I did mention that it’s tough to name any good that’s come out of the Bush presidency. And — you must forgive me for seeming cynical — whenever Bush has done something that seems good, there’s always a kicker. Remember when he said he wanted to increase money to charities? But then it turned out they were faith-based charities. Which meant that he was going to funnel federal money into religions. Or remember Mr Bush helpfully offering to fix Social Security? Yeah.

Well, now it looks like he’s done something genuinely unambiguously good.

President Bush will create the world’s largest protected marine area today, designating as a national monument a 1,200-mile-long chain of small Hawaiian islands and surrounding waters and reefs that are home to a spectacular array of sea life, senior administration officials said last night.

Uh, today? Like, now?

What caused this? Perhaps something he watched on TV.

A turning point came in April, when Bush sat through a 65-minute private White House screening of a PBS documentary that unveiled the beauty of — and perils facing — the archipelago’s aquamarine waters and its nesting seabirds, sea turtles and sleepy-eyed monk seals, all threatened by extinction.

The film seemed to catch Bush’s imagination, according to senior officials and others in attendance. The president popped up from his front-row seat after the screening; congratulated filmmaker Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the late underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau; and urged the White House staff to get moving on protecting these waters.

Okay, I’ll still take it. Even if it’s something he just saw on TV, I’ll take it.

What’s going on? Are we having a Dave situation here? Can someone (perhaps dobbins?) tell me if there’s some kind of huge upside for Big Oil on this? Because I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wouldn’t be like this if the last five years hadn’t been what they were.

Also, could someone please get Mr Bush to watch more PBS?

I have figured out the appeal of quiz shows. Like why people go on them. Going on a quiz show is a really big risk, you know. It’s like, here’s an opportunity to show how much stuff you know. And what if the answer to that question is “Not much”? Then everyone knows that despite your carefully contrived aura of wisdom, you actually don’t even know things like “Who was the 42nd President of the United States?” because you never bothered to count them. And you could actually know a lot, but everyone has these gaps in their knowledge, so you could blow an easy one like “What country do they make Waterford crystal in?” and everyone at home is eating potato chips and thinking, “If he doesn’t know that one, then he probably doesn’t even know (say) how many cards are in a deck.”

So why do they do it? Because there are PRIZES. I don’t care how stupid you make me look as long as people can see me WINNING STUFF.

And that is why I found myself at the Channel 7 studios this evening with a bunch of other eager contestants trying out for a new quiz show, called Quiz Show. It’s still in development, but apparently it’s a serious one with a million dollars at the end of it.

Everyone took the 40 question test, on which I scored a modest 24. I put that down to not knowing any Australian trivia, and also I can never remember for the life of me whether it’s M or Q that designs the weapons for James Bond. Lucky for me the cutoff was 18 tonight, so I stayed while half the crowd filed out in an abashed way.

Then it was the interview, where I chatted for a few minutes with a lovely young lady named Belinda, and when I say ‘chatted’, I mean ‘tried desperately to leave a positive impression’.

They may call in a few weeks or a few months for the taping. But I’m through to the next round. I’ll keep you posted.

Let’s make this an open thread. Put your favourite trivia question in comments.

I am a linguist. That’s not just something I say to get people to believe me when I try to pass off ‘fotarb’ as a real word in Scrabble, although I have done that. Being a linguist is also a opportunity to help.

So in the interest of providing a community service — a bit of pro bono if you will — here’s a question from comments.

in english, what is the plural of Jesus, ie if there is a group of men called Jesus, what do we call them?

Ah, yes. I first came across this conundrum when Youngest Boy gifted me half a walnut shell with two wax figurines inside.

“That’s nice,” I said. “What is it?”

“It’s the two Baby Jesuses,” he said.

“I didn’t know there were two of them,” I said.

“Well, there were,” he said. “They were separated at birth, and they had to fight each other.”

“Did they work it out eventually?”

“Yes. They decided to team up to fight crime.”

“That’s good,” I said. “And along the way, they learned a little something about… the power of friendship.”

“Yep,” he said.

Well, anonymous, if that is your real name, there are two approaches.

Approach 1: Find out where the name comes from, and apply the rule appropriate to that language of origin.

This is the approach favoured by annoying people who insist that the plural of ‘octopus’ should be ‘octopodes’ and not ‘octopi’ because ‘octopus’ comes from Greek and not Latin. Avoid them.

But if we took that approach, we’d have to track the name back to Hebrew. And we’d find something like this:

The name Jesus is an anglicized form of the Latin Iesus, which itself is derived from the Greek name Iesous. Iesous was the Greek transliteration of the Aramaic name Yeshua, which itself was the later Aramaic form of the Hebrew name Yehoshua.

Got all that? So, most recently, Latin.

You may know that Latin has five nasty declensions — different categories that have endings and you have to memorise them all. Life is somewhat easier if you know that ‘Jesus’ is a fourth declension noun, and is pluralised thus: One Jesus, two Jesus. Wasn’t that simple?

But the second approach is: screw it, just pluralise it like English. One Jesus, two Jesuses. Like a little black dress, it’s always appropriate when you’re dealing with borrowed Latin words.

And as a parting thought: if you’re worried about doing the wrong thing, just remember that language is what you do. Any linguist worth his or her salt doesn’t care what you should do. Just talk. We’ll be listening and writing it down. Not in a creepy way.

The phrase of the week would have to be ‘asymmetrical warfare’. Picture it: you’re the camp commander at Guantánamo. Your prisoners are being held indefinitely without due process. There are some suicide attempts, and three prisoners finally succeed in hanging themselves. What do you tell the media?

“I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

Or perhaps:

a “good PR move to draw attention“

Or perhaps both.

This is only the latest (and most extreme) manifestation of the same damn line over and over again. And here it is: The strong are being persecuted by the powerless. Check these examples and spot the pattern:

When unlawfully held prisoners kill themselves, the US military accuses the dead of trying to make them look bad.

The Wall Street Journal says that people that earn the least are ‘lucky duckies‘ who don’t pay enough taxes and take advantage of the system.

The religious right, with all three branchs of government under their control, scream that America isn’t Jesusy enough.

Speakers of English, the majority language of the USA, worry about being overrun with Spanish speakers.

A soldier is killed in Iraq, and wingers, enmeshed in the war they wanted, attack the slain soldier’s mother for becoming a visible symbol for opposition to the war.

Christians, members of the world’s most common religion, scream that atheists are trying to suppress Christmas.

Bush, having stacked the Supreme Court with two extremely conservative justices, still complains about judicial activism.

The Christian Right (again) fear that heterosexual people are being recruited by gay people, and that gay marriage is somehow cheapening straight marriage. Apparently 97% of the population isn’t enough.

It’s just never enough for some people. Right-wingers have often accused the Left of promoting a culture of victimhood, but I’ve never seen anyone hone a persecution complex like this, and they’re the ones in power. Just holding a different point of view is enough to get you labelled an America-hater, a terrorist-sympathiser. And when you die, they’ll call it a cheap stunt.

I always thought that the word ‘good’ came from ‘god’. After all, didn’t ‘good-bye’ derive from ‘God be with ye‘?

Well, yes it did. But that happened later.

It turns out that ‘good’ and ‘god’ come from completely different places.

According to the OED, the word ‘good’ comes from an Old Teutonic root ‘gôđ’ which meant ‘to bring together’. You can even tell that the word ‘gather’ comes from this. This source, on the other hand, has it as coming from a Proto-Indo-European hypothetical root ‘*ghedh-‘, meaning the same thing. Either way, the word meant something like ‘fitting’, or ‘suitable’, and in time, good.

There are two possibilities for the origin of ‘god‘ though, and both are from Proto-Indo-European. Either it’s ‘*ghut-‘ meaning “that which is invoked”, or ‘*ghu-to-‘ from “poured”, as you’d pour on offering on the ground for the gods to drink.

Not surprising, though, that the two words would converge as they have. There always seems to be more than one motivation for how words are.

The best psychologists (besides actual psychologists) would have to be salespeople. They’ve learned lots of ways to exploit all our cognitive funny bits.

Case in point: a grocer friend of mine has alerted me to an interesting tendency among shop-goers. Say you’ve got a big pile of oranges, but with one spotty one featured prominently. Even though all the other oranges look great, they’ll all stay right where they are. No one will touch them until you remove the bad one. Then they’ll start to move again.

In this case, people are making assumptions involving sampling bias. We may believe that most of the oranges are good, but that one prominent bad orange is somehow more salient than the others, and we weight it more heavily when deciding how good the rest of them are. Perhaps the bad orange is more salient than all the good oranges because of the ‘Minimax principle‘ — we want good outcomes, but we often just try to avoid bad outcomes.

This also reminds me of the ‘Volvo fallacy‘, where a negative anecdote can overrule more reliable information.

I read an internet exchange once where someone said, “You have arrived at the right answer, but for the wrong reasons. And so you will revert to your earlier wrong opinion.”

The author of this article is doing just that. I was considering not putting a link because a) I’ve never linked to the bedwetters at townhall.com, and I hesitate to start, and b) there’s an annoying ad there urging you to fight some kind of imaginary liberal bias in the media. I’m linking anyway if you want context, but wash your hands afterwards.

He raises a lot of issues about Joseph Smith (who Mormons consider to be a prophet) in the form of a quiz:

After I was asked to read about (and consider converting to) Mormonism, I came across some rather disturbing accusations against Joseph Smith, Jr. Were he alive today, I would submit the following true/false test to the founder of Mormonism:

1. True or False. Among your 33 well-documented plural wives, there were close to a dozen unions in which the wife was already married to another man.
2. True or False. In your lifetime, you married four different pairs of sisters.
3. True or False. You once married a young woman and also married her mother.
4. True or False. At least one of your plural wives was as young as fourteen.

And so on and so on.

His implication is that if Joseph Smith did those things (and I have no reason to doubt that he did), that somehow invalidates Smith’s claim to be a prophet. But there’s an assumption here: God wouldn’t tell Joseph Smith to do those things because I don’t think God would condone that behaviour. And why wouldn’t s/he? Is the columnist so in touch with the divine that he can figure out what God would do? Seems that a lot of people are claiming the privilege of theo-telepathy lately.

This is the same kind of trap that atheists commonly fall into when they discuss the problem of evil: how could God allow suffering? After all, I wouldn’t allow it, and God must be… just like me! And then they are easily countered by scriptures like “Your ways are not my ways.” After all, maybe God is an sadistic God who likes to see suffering, but who you should worship anyway. Or he has his own reasons for doing things, which even a cursory glance at the Old Testament will confirm.

Atheists are only on slightly firmer ground when we say, “God claims to be loving, but allows suffering, and that doesn’t seem very loving.” And then the believer finds a way around it with the ‘free-agency’ argument or the ‘growth through adversity’ argument, or any argument that comes to mind — they’ve evolved millions of them.

No, the way to attack this is like so:
1) Smith claimed to receive revelations from God.
2) The existence of God is unsupported by any real evidence.
3) There are therefore other non-supernatural explanations for the things Smith wrote and did. We accept those explanations because it is more likely that Smith was mistaken or deceptive than that God exists.

And then you can debate that without having to get into guessing the mental states of hypothetical beings.

São Paulo by Morcheeba Album: Charango
The closest I’ve ever come to Brazil is Spain, which I realise isn’t very close. (In fact,Washington State may even be closer.) But walking around Barcelona was lots of fun. What an interesting and sexy place. It didn’t seem unusual to see a young man and woman riding a bicycle together, but with her in front facing him. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Morcheeba. And when you’re walking along the beach meeting extroverted people, this is the soundtrack. But why is the singer so depressed? It’s chill. Go with it.

Sex and Candy by Marcy Playground Album: Triple J Hottest 100, Volume 6
I don’t know much about the band, but I like the groove of the song. And while the phrase ‘disco superfly’ never really made into the vernacular (partially because of questions as to its usage), it wasn’t the fault of Marcy Playground. A good listen.

Captivate by Nitzer Ebb Album: Belief
I was on this huge industrial thing back in 1990-91. Ebb was a band that I quite liked, even though I knew they were kind of derivative. Except that I never really knew how to pronounce the name. ‘Night-zer’ seems to have prevailed, though I was a ‘nit-zer’-ista. There’s a sexual streak in the Ebb, especially this song. Smooth beats pump, not pummel as in so much of their work. Is it a seduction, or something a little rougher? Does the lead singer have his hands down his pants, in that special way that thrilled so many concert-goers?

Junk Culture by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Album: Junk Culture
OMD was an anomaly, in that they actually got better the more commercial they got. And while every band peaks and each successive album gets suckier and suckier, each new OMD album after Junk Culture turned out to be not as sucky as you expected it to suck. In fact, they were quite good. At the time. Junk Culture finds OMD poised at their perfect moment — the experimentalism of Dazzle Ships is over, and ‘If You Leave’ is yet unpenned.

A Guide for I and I by Thievery Corporation Album: Ministry of Sound: Clubbers Guide to Breaks
I am not a clubber. I do not club. It’s just that you see these albums at the library, and you think, “Here’s a chance for me to hear how the other half lives, without having to actually waste money on the CD.” And then someone sees it in your iTunes Library and says, “Don’t you feel like a dick having songs by somebody with ‘DJ Whatever’ in their name? What are you, 18?” And I’m like, “39 is the new 18.” I will defend this track; it grooves along pleasantly, despite the annoying references to ‘Jah Almighty’. It could probably be longer, even. But you didn’t hear it from me.

Does God exist? Only one way to find out:

A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal’s enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.

“The man shouted ‘God will save me, if he exists’, lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions,” the official said.

“A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery.”

So that’s pretty conclusive, then.

It’s a senseless tragedy, and very sad for the man, his family, and the observers. I can’t find any way to express the enormity of this, except through the sensitive medium of poetry. So I’m challenging everyone in the world to a limerick contest on this topic. Put ’em in comments. I’ll post mine when I’ve got a good one.