some peculiar halloween customs

• On Halloween hang an apple by the door just the height of the chin. Rub the chin with saliva, stand about six inches from the apple, and hit the chin against the apple. If it sticks to the chin, you will be married, and your true love will stick to you.
• On Halloween a girl is to go through a graveyard, steal a cabbage and place it above the house-door. The one on whom the cabbage falls as the door is opened is to be the girl’s husband.
• On Halloween walk backwards from the front door, pick up dust or grass, bring it in, wrap it in paper, put it under your pillow, and dream. 
• On Halloween, girls place three saucers beside each other, two filled with earth and water, in the other a ring. They are respectively death, cloister or unmarried life, and marriage.
• On Halloween put an egg to roast before the fire and leave the doors and windows open. When it begins to sweat a cat will come in and turn it. After the cat will come the man you are to marry, and he will turn it. If you are to die unmarried, the shadow of a coffin will appear. 

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source: memoirs of the american folklore society, volume 4 (1896).

some peculiar fan community nicknames

• Avatards (Avatar: The Last Airbender or Avatar)
• Buffistas (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
• Daisy-Pushers (Pushing Daisies) 
• Darklings (Darkwing Duck)
• Dunderheads (US version of The Office)
• Gleeks (Glee)
• Heroes or Colbert Nation (The Colbert Report) 
• Leaper (Quantum Leap)
• Lostralians (Lost)
• Pokémaniac (Pokémon)
• Sidekicks (Heroes)
• Transfans (Transformers)
• Wheel Watchers (Wheel of Fortune)
• Wingnuts (The West Wing)
• Whovians (Doctor Who)
• X-Philes (The X-Files)
• Xenites (Xena: Warrior Princess)

transfans?

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for a whole lot more (including fans of bands, movies, and videogames): tvtropes.org

some peculiar adjectival forms of country names

on my flight back from wyoming, i was seated next to a woman who claimed to be a resident of the principality of monaco. obviously, this led to a conversation about the only (and perhaps stereotypical) items that i know about that particular micro-state: gambling, f1 racing, and grace kelly. at some point, i fumbled when trying to use the adjectival form of the country by muttering something like, “MO-knockin” or “monna-KANDER,” and was informed that the proper word was, quite unexpectedly, “monégasque.”

that got me thinking about irregular demonyms and which other countries had peculiar forms. here are a few »

• Azerbaijan → Azeri
• Barbados → Bajan
• Botswana → Motswana
• Côte d’Ivoire → Ivorian
• Cyprus → Cypriot
• Greenland → Greenlandic
• Hungary → Magyar
• Isle of Man → Manx
• Lesotho → Basotho
• Luxembourg → Luxembourgish
• Madagascar → Malagasy
• The Netherlands → Dutch
• Philippines → Filipino
• Switzerland → Swiss

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incidentally, the wikipedia article contains this delightful shoutout:

In some of the latter cases the noun is formed by adding -man or -woman, for example English/Englishman/Englishwoman; Irish/Irishman/Irishwoman; Chinese/Chinese man/Chinese woman (versus the archaic or derogatory terms Chinaman/Chinawoman, which are not the preferred nomenclature).

another peculiar dedication

jerome k. jerome dedicated his 1892 book, idle thoughts for an idle fellow to his pipe. the dedication reads:

To the very dear and well-beloved friend of my prosperous and evil days

To the friend who, though, in the early stages of our acquaintanceship, did ofttimes disagree with me, has since become to be my very warmest comrade

To the friend, who however often I may put him out, never (now) upsets me in revenge

To the friend who, treated with marked coolness by all the female members of my household, and regarded with suspicion by my very dog, nevertheless, seems day by day to be more drawn by me, and in return, to more and more impregnate me with the odor of his friendship

To the friend who never tells me of my faults, never wants to borrow money, and never talks about himself

To the companion of my idle hours, the soother of my sorrows, the confidandt of my joys and hopes

My oldest and strongest

Pipe,

This little volume is gratefully and affectionately dedicated.

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•a previous peculiar dedication [achtung: it contains a derivative of the word pussy. [deflator alert: the word refers a pet name for a pet and not a slang term for the shameful female sex organ]]
•other peculiarities: board game starting player rules, stage directions i & ii, epitaphs

peculiar starting player rules

i played pandemic for like 16 hours yesterday. what really tickled my crinkle-cut pickle was the rule for determining which player gets to start first. in most games the starting player is selected either randomly or who is oldest. in pandemic it is determined by who was most recently sick. orson, who had his bowels scrambled by salmonella in thailand, was the lucky person who got to start.

after re-reading the guides of other games, it seems that pandemic is not alone. here are some other bizarre rules for who gets to go first: 

• alhambra · whoever has the least money
• the bridges of shangri-la · whoever last reached the peak of everest using nothing but blue and white checkered stilts carved from the wood of a mammoth tree. in case of a tie, the wisest player starts
• cartagena  · whoever looks most like a pirate
• fluxx · the first person to declare a desire to go first gets to go first
• for sale · the player who lives in the largest house
• gloom · the player who has had the worst day
• guillotine · the player with the longest neck
• settlers of catan · the oldest player
  
• small world · the player with the pointiest ears
• ticket to ride · the most experienced traveler

by my reckoning, i should be playing guillotine more often because my neck is so long that when hot vampire chicks are feeding off of me, they can do it in parallel and nobody has got to worry about sloppy seconds.

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believe it or not: there is an entire game that players can play for the sole purpose of determining which player gets to play first.

other peculiarities: stage directions, epitaphs

source: here & here & my own game library

two peculiar epitaphs

this one from victorian england:

Here lies Lady O’ Looney,
Great niece of Burke,
commonly called “The Sublime.”
She was bland, passionate, and deeply religious;
Also she painted in water colors,
And sent several pictures to the Exhibition,
She was first cousin of Lady Jones,
And of such is the kingdom of Heaven

and this one from gold rush-era california:

Here lies the body of Jeemes Humbrick who was accidentally shot on the bank of the Pacus River by a young man. He was accidentally shot with one of the large Colt’s revolvers with no stopper for the cock to rest on. It was one of the old-fashioned kind—brass mounted. And of such is the kingdom of heaven.

ragbag readers’ favourite stage directions

who knew that my brief breech of the proscenium would cause so many of you to send me erotic poulets filled with your own favourite stage directions? who knew that stage directions were a thing that a *regular* person had a favourite of? who cares? thanks to 4 anonymous ragbag readers (or people that pretend to read it), today’s post has written itself:

from shakespeare’s titus andronicus:

• Enter the empress’ sons, with lavina, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish’d

from shakespeare’s much ado about nothing:

• Enter Prine, Leonato, Claudio and Jacke Wilson

the only problem is that “jacke wilson” is not in this scene nor in the play at all. from wagner’s götterdämmerung:

• The flames immediately flare up so that the fire fills the whole space in front of the hall and appears to seize on the building itself. Horrified, the men and women press to the very front of the stage. When the whole stage seems engulfed in fire, the glow suddenly dies down, so that soon all that remains is a cloud of smoke which drifts away to the back of the stage, setting the horizon as a layer of dark cloud. At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks in a mighty flood, surging over the conflagration.

from ring lardner’s [dadaist drama] i gaspiri:

• The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week

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beckett bonus: the stage directions for beckett’s ghost trio specify that the door leading to a room stage right should be ‘imperceptibly ajar’.

peculiar elizabethan stage directions

• enter hieronimo; he knocks up the curtain
• hell is discovered
• volpone peeps from behind a traverse
• eugenius discovered sitting loaded with many irons; a lampe burning by him; then enter clowne with a piece of browne bread and a garret root
• a couch discovered with the duke on it
• enter lopez at a table with jewels and money upon it, an egg roasting by a candle
• exit orestes dragging clytemnestra’s body
• enter gloucester and buckingham in rotten armour, marvelous ill-favoured
• haughty, centaur, mavis, mrs otter, epicene, trusty, having discovered part of the scene above
• enter giovanni and annabella lying on a bed
• nuns discovered singing
• dashing of brains heard within

and of course, the always-intriguing cue from the winter’s tale

• exit, pursued by a bear

a dedication worth noting

the dedication in mrs. frances simpson’s, cats for pleasure and profit (1905) reads:

To the many kind friends, known and unknown, that i have made in Pussydom