July 12, 2004
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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.