“If you want to shine like the sun, first you have to burn like it.”
– Adolf Hitler

“He was marooned in the jaws of a human minefield, and with every step the noose grew tighter.”
– Paul and Anthony Cuneo, quoting sports columnist Jerry Izenberg in the New Jersey Star Ledger

“I am pleased to announce that, although attitudes have improved immensely, the beatings will continue.”
– M. Boots

“When I was a kid I found a pocket dictionary that defined ‘bucket’ as ‘pail’ and vice-versa and realized that no one’s in charge of anything.”
– Daniel Kibblesmith

“Never let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants can be in the parade.”
– Merlin Mann

“It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.”
– Weinberg

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again,”
– CS Lewis

“No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”
– John Adams

“He who laughs last thinks slowest”
– Anon

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.”
– Stephen King

“You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.”
– H.L. Mencken

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
– Borges

Humanity’s most pointless endeavor: trying to get girls to like boy stuff. At least Prometheus is getting some acupuncture out of his deal. At least Sisyphus is getting in a workout.

In 1973, Playgirl was conceived as a female-friendly riposte to male-aimed porn magazines. The magazine ended up with a loyal readership…of gay men.

In 1998, Powerpuff Girls was launched as an action-focused cartoon that gave girls butt-kicking role models. By 2002, 70% of its TV audience was male.

More recently, girl-aimed My Little Pony attracted a rather odd male fanbase that disturbs Lauren Faust and almost everyone who works on the show. (I’m trying to find that Tara Strong twitter reply where she say something like “no, you can’t have sex with an animated horse”)

I think a lot of people who work in TV have the arrogant belief that they’re the shapers of public taste. When f*m*n*sts get involved, that manifests as ideas that media is brainwashing young girls, and that girls only play with Barbie because they we didn’t give them Gina Rinehart dolls, or something. If girls seem any different to boys, it’s the fault of TV shows and toy companies. We’ve gotta fix this right now. No more pink toys. No more girls shows that focus on romance.

All such attempts fail, but let’s assume the premise is correct. If young minds are malleable to such a degree, why stop there? We could easily be building a race of superhumans.

Lovable “slacker” characters should be banned from TV. Seriously. They’re clearly a bad influence. No more Homer Simpson or Beavis and Butthead. All TV characters should be type-A overachievers who go to church and never forget to call their mothers. We’ve got impressionable young brains watching this stuff, and we can’t allow them to be lead astray.

No more villains and crimes depicted on TV, either. Maybe we should have Batman putting the fear of God into people who pick their nose or chew with their mouth open. Obviously TV is the fount of all human behavior, so if we accomplish this we can eradicate crime in one generation. That was easier than I thought.

Obviously, humans have no biological limitations, it’s all cultural. TV has to teach kids to dream big. We should show crippled kids NBA matches, and triathlons. Maybe it will motivate them to be less crippled. It’s worth a try, surely.

(I’ve noticed though, that nobody gives much of a damn about negative stereotypes about boys. Nobody thinks Beavis and Butthead is a misandrist conspiracy to discourage boys from being ambitious. They flip shit when Barbie says “math is hard”, though. I agree with Barbie. Math is hard.)

This piece by Douglas Hofstadter was funny, but I don’t agree. I think common usage is the king, and people should only contravene the king’s orders under dire circumstances. I also don’t agree with Vihart’s tweet that “Gender neutral pronouns have failed again, and again, and again… which means they have the persistence to someday succeed.” So the more I fail, the more likely I am to succeed? Doesn’t sound mathematically rigorous. The English language changes to whatever form it wants, nobody can predict it, and none of those changes are intrinsically better or worse – the Grimm’s Shift of ancient times was no different to the “ebonics” of today. Just a mutation that seems to have survived.

But if we were able to redesign the English language to be as convenient as possible, what would we do?

Graphological changes

– Make every character unique – no mirrors or flips. Make it impossible to mistake b for backwards d, or M for upside down W.

– Rearrange the alphabet so that commonest letters are at the front, and less used letters are at the back. There’s no reason the alphabet should run A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z instead of E-T-A-O-I-N-S-R-H-D-L-U-C-M-F-Y-W-G-P-B-V-K-X-Q-J-Z. Maybe then we won’t call it the alphabet, we’ll call it the epsilontau.

– Optimise the English script for handwriting. Make it so that x (for example) can be written with one stroke – perhaps by connecting the two lines with an arch.

Linguistic changes

– Incorporate Japanese’s honorifics. They’re useful as hell. They let you add trick out sentences out with emotion and color and nuance. “Yes, Spongebob-sama” is a nearly the opposite of “Yes, Spongebob-chan.”

– Add some pronoun modifiers so we can tell multiple people of the same gender apart. You want effective anti-gay therapy? Imagine giving yourself an embolism trying to puzzle out gay erotica (“He pressed him closer and ran his teeth over his neck…”). Maybe call the subject him1 and people in further proximity him2, him3, etc.

– Fix “w” so that it isn’t three syllables long. Have you ever tried to give someone a website address and had your mouth block up with dubya-dubya-dubyas like a jammed printer? This article suggests a pronounciation of “wu”.

– Remove the indefinite article, like Greek does. And if we get get away without the definitive article, so much the better. I hate a‘s and the‘s sitting in between the real words. Somehow they cause my trypophobia to flare up.