StrangeSights

More words - this time from Macquarie Dictionary which has published it’s inaugural list of “words of the year”. The Word of the Year was “muffin top” (”the fold of fat around the midriff which, on an overweight woman, spills out over the top of tight-fitting pants or skirts”). Other category winner included affluenza, ubersexual, cyberstalking, ethical eating and plausible deniability.

Meanwhile, those looking in the property market may find these two of interest. The 14th century Romanian fortress Bran Castle, known as “Dracula’s Castle”, is apparently up for sale for a cool $101 million. If that seems a little steep, there’s a 2.1 metre by 3.4 metre former janitor’s cupboard in Chelsea, west London, that can be snapped up for slightly more than $430,000.

If you’ve seen The Pursuit of Happyness, you may know of one reason for the popular resurgence of the Eighties icon, the Rubik’s Cube. But yes, apparently it’s making a comeback with Hasbro, which distributes the cube, telling The Baltimore Sun in the US that sales were up 73 per cent in 2005 and they expected similar in 2006. Toby Mao has helped. The 18-year-old Californian solved the cube in just 10.48 seconds last August, creating a new (though apparently not official) world record. His older brother Tyson (incidentally also the founder of the World Cube Association - well, who else is going to verify those records?) is apparently renowned for finishing the cube blind-folded. Makes my two sides in half an hour look pretty lame! Make sure you keep your eye out for the World Rubik’s Cube Championship in Budapest this October.

In other oddities this week:

• The Doomsday Clock, created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to herald the dangers of the nuclear age, was moved to five minutes to midnight, the first time it’s been moved since 2002. Apparently the basis for the move are the challenges posed by climate change and nuclear proliferation. But don’t worry - the clock was up to 11.58 in 1953 following the US’ detonation of a hydrogen bomb. We’ve got three minutes on that!

• And AAMI has come up with a list of driving habits we should all do our best to avoid. According to a story in Melbourne’s The Sunday Age, they include road ragers (do we need to explain?); turtle racers (they drive 30kph slower than the rest of the traffic and sit in the outside lane - argh!); gap snatchers (they accelerate to stop you changing lanes); and piggybackers (tailgaters). Recognise anyone you know?

It’s school holidays, so that means that across Australia people are dusting off the Monopoly board and trying to last the distance through a whole game of Monopoly. There’s been numerous different versions of the game - Junior Monopoly, Star Wars Monopoly, The Simpson’s Monopoly, as well as various different country versions to name just a few (Wikipedia has a big list) - but now Parker Brothers are looking at producing an Australian version of the game and they’re asking for our help in doing so.

Until 10th February you can visit www.monopoly.com.au and cast your vote for what street you think should be on the new board with the state or territory that garners the most votes occupying the esteemed position usually held by Park Lane and Mayfair (the results for these are also on the site - when Sight checked this week, Victoria was leading on 20 per cent followed by Western Australia on 17 per cent and Queensland on 14 per cent).

The properties on offer include the Great Ocean Road and Sovereign Hill in Victoria, Uluru and Katherine Gorge in the Northern Territory, the Baroosa Valley and Kangaroo Island in South Australia, Byron Bay and Tamworth in New South Wales, Lake Burley Griffin and Anzac Parade in Canberra, the Gold Coast and Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Port Arthur and Cradle Mountain in Tasmania and Exmouth and Margaret River in Western Australia.

What properties do you think should have been included?

Just had to give this story a mention. A new report has suggested that NASA might have discovered life on Mars - in the form of alien microbes - as far back as 30 years but because it didn’t recognise them as such, inadvertently killed them. The paper was presented by planetary scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch at the American Astronomical Society’s annual conference. He argues that because the Viking space probes - which landed on Mars in 1976-77 - were programmed to look for salt-water based cells, they may have missed other microbes and even killed them by soaking them in water. If so, it’s a pretty big whoops!

You may never have heard of Michigans’s smallest public university - Lake Superior State University (or LSSU as we like to call it) - but they’re doing their bit for the world. Since 1975, the university has been issuing an annual banned words list to rid us of those horrible words and phrases that have been mis-used, over-used or just been found to be useless. This year is no exception. My favorites include:

• Combined celebrity names. Ta ta Brangelina, TomKat and Bennifer!

• GITMO - that fluffy, character-like name for the Guantanamo Bay Naval Bay in Cuba;

• Awesome - yes, this I understand - it’s just such a misused word;

• “We’re pregnant” - a sad way for men to try and feel included in the whole pregnancy thing;

• i-anything - the ‘e’ prefix was banned back in 2000. Now it’s time for the i to go (with the exception, I should lobby, of all Mac-related things - after all, they were in early!)

• “Healthy food” - a valid point here. A tuna steak is not healthy but healthful (if the tuna steak were healthy, it would still be swimming!)

For the Sight list, I would add:

• “Australian values” - what on earth are these? Are they any different to universal human values? Should they be?

(Actually, that’s all I can think of so far - more to come)…

What words/phrases would you like to ban?