Hi, Mom.
(She asked if I was alive and well, OK?)
Those of you who have read as far as the tagline of this site have probably noticed our fondness for neologisms and malapropisms and just downright silliness. Since anyone who visits Science After Sunclipse has certainly wasted at least one afternoon reading through the xkcd archive, you must already know the ultimate origin of our favorite malaprops:
(Hold mouse over image for additional joke. Cartoon licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5.)
Eric and I spent quite a while trying to find the best generalization of blag and wobsite. Eventually, while walking to a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square — on the sort of dark and rainy day which makes you intone, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies” — we decided upon blagnet and wobosphere. Recently, I’ve also grown fond of new formations from the blag- root, such as blaggregator and blaggravation.
Usage: “Man, keeping myself on PZ’s groll is really giving me some blaggravation!”
Those of you in the Greater MIT Metropolitan Area are invited to join us in making xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe’s visit to the Institute this 14 May as memorable as possible. I’m sure you’ll all have leftover weirdness you didn’t expend during Steer Roast. . . .
Thank you, son. Is it sorta like having a parent over your shoulder if your mother reads your blog –er– blag? Will it inhibit what you post??
Given that my next topics in the queue are statistical bioinformatics, supersymmetric quantum mechanics and the pseudoscience of “Heim theory” — no, probably not.
:-)
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, son, but that’s not your mother. It’s coming from inside the house!
Hehehe. The alt text on xkcd posts often makes the cartoon go from “uh, okay” to all out laughter.
It’s also totally awesome that LSC is getting someone popular out there to speak. I’m so jealous.
I’d be curious to know what the male-female ratio will be at this Randall gathering. And what does a cartoonist talk about in regards to his cartoons? “I draw my thoughts, they often have sciency themes; so much can be said in one square; people like them; they like talking about them; they really like the romantic ones; I attract nerds; they so dig me that they’re planning to meet at a Boston playground in September based on one of my cartoons; let’s go for drinks now.” :-)
(May 14th is my birthday and even “older non-nerds” dig him.)