open says me...

I have always found any humour relating to double entendres or puns to be enormously hilarious (then again, i also find that flatulence is the real godfather of all comedians. I recently was sitting around with my nephew of some three years old and he looked at me and said "i farted" and then began to giggle uncontrollably. of course, i quickly followed suit and started rolling on the ground. there must be something magical about methane mixed with just the right amount of sulfur that delivers us into a state of semi-euphoria. i just find it hilarious and great that despite all the development, puberty, book learnin' and useless knowledge that i have amassed over my quarter century, i still hearken back to the joy of pungent gas to make me laugh the hardest. i hope that when i am an octogenarian and i am fully incontinent that i will maintain this primal instinct. otherwise, life without control over one's anal sphincter is going to be very unpleasant). i sometimes wonder if puns exist so readily in other languages. consider, for example, those silly african dialects that use clicking sounds (remember, the stupid sound that every 5 year old learns to make with his tongue and suddenly thinks he is the master of all things sound wave?). Can you imagine clicking your tongue and that being the punch line? well who knows. i always did find it interesting that the english language was so diverse (and perverse). for example, did you know that in France there is a committee of scholars (i assume anyways, a committee of special olympics winners would certainly be more amusing) that actually decides what words officially become part of the French language. i mean, i hate ridiculous slang just as much as the next guy (the decimation of grammar in urban slang is an atrocity against humanity for which certain rapping fools should stand trial in the international criminal courts (a quick aside: what the hell does "yo" stand for? "you?" "y'all?" "you know?" "yolanda has a big bootie?")) but the idea of a tribunal assembled with the sole purpose of voting on new words seems very ludicrous to me. that being said, what a hilarious job that would be. can you imagine defining a language? "Henceforth, the pronoun "le" will be replaced with "[insert appropriate ex girlfriend's name] is a dirty dirty cunny." Man, i would never tire of that. or perhaps just creating words that had raspberry sounds slyly inserted. (i'm losing my train of thought) In any case, English is one of the few languages that have the range and vocabulary to really create great puns. On the other hand, there is Chinese with about 3,000 common words all of which only contain one syllable. i've never understood the idea of Chinese poetry. how interesting could it get when you're rhyming with one syllable. no wonder the japanese have haikus. they probably ran out of things to say after the 17th syllable. (Aside: Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce's chef d'oeuvre, is written almost completely from a stream of consciousness point of view in some 10+ languages somehow weaving together to create a deluge of double entendres. in fact, it was said that Joyce even had graduate students do research into languages he did not know (such as ancient Sanskrit) so that he could include them in his novel. what a nut.) anyway, i think english is pretty sweet despite the fact that i seem to communicate better in binary than words. this is especially evident when in the presence any humanoid form that possesses at least 1.5 X chromosomes.

so, maybe you're still lost. i am too. i have put much stock into the idea of continuity and sectioned thought. however, since there is a slight possibility that i'm actually writing to someone other than myself, i will explain. the subject of this post, "open says me," is one of my all time favourite puns of all time. I think it harkens back to one of my first memories as a child. when i was younger, my parents would read fables to me from this big red book in Chinese (then again, my father also once told me that the reason that some toilets have handlebars is so that people can pull on them when they are defecating and that, in fact, one time some woman pulled so hard on it that the building she was in collapsed. I believe i pulled on those damn handles until i was 10. (no, i wasn't that bright)). Some of them were spins on Aesop's fables such as the fox and the grapes and some were more geared toward the rice bowl crew like the Zodiac race. in any case, there was one story about ali baba and the 100 raiders or something like that and i used to love the part where he would say "open sesame." mind you that all of this was relayed to me in Chinese. So, when i was a bit older and was being subjected to the oppression of the caucasian race, i heard one of my friends say "open sesame" and i thought it was the most fantastic coincidence that they were the same and that, moreover, it actually sounds like the three separate words "open" "says" "me." i mean, what are the freaking chances.

Another story of my adolescent idiocy that will surely delight the masses:

In fourth grade or thereabouts, our illustrious class was learning about hieroglyphics and the ancient Egyptians. We learned about how cryptographers finally discovered how to read the writing through the Rosetta Stone. To demonstrate the principal, they gave us hieroglyphics and asked us to decode it. the lesson that was supposed to be learned was that hieroglyphics were a phonetics based language. So, an owl with his head turned left makes a "G" sound or something like that. So, when we decoded the hieroglyphics that were provided as our afternoon project, it said something like "Kun gra Do Lay seeuns Yeew hav dee Coe dead dee mess idg." So, for the next few years, i told my friends that it was a little known fact but the ancient Egyptians actually spoke in a language that amazing sounded exactly like english but was spelled in these weird phonetic hieroglyphics. i was astonished by the seemingly impossible coincidence. Too bad i never pondered my serendipitously vacuous cranium. in any case, i later found out that the rosetta stone showed that it was a phonetic language based on a variant of Arabic.

so, the whole point of the "open sesame" thing is this. My thoughts will begin spilling with little abandon on this ill-frequented backwater of the internet and just like the ali baba's den of thieves, my treasures shall be exposed.

I guess the most interesting thing though is that i am sharing all these silly things and it's available to any soul that possesses the power of a browser and there is a chance that not a single soul will ever find his way upon my nonsense.