‘Con’ is short for ‘convention’, and you can have a ‘convention’ for any number of things. Doctors have them, teachers have them, leaders of business do it, and so on. But when it’s the geeks and freaks, it’s just a ‘con’. Cons often have a theme (duh, it’s run by nerds!) – they are often anime, scifi, fantasy, or gaming, etc. The biggest in the business is ComicCon in San Diego, with over 100,000 in attendance. Yes, this is either your best dream come true, or a freakin’ nightmare! And I mean the ‘freakin’ part literally.

DragonCon in Atlanta is the next biggest with 60,000 folks. Most are smaller, and in order to compete with the big guns, they have to distinguish themselves. Many go for the fun con names. A few of my favorites are: ConStellation, ConGlomeration (I’ll be there!), LepreCon, ConClave, ConDuit, ConFusion and my favorite the Wrath of Con.

Most Cons have dealer rooms (where I am with all the other vendors). But they all have something else, too. It may be art shows (all the multi-hued ink drawings of fairies and dragons you could ever wish for). Or games (D and D with about 500 other folks). Or seminars (The future of SciFi, how to sell your novel, what’s next for Joss Whedon). Or any combination of those.

Because of this, each of the Cons has its own feel. And for me, this changes how my booth fits. Some are more literary (oooooh books!). Some are more SciFi and tech oriented (ooooh Audiobooks on a Flash Drive!). Some are more Fantasy oriented (bronze age materials only! If it isn’t a sword or chain mail, they aren’t interested.) And some are more anime oriented (now, you call these black marks on the papers ‘words’? and you say if I turn the pages I could get a whole ‘story’? Well, I don’t know about this ‘book’ thing.)

What doesn’t distinguish any of the cons is the costumes. Folks come dressed to the hilt as their favorite characters. Or as someone that might have been found in their favorite movie or book. Or they come in a storebought Halloween costume. You name it, it’s there. And it’s everything from a pair of ears, to the full nine yards.

I’ve seen SuperMen and WonderWomen. Tons of Jedi Knights and Storm Troopers – a really high quantity of which are surprisingly overweight! There’s a full scale, remote controlled R2D2 that makes the rounds of all the cons. This guy just built it, and enjoys walking around about 20 feet behind it and watching people interact with the droid. He makes it turn, bleep, you name it. It’s pretty cool, even if you aren’t a die-hard Star Wars junkie.

Horns and elf ears are about a dime a dozen, but even at the small cons, there’s at least one person who goes all out. A great recent one I saw was Spy vs Spy. You have to be old enough to have read Mad Magazine to get that one. But the two guys stalked each other around the con for the day and stopped for photo ops along the way. I’ve even made friends with a full-costumed Darth Maul. He ended up buying one of my books. With credit! Who knew? (See pictures on my Website.)

But my favorite con story (so far) is when two Indiana Joneses met in front of my booth. Actually there were three – one of them had a son, also dressed as Indiana. They started having a conversation about where to get the whip and the hat and the jacket. Apparently, there’s a website. Or several. You aren’t limited to Indy-wear either. There’s a “Golden Fertility Idol Pencil Holder” and a “Holy Grail Magnetized Paperclip Container”. But the best part of the conversation was when the two Indys finished, shook hands and walked away. After a second, the one Indy realized his son wasn’t following. The kid was checking out an action figure at the next table. So the dad chided him. “I told you not to touch the toys, Harrison.”

Ah! Now, that’s dedication. See you at the next con!

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Limited Time Offer – Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

We can all laugh about Southerners and their speech, and why not? Southern twang is the one most often associated with ‘stupid’. Though southern states do not help their cause by routinely coming in the bottom quarter of public school rankings, the fact is, this just ain’t so. It’s just a vernacular like all the others.

Try it out! Give us your best New Yawk accent, or what about Bawston, where the cahs ah wicked good in the cold wethah. You can lilt like a Suthonah or even drawl and crawl like they do in NewAhlins (yes, that’s all one word to the locals). But what about the Westerners? Give me a good Oregon accent? Wyoming? California? Yep, I can’t do it either.

What’s really interesting is the fact that Western American dialect is only just now beginning to diverge, and my own imagination believes this will be stifled by the use of facebook, texting and all things internet and cellular. If you look at a dialect map, it really resembles the old 13 colonies map (lots going on over in the east, some in the Midwest, then just a big block with some handscrawled lettering saying ‘western territories’). The two are so similar that it makes me wonder if this isn’t part of the issue.

This may go back to the whole territory thing; the South was settled in large part by the Irish. The New York area had Irish but also lotsa Italians. The West had . . . well, a lot of those people were already Americans. It seems the Westerners (particularly Californians) don’t so much give us an accent to make fun of, but they do give us lots of great terminology. Who can forget “gag me with a spoon” and “totally”? And the cursed ‘like’ is still part of our vernacular. And if you drive in SoCal (yes, another of their phrasisms) you don’t take I-5 to 101Freeway. You take THE Five to THE one-oh-one. You could take that to THE four-oh-five, but you’ll just sit there. That road is a parking lot.

Many thanks to the “American Dialects Links” page

But seriously, no matter where I searched, there’s only about 1/3 as many dialect links for anything in the Western HALF of the US as in each of the 5 other regions (New England, Mid Atlantic, Midwest, Southeast, Mid South). Crazy huh? I guess you westerners just don’t talk funny do you?

It also seems that the stronger the twang, the more people assume the speaker is uneducated. Growing up with an East-Tennessee physicist for a father (yes, you can read that phrase again if you need to. In fact there is more than one East-Tennessee physicist out there!) I heard the craziest stuff around the dinner table. Yup, phrases like ‘them there quarks’ ‘would you carry me up to the lab? I gots to run the reactor experiment tomorrow.’ (Oh, did I mention these were nuclear physicists?) and ‘Them missile payloads we done designed might could be comin’ in tomorrah’.

Though a strong Minnesota bent toward ‘ya umm-hmm’ or even the complete inability of a Bostonian to pronounce an ‘r’ will lead the listener to believe he’s talking to someone who didn’t make it through the SATs, that would be a mistake. Humans survived by imitating, and language is no exception.

When I first moved back to Tennessee, I had a good friend ask if I was going to start using ‘y’all’ now that I lived in the South. I laughed. Of COURSE I was going to start using ‘y’all’. This led to phrases like ‘but you don’t really have an accent’ ‘you’re a bit of a grammarian’ and some general disbelief. Why would anyone choose to use y’all?

I pointed out that Southerners had the only reasonable distinction between ‘you’ the singular and ‘you’ the plural. What are the other options? You guys? Yous? Yous guys? The South not only tames this trouble with ‘you’ and ‘y’all’ but goes above and beyond with a third option. When addressing the whole group (especially if it might have become confused with a sub-group – i.e. all the workers and not just the female ones) we have the following: all y’all . . .

It’s even better when it’s possessive, ‘pick up all y’all’s plates when y’all’re done eating.’ Nothing beats the word with not just one, but TWO apostrophes. I am all in.

So all y’all shut down your computers when y’all’re done reading this. Don’t want to make a big carbon footprint, now do ya?

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Limited Time Offer – Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

I’m sure that I’ve missed a good number of alternate uses here, too – that just about every profession has something that’s ‘hot’ that means something unique to the job. I bet you probably haven’t ever sat down and tried to come up with all the different meanings of that silly little word, but sadly it’s the kind of thing my brain latches onto and won’t let go of. And it got stuck on this ‘hot’ track when my daughter was in the backseat of the car waiting for the AC to kick in, so she exclaimed “I am smokin’ hot back here!”

No, not ‘hot’, not ‘boiling’ ‘frying’ ‘about to vaporize’ or any of the other phrases us adults had been throwing around in the Ninety-plus heat that week. And she didn’t even say ‘smoking hot’ with the ‘g’ – no she gave it the kind of inflection that calls to mind just about anything Jim Carrey is in. She said she was “Smokin’ Hot!”

It’s really hard to tell an eight year old why she isn’t smokin’ hot. Should you explain what the phrase she just yelled out means? Reassure her that one day she will be smokin’ hot, but not at eight. You can’t tell her that you just don’t say that! Because then it becomes mysterious and forbidden and suddenly she’ll be saying it all the time. I decided for distraction.

Though this was funny (kindof!) adults are doing it, too. As parents we had to recently do the ‘dance recital’ thing. This means a backstage, a swarm of little girls in fluffy, sparkly, shiny multi-hued costumes. Out in the wings, where the girls gathered after they were dressed and waiting to get their hair artfully done (maybe in an attempt to distract from the dancing?) one mother was complaining that her little girl couldn’t keep her costume straight, or her hair up or her makeup on. I was biting my tongue to say something about the reason four year olds shouldn’t be dressed like that, when the mother exclaimed that her daughter was just a ‘hot mess’.

Um. Ew.
I don’t think she meant that, though her daughter was smokin’ hot, she was an emotional wreck . . . I hope not. I always hear this term used for pretty girls with binge drinking problems or the girlfriend with issues that she just has to share with everyone else. I really hope she didn’t mean this about the four-year-old.

But how is my kid supposed to know that she’s not smokin’ hot if this Mom isn’t even paying attention?

I used to think that adults should keep up with the latest phrases . . . but now I may be changing my mind. If you can’t use them right maybe you shouldn’t be using them at all. I mean you wouldn’t want to mistakenly tell people that your four-year-old may be really attractive but she has drinking problems and probably daddy-issues when all you really mean is that she’s a mess.

This mom didn’t seem to have a clue that she’d said something inappropriate. But even when you know the wrong thing can come out your mouth. As a teacher for adults, I am often starting up a new class with new students, and my boss likes to come in and introduce us teachers when possible.

I was recently introduced as ‘Your super hot teacher’. Um. Ooops. My boss at least had the wherewithal to be embarrassed by this slip. The students no longer cared if I was a good teacher, all heads cranked around to the back of the room to see if I was indeed ‘super hot’.

Later he sat in his office with his head in his hands as he tried to apologize. “I was trying to say ‘super great’ or ‘super cool’ or something.” Yeah, when adults get their hands on the latest lingo only bad things can happen. It hasn’t worked well since the grandma started talking Jive in the movie Airplane and that was a long long time ago.

My boss apologized several times more before I finally said ‘Look, I know it was a slip. The only thing you really need to apologize for is doing it halfway. Couldn’t I have at least been ‘smokin’ hot’?”

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Limited Time Offer – Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

It isn’t surprising that I love this kind of thing, since it seems to run in my family. Case in point, I have to credit my mother with this one:

She had a good friend who was turning forty. This woman was mortified that someone might find out it was her birthday (she hadn’t celebrated in years) and worse, that someone might know just how old she was.

This prank has the trifecta – perfect fit for the victim, cheap and easy! (those were the three criteria – I wasn’t calling the victim cheap and easy.)

This woman was at a class that my mother also attended, and when they left they went to their cars. My mom pulled the bright yellow flier off her car and headed back to her friend, let’s call her ‘Carol’. “Is this right, Carol?” Mom is waving this flier that says “Carol is 40! Cake, Beer and Strippers! Saturday, 7pm” and it lists Carol’s home address. Mortified, Carol pulls her own flyer off and reads it.

In a fury, she tears through the parking lot, ripping flyers off windows, as fast as she can. Empty spaces reveal that some of them already got away. She cleaned most of the cars before she realized all the others had a stupid happy face and read ‘have a nice day’.

It was a nice day for my Mom. It was twenty minutes before she could stop laughing enough to drive me home, and two weeks before Carol spoke to her again. As I wasn’t a big fan of Carol’s kid, I thought it was well played all around.

Another favorite of mine is the high school senior prank. There’s always a challenge to outdo previous years’ escapades. We had one of those big Mayfield cows nearby, and it was stolen so many times they finally permanently installed it on a trailer, so at least it was easy to fetch back.

But my favorite is the group of kids who released two pigs in the senior high just before the last week of school. Apparently, the pigs were released on a Saturday and they had plenty of time to cause havoc over the weekend before a Monday morning discovery. This prank gets points because once you set the pigs free, they do all the work for you.

But the kids get extra bonus points because they painted on the sides of the two pigs. The offending porcines were labeled “Pig #1” and “Pig #3”.

*sigh*
I so want to hire these guys when they finish college!

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

It’s best when you can have this kind of fun with your friends – a group of folks just having a good time. But there’s also a lot to be said when a friend gets to participate unwittingly.

Now, I’m the first to say that if you drink yourself into a state where you don’t know what’s going on around you, that’s your own problem. You could wake up with a wet bed from the old hand-in-warm-water trick. Or get a face full of shaving cream – be sure your friends didn’t load your palms with the stuff before they woke you up. You could wake and find your bed/cot/whatever suspended twelve feet in the air between two trees – and if you were drinking the night before, you likely aren’t on you’re A-game, so you probably didn’t figure that one out until you hit the ground. You could even wake up duct taped to a tree. Worse, you could come around to find any one of these things has happened, and you’re naked, wearing a black-permanent-marker pirate face, and it’s posted on Youtube.

No, don’t blame me for any of those. If you drank so much you don’t remember, then that’s your own fault. In fact, my group of friends knows to stay sober or take what you get.

A good time might have a victim, but it doesn’t have to. Stuffing the coke bottles with dry ice is just fun for everyone involved. And when I was looking at grad schools for the spring term, my tour group at Cal Poly passed a huge gooey mess on the quad. It turns out, some of the students decided to have a pumpkin smashing contest. Only, instead of just dropping the suckers, they dipped them in liquid nitrogen first so they shattered. Pumpkin shards are pretty cool things. And actually pretty dangerous. They scatter far and can be really sharp. So this fall, stay back twenty feet from my house.

The pumpkins unfreeze fast enough that they are only dangerous when they break, but if you left one on someone’s doorstep they’d have a real hard time figuring out how you broke it into those cool looking slivers.

No, I’m not suggesting you do anything really dangerous, but hey, you can really put one over on someone. The next time you have a group over for dinner, the last one in gets the meal you cooked separate. Though it looks the same, it can be full of salt, Cajun spices, jalapeno juice, whatever. Just make sure it looks identical to the other plates, and make sure everyone else knows to complement the meal repeatedly. See how long the sucker will eat the nasty dish before he catches on.

Sure, you can toilet paper your friend’s yard. But why? I grant that it’s tried and true. But you could do so much more. Be creative. Then sleep lightly!

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

This kind of thing has been done before . . . there are old psychology experiments where the experimenters would run a series of simple tests that didn’t do anything except make the test subjects feel like something was really happening. Then an assistant would run in and tell the subject that they had just received word that his sister had died in a car accident. The scientist would carefully record the reaction and later say, “it was all part of the test! Your sister is fine! Ha ha ha.”

Yes, this is illegal now.

Except that maybe it isn’t. In my book, Resonance, I referenced a ‘gas leak’ in McMinnville Tennessee from some number of years before. It was reported on NPR and the CDC determined it was just mass hysteria. The problem was that the good folks at the CDC are better educated than that, and even the janitor there should know that mass hysteria doesn’t have entirely separate simultaneous multiple start points. It just doesn’t work that way. But I never heard anyone raising a cry about this.

Later, I heard of a study (and this is me spreading hearsay because I haven’t found the reference) where a psychologist put a man in an elevator and had him ride up and down without getting off. The idea was to see how strange he had to be before people reported him. The rumor has it that he never got reported, even though he wore a hockey mask and carried an axe at one point. Mothers with their babies in carriages just gave a slight smile and came right into the elevator.

Now there are more of these social experiments going on . . . and they are terrible!

The Burger King peeks his plastic eyes into people’s windows as they are dressing in the morning. So far he hasn’t been shot. He simply hands out a breakfast sandwich and all is okay. He has girls shaking their square asses to sell kids meals. Why has no one called foul? We won’t take this!

But wait! We do!

We buy Kesha CDs. Blech blech blech. Does no one else think she sounds like an idiot teenager? Is that really just me?

And don’t get me started on Justin Bieber. He is just the lucky kid who got selected to spearhead the experiment. He doesn’t sing particularly well (See ‘Kesha’ above) and he’s even worse on camera.

I understand that you have to have that certain spark to be a real star. I know that’s what the American Idol judges are looking for. And I know that a lot of us don’t have it. (I sure don’t!) But neither does Bieber! And I haven’t seen him on stage. Right now he is in an autotuned world where he can’t miss a note, because a computer will repair it. And he’s on video, which means they can do multiple takes and fix what’s wrong, or just use the best shot. So why is he still so bad?

Is a cute face and a handful of hype all that’s necessary now? It’s looking like that’s the case. Why would these experimenters go to all the trouble to create gas leaks and try to pass it off as ‘mass hysteria’ when they can simply put out a product like Justin Bieber and see who will bite.

I’m telling you, one of these days, all will be revealed. And we’ll all say “Oh, no, I thought that didn’t sound right.” But maybe the time to say it is now. And we’ll stand up together and rid the world of . . . .

Yeah, I know. Never gonna happen. Just wanted to dream there for a minute.

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-f6b4a6187b2cd4419de4f344eb6c0520}

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

You can shout your political preferences. I saw a “Black Women for Obama” sticker on a minivan, and I was so sure I knew who was driving it, but I was as wrong as I had been sure. It was a little wizened, white, redneck man. I like the bumper sticker even more for that.

You can ruin other people’s political and social expressions. You can buy a white circle with a picture of a screw on it to sticker over the heart on any number of bumper stickers. “I heart my Rottweiler” becomes “I screw my Rottweiler” and becomes much funnier in the process. Before all the drug charges, Rush Limbaugh fans could be seen with “Rush is Right” tags on their bumpers. Not too long after, you could get the word “Reich” in the same font, size and color. Which was awesome, because it completely reversed the meaning, suggested Rush was a nazi, and was indistinguishable from an untampered sticker unless you actively read your own bumper everyday to see if you had been vandalized.

Now my favorites are the ones that are unintentionally funny.

In LA a few years ago, I was stuck in traffic behind a truck that had an old favorite on the glass of the topper: “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.” Ha. That’s funny and all. But what was better was that it had been vandalized! Someone had taken a pink highlighter and written over the three lines of standard black text. Yes, this one said, “Sore Looser.”

I laughed until I cried. If you read it, you might have read “sore loser” as it was intended. But it had two ‘o’s in it. I love that the folks in defense of a man called an idiot can’t spell words that made the third grade weekly test. Now that’s awesome.

Another personal favorite are the fish. The Christians started it. The little stylized fish that tells the world what faith you are. And others have hijacked it, again and again. There are sharks. Darwin fish, with feet. UFO fish with two tails. For the truly geeky, Cthulhu fish.

It seems the Christians didn’t take this whole hijacking of their beloved symbol too well. They came back with a response to the Darwin fish in particular. The second version has a big Christian fish (with the word ‘truth’ embedded in it) opening its mouth and swallowing a footed Darwin fish. Doesn’t this indicate that ‘truth/Jesus’ will win out? That the bigger (or more truthful idea) will prevail?

I laugh so hard at this one.

The idea that the big fish eats the little fish is a Darwinian principle. They are trying to promote straight faith in religion, but instead they are advertising that they are behind the ideas in evolution.

There are more of these out there. So I say, please! Bring them on! Sticker your bumpers! I’m watching.

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

I love that quote partly because it is so different from my method. Some writers are fast and some are slow, there’s the wordy and the terse, the action driven and the thoughtful character oriented. Some writers are disciplined, some just write when the spirit moves them. I was of the latter and am moving more toward the former. But then there are those times when I am a bit of both.

Those times hit when the end of the story approaches. I don’t map every little detail of the story when I start. I often don’t map anything at all – even for a novel. But as I approach the end, I see exactly how all the little pieces fit together – all the ties to the little loose ends and how to tuck them in so it isn’t too obvious. And that’s when the fever strikes.

That’s when I write furiously. The trash doesn’t go out. I don’t eat much, and my family realizes that I’m not really there. If they ask me a question they get waved away with muttered phrases about ‘killing this guy’ or ‘ending the world’. There’s actually a three-way sign on my office door that I can change to indicate whether I’ll answer questions. They are color coded, green, yellow and red, and the red states that there had better be a fire or a lot of blood before you even knock.

Endgame is a time when the air crackles, and I sometimes can’t feel sensation from my elbows down. I sleep sporadically, often when I realize it’s four a.m. and I have to be up at seven to get my kids on the bus. If I’m not at my computer and even sometimes when I am, I have a scrap of paper that gets scribbled on. It’s usually titled something like ‘things that must not be forgotten’. There are neat, marching lines of reasonably neat script until about halfway down the page, at which point the writing starts to resemble Sanskrit more than English. After that, it begins to climb up the edges of the paper. Arrows go everywhere, to point out what weaves where.

Later, at those moments when I stop and eat a bite of something and check my notes, make sure I didn’t forget anything pertinent, I find that even I can’t decipher some of it. If I can make out a few words, then I’m good. I really only need enough to jog my memory – thank goodness. You’d think I’d learn to write it better the first time, as the torn half legal sheet with my current scribblings looks like a random mess of illegible half-thoughts. Well, it doesn’t just look like that, it IS that.

As things have changed for me – mainly, the first book got published and I travel a good bit for promotions and cons – I have been getting interrupted in the middle of the endgame. I am at a con right now! ConGlomeration, to be precise. And having a blast. But there’s an endgame in need of me right now, too. Katharine is making some serious decisions, and she is awaiting the ramifications. Alas, she won’t know any more until Monday, which will be the earliest I can get back to her.

I promise as soon as I get home, the standard issue green sign (Come in – I’m happy to answer questions) will be changed right over to red. Though I’m thinking of getting a black sign.

“ENDGAME –
Yes, you can watch whatever you want on TV.
Sure, you can eat what you found in the pantry.
The fire extinguisher is in the kitchen behind the bread machine.
For all else, dial 911”

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

A car is a big purchase. You’re likely going to make payments on it for a while. You’re going to pay for maintenance sooner or later. And you’re going to ride around in it and trust that it will save your hide in the case of an accident. Sorry, Miatas, you’re out of luck. And you too, Ford Focuses! (Or is it Foci?) You can ponder the plural of ‘Lexus’ for a few moments, but it won’t take any time at all to realize that the kind of personality that pushes a person to make a car purchase is not the kind of personality that translates well on screen.

Seriously, acting is a talent and a skill. I don’t have it. I write! When people ask if I record the audio tracks for my books, I say ‘oh, hell, no’. I think this is one of my better qualities – recognizing that I totally suck at acting (even just vocally). And I wish more dealership owners would come to this same conclusion.

But aside from the scary local ads that we all suffer through, there are bigger national, and even international campaign problems with our good buddy the automobile. Most of us have heard of the Chevy Nova problems in the foreign market. Chevy couldn’t sell the things in Mexico or Spain. Apparently, it took them a while to find someone who had passed junior high Spanish I to tell them what the problem was. ‘No va’ translates to “It doesn’t go” in Spanish. Smooth move, Chevy.

At one point I had heard rumors of a gasoline that translated into Japanese as “stalled car”. While I can’t really forgive that one either, at least every exec didn’t have a kid in school who could have done the Japanese translation.

Some of it is just a joke. The first model of the Sidekick had a problem with rolling when it hit sharp curves. There was a fake tagline circulating with that one. But “Suzuki Sidekick – you’ll flip over them!” wasn’t for real. And I’m not old enough to know what went around with the whole exploding Pinto scandal.

But some of it is for real. And my favorites involve a bad case of timing.

Back when OJ Simpson was tried for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole, he was a spokesperson for a number of products. Companies seem to have learned by now to yank the endorsement deals faster than you can say ‘I didn’t do it’ or ‘I’m a sex addict’. But at the time, they wanted to believe OJ was innocent, and so he held his position maybe a little longer than he should have.

At the time, one of OJ’s contracts was with Hertz Car Rental. And their big deal was that you didn’t have to come to the rental shop. They would pick you up. What this left them with was a nationwide campaign of airport posters, billboards, and the like, all depicting a grinning OJ holding up a set of car keys and the slogan, “We’ll come and get you.”

Yikes! This brought really bad images to my mind, but the campaign persisted.

Now, Toyota has been suffering. There are tales of braking issues. I say ‘tales’ because investigative units and research companies (Toyota’s own included) have had trouble reproducing the effects. But consumers have complained loudly, and there are rumors that Toyota filtered the repair requests so that they didn’t have to report the issue or recall the cars.

In response to the negative publicity, we’ve all seen low, low car rates and really great deals. Just a nice, ‘hey we’re sorry about that very dangerous problem, but here’s a zero down offer to make it okay.’ Yes, Toyota is working hard to change the negative perception of the company. In fact, they’ve even deemed the problem “accidental acceleration”. Yeah, that’s a problem. Cars need to stop when you tell them to.

Perhaps Toyota could change something else. Maybe, (and call me crazy here) just maybe, their tag line shouldn’t be “Toyota – Moving Forward.”

I’m suggesting my own campaign! “Toyota – stopping when you want to”

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Tweet This Post Digg This Post

This works because of the logarithmic nature of the Richter Scale. It’s in base ten. In simple terms that means each increase of 1.0 is a tenfold increase. And in Richter terms that means a tenfold increase in shaking amplitude. Lots of people interpret this as power, and while the two are closely related, the amplitude and power aren’t 1:1. In fact, as the difference on the Richter Scale increases, the power varies even more than the amplitude.

Lots of the info out there says that Richter was measuring the power of the quakes, but the best info says he was measuring wave amplitude. This was what he could observe. And observe he did: the scale was born (not surprisingly) in Southern California.

Measuring wave amplitude means that the actual ‘power’ (in the Physics sense, not the everyday sense) varies by a 3/2 exponent (or you could say ‘to the 3/2 power’ but that’s the mathematical use of ‘power’, not the physics use, or the everyday use. Silly mathematicians.) Okay, what this all means is that a 2.0 increase in the Richter Scale for shaking amplitude means a 1000-fold increase in the power of the quake (in the physics sense). Yeah, yeah, if you really wanna know, get your pencil out and get your math on – it works.

What this all comes down to is this – the Chile earthquake was a big ass quake. It made Northridge (6.7) and Haiti (7.0) look like they weren’t even trying.

Apparently enough mass shifted from the quake that the earth literally moved on its axis. (No, that wasn’t you. That was the quake.) It moved a whopping 8 centimeters (that’s about three inches, for the conversion impaired.) 8 centimeters is a big movement in earth terms. Think about how hard it is just to move your refrigerator 8cm, then think about doing that to the earth. In earthquake terms again, Haiti and Northridge didn’t touch this.

This movement of the axis has apparently altered sunrise time, popping it up to about five minutes earlier. And that’s not all. Not only did the quake tip the axis, it moved enough of the earth’s mass toward the equator to make the earth spin just a little faster. If you doubt or don’t know how centralizing mass makes things spin faster, try spinning on a tire swing or a rope. Go ahead, relive some childhood memories in the name of science. You can also run your own biology experiment here . . . fast spinning induces nausea due to the way your eyes track movement. Good times!

Sadly, though the earth is spinning faster, it isn’t noticeable. (Even if it were largely different, would we notice it? After all, the vast majority of our timescale is based on the rotation of the earth . . . so how would we know?? It’s all very Einsteinian.) While it’s cool that the Chile Quake changed the course of days, it only shortened them by 1.26 microseconds. What a let down!

In fact, the Indian Ocean Quake (that triggered the Tsunami in 2004) moved enough mass to shorten earth’s days by 7 whole microseconds. Cool, but still not measurable without some very precise instruments.

This does mean that since 2004 we have lost a total of 8.26 microseconds from each day. Let’s consider one more thing, though: both these quakes moved mass toward the equator, and quakes tend to move in the same direction. This is because the earth is, quake by quake, moving further and further away from the good old days of Pangaea. So it makes sense that these big quakes will continue to shorten days.

Sadly, we won’t be here to see it really take effect. It either won’t add up to enough time in the time we have, or we’ll perish in one of the big quakes that really moves the mass around. Ironically, wanting to see the days get shorter, is detrimental to living to see them get shorter.

I really wanted to say to my great-grandchildren, “I remember when days used to be a full two minutes longer than what you kids have!” On the upside, just the time it takes your neurons to fire to learn that the days have gotten shorter was way more than the 8+ microseconds we’ve lost. In fact, we could argue that, with all the time we put into contemplating the Chilean Earthquake just now, we have effectively lost a good second+ per day for the next year! Mission Accomplished! Sweet!

Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -

Tweet This Post Digg This Post