fearman's definitions

Quare on the Square

Dublin rhyming slang ("Quare" from the originally derogatory "queer" for gay, homosexual) for the reclining statue of Oscar Wilde, carved in County Cork from rocks of various colours. The statue is mounted on a boulder at one corner of Archbishop Ryan Park, Merrion Square, Dublin, opposite two metal columns inscribed with quotes from Wilde.

You've just got to come and see the tart with the cart and the quare on the square.

by Fearman February 10, 2008

Modern Art

Someone bought more burgers and fries than they could eat at a drive-thru McDonald's in the boondocks. Thirty miles down the road they tossed the leftovers out the window. The leftovers fermented in the sun and five days later a great big dog wandered by, thought the mess smelled appetising and ate it. The meal played havoc with the dog's nervous system and it went quite wild. The next time a car came by the dog took a flying leap through the windscreen at a relative speed of almost a hundred miles an hour, killing itself and likely the driver and sending the car out of control. The car flipped over four times and lay on the road, subsequently catching fire and burning out. A milk lorry came over the top of the hill and crashed into the mess, and was followed by five or six more vehicles before the authorities got the faintest notion what was going on and partitioned the area off. Shortly afterwards a Boeing 747 carrying, among other things, a few large containers of yellow paint suffered a blowout and had to descend. The paint squirted out of the plane and splashed down on top of the pile-up. A hitch-hiker came by with a camera and thought the whole thing looked intriguing. He took some pictures and downloaded them onto his computer later on. The pictures were Photoshopped to look a little spooky and later printed in this new form on T-shirts. The photographer's girlfriend wore one of these to an art gallery and he photographed her pulling faces and balling her fists while wearing the T-shirt. Later on, these photographs were projected onto a screen in a display room in another gallery and a painter executed a painting of people in the room watching the slide show. Shortly afterwards everyone involved in the production of all this art - the hitchhiker photographer, the girlfriend, the painter, and all - had the good sense to overdose on cocaine at a party and die shortly thereafter, thereby sensibly removing themselves from the means of production and terminating their financial interest in the process. The painting was sold for £300,000 at Sotheby's and artie journalists claimed it was emblematic of the ultimately existentiallistically meaningless search for meaning within the postmodernist aesthetic.

And that more or less is a typical story of Modern Art.

by Fearman March 5, 2008

necro-reiteration

Mental experience in which you come to believe on numerous occasions that someone must have died a while back, often persisting for many years until you hear for certain in the media that they have just actually died.

I had necro-reiteration about Joan Miro and Evel Knievel for at least a decade before they popped their clogs.

by Fearman January 6, 2008

cable hair

One of those hairs often found growing in facial hair that seem to consist of at least ten normal hairs welded together and that you simply can't resist the urge to pull out; fortunately, frequently an easy operation.

Oh, look. Cable hair. (Pinches and pulls.) Oooohh ahhh, that's lovely.

by Fearman August 30, 2007

prayer capsule

An intriguing marriage of technology and religion imagined in 1972 by prog rock outfit Genesis, In "Supper's Ready" from the album Foxtrot.

And even though I'm feeling good / Something tells me I'd better / Activate my prayer capsule.

by Fearman November 26, 2007

family rod hypothesis

The belief that children who are abused (emotionally, physically or sexually) inevitably go on to abuse any children they have themselves. Thought up by an abusive and deeply narcissistic parent who wanted to dismiss any misgivings on their own or their offspring's part as the idealism of green and inexperienced minds, and who held to the belief that if everyone does something it must be OK. Truly adult minds are not impressed by such phony reasoning. If the family rod hypothesis were true, the human race would rapidly be descending into violent dysfunction, with new traditions of bully-boys being established as the old ones persisted. A rather dangerous idea in the age of the multi-megatonne thermonuclear warhead, don't you think?

Like all redneck bully-boy cowards, John taught his kids the family rod hypothesis.

by Fearman May 28, 2008

verb the whole object

A snowclone often used in New Age, pseudoscientific or borderline fields to cast a warm glow over the enterprise in question. Meant to imply, usually fallaciously, that the real scientists or professionals are missing out on something that their clients urgently need, or at least want very very badly but for some arcane reason are unable or afraid to articulate.

Examples of phrases using the "verb the whole object" construction would be:

"Alternative" practitioners treat the whole patient. (Unlike those bloody doctors, of course.)

Home birth widwifes read the whole woman.

Organic caterers use the whole plant. (I wonder if they make rhubarb crumble).

by Fearman February 23, 2008