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-   -   What the hell is this? (http://www.fiveminute.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1551)

Sa'ar Chasm 04-05-2010 03:57 AM

What the hell is this?
 
http://www.mysteryarts.com/magic/wor...ndex.php?p=387

It's amazing what turns up when you vanity Google yourself.

This book appears to be a compilation of random magic words that some dude has stolen off the Internet. The weirdest part is that I stole that "magic word" from the fora (I also stole from Arabian Nights, The Day The Earth Stood Still and Sesame Street). He makes a half-assed attempt at citation, but attributes the quote to the "author" (my screen name, despite the fact my real name is at the bottom of the page along with the copyright declaration) rather than the character speaking, and simply lists the title of the fiver with no attempt to provide a URL, the name of the site, the date accessed or any explanation at all as to what "Five Minute Body Parts" is. Taken out of context, it sounds like some sort of Prosthetics While You Wait service. I wonder if this counts towards my Cited By total.

This find is much more entertaining than that Argentinian website that translated one of my fivers into Spanish. Apparently it was hilarious, judging by all the "jajajajaja"s. I can't remember which one it was, but I thought it was fairly mediocre in English.

Chancellor Valium 04-09-2010 10:14 PM

Hee. I love nutty pseudoscience online.

Also, I'm fairly sure "Sesame" does not have anything to do with "seshemu"; Faulkner's Concise Dictionary marks two words that this might derive from; one is "ruler, leader", the other is "statue, portrait, image, counterpart". Quite aside from that it makes no sense whatsoever as an etymology.

Wiki claims the term derives from the plant, the name of which, apparently, derives from Assyrian "shamash-shammu".

My guess is that the site/book/etc. is some kind of 'secrets of the ancients' claptrap a la Zeitgeist: The Movie.

Sa'ar Chasm 04-10-2010 04:49 AM

When I was a kid, I always thought it meant "says me" with an extra syllable in the middle, so that Open Sesame essentially means open the door because I said so.

It may just be a nonsense word made to sound foreign, since anyone speaking Arabic is unlikely to say the English word "open".

Quote:

Hee. I love nutty pseudoscience online.
I'm not sure how seriously the dude takes his book. It might be in the vein of Legends of the Ferengi or the Star Wars atlas, where fictional stuff is presented as "real", but both author and reader know it's fake and accept the premise because they think it's neat (for a sliding definition of "neat").

NAHTMMM 04-11-2010 08:52 PM

Wow. That's really surreal. And amusing, of course.


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