December 2009
32 posts
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audiobooks out of context #5
this is the fifth...
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a christmas calamity many years ago
many christmases ago, my kid sister and i wrote to santy and listed all of the bad-ass toys that we wanted. my list was basically the entire crate & barrel catalogue (how lovely it would be to run my hands up and down those fine linens! and all the drinks that i could sip from that exquisite glassware!) but my kid sister’s list only had a single item—hamsters. she kept annoying our folks...
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fourings news
Q: Can my dog Sparky enjoy fourings or is it for humans only like snorkeling and the missionary position?
A: Just as fourings is for all people, it is also for all species. Roasted sunchokes and squash blossoms make for an excellent canine fourings, especially if Sparky is a vegan.
some idiots and i have started a fourings website. it can be found on the internet at the following web address:...
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singular pleasures
the final pearl in our pearl necklace of erotica comes from harry matthews’ singular pleasures. mr. matthews has the distinction of being the only american member of the randy group of french oulipo writers. members of this group used wacky constraints (e.g. never using the letter e, starting each sentence with a successive letter of the alphabet, et cetry etcetry) in order to get their...
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do you know what mark twain was doing in the...
answer 1: he was researching material for what would later become the prince and the pauper. TRUE.
answer 2: he was writing his great, great-american-novel the adventures of huckleberry finn. ALSO TRUE.
answer 3: he was penning bawdy elizabethan fanfiction that included the characters: queen elizabeth, william shakespeare, ben johnson, walter raleigh, and—my main squeeze—françois rabelais. MEGA...
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sexlit day is here at last
i have been rolling on zoloft since the conclusion of word idol, but today’s (slightly-rescheduled) second annual observance of sexlit day has been the light at the end of my freudian tunnel.
what is sexlit day? sexlit day is a way of posting the greasiest, oiliest, most prurient passages from our all-too-typically dry canon; think of it as mr. skin but for literature. these excerpts shall...
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and are puzzles posted on the ragbag?
answer: from time to time they are. here is a good one that recently crossed my footpath (i rewrote it to prevent resourceful readers from gooooogling the answer).
a good one: gertrude “gerty” corpuscle is on a blind date with manfred “bogman” burns. gerty learns that bogman has three children and asks their ages.
says bogman, “the product of their ages is...
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words wholly unrelated
scotch [whisky] & butterscotch
when i was just a wee raynorling, i always thought that the grownup version of butterscotch would be my goto bar drink. imagine the existential bummer that i received when i found that there was no such thing (schnapps doesn’t count).
scotch whisky is named for its country of origin. butterscotch gets its name from its primary ingredient + scotch which...
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audio books out of context #4
this is the...
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thus far, part 5
fash & ferly (a suitable name for a ’70s detective drama) had their time in the sun on the final day of this challenge. orson, a dark horse, played a wildcard—or more accurately—a wonder card. he stuck us in his ferly delorean and drove it to the intersection of strange and wonderful. sarah dropped a bucket of fash on us and was able to root out an amusing correlation between fash and...
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thus far, part 4
as the sun rises on the final day of word idol, let us digest what happened on the fourth. molly bewitched us in the way that only molly can: with eyre and oreos. doubtless, her entry has rendered many a fellow challenger flippering in their britches. also, we finally got to hear from mills who swaggered into the word idol arena in a flyabostic technicolour dreamcoat with a peacock-feathered...
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thus far, part 3
yesterday, we experienced the multimedia portion of word idol. meaghan and peter used roasting alligator flesh and oddly-proportioned stick-figures to hammer feer home. as a final exclamation point to her απολογία* on frimicate, brainland cited elton john’s candle in the wind (but which version?!?!). and langer—the self-proclaimed adam lambert of american idol of word idol—infiltrated our...
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thus far, part 2
yesterday, we heard from the defense attorneys of three different f-words: flizzen, fyllok, and featlet. noteworthy are the different tactics that each used to champion their word:
abby entered the fracas with laughter and sarcasm. she gave us clear examples of how flizzens can keep us warm on long winter nights. she established the pavlovian association that to flizzen = to enjoy freshly baked...
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thus far
as word idol continues into its second day (there are treats in store, to be sure) let us take stock of where we are thus far:
yesterday, andy blew out of the gates, indeed, he blew the gate off the fence with a veritable eating manifesto. joshua injected his own special blend of political satire and folk etymology (is faff, fap’s 14th century great grandfather?) in these tough times of layoffs,...
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lazarus taxon
get a hot load of this »
In paleontology, a Lazarus taxon (plural taxa) is a taxon that disappears from one or more periods of the fossil record, only to appear again later.
a few notable lazarus taxa:
Coelacanth: a fish thought to have gone extinct 80 million years ago; found in 1938.
Monoplacophora: a mollusk believed to have died out 380 million years ago until living members were...
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an unexplained absence
salve citizens,
i have been away from the thing called the internet for the better part of ten days. this mysterious disappearance was due to a spirit journey that i pretended to undertake in the white mountains of new hampshire. while i cannot reveal the 14 new enlightenments about my psyche that i feigned to achieve, i can tell you that the tutelary deity that assisted me took the form of an...