Pep Talk

Friends, it's cold out there. Real cold. Butt ass freezing cold. Highs in the single digits, wind chills of -25. Fuckin' Siberian. Your nose hairs are frozen together, you can't feel your toes, your contacts are stuck to your corneas, and your testes have burrowed behind your solar plexus. On your way to work, you saw puffins migrating south. Your car's heater is broke, the bus window was stuck open, the tracks are so cold your train was a half-hour delayed.

Does that mean you're going to stamp your feet and bitch about it? LIKE HELL!

You've got your pride, your dignity. You're not some Arizona pantywaist who whinges whenever he can see his breath. You don't cry "Frostbite!" the moment an extremity goes numb or "Pneumonia!" at the first shiver. You don't lose your ability to drive in a half-inch of snow or break your leg on the first icy patch. You're tougher than that. You laugh into the snowstorm and fart into the howling wind.

You may be surrounded by these transplants and visitors mewling and kvetching in their Thinsulate® jackets and designer boots, but does that mean you weaken? Do their outraged protests arouse sympathetic clucks and tender commiserations? HELL NO! When the wind chill hits ludicrous, you tell 'em, "I go golfing in this kind of weather." Next time it sleets, you shake your head at the season's mildness. At most-- after the second half-foot of snow falls--you mutter, "Still ain't half as bad as '99."

Never forget who you are! Whether your were born here or not, you're Chicagoans, and that means something. It means that where winter's concerned, only Canadians and Siberians get bragging rights on you. It means that no matter how extreme, you bear it all with the stoic fortitude of your Upper Midwestern forebearers. Stand tall, be proud. Wear long underwear.

Friday Fill-In-the-Blank

On the train today, I saw an ad for PowerBar® with the tag line "Be great." Below it, someone had written:

"Ha ha! I'm"

Complete the thought.

X = ?

English-speaking fantasists love X. None of the other 25 letters pulses with exotic associations in the same way. Q is a distant second, found in such run-of-the-mill words as "quiet" and "quick" (though it can have something of the same flair when there's no U in its company). Like Z, it's odd, but at the same time familiar. X is unknown, even unknowable. How many years of our childhood were we tortured by the question "x = ?". All this baggage makes it basically untranslatable--particularly for languages which don't even use the Latin alphabet. What represents it in Cyrillic, where what looks like "X" is pronounced like the ch in chutzpah and is just another letter, no more restricted than h in our own language.

The problem of X was the most important to be tackled if I were going to adapt the X-Men to Gaea. Last night, I hit upon an ingenious solution: Wasn't one of the ancient Germanic runes shaped like an X? Yes, indeed; geofu (in Old English), which means "gift". (All the runes had names derived from common vocabulary words which started with--or at least contained, as in cases like yng--the sounds the represented.) The Old High German form would be gëba. How would the Lombards have understood a term like Gëbamenn? Gifted men, i.e. those with talents beyond those of other mortals? The men who give generous gifts, as a good liege was expected to, or who had received them, as befits a faithful vassal? Or men who had been given, like the oblates who were donated to monasteries?

All of these fit the group in some way. Instead of being named for its leader, it lent his name to him. If they were the Gëbamenn, he must be the Gëbahērro, the Gift-Lord. Assume this contracts to Gebērro in the mouths of the conquered who repeat his story and whose language lacks the sound represented by h. In accordance with the fate of all words in their speech, the g palatalises, the b lenits, maybe the first vowel becomes indistinct with loss of stress...centuries later, it has become Javerro--in some dialects, where the zh sound merges with sh (written x, in accordance with Old Spanish practice), Xaverro.

Who did he gather around him? First there was a great hairy brute of a man, know affectionately as Tiorīno or "the Beastly One". Later generations know him as Tirinho. Next, a woman of great reknown called Jana Grouwa "Yana the Grey", but possessed of such remarkability that she came to be known as Wundardiorn or "Girl of Marvels"; her name has since been corrupted, to Gundaldrienha, but not her reputation. One of his band, a foreign giant, was possessed of an evil eye, great and swollen as that of Balor the Fomorian and just as deadly in its effects. For his own protection, he was forced to cover it with an eyepatch, garnering him the name Einaugo or "One Eye", later Yougo or Inyogo. There were others, too, but they are not remembered as well as those who were attracted to his court later--such as the fierce fighter Filufraz or "Much-Devouring" (now Felfraz or Felfrau) and the daughter of the storm goddess of the great inland sea named Demara (now Dembra or Diembra) for the first hour of daylight.

As you can tell, the more I thought about it, the less this figures sounded like mere feudal counts and the more they resembled the heroes of King Arthur's court of Charlemagne's Paladins. I'll have to find another source of inspiration for place names.