Going Gaga

Big Concerts has come out with a Big Announcement that they are going to make a Big Announcement on Monday morning.
Care should be taken here, since the last Big Announcement by Big Concerts was that Celtic Woman were to play in South Africa. (If you don’t know who Celtic Woman are, then you join the rest of us. Welcome.)

Speculation is unsurprisingly rife that it could be Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, the Foo Fighters, or indeed a return visit from Celtic Woman. And then there’s the Lady Gaga thing.

Let’s have a quick look at how Big Concerts is advertising their Big Announcement:

And let’s compare that with the typography on the Lady Gaga “Born This Way Ball” site:

Similar? Not similar?
Coincidence? Not coincidence?

If it is her, she’d better not wear that meat dress. She’ll get braai’ed.

Penetration of the Oral Mucosa by Parasite-Like Sperm Bags of Squid: A Case Report in a Korean Woman

You what?!?

Yep – it’s one of those moments where you have to sit down and take a long look at what you just read.
And re-read. But even when you do, it will still read:

Penetration of the Oral Mucosa by Parasite-Like Sperm Bags of Squid: A Case Report in a Korean Woman

That’s because it’s the title of this paper, which descibes how:

a 63-yr-old Korean woman experienced severe pain in her oral cavity immediately after eating a portion of parboiled squid along with its internal organs. She did not swallow the portion, but spat it out immediately. She complained of a pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity.

And what caused that pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity?

This did.

Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa. On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.

But just what does that mean? Step forward Danna Straaf from website Science 2.0 – a woman whose claims expertise in these matters is obvious from the moment she states that:

I’ve probably had hundreds of spermatophores ejaculate on my fingers and never felt a sting.

As Danna says, that’s probably because the skin on the human hand is too thick for those pesky squid spermatophores – essentially bags of squid sperm – to penetrate. Not so your flimsy oral mucosa.

That’s why Danna doesn’t eat half-cooked squids. Probably.

So should we calamari fans freak out right about now (that’s if you haven’t already freaked out having digested (sorry) the contents (sorry again) of this post thus far)?

No – we “Western” squid nibblers are just fine:

First, most Western squid preparations remove the internal organs and serve only the muscle, so there’s no danger of accidentally ingesting spermatophores.

Oh, and just in case you were thinking about getting bags of squid semen and popping them into your oral cavity:

Second, it’s perfectly fine to handle spermatophores – just don’t put them in your mouth.

Consider yourselves educated. And slightly less hungry than you were five minutes ago.

Quiz Time…

Here’s a Euro 2012 quiz question from the guy who used to do the pub quizzes I attended in the UK:

What links Jakub Blaszczykowski, who scored for Poland yesterday against Russia, with ex-Denmark midfielder Stig Tøfting, who played in Euro 2000?

Don’t bother with football. Forget your thoughts about implausibly large Scrabble scores or tenuous ties to Top Gear. The actual answer is far more bizarre.

See here:

As a child, Blaszczykowski witnessed a tragedy, which had a major influence on his life. When he was eleven years old, his father stabbed his mother to death.

and here:

During the 2002 World Cup, Danish weekly gossip magazine Se & Hør ran a story that Tøfting, when aged 13, had returned home from school to find the bodies of his parents. His mother had been shot by his father, who shortly thereafter turned the gun on himself. The story had been kept secret for years, as Tøfting had not yet told his children.

Ah. The delicate subject of matricide. A crime which, somewhat ironically, probably increases during major football tournaments.

Only in PE…

With all the pro-PE propaganda around of late, it’s important to ensure that we don’t all get carried away and we remember that PE is still PE.

This story has been doing the rounds on twitter in South Africa today, but by tomorrow, it will be gone. Then next week it’ll appear for 24 hours on Facebook and then it will be gone forever and ever.

Therefore, it’s my job to ensure that it is recorded here for posterity. So here goes:

A Port Elizabeth man’s neck was broken when the dog’s leash he was wearing got stuck in the wheel of his car, Beeld newspaper reported on Monday.

Rob Emslie, 47, had worn the leash around his neck from time to time after his dog Sheevah died about five weeks ago.
His friend Andy Green told the newspaper Emslie got a new dog but struggled to get over the death of Sheevah.

He was wearing the leash when he visited a restaurant in Kragga Kamma last Monday.

Green said that when Emslie got into his car and closed the door, he did not notice a large part of the leash was hanging outside the car.
As he reversed, the leash got stuck in the wheel and broke his neck.

Police Captain Stanley Jarvis confirmed the incident.

Emslie’s new dog was with him at the time and drew the attention of a passer-by by jumping in and out of an open window of the car.

The new dog had not been seen since, Beeld reported.

Some stories don’t require any further comment.

This is one of those stories, except to say: Only in PE…

Notes on Japanese ship-naming conventions

Yeah, I know. That title. You’re already disinterested, but hey – hang tight – you might just learn something today.
I know I did.

Japanese fishing vessels have been all over the news lately. If you count the one that ran aground on Clifton Beach last month and the one that was found drifting off the coast of Canada in April, that is.
The former has sadly dropped out of the news and even now, no-one is really sure how it ended up parked among the holiday homes of the German elite. The latter was a victim of the March 2011 tsunami and has been drifting across the Pacific ever since.

Their names: the Eihatsu Maru and the Ryou-Un-Maru. And I’ll use this handy opportunity to chuck the name of the only other Japanese fishing vessel I know in there too: the Meisho Maru 38. Some of that one lies aground near Cape Agulhas and has surely featured in many photographs, but most notably, this one:

Eagle-eyed readers should really give the eagle its eyes back, but in the meantime, they will have noticed the common “Maru” in the names of all these vessels, because eagles are good at spotting that sort of thing.

When you look  up Maru on Google translate, it tells you in mean “circle” and also, if you look a little below that, “suffix for ship names”. But why?

Well, god bless the internet, because Wikipedia can help us out with an answer on their helpfully named: “Japanese ship naming conventions” page, which discusses and explains Japanese ship naming conventions. And it tells us:

The word maru (meaning “circle”) is often attached to Japanese ship names. The first ship known to follow this convention was the Nippon Maru, flagship of daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s 16th century fleet. There are several theories which purport to explain this practice:

  • The most common is that ships were thought of as floating castles, and the word referred to the defensive “circles” or maru that protected the castle.
  • That the suffix -maru is often applied to words representing something that is beloved, and sailors applied this suffix to their ships.
  • That the term maru is used in divination and represents perfection or completeness, or the ship as a small world of its own.
  • A legend of Hakudo Maru, a celestial being that came to earth and taught humans how to build ships. It is said that the name maru is attached to a ship to secure celestial protection for it as it travels.
  • For the past few centuries, only non-warships bore the maru ending. It was intended to be used as a good hope naming convention that would allow the ship to leave port, travel the world, and return safely to home port: hence the complete circle arriving back to its origin unhurt.
  • Note also that Hinomaru or ‘sun-disc’ is a name often applied to the national flag of Japan.

Today commercial and private ships are still named using this convention.

Of course, there are many superstitions and traditions in Japanese society and there are probably (at least) an equal number in the seafaring community, so it seems perfectly reasonable that when these two behemoths of folklore come together, we get this well-observed custom of nomenclature.

That said, many of the reasons given above are centred around the protection of the vessel and its safe return to port and that hasn’t really held true for any of the ships I am aware of (n=3). Let’s not forget that one ended up on a local beach, another ended up on some fairly local rocks and another was sunk by the US Coastguard “for safety reasons” (and, let’s be absolutely honest here, fun).

Look, I recognise that it’s Friday afternoon and you aren’t in the mood to learn stuff. But you’ll be thanking the Japanese Seagods and 6000 miles… at your next pub quiz, believe me.

Assuming there’s a question about this sort of thing, of course.