Animal Planet

There is a word for animal heads sitting on human bodies (and no, the word isn't "gross" or "surreal").

Wikipedia describes theriocephaly (from Greek therion ‘beast’ and kefalí ‘head’) as the condition of having the head of an animal - commonly used to refer the depiction in art of humans (or deities) with animal heads.

In Hinduism, the god Ganesha (also known as Ganesa, Ganapati and Vinayaka) is depicted with an elephant head. He is known to represent the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and the benevolent supernatural being of intellect and wisdom.

While some find it fun to fill their blog posts and pin pictures of people with animal heads onto their pinterest pages, it's a very real phobia for others who are very fearful of seeing animal heads on people's bodies. I have not been able to find a name for this phobia. But if you're one of these fearful people I apologize.

And you shouldn't be surprised to find there are artists who paint animal faces onto people's portraits. They do this, they say, to reveal something about their personality or to explore their animal nature.

Not that I'm doing this here, of course.

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There have been print ads and television commercials and commercial videos done using this technique. So, the technology exists. Here I've fooled around in Photoshop (using three photos manipulated in layers to make one image – two in the last one) but there is a free image authoring/manipulation software called Gimp that you can download if you want to give it a try. (I haven't used it so you'll be exploring untested waters.)

Banana Playtime

The term "banana for scale" is a social media phrase. It's a lighthearted inclusion when people post pics of stuff – they put a banana in the shot to indicate the relative size of what the real subject matter is. This got me on a bit of a roll putting bananas into images. Please forgive me...

Please overlook the poor Photoshopping. Just playing around...

Maybe it's a guy thing but who hasn't used a banana to shoot someone (good until you run out of ammo)... ptew, ptew!

Enjoying a good Cuban banana is a rarity, especially in the U.S. where I think they are still banned. (Hard to keep them lit, I hear.)

Love and The Bubonic Plague

Love. The modern meaning of the word love is actually a relatively recent thing. It was invented by King Louis XV of France (Louie de Ha-Ha to his friends) in 1728 as a way to take his subject's minds off of The Great Plague of Marseilles, an outbreak of bubonic plague which had killed 100,000 French citizens. Desperate measures were called for to repopulate homes and refill palace tax coffers so a royal proclamation was issued called Proclamation royale de l'amour français which was posted around the country by hundreds of the court's finest scantily-clad ladies of the evening, singing an earlier version of "What is this thing called love?" Essentially, the pronouncement was designed to begin the first hippie "free love" movement. Love beads made from dyed kidney stones, small seashells and hand painted rocks were worn around necks, beards became fashionable and sandals were to be worn only without socks unless one wanted to run the risk of beheading by guillotine.

The male population were immediately interested. Seeing the eye-popping reactions of the local men to these ladies and the proclamation explaining and encouraging new feelings of intimacy between the sexes, (feelings until then normally reserved for inanimate objects like favorite chairs and fine wines) the wives and girlfriends of these men chased the Court Ladies out of town and began to sing themselves, write beautiful poetry and wore patchouli oil to smell better; causing men to look at women with fresh eyes. Men began to take out the garbage, have baths more than once a month and fixed things around the house. And love was born. 

Before then, people had relations of course, but it was considered a messy, purely physical duty that included lots of grunting and splinters. Men and women didn't actually even like each other very much. Duties those days were firmly based on keeping men doing things that kept them away from what the women were doing. And women were just fine with that. 

After the proclamation came out though, things changed. Knowing that this new thing called amour had royal approval falling in love became la nouvelle chose populaire – a national mania. Everyone wanted a piece of that action. In honor of the King's proclamation the act of encouraging love by one person to another was called la courtoisie, or "courting". And it took very few years for the population of France to regenerate itself back to pre-plague levels.

(All of the above is a total fabrication, of course. Everyone knows the Greeks invented everything...)

Getting From A To B

If there is one constant in the human evolution equation, it's that we have always had to get somewhere. For something. Or someone. To get stuff done. Or to visit others whom we were secretly happy didn't live close. Used to be, in order to do so we walked everywhere.

Then somebody (there are no written records) figured there must be a better way to get around and set about devising ways of doing so. At first, a few stupid guys tried riding their wives around but found too often it ended with the women riding the men. (That idea was quickly abandoned.) Then, humans found horses, cows and donkeys (they tried sheep but they were generally much too short) and found them much more conducive to the task but discovered upon further experimentation that cows were pretty slow and donkeys too apt to take you where you didn't want to go, so over time the smart ones stuck mainly with horses which, once you both got over the bucking thing, worked pretty well.

Hemorrhoids, back problems, dignity issues surrounding the pouring of fine wines on a date ride and the problems associated with dragging huge sacks filled with goods on the ground behind them led people to invent the carriage – a device with wheels – to be pulled by horses. It was a successful transition. The horse union didn't complain because it meant better working conditions and getting the owners off their backs. So ingrained did this horse-driven custom become that once we started substituting combustion engines for the four-footed variety we still referred to the power generated as horsepower.

But the interesting thing is that over time, the progression from foot travel to horseback to being pulled by horses to zoom-zooming with horsepower, having no actual horses involved, has led to an another important thing. How we get where we're going and the journey involved has become as important as our destination.

We all know how words and phrases evolve over time. Don't be surprised if the word journey becomes more and more synonymous with quality of life. That while we have to get somewhere, the time it takes gives us the opportunity to share, learn and experience.

So there. I may have said something smart. Or not.