The March of Progress

One thing that always puts my Google skillz to the test is when I'm trying to find out about something I don't know the title for, especially when it's an instrumental piece of music or an image. This morning, we were talking about evolution at work (for a marketing project I'm doing) and I wanted to look up that picture of apes, apemen and men walking in a straight line. What's it called? The Ascent of Man? The Descent of Man?

It's actually called March of Progress, and was commissioned by Time Life Books. According to Wikipedia, it was painted by "noted natural history painter and muralist Rudolph Zallinger."

It's a hard image to find on the Web, but if you Google "ascent of man," "descent of man," or "evolution," you're sure to see countless parodies of it, including a poorly researched anti-evolution screed from nutty Christian cartoon propagandist Jack Chick and the poster for Encino Man.

It seems the knower has become... the knowee.

My Secret Hospital teammate Michael Hartney has "tagged" me on his blog, which apparently means I have to post eight random things about myself. I'm not sure that any of you who know me don't already know these things about me, or that those of you don't know me would care, but I guess that's the point of a blog, right? I talk about myself and assume someone out there is listening. Whoever you are, prepare to have your world rocked.

1. I speak Esperanto.
Really. I picked up a book on it when I was in Japan. It was something I'd been curious about since I first heard read about it, and having spent some time trying to learn Japanese, I was attracted to the idea of a(n almost) perfectly regular language. And it is easy to learn: check it out yourself.

What's more embarrassing—even more embarrassing than the fact that I can't spell the word embarrassing—is that I've recently picked it up again, after having lent the book to my friend Stan. "I'll just brush up, in case he wants to practice speaking with someone," I told myself, probably out loud. And now I'm studying it again. For the record, I have spent some time trying to learn the following languages (in order of how much time I spent studying them, from most to least): French (which I speak assez bien), Japanese, Esperanto, American Sign Language, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Ancient Greek, German and Indonesian.

2. I don't have any wisdom teeth, and never will.
My dentist always thought that was cool, and I agree. Something like 95% of adults have at least one wisdom tooth... or did before they were rudely ripped from their mangled gums. I am very thankful to be in the wisdom-deprived 5%.

"I guess that means you're not wise," the wiseasses quip. "Or I'm more highly evolved," I retort. Turns out the wiseasses may be right, according to Wikipedia:

In dentistry, hypodontia is the condition of naturally having fewer than the regular number of teeth. In Caucasians, the most commonly missing teeth are the wisdom teeth (25-35%), the upper lateral incisors (2%) or the lower second premolars (3%) The congenital absence of all teeth is called anodontia. Hypodontia is often familial, or associated with ectodermal dysplasia or Down syndrome.

3. I wrote the tagline to the film Erin Brockovich.
I've written lots of taglines for movies and TV shows, but that's one of the more memorable examples. "She brought a small town to its feet... and a huge company to its knees." More recently, Cinderella Man used a very similar tagline for its poster.

Some of my co-workers at the time complained that it reminded them too much of oral sex, I guess because of that famous incident where a woman forced a utility company to give her head.

4. I am related to President William Howard Taft.
...supposedly. My grandmother's maiden name was Taft, and is supposed to have been related to the Ohio Tafts who gave us the fattest president in US history.

I feel sorry for the guy. He wasn't a very good president, apparently, but he never really wanted to be president in the first place. He wanted to be on the Supreme Court, and only after leaving behind the White House and its impossibly small bathtub did he finally get his wish.

5. I was on Jeopardy! and Project Greenlight.
Lost both. (My screenplay Skeletons was in the top 50 screenplays for the latter.)

Ashley Ward, who is also on Secret Hospital with me, was on Jeopardy! too. She won.

6. I've always wanted to be in a band.
I'm sort of the same way with musical instruments as I am with languages... I fiddle with learning lots of them in a half-assed way. I started out playing clarinet, which led to bass clarinet and sax. Then, in college, I had the good sense to learn guitar, which is much better for getting girls than a saxophone, no matter what Lane Myers* thinks. In my room now, I have two guitars, a mandolin and a flute someone was getting rid of. I always dreamed of being that guy in the band who plays everything, like Brian Jones (without the dying), or one of the guys from Camper Van Beethoven.

Also, I've always wanted to name a band Midwife Crisis.

7. My grandparents had a cottage on Lake George in the Adirondacks, and as a kid I went there every summer.
I sometimes focus on the bad or weird parts of my childhood, but man, was I lucky to have had this place. Everything about it is so vivid in my memory. The smell of coffee in the morning, Grandma and Grandpa at the table doing the Jumble. Spending days swimming, waterskiing, jumping off the upper deck when we were old enough, canoeing to a nearby island for a picnic. Showering up for cocktail hour, playing pitch and munching on peanuts (my cousins and my sister and I brandishing our sophisticated Shirley Temples). Buying comic books at the tiny market, gray days playing miniature golf, Freihofer's chocolate chip cookies, Borg vs. McEnroe at Wimbledon on the TV....

I think if I had three wishes, one would be that for one week a summer, I could take whomever I wanted back to Lake George, and everything would be exactly the same.

Except that I could drink real cocktails.

8. I don't have any tattoos, but I often think about what tattoo I would choose.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against them per se. I've gotten as close as going into a parlor and leafing through the books. The two things that stop me are that I have no idea what I would want on me forever, and that I'm not all lean and muscled. And also that my entire body is covered in freckles and moles. What if I got a mermaid and a big mole appeared in the middle of her face? People would be all, "Why did you you get a tattoo of a mermaid with cancer?"

I think, if I had to get a tattoo now, it would be of Drinky Crow. I love love love Tony Millionaire's comic strip Maakies, and Drinky is one of those characters you just want to draw again and again in your notebook during a boring lecture. And, for some reason, I find pathetic alcoholics really funny. Sorry, pathetic alcoholics.

I had a neat idea recently. I was looking at my back and thinking how there are way too many freckles for me to get a tattoo. It's like a starry sky at night. Then I imagined Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby at the bottom of my back, looking up at the stars. Or Uncle Gabby would be looking at the stars, anyway. Drinky would be drinking. Or holding a gun to his head. And no, that would not count as a "tramp stamp."


I'm done! Those are my eight random facts. Now I have to tag eight people with blogs, which for me is hard. (Do I even know enough people with blogs?) I tag Sarah, Rob, Annie, Michele, Glennis, Erika, Jen, and, what the heck... Jonathan Coulton. I predict a 12.5% rate of return.

*John Cusack's character from Better Off Dead. And anyway, you can totally tell that a) his fingers are not in the right position for him to be playing that saxophone, and b) you're really hearing a synthesizer on the "sax" setting.

In which I fail to discover the name of a bodily function, and try to name it myself

So there we were—my girlfriend, her roommate and I—having just finished a meal of slow-cooked pork, egg noodles and root vegetables, when the roommate did that thing. You know... kind of like a single hiccup? An involuntary inhalation of air that happens after you've eaten a big meal, and usually sounds like you gasping the word "HUP"? And for some reason you feel compelled to excuse yourself, as you would after belching?

"What makes us do that?" I said to them. "And what is it called?"

Well, after spending hours searching the Internet, not only did I fail to find either an explanation or a name for the phenomenon, but, as far as I can tell, no one has even written about it. IN THE HISTORY OF MAN. How is that possible? You know what I'm talking about, right?

When Googling something like this, all roads lead to hiccups. So let's talk about them first. A hiccup, according to Uncle Wikipedia, is a spasm of the diaphragm that causes you to sharply inhale, until your glottis flaps shut. It's scientific name is singultus. (In case you enjoy bodily functions but hate crass language, you should also know the words sternutation [sneezing] and eructation [burping]. You can find the scientific names of all the effluvia here.)

Also? According to Wikipedia the Guinness World Record for the longest bout of hiccups gies to Charles Osborne, an Iowan who hiccuped constantly from 1922 to 1990. Sixty. Eight. Years. Of. Hiccups. I can't believe he didn't shoot himself in the face.

I spent much of the time googling various combinations of the words involuntarily, inhalation, gasp, after eating, ate too much, etc. One of the weirder things I came across was a detailed refutation of the aquatic ape theory (or hypothesis, which he abbreviates as the AAH/T). Since the sixties, apparently, there's been a hypothesis among certain, uh, thinkers that the only thing that explains the divergence of human anatomy from that of the other primates is a more aquatic past. I don't quite understand what that more aquatic past would consist of. Like Waterworld, but with cavemen?

Not that I have that many readers at this point, but readers? I need your help. Do you know anything about this phenomenon? Is there a name for it even, say, among your group of friends? While you work on that, I'll try to ask people in that world outside the Internet. My girlfriend says there are people called "doctors" who might be answer this question.

Until I hear a better name, I hereby dub it hupping. As in, "I was so full I hupped, like, four times."