Link that made us feel the most stoned. December. Shakespearean: When people speak English but with German grammar. Watching this makes us feel stoned. 

Most Scooby-Doo. November. From the annals of superstimuli: Why Are Dogs So Obsessed With Lamb Chop? (The article doesn’t really deliver an answer, but it’s a good mystery.) 

Stinkiest post. October. I can smell “the flu” : r/RandomThoughts h/t Collin Lysford 

Most medieval. October. Medieval Sourcebook: The Trial of Joan of Arc

Asked if she knows she is in God’s grace, she answered: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace.” She added, if she were in a state of sin, she did not think that the voice would come to her; and she wished every one could hear the voice as well as she did. She thought she was about thirteen when the voice came to her for the first time. 

…

Asked if she had her sword when she was taken, she answered no; but she had one which had been taken from a Burgundian. … from Lagny to Compiègne she had worn the Burgundian’s sword, which was a good weapon for fighting, excellent for giving hard clouts and buffets (in French “de bonnes buffes et de bons torchons”).

Best parody. September. The Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of the Frogs and Mice”) is a comic epic parody of the Iliad and a good source of names for your pet mice. Like Artepibulus, “he who lies in wait for bread”.

Greek etymology rabbithole also led us to troglodyte, which ultimately means, “hole, I get into”:

From Latin trōglodyta (“cave dwelling people”), from Ancient Greek τρωγλοδύτης (trōglodútēs, “one who dwells in holes”), from τρώγλη (trṓglē, “hole”) +‎ δύω (dúō, “I get into”).

Toastiest. August. I Put a Toaster in the Dishwasher (h/t Adam Mastroianni)

These commenters are speaking authoritatively on subjects about which they are completely ignorant, but they are strident in doing so because they are repeating what everybody knows.  They are intellectually secure in the center of a vast mob; their wisdom was received, not crafted.  It doesn’t need to be crafted, because it is already known, established, beyond question (but demonstrably wrong).

Highest cheekbones. July. He secretly changed this freeway sign, helped millions of drivers. Top YouTube comment: 

In 2001, a friend and I had gotten so tired of a massive pot hole in Seattle that we went and got some vests and bags of asphalt and fixed it ourselves. We didn’t live near it, but hung out down there almost daily and hated driving over it. People in the neighborhood asked if we were from the city, and we said no. People clapped, and one brought us iced tea. A city bus came by as we were finishing and was so happy he drove over it, backed up, and drove over it several times to pack it in. I drove by it earlier today for work, and our patch still holds.

Most Bond villain. June. A New Atlantis: “Britain should reclaim an area the size of Wales from Dogger Bank, the area of the North Sea where the sea is only 15-40m deep. We could do it for less than £100bn.” 

Cutest animal. May. Sea Urchins Love Sporting Cowboy and Viking Hats. Also, see here for the original thread on reef2reef.com 

Most hidden desire. May. Brine thoughts: ​​the unspoken, instinctive need for a sweet-tangy-salty beverage in the heat, the combination of sugar, savory, and acid…the American yearns for kala khatta but they do not know it…

Most Constitutional. April. While Lucas M. Miller was serving in Congress, he proposed a Constitutional amendment to change the country’s name to “the United States of the Earth” because “it is possible for this republic to grow through the admission of new states…until every nation on earth has become part of it.”

Best coincidence. March. There is way too much serendipity — “It is therefore a fact of the world that virtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic.”

Most empirical. February. Friend of the blog ExFatLoss beats obesity:

Best near miss. February. AT&T gets a solid B+ on predicting the future: “You Will” Commercials (high quality) YouTube comments have it: “These are absolutely amazing. The only thing they got wrong is ‘The company to bring it to you, AT&T’.”

Most illegalist. January. That’s some good illegalism: Activists vow to keep installing guerrilla benches at East Bay bus stops (h/t ACX)

Most unethical. January. The for-profit system of academic journal publishing was created by Robert Maxwell, who also happens to be Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad. Along with other tidbits, the linked article does a good job highlighting the ways in which scientific publishing is a principal-agent problem:

You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. … then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.

Most unorthodox. January. Ada Palmer: Tools for Thinking About Censorship

If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would.  If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time. The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.  Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.

Best album. January. Soothing Sounds for Baby

---

Happy New Year! Cheers to the quarter century.