America! America outraged! America broken! America martyred! But America liberated!

 A sneak preview of Biden's inaugural address in just over an hour:

TWO IMPORTANT LANGUAGE NOTES

1) The proper English term for the Jewish celebrations in early adolescence is hereby termed "b'mitzvah" (both singular and plural). This allows easy sentences like, "when are your kids' b'mitzvahs?" or "we've been going to a lot of b'mitvahs lately", to say nothing of gender-noncomforming kids.

2) The word ducking is now an intensifier, as in "I can't ducking believe Pelosi actually had the guts to start impeachment hearings", and "I hope that the GOP is willing to do its ducking job and convict". Easier on kids & Apple ducking lets you type it.

Signed,

The English Language Academy

Four Questions For the Second Seder

Why is this night exactly the same as last night?
Last night, we had a seder. Tonight, we're having exactly the same seder.
Last night, I asked you four questions. Tonight, I'm going to ask you the same four questions all over again.
Last night, you made a big deal out of the Torah verse "on that day". Now, you'll do that today too?
Last night you told me the story of the coming out of Exodus. Good yarn. But you're repeating it. Didn't we cover this already?

(Chag kasher v'sameach to those celebrating this week.) 

Far From the Only Reason, But A Key One, This Blog Has Been Slow of Late, Revealed In Humorous Fashion as a Parodic Request

Hey, y'all, quick favor: I need the entire world to stop for, oh, I dunno, not too long, maybe a week?, yeah, a week, that'll do it, so I can sorta catch up on some things. You're all willing to do that, right? I mean, no big. I'd appreciate it. You're the best! See y'all in a week. Which, for you, will be tomorrow. KTHXBY.

I Swear I Don't Know Why But Sometimes These Things Just Pop Into My Head

Rudolph, the red-eyed dragon,
Had a very flamey breath,
And if you ever saw him,
It would be a firey death.

All of Santa's reindeer
Used to scream and run away,
Because they knew that Rudolph
Ate about one per day.

Then one foggy Christmas eve
It was Santa's turn,
But when Rudolph ate him up
It gave him quite bad heartburn.

So now it's back to reindeer,
No more plump elvish men:
Rudolph, the red-eyed dragon
Won't be eating them again!

Stray Thought

In some (presumably hypothetical but perfectly realizable) language, the sentence You have to be a good speller to write a palindrome is, itself, a perfect palindrome.  It's funny.

But in a different (presumably hypothetical but perfectly realizable) language, it's one letter off from a perfect palindrome -- and is much, much funnier.

The Four Questions: A Modern Day Version

Why is this night different from all other nights?

On all other nights, the house is a total mess, but tonight, the house is clean.

On all other nights, we don't eat vegetables, but tonight, we're eating vegetables.

On all other nights, we wolf down dinner in front of the TV, but tonight, we're actually sitting at a table together.

On all other nights, Daddy drinks four beers, but tonight, he's drinking four cups of wine.

On the Mayan Apocalypse

CORDELIA
...if the world doesn't end, I'm gonna need a note.

-- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Episode 3.12, "Helpless", by David Fury

Joss Whedon on the Election

(Via, but what, like I wasn't going to run across this somewhere and post it at soon as I saw it? Puh-leeze.)

If I Twittered, I'd Retweet This

You've really got to hand it to short people. Because they often can't reach it.

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) January 8, 2012

Actually, one more while I'm at it:

Funerals. RT @mcdonalds: What brings your family together?

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) July 19, 2012

...I came across this guy's twitter feed here. Most of its humor simply wasn't to my taste (some I found positively distasteful). But those two made me, as the kids say, LOL.

The Suspension of Disbelief Has Limits, After All

From America's Finest News Source (via), it seems Superman has gotten a bit too unrealistic:

While they acknowledged that enjoying the adventures of a superhero who can fly, lift a bus over his head, and shoot beams of intense heat from his eyes requires some suspension of disbelief, longtime fans told reporters they simply could not accept a daily metropolitan newspaper still thriving in the media landscape of 2012.

"I can play along with Superman using a steel girder to swat someone into outer space, but I just can't get past the idea that The Daily Planet still occupies one of the largest skyscrapers in all of Metropolis and is totally impervious to newsroom layoffs or dwindling home subscriptions," said comics blogger Marc Daigle, adding that it was impossible for him to even look at Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, without immediately thinking he would have been replaced long ago by a freelancer who gets paid nine cents a word and receives no health benefits. "Every time The Daily Planet shows up, I just get taken out of the story completely. I usually flip ahead to Superman freezing a volcano with his breath or something."

Generic LImerick

There once was an X from place B,
Who satisfied predicate P,
    The X did thing A,
    In a specified way,
Resulting in circumstance C.

That fabulous little limerick is from Wikipedia's page on meta-jokes -- a really awesome page (and, hence, probably at risk for deletion under Wikipedia's standing 'musn't-get-too-fun'). It's uneven -- some of what they cite as meta-jokes seem not to qualify, at least to me. But there's good stuff there. Here are two others I liked:

"How many members of a certain demographic group does it take to perform a specified task?"

"A finite number: one to perform the task and the remainder to act in a manner stereotypical of the group in question."

And, slightly less abstractly:

A Priest, a Rabbi and a Leprechaun walk into a bar. The Leprechaun looks around and says, "Saints preserve us! I'm in the wrong joke!"

They also quote several classic not-quite-limericks, a sub-sub genre I must admit a certain fascination with. In addition to the famous ones about the men from Peru and Verdun, there is W. S. Gilbert's famous one:

There was an old man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp;
    When they asked, "Does it hurt?"
    He replied, "No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet."

And one by Tom Stoppard which I'd never seen before:

A performative poet of Hibernia
Rhymed himself into a hernia
    He became quite adept
    At this practice, except
For the occasional non-sequitur.

...and now I'm going to stop before I quote the whole damn page. Go read the rest if you're so inclined.

Poem of the Day: Theme with Two Variations

The theme, William Wordsworth's classic poem "Daffodils"

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

-- William Wordsworth

The first variation, a parody, by that prolific poet "anonymous":

There once was a poet named Will

Who tramped his way over a hill

    And was speechless for hours

    Over some stupid flowers

This was years before TV, but still.

-- Anonymous

...I gotta admit that last line just kills me.

The second variation: an oulipian transformation of the poem by Harry Mathews, using the N+7 technique (which I've discussed (and essayed) before, including my reservations about it). The Oulipo Compendium defines the technique as follows:

Choose a text and a dictionary. Identify the nouns in the text and replace each one by counting seven nouns beyond it in the dictionary... With classical poetry, meter and rhyme can be ignored or respected. In the latter case, one selects the first noun to satisfy the prosodic requirements of the original starting with the seventh noun listed in the chosen dictionary. The search for a suitable replacement may extend over several successive letters...

The Oulipo Compendium reprints Mathews's poem in its entirety, but should your copy of the book not be right at hand, just for convenience, here it is:

Imbecile

I wandered lonely as a crowd
That floats on high o'er valves and ills
When all at once I saw a shroud,
A hound, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lamp, beneath the bees,
Fluttering and dancing in the cheese.

Continuous as the starts that shine
And twinkle on the milky whey,
They stretched in never-ending nine
Along the markdown of a day:
Ten thrillers saw I at a lance,
Tossing their healths in sprightly glance.

The wealths beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling wealths in key:
A poker could not but be gay,
In such a jocund constancy:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What weave to me the shred had brought:

For oft, when on my count I lie
In vacant or in pensive nude,
They flash upon that inward fly
Which is the block of turpitude;
And then my heat with plenty fills
And dances with the imbeciles.

-- Harry Mathews

I wouldn't, myself, have taken this work to imply any disrespect for Wordsworth, but apparently Mathews is not much of a Wordsworth fan:

Mathews has no qualms about dissing Wordsworth. Indeed, he can't understand how anyone who takes literature seriously and cares about words can not disrespect Wordsworth. As he told me on the phone shortly after the reading, he holds Wordsworth responsible for the largely mistaken direction of most modern literature. Before Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, he said, personal feelings were just a small part of what literature addressed. Because of Wordsworth, emotions became the subject of literature: sincerity moved to the center of the literary enterprise, and to be morally responsible meant that one had to account for one's feelings. "It's all so nauseatingly bourgeois."

"I also hate him for the hypocrisy of his theoretical positions," Mathews said, warming to his subject. He was thinking especially of Wordsworth's pronouncement, in his 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, that the language of poetry should be the "language really used by men." "'Language that men really use.' What could be more 'poetic,' more literary, than Wordsworth's language? If only he had used simple, unpoetic language. If someone had come along capable of combining the intricacies of Milton's prosody with genuinely simple diction, wouldn't that have been something?"

Wouldn't that last have been Robert Frost?

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little excursion into Daffodiliana.

The Unanimous Declaration of the Scientific Teams at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

In Press Conference Assembled, July 4, 2012:

When in the course of scientific events it becomes necessary for one particle to create the mass which attracts one to another, and to assume among the particles of the bestiary the confirmed status to which the laws of science and scientific priority provide it, a decent respect to the opinion of mankind requires that it declare the evidence which compels us to believe in it.

We hold these truths to be evident only through decades-long search: that all particles do not have mass equally, and that they are endowed by the Higgs-Boson with certain variable mass; and that among those particles are the quarks, the leptons and the bosons; that to secure this mass, Higgs-Bosons are distributed among particles, which derive their evident mass from the action of the Bosons....

Warning: joke still under construction. Physics of the area definitely uncertified; the entire joke might collapse at any moment. Wear hard hats at all times.

Happy Independence & Higgs-Boson day, everyone.

Poem of the Day

Lives there a man with soul so dead
He's never to his toaster said:
“You are my friend; I see in you
An object sturdy, staunch, and true;
A fellow mettlesome and trim;
A brightness that the years can't dim.”?
Then let us praise the brave appliance
In which we place this just reliance.
And offer it with each fresh slice
Such words of friendship and advice
As “How are things with you tonight?”
Or “Not too dark but not too light.”

-- Thomas M. Disch (1940 - 2008)

Theodorides's Epigram (and Diverse Tangentially Related Matters)

A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale.

-- Theodorides, trans. H. Wellesley (from the Greek Anthology)

I saw this in William James's Pragmatism, chapter 8, where it is quoted and ascribed simply to The Greek Anthology. (An 1895 volume called Selections from the Greek Anthology is online here; this epigram is on p. 275). The Greek Anthology ascribes it to Theodorides, and credits the translator.

In the notes to the Penguin edition of James, Giles Gunn refers to the author as "Theodorides of Syracuse", adding that he "wrote towards the end of the third century B.C.", although Gunn downgrades him from the author to the reported one, saying that the epigram is "ascribed to" him. Poor Theodorides does not come up in the first page of Google results for a search on Theodorides, and does not even seem to have a Wikipedia page in English. (Here's one in French.)

Here's an alternate translation:

Shipwrecked I; but be none scared by my ill-starred lot;
Other ships sailed the sea with mine, and suffered not.

-- from this web site, and a few others, although none that I found credit a translator.

I must say that poor Theodorides of Syracuse seems sadly underrepresented on the web.

The translator, interestingly, does somewhat better. H. Wellesley seems to be Rev. Henry Wellesley, D.D. (1794 - 1866), principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford, editor & translator of a volume called Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages Chiefly From the Greek Anthology (London, 1849), available in full at the link. The link before that is to a genealogy site from which I got his dates; it, in turn, seems to be citing this W. H. Auden-focused genealogy site on which Rev. Wellesley turns up.* From those two sites, both just lists of facts, you get a sketchy but none-the-less real picture of his life: he was ordained at Oxford at age 28, married at 40; and was the father of four children (one of whom died at birth). He became a Doctor of Divinity at age 51, the same year he was made principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford (the latter, at least, because of his uncle, the Duke of Wellington, who was the chancellor of the university). He died at age 71.

Wellesley's translation of Theodorides is in his Anthologyia Polyglotta, at page 300, along with two Latin translations (one by Samuel Johnson (!)), a German translation, and the Greek original. Interestingly, Wellesley seems to have organized his book by subject and theme, so that on the very next page he reproduces a nearly identical epigram by Leonidas of Tarentum, also from the 3rd century B.C.E., who is also well represented in The Greek Anthology (with over a hundred poems, according to Wikipedia). Here's Wellesley's translation of the Leonidas:

Fearless set sail from this wreck'd seaman's grave.
We perish'd: others safely rode the wave.

And here's a second English translation, which Wellesley attributes to one W. Sheperd:

Loose from my tomb thy hawser: though I died
Shipwreck'd, my comrades 'scaped the raging tide.

Those two English epigrams read simply as alternate translations of Theodorides -- indeed, at first that's what I thought they were. But the Greek Wellesley gives is (even to this non-Greek reader's eye) different. So I suppose that either two versions of a common poem have come down to us, or it was a common sentiment in 3rd century B.C.E. Greece. (Click through for French, Latin and Italian translations, plus the original.)

Take heart, Henry Wellesley! Your work lives on: though you died, it has, so far, weathered the gale.

Update: An anonymous source, who agreed to be described as "one familiar with the President's thinking on the issue", sent in the following literal translation of the Theodorides:

I am a shipwrecked man's tomb; but you, sail! For even as we
Perished, the surviving ships traversed the sea.

--------------------------------
* Wellesley is on an Auden-focused genealogical site for the single most distant relationship I have ever had reason to contemplate: Wellesley's sister's great-grandaughter's husband's second wife was the granddaughter of Auden's aunt (by marriage's) brother's son's wife's great-aunt's husband's brother. I swear to God I didn't just make that up (although I might well have gotten something wrong there -- it isn't the easiest chart to put into words!); in fact, it took some effort to extract that from the site, so I hope you appreciate it.

The Headline All of Human History, Up To This Point, Has Been Leading To

"Gordon Ramsay's dwarf porn double Percy Foster found dead in a badger den in Wales."

- Source

(via Abi Sutherland at Making Light, who (correctly) notes, in the title-text, that "Like most strange and funny things, it's actually made up of deep sadness.")

But What Was the Name of the Cat?

"We even adopted a cat—a sweet indoor kitty with an autoimmune virus we named Wimbledon."

-- Paul M. Davis

I Dream Things That Never Were, and Ask, "Why Not?"

"They don't pay people $25,000 a month to be a historian."

-- Mitt Romney

(title cite)

"Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Clay, Charles De Gaulle, William Wallace, Pericles...

...The Duke Of Wellington, Thomas Edison, Vince Lombardi, The Wright Brothers, Moses, and 'a viking.'"

-- A list of the people to whom Newt Gingrich has compared himself (as reported here, in turn as distributed by the Romney campaign (whose word is worth the paper it was emailed on, so caveat lector on this one)).

For sheer entertainment value over the next ten months (which seems to be a non-trivial part of the value our increasingly farcical elections have these days), there's no question who you should root for as the Republican nominee.