September 2009
38 posts
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recipe for a good vomit
Take two ounces of the finest white alum, beat it small, put it into better than half a pint of new milk, set it on a slow fire till the milk is turned clear; let it stand a quarter of an hour; strain it off, and drink it just warm; it will give three or four vomits, and is very safe.
this and other amusing remedies from the compleat housewife by eliza smith (1730).
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minced oaths
make certain that there is NO liquid in your mouth when reading the last bullet or you will be doing a spit take worthy of groucho marx »
The TV broadcast edit of Snakes on a Plane has Samuel L. Jackson saying “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane”, emending two occurrences of motherfucking.
In the film The Big Lebowski, John Goodman’s...
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trivia tuesday
name an animal whose body is not symmetric.
after consulting with elaine benes, you can find a very unsymmetrical animal here.
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the adventures of alfred tennyson and charles...
charles babbage, the english mathematician and father of the modern computer wrote the following to alfred tennyson in response to his poem, “the vision of sin” »
In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads, Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born. … If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is...
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words wholly related
precocious & apricot
both derive from the latin word, præcox (early-ripe). a precocious child is said to be more mature than other children. an apricot is a fruit that ripens before other fruits.
worthy of note: is the path that the apricot took in getting to english through the circuitous waypoints of portugese (albricoque), arabic (al-burqūq) and greek (πραικόκιον).
even more worthy: is...
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words wholly unrelated
counsel & council
they are pronounced the same and have overlapping meanings yet they are from two totally different latin words. the former is from consulere (to consult), the latter is from concilium (assembly).
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get this:
my next door neighbor refers to the usb port on his laptop as his laptop’s cornhole.
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word salad -or- semi-semiotics
i was throwing back apéritifs with an associate the other day and realised that through the course of our conversation i kept using ridiculous placeholder names like whats-his-name, doohickey, and watchamacallit. in fact, using placeholders is nothing new for me, but this time i became acutely aware of how much my associate probably thought that i was an unlettered boob.
thus i resolved that in...
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today is butter day at the ragbag
a b-list friend of mine just returned from paris where he took a two week haute cuisine cooking course (just for yucks). among other tricks that he taught me is a french technique for cooking steak—in a pan while constantly spooning melted butter over it. this is known in the trade as nourishing. thus, to nourish something is to bathe it in butter so as to increase succulence.
now if...
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concerning butterflies
i thought i would write a post today that didn’t involve freaky sex terms or raw fraternity boy potty humor… and so, like nabokov, i turned to butterflies! but then i came across this factoid [alert: it has the potential of (figuratively) spoiling your butter]:
butterflies were so named because butter was thought to be similar in both colour and consistency to butterfly excrement.
oh...
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recipe for "light-as-air brunch"
Air, approximately 6 cubic feet
1 pound highest-grade sirloin
3 eggs
4 perfect lobsters
Whipping cream, basil and the most expensive mushrooms obtainable anywhere in the world.
Mix, in a mixing bowl, the air. Set aside to cool.
Take the sirloin, the eggs, the perfect lobsters and the incredibly expensive mushrooms and return them to the store.
Come home.
Remember that you also...
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the panel game
i was called a smart alec on two separate occasions today and thus went immediately to wikipædia to see if the alec in question was of the baldwin or guinness variety. it turns out that it was neither and i was instead treated to this (possibly-apocryphal-but-who-really-cares) vignette of the colourful person behind the name »
According to Gerald Leonard Cohen, the phrase “smart...
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f-clichés
this week’s f-words are more properly f-clichés. of particular interest to yorrs tru-ly are fossil words (such as fettle and fraught) that now only exist in the english language because they have been preserved in idiom like frogs in formaldehyde.
fall head over heals: to enter an activity so thoroughly as to be almost helpless. the head is normally over the heels, so the term would seem...
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today's todo list
Develop a new non-verbal system of communication independent of all known linguistic models. Estimate the impact this form of communication would have had on the oral tradition in literature if it had developed instead of speech.
keith mountford in lingua pranca (1978).
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words wholly related
pork chops & porcelain
both are ultimately from the latin porcus meaning pig. porcelain chinaware was so named because of its resemblance to the cowrie “porcella” shell. the porcella shell was so named because of its apparent resemblance to she-pig pudenda.
note: while i HAVE verified the etymology, i have NOT verified the visual similarity.
further note: yet.
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another grade-a firsty
Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.
from the third policeman by flann o’brien (written in 1940...
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a single f-word
i was at the beach on labor day, rubbing a special blend of canola oil and lavender extract on my well-cobbled abdominals and reading the oxford english dictionary (volume vi, follow to haswed) when i happened upon the following obscure f-word:
foist, v. - to break wind silently.
¡muy fantastico! one of the usage quotes was: “spurne your hounds when they foiste.” but my question is...
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my favourite first line of any first line
In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than...
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how to get your girlfriend to be on board with you...
1. refer to the stripper as an ecdysiast, just as the ancient greeks might have. thus:
YOUR GIRLFRIEND: where have you been all night smelling like musk and dressed in those umbro® shorts?
YOU: seeing a professional ecdysiast.
YOUR GIRLFRIEND: i see, now let me do my best to relieve your epididymal hypertension.
previously.
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cock ale
i have tasted some weird treats in my lifetime but the thought of adding chicken gravy (and nutmeg) to my beer makes me want to dry heave.
Take a cock of half a year old, kill him and truss him well, and put into a cask twelve gallons of Ale to which add four pounds of raisins of the sun well picked; sliced Dates, nutmegs and mace.
Then boil the cock in a manner to a jelly; then press the body...
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deuteronomy 23:1
He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.
sorry lance armstrong and tom green, no matter how many tours de france that you won or freddy got fingered movies that you starred in, moses sez “no heaven for you!”
other (more graphic/less poetic) translations here.
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it's that time again
ever since my casio® digital watch got stuck on the 24-hour clock, so did i. like the american military (and everyone else in the world (including the portugese)) i dig its clarity°. one thing that i have always found confusing is determing if noon is 12:00 am or 12:00 pm. according to sticklers—it isn’t either. noon is the ONLY time on the dial that is neither before nor after...