My third Digital Kayak column, which examines video games, has been published in Raise the Hammer, so take a look if that interests you.

This issue of Raise the Hammer has some great articles, including one that is simply hilarious. Ten Words Ben Hates lists a number of words the author finds offensive, many of which are used regularly by friend and regular Ade commenter Ryan:

Juxtaposition

Hey Ryan! How’s it goin’, man? How are the kiddies? Good? Great! Yeah I really liked that last piece you did, etc., etc. Okay, the buttering up is over: Ryan! Why do you use this word, man? You’re killing me!

Read the full article to get Ben’s opinion on segue, play date, implosion and others.

“Looks aren’t everything, you know.” – Madonna

Life has its ups and downs, its highs and lows. Sometimes the highs are splendid. Sometimes the lows are truly dreadful.

The dinner party Casie (my wife, for any new readers) and I had in honour of her birthday Saturday fits snugly into the splendidly high category.

My head buried in the toilet bowl a few hours later, vomiting up the meal I’d prepared for our guests that night, takes it place among my most dreadful lows.

It was 5 am and my third trip to the washroom. The previous two trips had gone undetected by Casie, who was passed out on the couch in the living room. On my third trip, she happened to be washing up, getting ready to finally go to bed.

“Hi sweetie,” she said as I bolted into the washroom.

“Oh, sweetie!” she exclaimed as I got into position for another wretched series of gastric convulsions.

“What’s the matter, did you do shots?”

“No,” I gasped, drooling into the rancid bowl. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

In fact, I was convinced I had food poisoning – worse, that I had given food poisoning to all of my guests. I haven’t thrown up from drinking for almost a decade, and, as a later inspection of my one-third full vodka bottle proved, that night was not among my most valiant alcoholic efforts.

The dread that I had inflicted the awful nausea I was experiencing on 15 other people and the humiliation I would surely endure (who would eat my food ever again?) had me at absolute rock-bottom.

Or so I thought, until Casie decided to flush the toilet while I was still in mid-spew.

Numerous studies, some of which were likely quite costly, have shown that each time a toilet is flushed, minute particles of water and waste are sprayed upwards and dispersed throughout the washroom.

A great deal of money would have been saved had these researchers simply suspended their faces mere inches above the surface of the water and then flushed, since I came to the same unmistakeable conclusion quite unexpectedly.

“It smelled,” Casie later explained. No doubt.

As it turns out, it wasn’t food poisoning or a vicious hangover, but some kind of stomach bug that also felled my neighbour and two of his kids on the same day. I’m still getting over it, which is why I haven’t posted much this week.

All I know is that if the next high matches this low, it’s going to be spectacular.

From Harper’s Weekly this week:

Hawaiians were attempting to have the humuhumunukunukuapuaa (HOO-moo-HOO-moo-NOO-koo-NOO-koo-AH-poo-AH-ah) appointed as Hawaii’s state fish on a permanent basis after its five-year term expired. “It kind of looks like a pig and it squawks and everything,” said a humuhumunukunukuapuaa advocate.

AH-poo-AH-ah to you, this fine morning!

My first pet rodent was a guinea pig named Zac, who I would let loose in my bedroom. He would hide under things and try to escape, but I was never worried about losing him because he expelled a pellet of dung once every 10 to 15 seconds. Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs had nothing on Zac.

Washington, my gerbil, was next. We purchased him in a small Dundas pet shop owned by a man with a peculiar round appendage that dangled from his eyelid, like a bizarre fleshy monocle. Washington started out sociable, but after I saved up the money for an enormous second-hand acquarium and filled it to 6 inches from the top with compacted wood shavings – to simulate his natural burrowing habitat – he became viciously territorial.

I’d put my hand in the acquarium and scratch the surface of the shavings with my fingers. From deep inside his tunnelled lair I would hear the agitated thump-thump-thump of his powerful back legs pounding the ground (gerbils do this the way beavers slap their tails). Then he’d burst out from one of the holes on the surface. If I didn’t withdraw my hand fast enough, he’d bite into it hard enough to draw blood.

Next came our hamsters, Willy and Wumpy, two roly-poly balls of fur. Brothers, they started out affectionate and grew to hate each other, a phenomenon that coincided with the growth of their disproportionately enormous testicles.

Like all hamsters, Willy and Wumpy loved their hamster wheel. They took to it the moment it was placed in their cage. The cheap wheel we had was made of metal and had rungs instead of a solid running surface, like this one:

This is, apparently, the most dangerous type of hamster wheel, which comes as no surprise to me. Wumpy would get in the wheel and start running vigorously. Willy would try to get in, but since the wheel was already turning rapidly, he’d only make it halfway in before being carried upward and getting jammed between the wheel and the strut.

By the time Willy’d make it in, Wumpy would be frustrated by all the disruption and try to leave. This was difficult because by then Willy would be happily jogging on his way to nowhere. Wumpy would helplessly travel halfway up the wheel before falling back to the bottom, a process he would endure repeatedly.

The only way for Wumpy to leave was to stop the wheel, which meant jamming it with one of the only two body parts available: his head or his balls. Unsurprisingly, it was Wumpy’s head that usually ended up painfully purchasing his freedom.

To people, the thought of endlessly running but getting nowhere is torture. To say that one is doing something “like a hamster on an exercise wheel” means enduring endless and frustrating repetition.

Curiously, most people don’t seem to have the same negative feelings towards exercising on treadmills or stationary bikes. Perhaps this is because the similarities this draws between human and hamster are all too apparent.

With the exception of pet-owners, who swear by the unique intelligence of their particular friend, animals – especially small ones like hamsters – aren’t given much credit for similarities to people, especially when it comes to emotion or intelligence. In Philosophical Propositions: An Introduction to Philosophy, Jonathan Westphal writes about Camus’ “absurd world”:

[W]e become aware of the ultimate meaninglessness or absurdity of life. Aristotle’s question “Why?” arises. Why get out of bed now? To catch the tram. Why catch the tram? To get to the office or factory. Why go there? To work. For what? To earn money. Why earn money? To eat a meal. And so on. Camus’ description is a marvellous evocation of a human existence which resembles nothing so much as a hamster on a wheel. The only reason the hamster does not find its life on the wheel meaningless is because it doesn’t know that it is not going anywhere. If it did, it would, like us, feel “that weariness tinged with amazement”.

Hamsters, according to the same article that warned of the dangers of some hamster wheels, like to run on exercise wheels because they are “born to run”. In the wild, it says, hamsters nightly travel for miles in search of food.

And yet – although he was speaking metaphorically, and not about hamsters – Westphal writes that this foraging, adventurous and resourceful mammal “doesn’t know that it is not going anywhere” when it runs the endless circuit of the hamster wheel.

I have a sneaking suspicion of the opposite sort. When we plunked that wheel of death into Willy and Wumpy’s cage, they recognized it for what it was immediately: a dangerous but effective exercise machine. They strolled into it with the confidence of a greasy bodybuilder into a safety squat.

How did they know exactly what the wheel was for and how to use it? By the time humans figure out the answer to that, it will probably be too late.