June 2009
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state bird oddities
the state bird of utah is the california gull (related: the highest point of connecticut is on a mountain which peaks in massachusetts. go red sox!)
5 states have selected official birds FOR EATING in addition to their official state bird (3 turkeys and 2 quails)
mississippi has selected a state waterfowl (the wood duck) IN ADDITION to its official state bird.
the state bird of colorado, the...
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pete tarslaw's 16 rules of novel writing
rule 1: abandon truth.
rule 2: write a popular book. do not waste energy making it a good book.
rule 3: include nothing from [one’s] own life.
rule 4: must include a murder.
rule 5: must include a club, secrets / mysterious missions, shy characters, characters whose lives are changed suddenly, surprising love affairs, women who’ve given up on love but turn out to be beautiful.
...
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words wholly unrelated
donkey & [any other word]
the first written use is actually from the dictionary of the vulgar tongue (1785) where it appeared as donkey dick. no credible derivation or cognate has yet been found. the leading contenders are:
a familiar form of the name duncan.
a diminutive of dun (dull greyish brown and a typical color of donkeys).
potentially of imitative origin (could donkey be a...
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explicit subtext
i’m in a very public location now and there are scads of looker-ons gaping at my laptop screen. this is giving me a kind of blogging paruresis so i figure that now is as good a time as any to establish a code for all future posts so i can say things without actually having to say them (and thus keep the gaping looker-ons in the dark).
if the amount of e’s in a post is a prime number...
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[this post is untitled]
any discussion of the odd titling habits of oddball literary figures would be incomplete without the oddest title of them all by [fellow de-capitaliser] e. e. cummings. in 1930, he published a 63 page volume which he refused to give a title. he wouldn’t even consider calling it untitled because that was still giving it a title. bibliographies list it as:
[Untitled] with the house of...
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words wholly unrelated*
genius & ingenious
the former from gignere (to be born). the latter from ingenium (clever (and also where the word engine comes from)).
previously.
*etymologically speaking, duh.
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dead poets
perhaps there is more to hip-hop than...
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punch à la romaine
D. Federico Rasmussen left the 3rd Street Butcher Shop with parcels of brown-papered meat and a feeling of annihilation. Neither the meat nor the feeling was especially uncommon—the meat was saltmarsh lamb, though the 3rd Street Butcher Shop was exceptionally well stocked with all manner of flesh from both creatures of the field as well as the hunt.
Dinner at the Rasmussen manor was dinner in...
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spam or the avant-garde?
O motherless, O sunlit jumper cables! O cancerous chandeliers! Blame our spermicidal honeymoon on these inebriated bicycles.
the definitive answer may be found here.
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"-ing" nouns that are not gerunds
awning
batting
evening
farthing
gloaming
lightning
spring
youngling
i compiled this list myself so that means that there are probably a bunch more words. EVENSTILL it seems that a word that fits these parameters is relatively rare.
UPDATE (6/17/2009) words from the comments:
words ending in the dimminutive -ling like: sapling, gosling, duckling, elfling, and changeling
consonant sound...
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the ganan fanon
i have never posted f-words on a friday before but it does seem apropos. this week’s installment is from talk the talk: the slang of 65 american subcultures, by luc reid, 2006:
fanon (sci-fi/fantasy fans): facts about the characters or worlds of a particular t.v. show, book, movie, etc. that are not part of the source material but originate in fan fiction (contrast with canon).
flapper...
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in honour of bollywood*
here is a list of modern causal suffixes and what they have come to mean:
-aholic: an addiction (or exaggerated fondness for) (from alcoholic)
-athon: any type of repetitive endurance activity (from marathon)
-gate: a scandal, usually political in nature (from watergate)
-nik: adds an ironic connotation to an agent noun (made popular by sputnik)
-ollywood: a location associated with the film...
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in honour of my new pal, sachiv
here is a list of film industry locations with names inspired by hollywood »
Bollywood is the informal name given to the Mumbai (Bombay) based film industry in India.
Dollywood is an amusement park owned by Dolly Parton.
Hollyhammar refers to the film industry in Hallstahammar, Sweden.
Hollywood North refers to film and television production in Toronto and Vancouver and (more recently)...
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the passenger in 17d
if you ever have the misfortune of inhabiting a confined space with me for any length of time (be it an elevator, a car ride, a sporting event, etc.) you will notice that i have a præternatural ability of carrying on a dialogue entirely in questions. if all goes according to plan, the end result of my salvo of queries is *hopefully* a rare bit of information that small talk between strangers would...
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as of last night @ 2100 EDT
i have resumed my love affair with technology. i started out with a primitive hammer fashioned out of squirrel vertebrae and by midnight had worked up to operating a cotton gin. this morning it was an oven powered by “micro” waves (for heating up m’ cream o’ wheat) and reading (and not yet responding to) over 14 billion electronic mails. by this afternoon i hope to have...
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