the ragbag

now just wait a second here amazon—are you trying to tell me...

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:13:13 -0400

now just wait a second here amazon—are you trying to tell me that *none* of the 150 trash bags that i’m about to order are considered memorabilia? if i wanted to buy non-autographed trashcan liners i would go to the local tesco or duane reade—not the internet. if e-commerce is for anything, it’s for buying garbage bags signed by kevin costner, khloé kardashian, and the like.

rule of n my nephew recently asked me to give him some rules to...

Fri, 18 May 2012 09:47:00 -0400

rule of n

my nephew recently asked me to give him some rules to live by and since the best rules are mnemonic and numbers are the best mnemonic AND we just got internet access in our treefort (dial-up, bleh) i thought i’d give him these rules. hopefully they’ll prove useful if he decides to become a pharmacist, porn star or sith lord.

the holy trinity of doorway deities i’ve spent the past...

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:49:00 -0400

the holy trinity of doorway deities

i’ve spent the past week babysitting my nephew in a treehouse that we made and he’s napping on some soggy wood shavings right now so i thought i would take a quick break and tell you about an odd passage of st. augustine’s city of god that we just read. in it, augustine discusses how the early romans believed that not 1, not 2, but 3 separate deities presided over doors. he says:

…but these people have set three gods, Forculus to the doors, Cardea to the hinge, Limentinus to the threshold. Thus Forculus could not at the same time take care also of the hinge and the threshold.

therefore: if your hinges are squeaky, pray to the goddess cardea. if you get a splinter in your foot as you walk into a room, curse limentinus. and when you peer through a peephole to see who is knocking at your door, you are gazing through the cosmic fabric of forculus.

speaking of hyper-specialised deities, it is worth noting that augustine himself is the patron saint of brewers and printers (the two noblest professions) and is invoked against sore eyes.

other forgotten gods: the god of hot wet doo doo. the bulls-conjoined-at-the-penis god.

creepy roman door picture from here.

holiday’s i was writing my moms a mother’s day card...

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:12:00 -0400

holiday’s

i was writing my moms a mother’s day card (using a cæesar cipher and invisible ink) when i got to wondering how mother’s day is supposed to be punctuated. is it:

mother’s day (singular possessive)—a day that belongs to each mother
mothers’ day (plural possessive)—a day that belongs to all mothers
mothers day (plural attributive)—a day for all of us to honour mothers

it turns out that anna jarvis, the populariser of mother’s day was pretty specific with her apostrophe intentions, she stated:

it was to be a singular possessive, for each family to honour their mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world

so that settles that. but what about other u.s. holidays—do they all get the same treatment? it turns out that they don’t and like other aspects of government, the spelling of holidays is fraught with inconsistency. therefore i made us this handy crib sheet so we won’t embarrass ourselves when writing future columbus day and st. patrick’s day cards.

note: unbeknownst to me, presidents day is not the actual name of the holiday—it’s washington’s birthday. since presidents day is not official, there’s no official way to spell it and we are left to the mercy of car dealerships and furniture store circulars.

also inconsistent: is how it’s st. patrick’s day but columbus day.

then: there’s the odd case of veterans day.

finally: i would like to note that hallowe’en is a perfectly acceptable varient of halloween and therefore it is the only holiday that uses an apostrophe for purposes of contraction.

is it lame or cool to note that this chart is set in itc barcelona? donald says lame but donald wears black socks at the gym

thank you pierce for your unwavering enthusiasm for all things u.s.

bogman’s last supper last fall, with the aid of an...

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:55:00 -0400

bogman’s last supper

last fall, with the aid of an attractive botanist who has the hots for my older brother, i began perfecting a 2,400 year-old recipe for gruel. there are older food recipes* out there but this one is certainly the most precise. it contains over 25 ingredients (one of which is fine sand) and takes days to make (mostly because gathering seeds is highly time consuming).

you might be wondering how such an old recipe was recorded—and the answer is neither parchment nor clay. in fact this particular gruel recipe was reverse-engineered from the stomach contents of a murdered european man from the age of iron. because his body was preserved for posterity in bog water, modern scientists have been able to determine (down to the smallest kernel) the type of gruel that the bogman had for dinner—and the answer is danish weedseed gruel.

i have written about the bogman and given my own recipe for his gruel over at the awl. if you’re so inclined, you can make your own tonight—you’ll just have to fly to denmark with your gleaning basket to do so*.

*for instance, check out this 3900 year-old sumerian beer-making poem.

*the fine print: some of the ingredients may cause photosensitivity and blistering of the skin.

bogman’s last supper illustration by niels bach

just as a goof:

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:58:36 -0400

bcc raynor@ragb.ag on the next email you send out today. i’m working on a top secret project. also, i’m an unabashed voyeur of the first degree.

hey grrrl after my last post, i suppose me making this was...

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:58:36 -0400

hey grrrl

after my last post, i suppose me making this was an inevitability.

words wholly unrelated

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:37:00 -0400

female & male

hold up. is raynor going to tell me that the male part of female has nothing to do with the male part of male? i’m in a very fragile state right now—such a bone-rattling revelation is apt to put me over the edge.

indeed, i am going to tell you this, half-pint. and if you don’t wanna know the truth about males and females that your parents have been hiding from you since day 1, then slam shut your toshiba qosimo® laptop, toss it into your jacuzzi, and take a wrecking ball to your apartment building cuz things at the ragbag are about to get heavy.

have you been spelling women w-o-m-y-n and female f-e-m-a-y-l since undergrad as a repudiation of the traditions that define females by references to the male norm? if so, while your intentions were sound, your etymological understanding may not have been. while woman and women are related to man and men, they come from a time when man simply meant “person.” a woman (from wyf-man) was a female person and a man (simplified from wer-man) was a male person. male and female on the other hand are not even related. (there is still time to rent a wrecking ball crane, but just barely).

female actually comes from the old frisian femelle (woman) which came from the latin femella (girl). sometime in the late 1300s the word changed to female. its altered spelling was probably influenced (though not defined) by the mistaken parallel of male.

incidentally, the word male comes from the phrase male pattern baldness which was the phoenician name for the adam character of the coptic old testament.

for bestiary & herbal: mandrakes—male and female roots...

Thu, 03 May 2012 10:49:00 -0400

for bestiary & herbal: mandrakes—male and female roots that shriek when pulled from the ground.

vital mandrake information:

the male mandrake is white, has a beetlike stem, is hairy and terminates in a single root. the female mandrake is black, has a lettucelike stem, is fleshy and terminates in two forking roots.
the flowers fruit into small orange berries with a strong, apple-like scent. these are called satan’s apples.
the roots are much valued as medicine though it is said that anyone that hears the mandrake’s shrieking dies or goes mad on the spot.
it was therefore a custom to tie a hungry dog to the plant by a cord and place a piece of meat beyond its reach. to get at the meat the dog tugged at the cord and dragged up the plant, while its master remained safe.
if the mandrake sees an unclean man coming to it, it will run away.
the mandrake can cure six ailments: headaches, earaches, gout, epileptic fits, muscle cramps, and unwanted viruses.
it is said that the plant springs from the seed or urine drippings of a man hanged on a gallows. in germany the plant bears the popular name of galgemannlein or the little gallows man
in 1908, a man digging in a neglected garden, cut a large root of mandrake with his spade and ceased to work at once, saying it was ‘awful bad luck’. before the week was out, he fell down some steps and broke his neck.

sources: [1] [2]

james joyce and the hotel porter

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:56:23 -0400

[Said Joyce:] ‘A German lady called to see me today. She is a writer and wanted me to give an opinion on her work, but she told me she had already shown it to the porter of the hotel where she stays. So I said to her: “What did your hotel porter think of your work?” She said: “He objected to a scene in my novel where my hero goes out into the forest, finds a locket of the girl he loves, picks it up and kisses it passionately.” “But,” I said, “that seems to me to be a very pleasing and touching incident. What did your hotel porter find wrong with it?” And then she tells me he said: “It’s all right for the hero to find the locket and to pick it up and kiss it, but before he kissed it you should have made him wipe the dirt off it with his coat sleeve.” ‘

I told her,’ said Joyce ‘(and I meant it too), to go back to that hotel porter and always to take his advice. “That man,” I said, “is a critical genius. There is nothing I can tell you that he can’t tell you.” ‘

source: james joyce and the making of ulysses, by frank budgen (1934)

the alchemical symbol for urine

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:46:03 -0400

is this: ⊡

use it wisely.

limp fist pumps check out my latest yard sale acquisition! note:...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:57:00 -0400

limp fist pumps

check out my latest yard sale acquisition! note: i wasn’t just buying a workout bench, i was buying THE LIFESTYLE™. a goober son who makes up for his deficit of sideburns with a surplus of tube socks. he pretends to support me though secretly plots my unthroning. a pigtailed, doll-faced daughter who sits submissively on the floor. “go father!” she cheers, “go patriarchy!”—for i am the center of her universe. a trophy wife who hovers too close to my thrusting fists. “you can do it,” she whispers. “your accounting job may be crushing your spirit, your boss may demean you, but at home in this nietzschean void, with your suburban virility, you are a person of consequence.” the family pumps their fists listlessly while i stare into oblivion wondering how i got into this mess. i can’t be sure, but i think it started with impropitiously tailored jockey briefs and ended with the acquisition of this gympac 2500 fitness system.

on eating elephant what does elephant taste like? some intrepid...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:18:00 -0400

on eating elephant

what does elephant taste like? some intrepid individual over at the awl searches through every single book on the google books website and gets an answer for you.

As anyone educated by “The Flintstones” knows, one of prehistoric man’s favorite meals was barbecued mastodon ribs. Paleolithic cave paintings seem to support the claim (though whether the ribs were prepared with a dry rub or marinade is still a hot topic in archaeological journals). In fact, evidence suggests that early hunters found their way to the new world in the first place by chasing mammoth herds as they fanned across continents. So how did the cow, an ugly-looking milk monster from Vermont, become the utilitarian protein of the masses while the elephant, the mammoth’s lumbering grand-nephew, is only ever eaten in animal cracker form? The long answer involves section headings like animal lifespan, infrastructure, social taboos, endangered species lists and insurmountable husbandry challenges.

The short answer, however, is simple: the elephant has the strength of a hundred Danny Trejos. Add in its trunk and a set of thrashing tusks, and it’s best not to mess with one. But back in the day, certain adventurous individuals did eat elephant flesh and live to tell the tale for our vicarious benefit. Here are their wild accounts. READ MORE

special thanks to aaron cohen for his help in gathering information.

for bestiary: a moon rabbit—a cute wittle bunny that lives in a...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:37:48 -0400

for bestiary: a moon rabbit—a cute wittle bunny that lives in a lunar crater, making the elixir of life. the moon rabbit is mentioned in both mesoamerican and east asian folklores. this is probably because the markings on the moon can sometimes look like leporine.

i think it’s safe at this point to assume that most rabbits would not be able to survive on the lunar surface (because there is currently a lunar carrot famine), however it did not stop this ridiculous conversation from taking place between the johnson space center and the apollo 11 crew:

Houston: Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning, there’s one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-o has been living there for 4000 years…You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is always standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not reported.

Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin: Okay. We’ll keep a close eye out for the bunny girl.

moon rabbit image by ha55ha

ten quadrillion poppy seeds

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:21:00 -0400

even though the ragbag comments section stopped working a year or so ago, i still get comments from time to time. today, i received multiple questions from visitors (basically) wondering how big a caravan would have to be in order to transport the ten thousand billion poppy seeds from this morning’s post.

i am hesitant to answer this question because the post this morning was about literature—and math and literature do not mix. also, my solar power calculator wasn’t working because it was overcast today. however, glen was kind enough to let me borrow his casio cfx-400 scientific calculator watch and plug in some hard numbers…

94,971 poppy seeds per ounce × 16 ounces per pound × 70,000 pounds of capacity per grain hauling semi-trailer = 106,367,520,000 poppy seeds per grain hauling semi-trailer.
10,000,000,000,000,000 poppy seeds ÷ 106,367,520,000 poppy seeds per trailer = 94,013 grain hauling semi-trailers.
94,013 trailers × a trailer length of 53 feet ÷ 5,280 miles per foot = 943.69 miles of grain hauling semi-trailers.

this means that a caravan transporting ten quadrillion poppy seeds would span 943.69 miles or the distance between new york city and jacksonville, florida.

i would like to end this post with a joke.

10,000⁵

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:52:00 -0400

according to some rough calculations i just made on the back of a cocktail napkin (i’m at a bar in key west right now), i have read well over 17 million novels in my short life. so when i told you that i found the best first line in all of literature, you probably had no choice but to believe me. it turns out that i was lying to you. that particular first line is actually the second best first line. the best first line in all of literature is actually from a little-known translation of hungarian folk-tales published in 1889. it goes like this:

There were 10,000 wagons rolling along the turnpike road, in each wagon there were 10,000 casks, in each cask 10,000 bags, in each bag 10,000 poppy seeds, in each poppy seed 10,000 lightnings. May all these thunderous lightnings strike him who won’t listen to my tale, which I have brought from beyond the *Operencian Sea!

go take a cold shower and let the sheer magnanimity of that opening sink in.

ok?

it works on many levels but here is how it works for me: greetings nerd, i beckon to you with my math problem and tale of drug smuggling. here is some imagery of a caravan, let’s investigate together. an equation unfolds. let’s look closer. we are transporting narcotics. the plot thickens. you stoop to inspect some tiny poppies. you are curious what could be inside them. guess what? IT’S 100 QUINTILLION LIGHTNING BOLTS, MUTHAFUKKA—and if you don’t listen to my story, i’m going to zap you with each of them.

* the operencian sea (or óperenciás sea) is a fictional body of water in magyar folk-tales that has come to mean something like, an uncrossable boundary which is “very, very far from here.”

source: “the wishes” from folk-tales of the magyars edited by w. henry jones (1889).

six surefire ways to cure your warts

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:41:18 -0400

Rub them all with a bean, put the bean in an envelope, and bury it. When the bean sprouts, the warts will be gone.
To cure a wart, pick it and let a drop of blood from it fall on a penny ; throw the penny away and the person who picks it up will have the wart.
If you have conscientious scruples about making other people carry your warts, you can relieve yourself as follows : Break off a milkweed, rub the milk on the wart and bury the milkweed. When it decays, the wart will disappear. Others say that the juice of the milkweed will make you have warts.
Does that wart still trouble you? Find a snail, rub the wart with it and throw the snail away. When the snail dries up and withers into nothing, the wart will have gone too.
If you have a wart you wish to rid yourself of, wait until you see some one riding on a white horse. Then put your finger on the wart, look at the rider and say “I wish you had my wart, I wish you had my wart.” Then he will have it and you won’t.
Still another way that is equally good is to sell your warts. A conversation like the following can be held with a friend:

Friend: Do you want to sell your warts?
Self: Yes.
Friend: Well, I’ll buy them.
Self: How much will you give?
Friend: Five cents.
Self: All right you can have ‘em.

No more need be said and no money need be paid. The warts know they are fixed when they hear such a conversation and they make haste to leave.

faithfully excerpted from a published source in the public domain—without context; devoid of gloss; lacking commentary; and stripped of title, author, and publication date.

today in intriguing german loanwords:

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:01:00 -0400

fisselig • (adj.) flustered to the point of incompetence

despite how cool i seem to almost everyone that ever has met me (especially those who are superior judges of character), i can—from time to time, especially when nagged by a supervisor—lose my composure. and on those occasions, i don’t just show my nervousness, i completely break down to the most feral, least competent, slathering cretin that ever existed. it is on these occasions which i could accurately be described by the germans as “fisseliged.”

dreamfood

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:15:16 -0400

if you’re like me and 84.36% of all your dreams involve food, then you’ll find the gypsy dream dictionary to be an indispensable source in interpreting your visions. here are the secret meanings behind dreamfood that nobody outside of the new age community wants you to know about:

bacon・to eat bacon means triumph over enemies. to smoke bacon means someone close to you will become ill.
macaroni・a symbol of great distress.
ham・you will meet a very jolly person.
lettuce・to dream of lettuce is good, according to the gypsies.
cake・strangely, if a woman dreams she is eating wedding cake, it means she will have a period of bad luck.
mustard・there will be a number of family quarrels.
eels・malicious enemies.
cabbage・to dream of cooking cabbage means you will go into debt.
pancakes・seeing, cooking, or eating pancakes means that some of the tings you presently think of as curses in your life are going to turn out to be blessings.
boiled meat・you will be melancholy and dwell on the past.
cheese・vexation

tv time i was getting my downton abbey on the other night and...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:58:59 -0400

tv time

i was getting my downton abbey on the other night and realised that the show is moving at a much faster clip than i’m comfortable with. it kicks off with the sinking of the titanic (1912), breezes through the great war and is now temporarily resting in 1920. in just 16 episodes, 8 years have elapsed! at this rate (180 days per episode), the third season’ll end at about the time that double decker buses were first introduced to london (1925).

how does the downton pace compare with mad men? the latter show (which has more episodes per season, is moving much slower (42 days per episode). each season spans a year but the jump between seasons is usually a year by itself.

i thought i’d plot 24 as a goof (each season = 1 day) but then found out that the time between each of those “days” is as many as 3 years. i found a few other series with readily available dates (mostly period dramas) but then a sexy collaborator of mine reminded me that each star trek episode begins with a stardate and could thus appear on the same chart.

as always, you are free to make your own observations. here are a few of my own to get you primed:

rome was originally slated to be 5 seasons but halfway through writing the second, the series creator learned that #2 would be rome’s last. said the creator, ”i telescoped the third and fourth season into the second one, which accounts for the blazing speed we go through history near the end.” this is clearly apparent in the chart.
i had no intention of finding the date of every single the wonder years episode, but then learned that each season takes place twenty years prior to the date of broadcast. the wonder years line (dark green) is therefore a pretty decent basis ( with a 1:1 ratio of seasons to years) for the pacing of american-style tv shows.
look how early on in star trek, the episodes did not progress in chronological order. this is because 1. there was never an overt continuity between episodes & 2. the writers were given license to use whatever “stardate” they wanted so long as they conformed to certain guidelines.
i had another very insightful observation to make but i forgot it and then someone knocked on my door and now i have to pretend to be doing work.

data request: if you wanna see your own favourite programme plotted on this chart, send me the data and i’ll see what i can do.

many thanks to the nerds over at trekguide.com. stardate conversions are not as clear-cut as i thought and their website was helpful in providing a secret formula.