The airport can be the best place in the world if you some creativity and a background in lighting design. Richard Dunn was stuck at the McCarran International because he was bumped off two consecutive Delta Air Lines flights. Dunn had some time to kill, so he googled songs about being alone and came across some Celine Dion's "All By Myself" track. 


From CBC News:

“I thought, well I don’t have enough time to go to a hotel so what do I do? I’ve got my phone and an empty movie set, lets see what trouble I can get into.”

That trouble lead to a music video of him lip syncing to some Celine Dion in an empty airport. The video has received 7.1 million views since Monday. Talk about what some sadness and duct tape can do.

All by myself from Richard Dunn on Vimeo.

The Internet feeds off of Nicolas Cage's unexplainable antics. We can't confirm if Cage and Andrew Dice Clay decided to get dressed in the dark before going to see Guns N' Roses in Las Vegas on Sunday. But I'm glad the poor soul that manages the GNR social media duties snapped this epic picture that wii further the Internet Cage love for weeks to come.

Veni, vidi, vici—I came, I saw, I conquered. That was Julius Caesar’s famous dispatch to Rome after he and his legions dispatched King Pharnaces. While I didn’t conquer anything on my trip to Rome, I can say I ate a lot of food, drank a lot of wine and picked up some interesting word origins from ancient Rome.

My trip was a vacation, so let’s start with Roman holiday. Since the film Roman Holiday starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, this phrase has taken on a kinder, gentler meaning, but originally it meant gaining pleasure from seeing others suffer. That’s because the ancient Romans got a big kick out of grisly spectacles, like gladiators slaughtering one another, lions attacking elephants, and other cruel exhibitions.

Here's a post the children of the 90's might enjoy. Last weekend, Chance the Rapper covered the Arthur jingle "The Best You Can Do" at the Sasquatch! Festival in Washington. You might know chance from his collaborations with Justin Bieber. Aside from his esteemed musical career, this is a pretty positive video for a Friday afternoon.

The news is usually focused on hate, corruption, and crime, but not all is lost. While your favorite athlete was being indicted for two more murders, an everyday hero was at work.

Our story begins in San Francisco, California. An anonymous man reportedly closed a lucrative real estate deal and decided not to pocket all of the money. He thought long and hard about what to do with the money and decided he wanted to do something fun. Just to clarify, in his parallel universe "fun" means not spending it on one's self.

After deciding that he wanted to do something fun with his money. His next step was to decide what exactly to do. He bounced a handful of ideas around:

“I played around with different ideas, and frankly, they were too complicated,” he explained. “I was thinking of a ‘Survivor’-type game…or something like it at some point.”

HiddenCash then had an epiphany: He would leave the money around San Francisco in envelopes, tweet clues to the locations, and create a city wide scavenger hunt. While the amount of money he has left around town is unknown, he has been posting regular hints and updates of the caches he has left around San Fransisco and Los Angeles. In an economy so harsh that even the great Norm Macdonald can't hold a job (for unknown, NSFW reasons), it's good to see that good people are still making it out there.

In summary, HiddenCash is a hero. He decided that he would share the money he earned with others and create something fun for the community instead of the traditional real estate celebration of cocaine and prostitutes after closing large deals. While select individuals have been the recipients of free money, the whole city of San Francisco is the winner as all San Franciscans have been gifted with a quirkier culture and an act to inspire them all or something.

You can read the original story here.

Until next week, may all your dreams come true.

Eponyms are names that have become immortalized in well known words, such as syphilis, sadism and masochism. We’ll get to those, but let’s start with a favorite, bogart, which is slang for hogging something, like a medical marijuana joint at a party, instead of passing it on. As movie buffs will guess, bogart comes from Humphrey Bogart, who had a cigarette continually dangling from his lips—just like the guy at the party. The term got a big boost from the 1969 flick Easy Rider, which featured the song “Don’t Bogart Me” by the pretty well-forgotten band “Fraternity of Man”, whose lyrics began with “Don’t bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over to me.”
Words for clothing are often eponyms. Bloomers are those puffy trouser-like things that women once wore under a skirt. They were promoted as enabling women to play sports and such that they couldn't in a dress. This fashion trend was picked up by suffragettes, one of whom was Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer, and the undergarment became known as bloomers. Fortunately for women, fashion ultimately changed; women now can wear trousers that we call pants, so that today either sex might be wearing the pants in the family. Pants is a shortening of pantaloons, which comes from a stock goofball character in Italian comedies who wore this kind of clothing. This character, by the way, derives from St. Panteleone, the patron saint of Venice, which just goes to show you that nothing is sacred. Parenthetically, I should warn Americans that the Brits have a different understanding of the word pants, who use it as a synonym for panties. This will help you avoid a faux pas I once made. Better just say levi’s, named of course for Levi Strauss, who in turn was named after the Biblical father of one of the twelve tribes of Israel.

I have no good segue for this, so I’ll just move on to guillotine, which you will recall is a device popularized during the French Revolution, used to lop off the heads of people who failed to show sufficiently radical sympathies. Although the guillotine sounds gruesome, it was designed by Dr. Joseph Guillotine as a more humane method of execution than hanging, firing squads, and other more painful, slower methods of capital punishment. As Dr. Guillotine himself touted his invention to the French Assembly: “With my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it!” The necks of many members of the French Assembly, including Robespierre, would soon get to test the Doctor’s claim. The word derrick, which we now mostly think of as the structure in an oil derrick, began as a word for the tower supporting the hangman’s noose. It was named after one Thomas Derrick, a notorious English executioner, who was pardoned from the death penalty himself on the condition that he enter that particular profession. Proving that history loves irony, in 1601 Derrick was called upon to hang the Earl of Sussex, the man who pardoned him.

Speaking of Earls, the common sandwich is named after the infamous libertine, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who asked his servant to prepare him something that he could eat that wouldn’t pull him away from the gaming tables. Hence: a meal of meat and other food stuffed between two slices of bread. When he wasn’t gambling and fornicating, the Earl did stints as the First Lord of the Admiralty, where he sponsored Captain James Cook’s remarkable global voyages in the late 1700’s. A grateful Cook named the Sandwich Islands after him, but this honor was diminished when the islands were renamed Hawaii.

Masochism, in which a person achieves pleasure from being inflicted with pain, is from a 19th century Austrian writer, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, who among other things signed a contract with his mistress which called for her to treat him as his slave for six months. A contract? Really? His best known novel is Venus in Furs, which recently was made into a Tony Award-nominated broadway play, as well as a French movie. Sadism is from the Marquis de Sade, who achieved fame with his well known sex-capades, which in opposition to masochism involved inflicting pain on others. Interestingly, Citizen de Sade’s sexual proclivities did not prevent him from being elected as a delegate to the National Convention during the French Revolution. Syphilis derives from a 16th century Italian poem entitled “Syphilis Sive de Morbo Gallico”, which translates to “Syphilis, or the French Disease”, in which the hero, a shepherd named Syphilis, becomes the disease’s first victim.

Most of us would probably like to have a word coined after them, but John Duns Scotus would be humiliated that a dull-minded person is called a dunce. Dr. Scotus was a famous 13th century theologian, whose works were later criticized as hair-splitting sophistry—and whose obstinate followers were mocked as dunces.

One of my favorite eponyms is bowdlerize, a term of ridicule for censoring a literary work by cutting offending passages. Bowdlerize is from Thomas Bowdler, who expended a great deal of effort purifying Shakespeare. For example, where Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth cried "Out, damned spot!", Bowdler changed it to "Out, crimson spot!" He also attempted to improve the Word of God by eliminating some of the Bible's racier passages. I hope my editor sees no need to bowdlerize this column.

May 25th is Geek Pride Day. And why not; everyone else has a day, even fools. So, to honor the day, and feed your inner geek, I thought it might be the proper occasion to explore some hi-tech terms.

Let’s start with hi-tech itself. For that I need to begin with technology, which is a compound of two Greek words, “techno”, meaning “art or skill, and “logia”, which means a treatise or discourse. Technology came into English in the early 1600’s meaning a treatise on skilled arts and crafts. Its meaning later narrowed so that it referred more specifically to the body of knowledge of mechanical arts and sciences—technical know-how.

Hi-tech illustrates two common ways that language evolves: people shorten words and compound them, which is how we got hi-tech. The first documented use was a mention of a hi-tech home in the 1972 Whole Earth Catalogue. As a standalone contraction, tech came later, when in the 1980’s it referred to industries specializing in, well, technology. Techie began as college slang for students in technical fields, then expanded to anyone knowledgeable in the technical details that for most of us cause our eyes to glaze over. 
Many techies are nerds, which was a substitute for someone who is a square. No one is quite certain how the word nerd originated, but it might be based on a comical Dr. Seuss character, a made-up, human-like animal with an over-sized head—sounds about right. Of course, with the rise of technology, it became sort of cool to be a nerd, although increasingly nerds proudly prefer to be called geeks. That’s probably from a very old Germanic word “geck” for a fool of the simpleton sort, which is not how geeks are viewed today.

Today, geeks are most closely associated with computers. Interestingly, computer originally meant a human, coined in the 1600’s to refer to a person who performed calculations. Computer derived from Latin “putare” meaning to reckon, “com”, a Latin prefix meaning together (eg., combination), and the suffix “er”, for a person who does these kinds of things (eg., a grocer). In the 1800’s, computer transferred to mechanical calculating devices, so naturally was applied to electronic calculating machines when they were invented in the 1940’s.

Geeks invented robots, machines that perform mundane human tasks. Robot stems from a 1920 play by Czechoslovakian Karel Capek. He used “robotnik”, meaning humans in forced labor, which was from the Slavik root “robota” meaning slave and the suffix “nik”, meaning a group of persons, like Beatniks. The English translation of Capek’s play shortened it to robot. Science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov later popularized robots as intelligent machines. The Jetsons made them loveable. Computers have made them possible.

Speaking of loveable, remember R2-D2 and C-3PO, a couple of stars in the Star Wars movies, who filmmaker George Lucas called droids. Lucas didn’t quite make up this word on his own. An Encyclopedia from 1728 claimed that the scholar Albertus Magnus made an “androides” way back in the 13th century, meaning a human-like automaton—from Greek “andro” meaning “man”, and “eides” meaning “shape”. Lucas clipped this to droid, then made a gazillion dollars by trademarking and licensing the word.

Don’t confuse a robot or android with cyborg, which is a fusion of electronics with an actual human. Cyborg is a contraction of “cybernetics” and “organism”, then compounds them. We’re not cyborgs yet, although the makers of Android and other smart phones are giving it a go.

Also in Star Wars, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker battled using sabers that shot out “light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation”, the scientific name given by the computer nerds who invented the intense beam of light that is so narrow because the wavelengths of the atoms are identical. Fortunately, in 1960 someone came up with a manageable acronym for it: l-a-s-e-r. Oddly, we pronounce the “s” in laser as a “z”, maybe because “lazer” just sounds like it is “zzzzzapping” something? Or perhaps it’s just a lazy pronunciation.

Scientific inventions just seem to scream for geeky new words to describe them. Radar is another example. Radar detects the position of distant objects by aiming radio waves at an object, then measuring the time the waves take to bounce back. Radar developed as practical device at the beginning of World War II, which the British used effectively in defending against German aerial attacks during the Battle of Britain. The word is an acronym, more or less, of “radio detection and ranging.” Radio itself, as an electromagnetic wave, comes from Latin “radiatus” meaning to shine, or radiate.

Happy Geek Pride Day. Now, beam me up, Scotty. 

Looking for a reason to move to Tucson? The Tucson Young Professionals are hosting a #thisistucson Launch Party from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 22, at the Hacienda del Sol Guest Ranch Resort, 5501 N Hacienda Del Sol Road. .

#thisistucson is a city-wide social media campaign that allows people to express why they live in and love the Old Pueblo. For instance, I would say "The Tucson Weekly, and Carnitas, Duh," but no one asked me.

General Admission tickets are $25, and they include appetizers and drink coupons. Click here or the flier above for more information.

We counted many, many ballots, figured out the top five in each of the 200 categories, so the second and final round of this year's Best of Tucson voting is online for your decision-making pleasure RIGHT NOW. 

Will someone dethrone Jon Justice in the Radio Personality or Best Radio Talk Show Host categories? Will our very own Henry Barajas take the first Best Local Comedian award? How hungry will you get reading through the Casual Dining, Restaurants and Comida categories? SO MUCH INTRIGUE, Y'ALL.

You have until June 30 to add your voice to the voting process. Sure, there are a lot of categories, but you only need to vote in 30 for your ballot to count (and two are taken up by your name and email address) and you can save your work and come back later. It'll be fun and you can consider yourself a little part of our biggest issue of the year, coming out on October 2. 

Thanks in advance, Tucson. We're looking forward to the results as much as anyone, honestly.

Last week’s Word Odyssey was on the origins of God, so this week I’m giving the devil his due.

I’m going to start with that mysterious character Lucifer. We think of Lucifer as an archangel, God’s right hand man, who got too big for his britches so God cast him down—and who we now identify with Satan. But that’s not how Lucifer got his start.