Todd Stadler's blog

Water wheels within water wheels

I have just discovered my favorite island ever: Manitoulin Island.

Now some of you will say, "Manitoulin? As in the Ojibwe for 'spirit island'?" And I will reply, "Yes, I too can copy and paste from Wikipedia — in fact, most of this entry was written in just that manner."

Undeterred, you will sneer, "But it's Canadian! What's so great about it? I mean, it's biggish, but it's only the 174th largest island in the world. Even in Canada it's frite petite — only the 31st largest Canuck island. Big deal!" To which I, noticeably miffed, will reply, "If I tell you that I'm in awe of your Google-Wikipedia skills, will you stop using them"?

And then I will proceed to blow your mind. By telling you this:

Sure, Manitoulin is an island in Lake Huron. This much even the littlest schoolkid knows. But did you know that this island itself has several lakes? Not only that, but Lake Manitou (they were running out of names) on Manitoulin Island is the largest lake on a freshwater island in the world (and Manitoulin itself is in the running for largest freshwater island — it has its own rivers! Three of them!).

"Wow, Todd, that is interesting," you may say. "Not sure it blew my mind as such, but ..."

Quit interrupting! Not done yet!

So there's Lake Huron. Which has an island, Manitoulin. Which itself has several lakes. With me so far? Do you see it coming?

That's right, one of those lakes, Mindemoya Lake, also has an island, called Treasure Island!

And — can you stand any more? — there are apparently some ponds on Treasure Island!! Wheeeeeeeee! A pond on an island in a lake on an island in a lake (and, why not ... on a continent surrounded by an ocean)!

Or, to summarize the ten foregoing paragraphs in handy graphic form:

Fig. A: It's like a lacustrine Powers of Ten

Anyhow, my dream is to one day be in a canoe in the middle of a pond on Treasure Island in Mindemoya Lake on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron. With a bucket of water in my canoe. And a mound of sand in the middle, rising out of the bucket. On the sand is a small cup of water, with a tiny stone rising out of it. And I'll place a drop of water on that stone. As things stand, that is my retirement plan. Not sure what I'll do after that.

So I don't know about you, but my attitude towards Canada really changed after I found all this out. I mean, sure, on the one hand, there's the Red Green Show and milk in bags, but, on the other hand, there's the Manitoulin Island/Mindemoya Lake/Treasure Island/pond system to consider.

Words, words, words

I woke up yesterday and had a very clear memory of my dream, which involved flying in a passenger jet at a very low altitude through the main courtyard of Rice University, and then climbing very steeply once we got to the end. During this rapid ascent, the writer for the Portland Mercury was commenting on the plane's abilities, and she did so using the word "scutive".

So it was that when I woke up, I was curious whether "scutive" was a real word. In the dream, it was used to mean "unnecessarily cautious" — there were those in the aerospace industry, apparently, who thought the plane we were on was not capable of the steep ascent we were making.

I had no knowledge of the word, and so I was excited at the prospect that my brain had remembered some word it had heard once, but which had been lost to my conscious memory.

Sadly, upon thumbing through my beloved (if often ignored in this digital age) unabridged dictionary, I found that there was no such word as "scutive". And while Google has several pages of results for that seemingly made-up word, they all appear to be corruptions of words like "executive" or "consecutive" as mangled by optical character recognition software.

But there was a bright side. For, unlike Google, which only shows you what you're trying to find, my unabridged dictionary has the charming tendency to send me off on wild goose chases in which, en route to paging to one word, I find another word of interest.

In this way, while futilely trying to find "scutive" in the dictionary, I found the following fantastic words instead:

Usufruct: (noun) The right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something that belongs to another, as far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured. (From Roman law; of more interest to me is the etymology, which obviously derives from the idea of using fruit.)

Tatterdemalion: 1 (noun) A person in tattered clothing; a shabby person. 2 (adjective) ragged; unkempt or dilapidated.

Futilitarian: (adjective) Believing that human hopes are vain, and human strivings unjustified. (Again, the humor is in the derivation.)