Cap’n Refsmmat’s Blog of Doom

Write like this.

So it seems a thread on SFN inspired me to create Alex’s Law of Internet argumentation. I’d like to elaborate a bit on that, and propose a new Law or two:

• Alex’s First Law
  As soon as an online discussion becomes an argument, the participants will never admit they are wrong, no matter how strong the evidence against them. Winning an argument fairly is impossible.
• Alex’s Second Law
  Upon reading something that flies in the face of accepted science or reason, the educated layman will immediately make an attack on the semantics of it, as he does not understand enough science or logic to make a more detailed response. Inevitably, the discussion will shift to the meaning of one or two key words rather than focusing on the science or logic.
• Alex’s Third Law
  It is far easier to attack an argument by quoting one of the Laws of Argumentation than it is to actually construct a logical response.

  First Corollary: Using a Law of Argumentation (this includes laws such as Danth’s and Godwin’s) as a substitute for logical argumentation is justification for using Alex’s First Law against you.

  Second Corollary: Using Alex’s First Law to win an argument immediately makes you a victim of the First and Third Laws.

A list of the other Laws of Argumentation

First, read the poem What I Believe, by Michael Blumenthal. It’s crucial to understanding my poem.

What I Believe

I believe that unicorns exist,
but that dolphins and iguanas
are entirely imaginary.

I believe that a hamster’s bite
won’t kill a man,
but that his wife will.

I believe that the weirder you get,
the crazier you are,
but the more fun you have.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in a small bed,
you will fall off the side.

I believe that no one
is spared insanity,
but some people get too much of it.

I believe in determinism,
but that’s not my fault.

I believe that, when all
the clocks melt,
Dali goes on without them.

I believe that whatever
pulls us under,
will do so violently.

so as to alarm everyone,
so as to make them shout
and inspire generations of filmmakers.

And I believe that there are living poets
that are quite good,
but that I have yet to find any.

This is what happens when you tell a nerd to write poetry.

‘Twas a warm summer day in La-La Land,
Fields of grass swayed lazily in the breeze,
The cool wind made ripples in ponds quite grand,
Cattle grazed quietly in the tall trees.

Fields of wildflowers, cover’d in white snow,
Were drinking from the ice-cover’d river.
High up in the grasses was a white crow.
The moon resembled a small cheese sliver.

The townspeople, dressed in parkas, were out
To round up their herds of longhorn llamas;
The honey bees were beginning to sprout,
Searching for fresh floral-print pajamas.

Another normal day in La-La Land,
Said mister Dali to his melting hand.

Those who do not get the Salvador Dali reference should go check Wikipedia. And those who are Googling to see if I plagiarized this sonnet: 5th period. I was Hamlet.

• Kommandant of commas
• Sultan of spelling
• Advocate of adverbs
• Adjutant of adjectives
• Savant of style
• King of correctness
• Guru of grammar
• Partisan of participles
• Mogul of modifiers
• General of gerunds
• Pontiff of punctuation
• Archbishop of articles
• Kaiser of clauses
• Fountain of phonetics
• Syndicate of syntax
• Dystopia of dyslexia
• Conductor of conjunctions
• Purveyor of periods
• Secretary of semicolons
• Mullah of metaphor
• Imam of imagery
• Admiral of ampersands
• Priest of perspective
• Apostle of apostrophe
• Hyperion of hyperbole
• Deity of dependent clauses

And so on.

Nerd poetry! This is what happened when I was forced to parody The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.

(Yes, it’s long, but it’s worth it. Really.)

Once upon a schoolnight dreary, while I worked, bored and weary,
On many a long and arduous paper of the English kind,
While I toiled, nearly sleeping, suddenly there came a beeping,
As of some device slowly losing, losing its electronic mind.
“’Tis but a battery,” I muttered, “needing a replacement of its kind –
Nothing more, I hope to find.”

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the late of night,
And each separate keystroke rang out like a silenced gunshot.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; – vainly I had sought to delay
The completion of my work – work I could afford not
To lose, work whose final completion I had sought
A whole lot.

And the cold heartless beeping of the unknown gizmo
Scared me – scared me with its beeping, insistent and unkind,
So that now, to ease my nervous mind, I sat repeating,
“’Tis but a battery, only a battery, needing a replacement of its kind –
An old battery needing a replacement of its kind –
Nothing more, I hope to find.”

Now I looked about in search of the insistent beeping,
With each passing moment my mind filling with terror;
Terror that the beeping may not be trivial,
Terror that the error’s wearer
Could be the cruel bearer
Of a fatal error.

I cautiously looked about the debris-strewn floor
To find this beeper, to find its hidden location
And suddenly I saw it; I saw what I had hoped not to admit –
A computer, my computer, the source of all my frustration,
And I saw on its screen a message that caused a curious sensation:
“Illegal operation.”

I suddenly felt quite faint, as though I had inhaled paint;
I fervently prayed this was but a mere aberration,
That my hard work, my essay, had not just seen its final day;
But alas, it was lost, by an act of electronic constipation,
By my computer’s ceaseless and mindless oration:
“Illegal operation.”

“No!”, I cried, “you fiend! I was nearly done when you intervened!”
I was filled with sorrow – there was a great emotional tribulation;
Poetry is not easy, The Raven less so,
And now it was all lost in the electronic devastation –
The fatal aberration – of my computer’s
Illegal operation.

You often hear phrases such as “blind as a bat” or “soft as silk,” but nobody has ever attempted to define all these units. So I will. Here’s my list of informal units:

• Loons of craziness
• Silks of softness
• Bats of blindness
• Buttons of cuteness. This scale is logarithmic to allow for extremely low cutenesses.
• Helens of beauty. You know, Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” (This means that one milliHelen is defined as the beauty required to launch one ship.”
• Pies of easiness. (Alternate units include “as easy as 1-2-3″ and “as easy as 2 plus 2″.)
• Hatters of madness/insanity.
• Dogs of sickness.
• Mules of stubbornness.
• Lambs of gentleness.
• Fiddles of fitness.
• Long-tailed cats near a rocking chair of nervousness.
• Greased lightnings of speed.
• Posts of deafness.
• Doornails of deadness.
• Rocks of dumbness.
• Tree trunks of thickness.
• Clams of happiness.
• Beets of redness.
• Turtles of social awkwardness.
• “Hell” forms an interesting wildcard unit — things can be “hot as hell”, “loud as hell”, “crazy as hell”, and so on.

Suggestions for calibrations for the units are welcome.