-country trek in 1964, the song was recorded on January 15th, 1965; five days later, based on a demo they'd heard, the Byrds recorded their own version. "Wow, man," said Dylan, "you can even dance to that!"

The times..they are a changin':"I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, with short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way," said Dylan. "This is definitely a song with a purpose." Inspired by Scottish and Irish folk ballads and released less than two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the song became an immediate anthem and was covered by artists from the Byrds to Cher. Said Dylan, "I knew exactly what I wanted to say and who I wanted to say it to."

Comfortably Numb..

Pink Floyd's the Wall is arguably one of the most intriguing and imaginative albums in the history of rock music. Since its release in 1979, and the subsequent movie of 1982, the Wall has become synonymous with, if not the very definition of, the term "concept album." Aureally explosive on record and visually explosive on the screen, the Wall traces the life of the fictional protagoinst, Pink Floyd, from his boyhood days in war-torn England to his self-imposed isolation as a world-renownedrock star, leading to a climax that is as questionably cathartic as it is destructive.
From the outset, Pink's life revolves around an abyss of loss and isolation. Born to a war-ravaged nation that takes his father's life in the name of "duty," and an overprotective mother who lavishes equal measures of her love and phobias onto her son, Pink chooses to build a mental wall between himself and the rest of the world so that he can live in a constant, alienated equilibrium free from life's physical and emotional troubles. Every incident that causes Pink pain is yet another brick in his ever-growing wall: a fatherless childhood, a domineering mother, a country whose king signs his father's death certificate with a rubber stamp, the superficiality of stardom, an estranged marriage, even the very drugs he turns to in order to find release. As his wall nears completion, each brick further closing him off from the rest of the world, Pink spirals into a void of insanity, cementing in place the final brick in the wall. Yet the minute it is complete, Pink begins to realize the adverse effects of total mental isolation, helplessly watching as his fragmented psyche coalesces into the very dictatorial persona that antagonized the world during World War II, scarred his nation, killed his father, and thereby defiled his own life from birth. Culminating in a mental trial as theatrically rich as the greatest stage shows, the story ends with a message that is as enigmatic and circular as the rest of Pink's life. Whether it is ultimately viewed as a cynical story about the futility of life, or a hopeful journey of metaphorical death and rebirth, the Wall is certainly a musical milestone worthy of the title "art."

the Wall is about the golden mean and realizing that what you do affects others just as much as the things that are done to you; it's about being an individual but not to the point of personal and social alienation; it's about how a person can be so consumed with hatred that he becomes the very thing he hates; it's about the danger of making gods of men; it's about the importance of communication, the void of excess, the fullness of the little moments; and above all, it's about personal, communal and social responsibility.The metaphor of "the wall" is not entirely difficult to parse, especially after having been lead up to it by the previous songs on the album. The album is so grand and intricate that many people are intimidated by the thought of interpreting the main symbol of the piece, thinking that there is more to the simple image than meets the eye. While some might argue that the metaphor is incredibly tricky, I believe that it's the very opposite. If anything, the main idea of the "wall" is quite simple. In the physical world, a wall is simply a collection of material that is used as a partition to separate two or more things. The metaphor of the wall in the album and in life holds to this definition. Because life is so daunting at times, we all have a tendency to distance ourselves from it. Television takes our minds off it, alcohol dulls it, drugs alter the reality of it; in each example, we use everything at our disposal to prevent us from truly connecting with our feelings, from fully experiencing life as both good and bad. As a society, and equally as humans, we have been conditioned to distance ourselves from pain, even if that pain helps us in the long run. As a result, we create metaphorical bricks in our minds for every disturbing situation in an attempt to distance ourselves from being hurt again, from feeling raw and vulnerable. Over time, our personal walls in our minds grow higher and we become more cynical, more jaded towards life and our connections with it. In a sense, every brick is another defense mechanism, something that dulls the pain of a bad situation and disconnects us from ever having to feel that way again. Simply put, the metaphorical wall is nothing more than its real counterpart: a collection of bricks that separate us from something else. Just as the walls of your house protect you from the environment (both rain and sunshine, the good and bad), the mental walls we erect protect us from being completely vulnerable to Life (once again, both the good and bad).

There are a lot of recurrent images and themes throughout the album and movie: bricks / the wall; hammers;white / red color scheme; faceless masks; worms;etc.

As with most art, Pink Floyd's concept album is a combination of imagination and the author's personal life. The album's germinated during the band's 1977 "Animals" tour when frontman Roger Waters, growing disillusioned with stardom and the godlike status that fans grant to simple rock stars, became disenchanted with the seemingly mindless audience and spit in the face of a concert-goer. Drawing on these feelings of adult alienation as well as the those springing from the loss of his own father during World War II, Waters began to flesh out the fictional character of Pink. The band's first frontman, Syd Barret, and the wild stories surrounding his drugged-out escapades and subsequent withdrawal from the world provided Waters with further inspiration for the moody rock-star Pink. The contributions of bandmates David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright, provided the final brush strokes for Pink, a contemporary anti-hero, a modern everyman struggling to find, or arguably lose, self and meaning in a century fragmented by war.