Thursday Things: Sockdollager Edition
9 January 2020. Vol 2 No 2. By Dan McGirt. #22
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British squirrels should just be glad no country squires imported these things. Photo by Julia Craice on Unsplash
From the Thursday Things Squirrel Desk: Back in the late 1800s, pet squirrels were all the rage in England. No country estate was complete without a few in a cage for guest to feed and pet. Unfortunately for the domestic red squirrels, at least one country squire imported some red-blooded American grey squirrels. As you might expect, American squirrels are bigger, stronger, and ruder than the British variety. Inevitably, the Yankee invaders escaped or were released into the wild and proceeded to take over all the best squirrel habitat from the poor little local squirrels. Over the decades grey squirrels have all but driven domestic British squirrels to extinction. Now, however, top British scientists (or “boffins” as they call them) — including the guy who cloned Dolly the sheep — are coming to the homegrown rodents’ rescue with a squirrelly plan to exterminate the grey squirrels through genetic engineering:
They want to implant a gene into thousands of males to ensure any female offspring are infertile.
The trait would slowly spread, making squirrels unable to breed and wiping out the population.
This is nuts. It’s like no one learned the lesson of Jurassic Park. Do not mess with nature! If they go forward with this plan, we can expect the British Isles to be overrun by giant mutant grey squirrels by 2030 at the latest.
Listen to Jeff Goldblum, British boffins. Jeff Goldblum knows.
Also, I love that British scientists are called “boffins”. I have no idea why, but it has the perfect “brilliant, yet vaguely clueless” connotation, doesn’t it?
Time travel! One sage seriously working to build a time machine capable of reaching into the past is astrophysicist Dr. Ron Mallet, profiled on CNN.com:
He's created a prototype illustrating how lasers could be used to create a circulating beam of light that twists space and time -- inspired by his first job experimenting with lasers' effect on airplane jet engines.
"It turned out my understanding about lasers eventually helped me in my breakthrough with understanding how I might be able to find a whole new way for the basis of a time machine," says Mallett.
"By studying the type of gravitational field that was produced by a ring laser, this could lead to a new way of looking at the possibility of a time machine based on a circulating beam of light."
Mallett's also got a theoretical equation that, he argues, proves this would work.
"Eventually a circulating beam of laser lights could act as a sort of a time machine and cause a twisting of time that would allow you to go back into the past," he says.
The best part of this piece on Dr. Mallett’s time travel work is that it is posted not in CNN’s Science section but in the Travel section. Well played, CNN. Well played.
Cancer continues to lose ground. According to American Cancer Society statistics, “The death rate from cancer in the US declined by 29% from 1991 to 2017, including a 2.2% drop from 2016 to 2017, the largest single-year drop ever recorded.” You can download Cancer statistics, 2020 at the link.
Now that we’ve reached a decade with an actual name — it’s the Roaring Twenties, baby! — we can look back to the 1920s for cues. Will the Charleston make a comeback? Will flapper dresses? Prohibition? Who knows? But one thing that needs to return is quirky 1920s slang. Here are 59 Quick Slang Phrases From The 1920s We Should Start Using Again, including:
Bearcat: a lively, spirited woman, possibly with a fiery streak
Giggle water: liquor, alcoholic beverage
Hayburner: a car with poor gas-mileage, a guzzler
Noodle juice: tea.
Sockdollager: an event or action of great importance
Spifflicated: inebriated
Pick your favorites and start working them into conversation! Now you’re on the trolley!
Perhaps you’ve seen this already. It’s worth seeing again if you have. Adorable 6-year-old Irish girl arguing with her mother that she ought to be allowed to the pub. After all, “I am six years old! Why can’t I go to the pub?” Watch the whole thing!
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