June 2010
22 posts
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the cost of a grill in the year 600
i had to go back to the salon this morning because my bro-zilian wax didn’t take. and while maiko poured boiling wax over my exposed gonads, i pored through more medieval royal decrees. this time it was æthelberht of kent’s laws from the year 600, the earliest written code in any germanic language.
æthelberht’s code established a series of fines for all kinds of personal...
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monopoly men
i was getting a bro-zilian wax yesterday in preparation for the big brazil v. chee-lay soccer match and reading through tudor-era royal charters when i came across a few interesting deets. apparently, the monarch had the power to grant legal monopolies to a group of her cronies. thus, queen elizabeth could—say—give bill gates an exclusive license for making operating systems or allow mark cuban to...
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excerpts from the 1904 edition of "a dictionary of...
a man should remove his hat in a parlor-car, but not in a day coach.
toothpicks should not be used in public. if necessity requires it, raise the hand over the mouth, with the hand behind it, using the toothpick as quickly as possible.
salted nuts are eaten with the fingers.
smoking a pipe in the street is becoming more common. it is poor taste, however on a fashionable street.
men are not...
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words wholly unrelated
dog & dog
the word for dog in mbarbaram, a recently extinct australian aboriginal language, is dog. it is pronounced the same way as in english yet it is not a loanword—it is completely coincidental.
given the limited number of sounds that can be made with one’s mouth, the amount of basic words in any given language, and the 3.2 million languages currently spoken in our solar system,...
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hanno the navigator and the wild people of the...
way the heck back in five hundred bee cee (or thereabouts) hanno the navigator, a carthaginian explorer set sail for the african coast to see what there was to be seen. mostly it was boring trees and ugly beaches. occasionally, he would come across some dismal marshes. but then things began to get juicy. here is his account from two point five thousand years before you were born:
Following the...
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the great day
my niece, who is a famous 2nd grade novelist, just sent me her latest memoir. it’s called the great day and its virtuosic twist at the end is an m. night shyamalan movie waiting to happen.
the great day (2010)
the date is may 25. one day i was having a horrible, bad yucky day! it was may 24. i was walking in the grass. i sprained my ankle. “ouch!” i screamed.
i put a...
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hanging with hipsters
them: the party tonight is going to be so epic. them: the way he slipped in the grass was an epic fail. them: i just got an epic text. them: this milkshake is epic. me: the nibelungenlied and orlando furioso are so epic, amirite? and the shāhnāmeh, that’s about as epic as it gets. ha ha ha, i’m such a kidder. them: who invited this guy?
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words wholly unrelated
crayfish & fish
let us add another deceptively named animal to our list—for the crayfish is not a fish (nor a crayon), it is the crustiest crustacean of them all. crayfish and crawfish come from the old french escrevisse which means “little crab.” the word fish on the other hand, comes to us all the way from the pie language spoken by the pie people of the cenozoic era.
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milk and red curry paste
with my eagerness to tell you about my weekend double entendre (which did not pan out the way that i had hoped) i forgot to mention another peculiar interaction that happened at orson’s memorial day bbq.
i typically bring either a bottle of reichsgraf von kesselstatt riesling or a jar of kool-aid dills with me to summer bee bee ques but orson is a control freak with unconventional tastes....
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i'm not sure what to do with this information...
…so i will leave it in your capable hands.
fardingdeale · a portion of land worth a ¼ penny a year
obolate · a portion of land worth a ½ penny a year
denariate · a portion of land worth 1 penny a year
solidate · a portion of land worth 1 shilling a year
librate · a portion of land worth 1 pound a year
while this system is seemingly all neat and tidy, there is certainly some macaroni...