So, on the last official day of WisCon, after programming has wrapped, they have the dead cow party... what is sometimes known in other quarters as the dead dog party, but this is Madison so I'm afraid it's cows all the way down.

I know what I'd said about me not doing parties, but this was my last chance to see some of the people I know and hang out with them a little, so I made a habit of going downstairs every so often and peeking in to see if I recognized anyone. After a few times of that I decided that was more likely to get results if I stayed there, so I took my phone down and read an ebook on it in a quiet-ish corner. I'd only been there a minute or two when I heard "There's Alexandra!"

So that was how I ended up hooking up with ktempest on the last day of the con. Which, you know, I know I could have just shot her a message on any of the myriad places I can message her, but... not good at the outreach.

Anyway, she'd popped down to see what goodies there were in the cow room, and she asked me if we would like to join her up in the Governor's Club. For the unitiated, these are the top three floors of the hotel that are fortified with swankiness, views of the lake, and free alcohol.

I almost said no, because Jack and Sarah were waiting back in the room for me and Jack had been feeling a little run down, but I also knew that under a lot of circumstances he would have jumped at it, so I decided to leave it up to him instead of makin the call.

To make a long story short*, we did end up going up with her and we spent an hour just chilling, talking about Tumblr and meta-meta fan fic and all kinds of other things. We might have stayed longer, but we fly out in the morning and we hadn't had dinner yet, so we excused ourselves... but not before Tempest extracted a promise that we'd book in the governor's club for ourselves next year.

Which we've done. So, that's going to make it easier for us to find our folks and hang out with them, and also easier to withdraw from the hullabaloo when we need some time out.

So, next year in the Governor's Club. It should be awesome.

So, I just checked my Facebook and saw a post by my mother:

So we complained about the cold all through April, wanting warmer weather...and now second day of record-setting 90s on the temps. 97 F. on May 10! Guess this is the weather's way of saying be careful what you ask for.

All of a sudden, the past couple of days (which have been fairly miserable for me) kind of fell into place.

One of the things my mitochondrial condition does is make me vulnerable to high temperatures. My body's basic inefficiency makes it tend to run hot to begin with, and it's not any better at cooling itself than it is anything else. I had some coping strategies in mind for the height of summer after last year, but I hadn't been really thinking about implementing them because it has been such a cool spring. Just a week... literally one week ago, last Tuesday, we were having overnight temperatures of 34 degrees. Two degrees above freezing.

Today?

Temperature peaked at 97.

So on Sunday, my loft was still basically still arranged for winter when it started to warm up. I did get the window a/c set up, but only after the attic started to heat up. I didn't do much else, as I figured the a/c would be enough... I did cotton on to the fact that this week was shaping up to be warmer than last week, but I figured it was going to be May-warm. You know, eighties.

To make a long story short*, I ended up having an extremely uncomfortable and sleepless night on Sunday and an extremely sick and malaisey-feeling Monday. Monday night I made a few more adjustments to things, got my room a little better ventilated. Slept a bit better.

Today I realized the a/c wasn't cutting it. It's just not powerful enough to make a real dent in cooling a space as big as the entire attic when it's got the sun beating down on the roof all day. So I took two of my giant fleece blankets and tacked them up on either side of the support thing that roughly bisects the room. Et voila, a more reasonable-sized space for the a/c to contend with.

That was probably more physical exertion in a hot room than I should have undertook. When I did it I had no idea how hot it really was (I'm bad at telling that)... I was thinking, "Wow, if it's this uncomfortable this early on in May, I should do it now before later in the summer when we hit the nineties."

The results (of both my overexertion and the cocooning of one end of the room) are already noticeable. Happily, we're in for rain the next few days that will cool things down a bit. In the meantime, I need to hydrate a bit and take it easy.

I mentioned Douglas Adams's character of Dirk Gently in passing in a previous post, and my characterization of him as a con man attracted a comment voicing the other view. The commenter admitted only being familiar with the TV version, which I'm not familiar with, but this isn't the first time I've voiced my interpretation of the character and had someone disagree. Since I'm awake (again) I wanted to take a few minutes to spell out my reasoning.

To be specific, the way I describe Dirk is as a con man whose scams routinely fail, insofar as they fail to be scams. This happens so consistently across the two finished books that I believe it to be an unstated premise of them. It seems like few readers I've encountered agree with me, though. I think part of that is that it is unstated. There is a lot of subtle stuff in Douglas Adams's writing, but it's not all subtle and the surface is entertaining enough that you can forget there's a brilliantly multilayered mind at work. And then there's the fact that for all that "show, don't tell" is the rallying cry of writing instructors and editors everywhere, the state of the art is that you're at the very least expected to show in a way that is telling, or show and then tell the reader what you've shown them.

Nobody at any point in the series goes "Aha! I see what's happening. You keep pretending to be psychic and then your predictions come true." Dirk never curses the bad luck that keeps him from making a dishonest living as a huckster and instead lands him in the less well paying position of a heroic savior of the human race from extinction, and the fact that he does save the human race from extinction and preserve the multiversal order of things perhaps predisposes the reader to believe he's on the level.

But you know what? The question in my subject line isn't even a question. There is no question that Dirk is a con man because we see him engaged in confidence schemes in both books. There can be a question about whether his main line (the holistic detective agency) is meant to be a scam or not, but there's no doubt that he's a scammer in general.

In our introduction to Svlad Cjelli (alias Dirk Gently) we're told that while he was at university he deliberately engineered rumors that he was psychic while protesting that he was not, in order to create an environment in which people would pay him for what his best guess of what the exam answers would be, with the keys he sells being nothing more than a bunch of educated guesswork based on freely available information. We're led by the nose through the whole scheme. And then it falls apart because his best guesses end up being spot on, and with perfectly reproduced answer keys his plausible deniability flies out the window.

Now, a reader could infer from him that this experience led him to realize he has some intuitive understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things and that led him to decide to be a holistic detective, using his abilities to help mankind blah de blah blah blah.

Does that at all sound like how Dirk is portrayed in the book? As someone whose brush with prison prompted him to go on the straight and narrow? As someone who had a revelation? Given how quickly he accepts ghosts, time machines, gods, and everything else he encounters I can agree that he probably does believe in "the fundamental interconnectedness of things", but the main thing he seems to believe about it is that it allows him to charge credulous clients for expensive holidays and claim that they relate to the client's case. Because everything's related, he can charge for anything. I'm sure he believes that much. As Winston Zeddemore said, "If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."

Further, we see in book 2 that Dirk is still engaging in confidence schemes apart from the detective agency. He's doing a medium/spiritualism racket near the start of the book. We know it's a racket and not a legitimate extension of his stated belief that he can unravel mysteries through the fundamental interconnectedness of all things because he dress up in disguise and makes a load of shit up on the spot to tell some woman. It's a scam.

The fact that the load of shit later turns out to be bang-on accurate (after having first seemed to be completely at odds with reality) is just the unstated premise turning up again.

There's room for interpretation on whether Dirk actually is psychic (despite his protestations and his cynical attempts to fake it) or if the universe he lives in just has a perverse sense of humor (this is my theory, given that the universe in question is the mind of Douglas Adams), but it's not really left ambiguous that he is trying to fake it.

To make a long story short*, both books have at least one example of Dirk Gently, Phony Psychic. Do we as readers believe that he is a man who occasionally pretends to be a psychic in order to bilk people out of money while wholeheartedly believing he is a holistic detective who can solve mysteries involving unfaithful spouses and missing pets by interrogating the vibrational frequencies of a table leg (preferably a table leg somewhere sunny and warm) who sort of incidentally bilks people out of money while doing so?

Or do we believe the whole thing is a put-on from top to bottom, that the "holistic detective" gig falls into the same spectrum of pretending to have unique intuitive abilities as the "Really I'm Not Clairvoyant!"-Student-Scam and the Dress-Up-In-Fortune-Teller-Drag-And-Tell-Fortunes-Scam?

The latter seems more likely to me.

Take a look at this:

&

See that?

You're looking at the future.

But you're not just looking at any future, you're looking at one of those chilling dystopian types where the laws of civilization have been thrown out the window and anarchy reigns. Why? Because when you look at the symbol "&", you are looking at a world where such abomination as "leetspeak", "chatspeak", and "lolcat" can become accepted as a standard part of formal English.

To understand the future, we have to go back into the past. By the end of the 18th century, English-speaking schoolchildren were reciting their alphabets with a few flourishes that would strike us as odd. For one thing, they included the ligature for "and"--that symbol above--at the end of the list. For another thing, they attached the Latin phrase "per se" (essentially, "in itself") to any item in the recitation that could stand as a word. This included such notable vowels as A and I, and of course it included the ligature.

So the early 19th century recitation of the alphabet didn't end "X, Y, and Z."

No, it went "X, Y, Z, and per se and."

Do you see where this is going? The name we give that funny squiggly mark has no proper basis, it's just a product of one too many rote recitations being slurred, misremembered, or misunderstood.

And-per se-and.

Ampersand.

And now it's part of our language. And that mark? I called it a ligature. That's something we don't really do in American English. It's two letters written as a single glyph. When you see someone using British English typing "foetus" or an archaic spelling like "aeon" (as in the cartoon that was never adapted into a movie, Aeon Flux), you're witnessing an odd linguistic twist where two separate letters are being used to approximate a ligature that itself replaced the separate letters. The actual spelling would be "fœtus" or "æon".

The history of ligatures' rising and falling fortunes follows the history of writing technology. In the earliest forms of writing, they just sort of happened because some symbols tended to run into each other. Scribes copying books out by hand developed them intentionally as shortcuts. They survived the earliest forms of mass printing, but the more things trended towards standardization and mass production, the more superfluous all these special characters seemed to be. What was once a great saver of time became a bit of a needless expense.

Ligatures can be kind of a big deal in some languages but nowadays even in British English ligatures are often used just for stylistic flourishes (again, as in the title of the aforementioned cartoons), but & remains.

Those of you who aren't familiar with this history and don't know enough about language to fill in the gaps are probably wondering exactly what two letters "&" is supposed to be. Even if I tell you, you'll have to turn your head and squint a little to see them... it's sort of gone through multiple generations of flourishes.

The letters, though, are E and t.

Et.

Latin for "and", naturally.

To make a long story short*, we have in current use in the English language a symbol that we read as "and", that we give a name that has all the dignity and etymological standing of "pasghetti", and that we represent as a scribbled version of the same word in a different language.

I submit to you that a hundred internets operating for a couple of months (this is a hundred years, in internet time) could not come up with a linguistic convention more ridiculous than the simple ampersand... and yet no one looks at it askance when it shows up in the names of old and venerable corporations like AT&T, on the letterheads of respectable law firms, in published legal documents or even the bodies of laws themselves.

The future is here, in other words... the future where chatspeak has become accepted. And it's not just the &.

Computer programs designed for the very professionaliest of professional applications will still tell its users to click "OK" to continue, even though "OK" is a newspaper in-joke from the days when media itself was new media. It's an abbreviation for "oll korrect" (all correct). What can the modern era haz that compares to this?

At Wimbledon, the announcer will declare love for both sides in front of God, the Queen, and everyone else. Is he some kind of hippy? No. That's just another way of saying zero. How did "zero" become "love"? The most common theory is that it came from the habit of calling a zero an egg (as in "goose egg", or "duck egg" in some places.) Okay, how does "egg" become "love"? By way of French "l'oeuf". Wikipedia tells me that this is not proven, and is challenged on the basis that the French themselves never used "l'oeuf" to mean zero so there's no way an English-speaker could have misheard them... but of course, that's supposing it was a mistake in the first place, and not an in-joke, or a series of them.

First someone calls zero "the big ol' goose egg", or its equivalent. Then somebody decides that's undignified and decides to class it up by putting it in "the language of the court" (because everything sounds classier in French). It sounds kind of like "love", so by and by people start just saying "love", and before you can say "no1curr"... ladies and gentlemen, a meme is born.

Did it happen that way? I don't know. No one does. But we do know this: on a fairly regular basis, a very serious man will say "love" in a very serious tone and mean "zero".

I've said it before and it bears repeating: these kinds of changes to the language didn't start with the internet, or with our generation, or the moment you (for any given value thereof) first noticed memes, in-jokes, slang, text/IM conventions, or whatever else creeping into the language. It's been going on forever, and the examples of how it's affected the language we speak just go on and on, too. It is the language we speak.

We today use words that were just metaphors to our ancestors, or are bastardized foreign words that they thought sound cool, or really just rhymed with the actual word they meant... or in some cases, are another part of a phrase containing a word that rhymes with the word they meant.

Why does "bread" mean "money"? Because "money" rhymes with "honey", of course. Now "bread" meaning "money" isn't exactly standard English, but it's well-known and has spread beyond its Cockney roots. And of course, it is part of standard English that salt means money. No, really... the "salary" you get paid comes from "salarium". Salt money, the stipend given to Roman soldiers to buy the the essential staple of life that is salt.

Of course, that happened two thousand years ago, so we call it "etymology" and act like it isn't really kind of weird. Which it isn't. It also isn't weird that we use a 16th century contraction of "God be with you" every time we say "goodbye".

This is just how language works.

The problem... if it is a problem... is that language never stopped working this way. When you try to view a language that's still widely spoken as a finished product, it's like viewing a snapshot of a horse mid-stride with one hoof on the ground and saying "Well, clearly a horse is an animal with one leg and three arms." Or looking at the corpse of a horse and saying, "Well, clearly, a horse is something very much like a corpse."

English isn't dead yet. It's a vital language... living, growing, and evolving. None of us can predict with any certainty which of the conventions that have been emerging through the late 20th and early 21st century will catch on to the point that they will eventually be codified and recognized as being a formal part of the language (though there have already been some cringe-inducing additions to the dictionaries in the past two decades), but we can predict with a certainty that some of them will.

& it will be OK.

Srsly.