Are You Still Crazy (Alanis Morrisette)

Language: Italian

I didn't mean to take such a long break, there, but things have been weird. I'm not sleeping well, for the past few weeks, and my unemployment is about to run out (one more full check, on Friday, and maybe a partial check in two weeks, but that's it otherwise), and there's always something more important than Babelpop! to be done, so there you go. Today, the exciting thing was that the ceiling started to pour water, out of nowhere, around 9 or 10 this morning: the upstairs neighbors recently moved out, and apparently left the place utterly trashed, because there's been construction / maintenance noises from up there for a couple weeks now. Until today, the noise was the only real inconvenience, but this morning, I heard dripping noises, and upon investigation, found water dripping from the doorframe of the bathroom door. Then water started coming from the air conditioning vent, the room vent, and the light fixture in the hall. Took a while to mop up, and I had to call maintenance to get it to stop -- which leaves me wondering whether it's maybe going to happen again. I'm a little afraid to leave the building.

Anyway. The above picture is something I found with Galaxy Zoo, which is an effort to catalog hundreds of thousands of pictures of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using human volunteer eyeballs, like my own. The picture is easily the coolest one I've found so far, but there are others:



The second picture is a galaxy that was previously known, and the first one might be, for all I know, but considering the magnitude of the project, there's a good chance that you might be seeing pictures of galaxies that nobody has seen, and so there is much potential coolness. If you're interested, go to the Galaxy Zoo site and sign up: there's a quick and pretty simple test, to make sure that you can tell the difference between spiral and elliptical galaxies, and that you know clockwise from counterclockwise, and then you're on your own. Some of the pictures are quite pretty.

Anyway. There are still a couple more songs in the Strawberry Trilogy to come, so be watching for that. I just thought, after all this time, that I needed to put something up, and I'd been meaning to post about Galaxy Zoo for a while, so there you go.

This song turned out okay, I think. The original is, of course, "Are You Still Mad?", and the whole mad-to-crazy joke gets pretty tired pretty quickly, but even so, I think it did nicely for itself.

-Jessi

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Are you still crazy? You've given yourselves to the soccer base.
Are you still crazy? I've given you ultimatums.
Are you still crazy? I had all my forty-year-old male friends confront you.
Are you still crazy? I've communicated our problems with you to everyone.

Are you still crazy? Impressionable, I had a transaction without you.
Are you still crazy? Have you tried to model who you wish I could be?
Are you still crazy? I don't trust you there, your intentions.
Naturally you are,
naturally you are.

Are you still crazy? Who flirted wildly?
Are you still crazy? You have had a tendency to generate one of them.
Are you still crazy? The outside hatch is a foot towards that.
Are you still crazy? After we slept, that concluded it. Also, we had that in its entirety.
Naturally you are,
naturally you are.

Are you still crazy? I carried the pants more of the time than you did.
Are you still crazy? I seemed to put yours on fire only to upgrade them. Have that.
Are you still crazy? I've thrown that in the napkin.
Are you still crazy? I gave in much before that.
Naturally you are,
naturally you are.

Ironic (Alanis Morissette)

Language: Russian

For a while, as a joke, every time someone said "ironic" in my presence, I would come back with, "Yeah. It's like rain on your wedding day." Not too many people caught that I was mocking them, the song, and whatever they were talking about, simultaneously. Or maybe they did and they were just being really subtle about hating me. Of course, I did this whether people were using the word correctly or not, which may have confused things. (Oh, come on. Like you don't have idiosyncrasies. It's better than what I said whenever somebody got naked in the middle of a busy street: "Thank you, India.")

The sad truth is, Alanis Morissette has a lot more influence on the actual usage of words (and thus, on the contents of future dictionaries) than pedants like myself. Ironic, save in academic circles, now means things like disappointing, surprising, counterintuitive, unfortunate or co-incidental. That's the bad news.

The good news is, there's now an opening for a neologism that means what ironic used to mean, though it'll take maybe twenty to forty years before ironic is completely useless, so until the new word is established we're all going to be saying things like "What do you mean, 'ironic?' Like, ironic ironic, or co-incidental ironic?" and "How is that ironic? Oh, you mean ironic like rain on your wedding day. Gotcha." a lot in casual conversation. So, you word-coiner types, be thinking about that.

Which by the way, since I'm here: Morissette has since declared that the only ironic thing about "Ironic" is that there's no irony in it, with the implication that this was the plan all along. This is similar to the way religious leaders try to salvage inconsistencies in scriptures by saying something paradoxical yet meaningless, and should be ignored.

-Jessi

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Old ninety-eight, turned by a man.
It did it ironically. (Win the lottery,
and next day it'll be a black fly in your chardonnay.)
Which pardon will be the condemned men's camera?
2 minutes later, it'll be ironic, don't you think?

As rain on your wedding day,
which'll be a free ride.
You'll already pay them; it'll be good.
They didn't exactly listen to you; one would think,
it'd do to calculate the game.

Mr. Bezopasn was frightened to fly; he'd packed his trunk,
he'd kissed his little-ones good-bye,
he awaited his entire damn life in order to accept that flight,
and the plane broke. "This was in the best way, but it's not glorious --" Did he think it,
and isn't it ironic?

As rain on your wedding day,
which'll be a free ride.
You'll already pay them; it'll be good.
They didn't exactly listen to you; one would think,
it'd do to calculate a good life.

It has a funny road that steals up on you when you think,
"All is approved, and everything goes correctly,"
and life has a funny road to help you outside when you think,
"Did it all go incorrectly, and does it all blow up in your side?"

Street traffic congestion in the when you'll already be last, and
no-dinner-jacket-breach sign on your cigarettes,
they're as 10 thousand spoons, when everything you want is at their knife.
They meet the man of my dreams, and after this, they meet his most beautiful husbands and it'll be with irony, don't you think?
I think a little too ironic, actually, yeah.

As rain on your wedding day,
which'll be a free ride.
You'll already pay them; it'll be good.
They didn't exactly listen to you; one would think,
it'd do to calculate a good life.

It has a funny road steal up on you,
and life has a funny road to help you outside.