July 12, 2004

  • KIBO

    Everyone knows GIGO, right?  Garbage in, garbage out:  the
    integrity of output is dependent on the integrity of input.  An
    old computing term, coming from back when computers read holes punched
    in tape or cards, I first heard it when Gregory Bateson spoke at Lane
    Community College while I was a student there in the 1960s.  I’ve
    seen that acronym referred to as a, “word unreadable aloud.”  It
    has also been termed less usable communication than joke, because it
    often must be explained when used.  Those difficulties are not
    lessened by the alternate meaning of “GIGO”: garbage in, gospel
    out, meaning the input is a sloppy human operation, full of errors, but
    the output is done by a computer, so everyone assumes it is
    correct.

    Does, I wonder, todo el mundo
    also sabé KIBO?  I’m not referring to Kibo Parry who may or may
    not have named himself after the acronym for, “knowledge in, bullshit
    out.”  Kibo Parry has little or nothing to do with my point
    here.  I do have a point, but it will take some time and more than
    a few words for me to get to it.  Some of my readers will have
    come to expect no less of me. 

    It’s a quiet and inactive day for me, so I have time to follow my train
    of thought wherever it leads.  My body is still in a fatigued
    state from my unscheduled trip to town yesterday to purchase a new
    keyboard for this machine (mouse clicks won’t produce a blog–at least
    not for me, but I have
    seen one recently where all the best writing was
    copy-and-pasted).  I’m trying to conserve what little physical
    energy I have for the trip into Wasilla tomorrow to get Muffin’s
    shots at the vet’s. 

    That point I’m meandering around has something to do with
    synchronicity, and I mention that now partially so that if I wander
    too far afield I’ll have a chance of finding my way back to my point.

    …but first a little snack….

    mmmmm… Louisiana hot link sausage with hot Chinese mustard. 
    I
    wonder why hot weather makes me crave even more hot food than
    usual.   Now that we’re out from under that pall of smoke from the
    wildfires, and the midnight sun is coming through in full force, it’s hot again in Alaska.  “Chinese mustard on a hot
    link?!” you may marvel. 
    Well, I could have put pico de gallo
    salsa on it, but that would be culinarily absurd.  Mustard goes
    with hot dogs.  The salsa goes with these tortilla chips that go
    pretty well with the hot link, now that I think on it.

    ….

    There!  Now that’s done, and Koji had his chance to lick the plate
    (declined–he’s just a dog, he’s not stupid), I can get down to my rap
    or my rant or whatever this will turn out to be.  Oh how I love
    blogging!  Self-publishing on the cheap, there’s a chance someone
    may read it but it doesn’t have to get past an editor or a censor
    before it’s published.  I can be just as frank or as incoherent or
    as anything
    as I would be in a private journal, but with always the prospect of
    readers and a chance of feedback.  Blogging is my medium and Xanga
    is my Muse.

    A new Xangan, pyramidtermite, stimulated these thoughts for me today.  His comment on my cat gone
    blogs was the best of them all.  He showed that he had read and
    understood what I wrote and could see it from my perspective, which in
    itself is interesting in light of the fact that he says he has
    Asperger’s syndrome, which entails a lack of empathy.  Perhaps we
    are simply kindred souls.

    I had enjoyed reading his first entry, and so when I saw his nic in my
    comments I clicked that nic and read his second and latest entry. 
    It was uncanny.  That’s what he was writing about:  the state
    of being uncanny.  As he described it, I found a new understanding
    of that word, and came to accept the judgment of all the many people
    who have told me that I, or something that I had done or said, was
    uncanny.  I mean, I’ve known for years that I was weird. 
    It’s only just now I’ve realized I’m uncanny.
     
    My quibble over that had always been semantic:  “can” is Scots for “head”, and “canny” means having savvy (sabé), being knowledgable, so wouldn’t uncanny
    necessarily mean being clueless or ignorant?  Okay, okay, I’m
    attentive enough, able to pick up what words mean from the contexts in
    which they are used, but I’d never truly gotten
    “uncanny” entirely because of that connection with “canny”.  It
    always shows up in horror movies, and has connotations of creepy, eerie
    and weird.  I will not cop to being creepy, and although some say
    I do give them goosebumps with what I say and do, I don’t find myself
    to be eerie or spooky.  But I’m a freak of nature so I suppose
    that makes me weird and uncanny.

    So… that was how this train of thought got started, but as usual I
    had no trouble at all in getting it promptly off the track.  What
    derailed me was a new feature at Onelook Dictionary Search,
    the beta test version of the reverse dictionary.  I entered
    “uncanny” and got a great list of words including some I knew already
    such as, “eldritch” (supernatural), and a few I’d never encountered
    before such as “wanchancy” (unlucky).  To find out what wanchancy
    meant I clicked a link that took me to Forthright’s Phrontistery, a great thinking place.  (wixer, that link’s for you, in appreciation for your turning me onto the Online Etymology Dictionary.)

    Far down on that list of words associated with “uncanny” was
    “kibo”.  (Onelook
    says the acronym summarizes, “what happens whenever valid data is
    passed through an organisation [or individual] that
    deliberately or accidentally disregards or ignores its
    significance.”)  What the fuck, I thought, is uncanny about,
    “knowledge
    in, bullshit out?”  I followed that sidetrack into the roundhouse
    and around a few
    times before I discovered that Kibo Parry has an “uncanny knack” for
    turning up online wherever his name is mentioned. [Hi there, Kibo.]
    That’s a knack less uncanny than simply skillful in this world of
    computers.

    Anyhow, I said I had a point “to do with synchronicity.” 
    AHA!  …gotcha.  Robert Anton Wilson has written extensively
    about synchronicity, as has Carl Gustav Jung.  (Ever notice how
    many notorious miscreants are known by all three names:  John
    Wayne Gacy, Wayne Adam Ford, David Wayne McCall, Elmer Wayne Henley [sorry, darlin', couldn't resist ],  and
    Kathy Lynn Douglass?)  RAW’s contributions to the lore include the
    C.C.C.C.:  Cosmic Coincidence Control Center.  All one has to
    do is mention, see a mention of, or think about the C.C.C.C., and there
    you are, right in the middle of it, in Synchronicity Central. 
    It’s where I’ve been all day, and now **tag, you’re it** you’re in.

    Thus, primed this morning by a series of synchronistic online
    discoveries, the synchronicities kept escalating.  After I ran
    into KIBO, everywhere I went I found examples of the idea.  Of
    course, that’s not hard.  Our culture appears to be based largely
    on “selective inattention” (That’s medical / psychiatric jargon for,
    “an aspect of attentiveness in which a person attempts to ignore or
    avoid perceiving that which generates anxiety.”  When people deny
    what they KNOW, in order to believe that which will comfort their
    fears, what you get is a culture based on fantasy, lies, fairy tales
    and soap opera.  Ooops, where did this soap box come from and how
    did I get on it?  Where are we going and how did we get in this
    handbasket?  …as if we didn’t KNOW!

Comments (7)

  • Eating spicy foods cools you down. I can’t remember the exact mechanics of it, but that’s one of the reasons hotter climates have so many spicy foods–other than the fact they can grow pepper, that is.

    Semantics rock!

    And if you’re on a soap box, can one assume you’re clean?

  • I don’t know if it has anything to do with my impromptu pulpit, but I am definitely clean and serene!

  • OOOOOooo…. thank you for that link!  If I wasn’t packing to go to New York first thing in the morning, I’d get lost there!  I’ll be gone a month, but hopefully I’ll get some chances to look at it during my sojourn.

  • Today I found some relics of my Very Very Spiritual phase, including some RAW books. My storage unit is a reliquary.

    I always thought ‘uncanny’ meant ‘beyond understanding’ or ‘confusing.’ I think it’s meaning gets smeared toward the macabre because victorian horror writers used it a lot.

  • Very good point there, Homer. I, too, think that probably was the original sense of the word, as it was derived from “can” or “head”, the seat of the thinking brain, although you don’t generally find that sense in any modern dictionaries.

  • Can?
    Head?

    What a potty mouth you are!

    ———

    Thank you again, btw.  We get to pay our electric bill!

  • Actually there is a very canny reason for that three-name thing.  Since most guys have three names (and Catholics have four or five), news media uses them all to reduce the chance of confused identity and/or libel suits.

    Trust me, there are a LOT more John Somethingelse Gacy’s than there are John Wayne Gacy’s.  However, there do seem to be a hell of a lot more miscreants and/or nut cases with the middle name Wayne than mere chance would account for.  I think it is the John Wayne curse–having a name so blatantly macho just does a bad number on a kid’s head.

Post a Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *