"Common sense is very important in ghost research."

I find this quote amusing because it is well known that when the brain thinks about ghosts it undergoes clownossification. For those not familiar with clownossification ...

... let me first explain the most important point about the word: the first syllable divides between the "w" and the "n", not between the "n" and the "o" -- like this: clow-nossification.

Clownossification is the condition in which normally rational people under the influence of the unknown seek to attribute anything and everything out of the ordinary to the supernatural. You see it happen all around you, when people begin to talk or think about something mysterious suddenly a murkiness imposes upon reality and sense goes south for the winter and gets lost.

Clown-ossification is an entirely different condition -- it is the condition by which a clown undergoes something like petrification.

Some clowns were once rational human beings. One day something happened to them -- usually an emotional trauma -- and suddenly a murkiness imposed upon reality and their sense went south and got lost. At that point, starving and on the brink of personal extinction, they realized the only way to eat and have toilet tissue again was to become a clown, exploiting their new-found senselessness to the benefit of their own survival.

I'm not convinced everything out there can be researched. Sometimes you think of something to research that upon serious investigation would likely solve all of humanity's problems, and you know it, but you can't take on the project because there are no funding opportunities available. Then you happen to visit the circus, see the clowns, and think about ghosts and a murkiness is imposed upon reality.

I don't know if clowns have ghosts or not. If we assume a ghost is a soul, then it is unclear as to whether clowns have one or not. The world may never know, because I can't get funding for a project to investigate this conundrum, and now I'm thinking about both clowns AND ghosts, which is making my reality very murky.

Which brings me to the point of today's topic: Articulating the Numisma.

My Webster's New World Dictionary claims to have over 60,000 entries. My kids' Webster's Intermediate Dictionary has over 70,000. I tested this very scientifically by picking one page at random in the Intermediate Dictionary and comparing to the same set of entries in New World Dictionary until I found a word in the Intermediate Dictionary that is NOT in the New World Dictionary. The word I found was "acellular."

There are two conclusions one must reach in response to this important discovery: the New World will be less advanced than "intermediate" and in the New World, one will have no need of the word "acellular," implying, of course, that all things in the New World will be made of cells.

I didn't like the definition of numismatology in either of the Webster's dictionaries I consulted, so like any good post-modern man, I went looking for another authoritative source that I liked better. In this case I turned to the free online dictionary, WordNet 2.0. Thank goodness open source lags a little behind the rest of the world! It has the word in it and therefore is more advanced than "intermediate", but I still didn't like the definition. Fortunately I can get to a Webster's from 1913, which is even more advanced than WordNet and defines numismatology as "The science which treats of coins and medals, in their relation to history"

Clearly the problem with Webster's is that Noah Webster is dead. I can't seem to contact his ghost to inquire.

When I first saw the word "numismatist", I was walking along a sidewalk with a friend of mine gazing at abandoned storefronts along the main street of a small town near where we live. An abandoned jewelry store advertised the former proprietor as a "numismatist". Since we both live in the era on the cusp of the New World, neither one of us knew what a numismatist was because it isn't in the New World vocabulary. Suddenly we found a murkiness encroaching upon reality and found a satisfactory explanation in the supernatural which gave us topic for conversation throughout an entire lunch!

Clearly, a numismatist must do something with numisma, whatever that is -- certainly a substance of great power and probably a little gooey and sparkly. It must be something more psychic than material since we'd never heard of it and we had both been to college.

And then it all become crystal clear to my friend, P. (that's the old-school literary technique of naming someone anonymously. It doesn't happen now. In the New World people make up names for people to protect their identity and refer to everyone in the female gender). A numismatist must Articulate the Numisma.

Of course!!! And if the secret society of Numismatists did not continue and practice its arcane art of Articulation then all of space time would implode.

So let's have a drink to those heroic and unsung Numismatists!

There is a web site on the internet where you can look at photos of ghosts, read stories, get some ghost hunting tips, learn how to identify a real ghost from a trick of the light, etc., and visit their achrives. They claim to have been around sense 1999.

It is from GhostStudy that we learn that "Common sense is very important in ghost research."

The problem with ghost research -- indeed any research -- is that one is penetrating deep into the unknown and therefore at any and every turn runs the risk of clownossifying. This explains the existence of left-wing liberals, Obamanites, and evolangalists.

Let's take the evolangalists as an example. A dude we'll call Chuck came up with the idea that all lifeforms were descended through evolution over time from common ancestors. That idea evolved over time into the modern theories of evolution. That's all fine. Chuck himself (or should I say, in preparation for the New World, "herself") went on to become a self-professed agnostic -- sad, as it places his/her eternal soul in jeopardy, but still not a particular problem for the rest of us. Though why anyone would willingly run the risk of placing his/her eternal soul in jeopardy, I don't know -- sense would dictate that given the choice of oblivion or possible existence after death, that one would just go ahead with doing what was needed to ensure existence "just in case" -- if all things end in oblivion after all, you haven't lost anything by being a little cautious. Perhaps he was clownossifying. But I digress.

The problem with researching the origin of man or any life form isn't so much "how," as "why". "How" is relatively easy -- enough study, enough time, people will figure it out and that is very good. The "Why" is the Great Mystery of the Cosmos. Once research delves into the origin of anything it has to eventually ask why the thing originated, and when people start to do that they are confronted with the Great Mystery.

If mystery leads to murkiness, the Great Mystery leads to Darkness, and it is in the Great Darkness that reality is broken and people totally lose their sense. And so evolangalists, seeking, rightly, to try to understand how man was made, are confronted by the Great Mystery that cannot be answered by science -- it can only be answered by the Originator, and then only by personally asking Him (no "Her" allowed in any World for this One) and expecting an answer as to "Why? Why did You do it?"

There in the depths of Mystery people often lose their sense and rational people become clowns, Articulating the Numisma in a vain belief that they can control the Cosmos and that somehow the Why of things was conceived by the creature rather than the Creator.

Rather than own up to human inadequacy, people confronted with the Mystery will fall back on Pride and reject there is a mystery at all, and that is when clownossification begins.

But it does not culminate in the denial of the Creator. No, indeed, if only it did! No, when final ossification of all sense is complete, then the Creator is substituted with another concept -- any but Him -- with fanatic religious fervor. For evolangilists, the concept is evolution, and somehow the existence, for them, of a theory of how man originated is proof-positive that Jesus is not divine -- a leap of "reason" that could only be made by an ossified intellect -- or a clown.