if you haven’t seen this yet, a truly amazing compilation of dozens of unrelated musicians, merged into one funk jam. Worth watching twice. Bonus – includes a theremin solo!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA
Category: humor
Laughter is the best medicine
Reading Around on February 27th through February 28th
A few interesting links collected February 27th through February 28th:
- Debunking the Clean Coal Myth : EcoLocalizer – “There is no such thing as “clean coal” in the U.S. today. Coal is responsible for 32% of CO2 emissions in this country and 83% of the CO2 emissions from producing our electricity. In theory, we could retrofit this nation’s coal plants to capture their pollution and store it. Here is my question: If every single coal plant needs to be revamped to be truly “clean,” why not just invest that time and money in truly clean, renewables?” [Image Credit: Creative Commons photo by Seth Anderson]
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April Winchell » Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit – Ray, a fellow classmate of Obama’s, was also bi-racial, and also trying to define himself. But what set him apart was his colorful manner of self-expression. Ray cursed like a motherfucker.
This would all be snickerworthy enough, but it turns out that Obama actually read the audiobook version of Dreams From My Father.
And that means he read Ray’s quotes.
And that means you’re about to hear the President of United States using language that would finish Cheney off once and for all.
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Chicago Reader Blogs: Chicagoland Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all: The Chicago Journalism Town Hall – “In other words: journalism isn’t dying. (Journalists are dying, of course, but even I don’t blame the Huffington Post for that.) The institutions are dying. That’s it. We’ve isolated the problem!
Journalists (I will irresponsibly use this as a synonym for “people who work in broadcast or print,” even though we’re all kind of journalists, which I will get to later) blame the bloggers (ditto, for people who work online). Bloggers blame the journalists. Everyone blames the economy, and management. Was it Ben Goldberger in the Blog with the Aggregator? Or was it Eric Zorn in the Newspaper with the Inverted Pyramid, or Sam Zell in the Boardroom with the ESOP?”
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John Bolton at CPAC: The Benefits of Nuking Chicago | Mother Jones – “Former UN Ambassador John Bolton believes the security of the United States is at dire risk under the Obama administration. And before a gathering of conservatives in Washington on Thursday morning, he suggested, as something of a joke, that President Barack Obama might learn a needed lesson if Chicago were destroyed by a nuclear bomb.”
Asshole!
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BULLS: Sam Smith: He was always Stormin’ – “Chicago understood Norm because it is known as the Second City. It is in the flyover region. Norm couldn’t crack the big time and run with the big boys, not among the playing elite and not afterward. But he never accepted being less than them and always was sticking his foot in the door to remind them he wasn’t going away.
Norm was like us. Never really appreciated despite working so hard at it and giving everything he had every time. Norm broadcast harder than some guys played the game, and he let them know it. Someone was speaking up for us, and we loved Norm for that. And he loved us because he understood, if not accepted, rejection.”
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SLAM ONLINE | » First Person: Norm Van Lier – “It was my dad who helped me let go of my anger. Before he died in 1988, we watched “The Godfather” together. Afterward my dad asked me, “Why do you think the Bulls owe you anything?”
I told him about this and that, slights and slams, stuff that had grown into huge obstacles in my mind.
“Did they pay you on time?” Yes, sir. “Were their checks good?” Yes, sir.
“Well, then they don’t owe you a thing. So get up, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and go to work.”
I swear, from that moment on, my attitude was completely different. I’ve not looked back since.”
- The Sports Guy: Bill Simmons Welcome to the No Benjamins Association – ESPN Page 2 – Ru-oh.
“For once, the league’s problems have nothing to do with talent, drugs, racial issues or how the sport is being played. With the country embroiled in its worst economic crisis in 80 years, the NBA is quietly bracing for its own little D-Day … only outsiders don’t fully realize or care. Clearly, we wouldn’t put this budding debacle on par with the Gulf War, the collapse of American car companies, the real estate quagmire, the implosion of Wall Street, the decline of the American dollar, the shaky footing of previously untouchable media institutions (newspapers, magazines, TV networks, movie studios and publishing companies), or even Vegas and the porn industry caving financially. “ -
Media Matters – Media Matters: In support of shunning – Will has made false claims about the Voting Rights Act and the New Deal. He made a claim about China drilling off the coast of Florida that was so wrong, even then-Vice President Cheney — who cited Will in repeating the claim — acknowledged it wasn’t true. When even Dick Cheney thinks you’ve gone too far in spouting pro-drilling falsehoods, you have a problem. But neither Will nor the Post corrected the error.
Last year, Will claimed in his Newsweek column and on ABC that Social Security taxes are levied based on household income. Not true. He claimed that McCain won more votes from independents during the primaries than Obama did. Wrong. He claimed most minimum-wage earners are students or part-time employees. False. Will has even lied about Hillary Clinton’s Yankees fandom.
Basically, George Will routinely makes false claims large and small, holds politicians to disparate standards, and engages in ethically dubious conduct on behalf of his preferred candidates.
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The George Will Affair : CJR – Undeterred, on Tuesday, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, and Media Matters for America sent a joint letter to the Post reiterating the call for some form of correction or clarification. It cited three key problems with Will’s column: that he misused data on global sea ice levels from the Arctic Climate Research Center; that he misrepresented the World Meteorological Organization’s position on global warming and climate trends; and that he “rehashed the discredited myth that in the 1970s, there was broad scientific consensus that the Earth faced an imminent global cooling threat.”
“George Will is entitled to his own opinions, but he is not entitled to his own facts,” the letter concluded. “We respectfully ask that you immediately make your readers aware of the glaring misinformation in Will’s column.” But the Post’s position remains the same.
Reading Around on February 24th through February 25th
A few interesting links collected February 24th through February 25th:
- Obsidian Wings: In the only news worth hearing today ….. – It seems that Michael Cera has finally agreed to do an Arrested Development movie.The comment thread at the Onion’s AV Club is worth reading just to relive some of the classic lines from the show, like “I’m afraid I shot the wad on the dry run and now I’ve got a bit of a mess on my hands”; “She’s not that Mexican, mom, she’s *my* Mexican…and she’s Columbian or something”; and “I was the world’s first analyst/therapist [business card reads: ‘Analrapist’].”
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- The Godfather Wars | vanityfair.com – “In preparation for The Godfather, Lettieri took Brando to his relative’s house in New Jersey for a family dinner, “to get the flavor,” says Lettieri’s ex-wife, Jan. In addition, “Francis had sent a lot of tapes from the Kefauver Committee hearings, so Brando had been hearing how these real Mafia dons talked,” remembers Fred Roos. Soon Brando had the voice of Don Corleone. “Powerful people don’t need to shout,” he later explained.” … “What do you think this is, the army, where you shoot ’em a mile away? You gotta get up close, like this—and bada-bing! You blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.” Bada-bing became a mantra for mobsters and aspiring mobsters. More recently, it served as the name of Tony Soprano’s strip club in The Sopranos. “‘Bada-bing? Bada-boom?’ I said that, didn’t I? Or did I just say ‘bada-bing’?” asks Caan. “It just came out of my mouth—I don’t know from where.”
In Honor of Lent
I gave up Christianity for Lent, circa 1983, and haven’t looked back. (lifted from @joem500‘s FB account )
Your morality is 0% in line with that of the bible.
Damn you heathen! Your book learnin’ has done warped your mind. You shall not be invited next time I sacrifice a goat.
If you did poorly on this quiz (and I hope you did), it is because our morality does NOT come from the bible. If the bible were the source of morality, then there would be no basis to reject portions of it. Simply put, this book of Bronze Age myths reflects the superstitions of cruel and ignorant people that lived in a cruel and ignorant time, and has no place in an enlightened society.
Quite a lot of the questions on this quiz are illustrated in the lego-illustrated bible page, the Brick Testament.
Reading Around on February 19th
A few interesting links collected February 17th through February 19th:
- CBS Falsely Portrays Stanford as Democratic Scandal – But as Public Citizen, Huffington Post, ABC News and Talking Points Memo all reported, Stanford and his Stanford Financial Group PAC contributed to politicians and political action committees of both parties (including $448,000 in soft money contributions from 2000 to 2001 alone) to advance his agenda of banking and money-laundering deregulation. Many others journeyed on Stanford's junkets to Antigua and elsewhere, prompting TPM to brand his company "a travel agent for Congress." (TPM has a slide show of one of those of Stanford getaways.)
As it turns out, the list of Stanford beneficiaries is long – and bipartisan.
- Remembering Gene – Roger Ebert's Journal – Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."
- TidBITS iPod & iPhone: iPhone to Add Location Logging? – Could the iPhone soon be able to track your location in the background as you walk around? A hint that such a capability is in the works at Apple comes from a programmer friend who spent some time spelunking around inside iPhoto '09, which shows traces of being able to associate such GPS log data with photos.
- Daily Kos: Chocolate Covered Cotton – billmon – The fatal innovation…was the rise of so-called collateralized obligations, in which the payment streams from supposedly uniform pools of assets (say, for example, 30-year fixed prime mortgages issued in the first six months of 2006 to California borrowers) could be sliced and diced into different securities (known as tranches) each with different payment characteristics.
This began as a tool for managing (or speculating on) changes in interest rates, which are a particular problem for mortgage lenders, since homeowners usually have the right to repay (i.e. refinance) their loan when rates fall, forcing lenders to put the money back out on the street at the new, lower rates. This means mortgage-backed securities can go down in value when rates fall as well as when they rise. By shielding some tranches from prepayments (in other words, by directing them to other tranches) the favored tranches are made less volatile and thus can be sold at a higher price and a lower yield.
- An old habit dies… hard. « chuck.goolsbee.org – "I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)
I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period."
I'm still using Eudora on three of our most used Macs (since 1995 probably -only 14 years), but the writing is on the wall. Have to check out Gyazmail.
- Hands on: Drop.io's private, easy file sharing with a twist – Ars Technica – Sharing information online is getting more complex than it sometimes should be. If you want to share pictures, files, plain ideas, or even faxes with friends or businesses, you can try the old e-mail standby, but you may end up joining a social network, agree to a dense privacy policy, and then track down an app made by who-knows-who to get the job done. Even starting a simple blog usually involves more time than most users can afford‚ and more features than they'll ever need. Drop.io is an intriguing, but simple, new service that is part wiki, part file sharing, and part personal secretary, with an emphasis on privacy and ubiquitous access, requiring no signup or account activation.
Upon visiting Drop.io—pronounced as a seamless single word: "drop-ee-o"—the site presents a basic elevator pitch about its services and a short form with which to get started uploading files.
- Fat Tire Ale Downed Near Load Of Burgers – A Good Beer Blog – Motorists on Interstate 15 were impeded by a piles of hamburgers after a truck spilled a load of the patties, blocking the northbound lanes for four hours. The driver of a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties dozed off around 5 a.m., said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Cameron Roden. The truck driver's rig drifted to the left side of the freeway near 2300 North and crashed into a wall and an overhead sign, which ripped open his trailer, spilling hamburger over the north and southbound lanes of the interstate…A second truck spill east of Morgan caused minor delays. Before 7:30 a.m., a truck was heading westbound on Interstate 84 about a half-mile east of Morgan… The truck slipped off to the left, hit a guardrail, and flipped over on its side. The impact split the truck open, spilling Fat Tire Beer being shipped from Colorado, Roden said.
- The Associated Press: Chimp owner begs police in 911 call to stop attack – Police said that the chimp was agitated earlier Monday and that Herold had given him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Police said the drug had not been prescribed for the 14-year-old chimp.
In humans, Xanax can cause memory loss, lack of coordination, reduced sex drive and other side effects. It can also lead to aggression in people who were unstable to begin with, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
"Xanax could have made him worse," if human studies are any indication, Coccaro said.
- Facebook | Home – Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.
If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
- Big Tuna – Chicago — Anthony 'Big Tuna' Accardo, reputed crime syndicate figure, and his wife are shown as they arrive at the St. Vincent Ferrer Church in suburban River Forest to attend wedding of their son Anthony Jr, who was married to the former Janet Hawley, 1961 Miss Utah. Many top gangland bosses and other underworld figures attended the wedding under the watchful eye of law enforcement agencies
- Home | Recovery.gov – Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
- George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking | The Loom | Discover Magazine – In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”
We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.
- Wonk Room » George Will Believes In Recycling – Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.
But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word. Take a look:
Reading Around on February 16th through February 17th
A few interesting links collected February 16th through February 17th:
- Kotori Magazine – The Master of Low Expectations: 666 Reasons Sentient Citizens are Still Celebrating the Long Overdue Departure of George W. Bush – 666 Reasons Sentient Citizens are Still Celebrating the Long Overdue Departure of George W. Bush
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Talking Points Memo | Study Harder – In the late 1930s, of course, Great Britain didn’t have a Labour government with a principled Tory minority. It had conservative Tory government with a Labour minority. And Churchill was on the outs with both, although on some fronts he was beginning to make common cause with some Labourites on his key issue, which was foreign policy. When Churchill eventually came to power it was in a national coalition government for the purposes of fighting the war. And when he eventually went to the voters as head of the Tory party toward the end of the war they got crushed by Labour in a landslide.
I say all this as a big Churchill fan. But, I mean, not only is Eric Cantor no Winston Churchill, I’m not even sure he’s read a book about Winston Churchill.
Reading Around on February 10th
Some additional reading February 10th from 19:19 to 21:03:
- Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about? – real time twitter feed of curse words. Not everything shows up, but still amusing
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Ukulelia: Your Passport to Four Stringed Paradise – Performance artists Roger Geenawalt and David Barratt recorded and performed all 185 Beatles songs with 185 guest artists…on ukulele, natch.
The performance was then cast as a benefit for Warren Buffett. (Head about to explode. Must. Keep. Blogging.) And they’ve now just delivered the cash to him in person. (Following is the BEST interview with Warren Buffett evar.)
Blitzkreig Bop
“Oscar Schmidt OU2 Ukulele” (Washburn)
For some reason, I want a ukulele now…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNFpOh2seqo
Gus and Fin Rock n Roll Radio Ukulele Show perform some fine vintage Ramones…
Reading Around on January 26th
Some additional reading January 26th from 10:22 to 22:31:
- The Washington Monthly – This Explains a Lot– “On the one hand, the Bush administration released some detainees who apparently turned out to be pretty dangerous. On the other, the Bush administration refused to release other detainees who weren’t dangerous at all, and were actually U.S. allies.How could this happen? In light of these revelations about the lack of files, it starts to make a lot more sense.But to put this in an even larger context, consider just how big a mess Bush has left for Obama here. The previous administration a) tortured detainees, making it harder to prosecute dangerous terrorists; b) released bad guys while detaining good guys; and c) neglected to keep comprehensive files on possible terrorists who’ve been in U.S. custody for several years. As if the fiasco at Gitmo weren’t hard enough to clean up.”
The three primary roles your local website should play | yelvington.com– “Journalists tend to gravitate to only one of these roles: the town crier, the quaint colonial-era village character who walks around ringing a bell telling you what’s happening. It comes naturally. This is why 24×7 coverage teams and the “continuous news desk” concept take root so quickly when newsrooms suddenly awaken to the urgency of taking the Internet seriously.- But the other roles aren’t secondary. They’re coequal, and they’re grossly neglected by most local news websites.Moreover, they consistently surface in qualitative research as poorly met needs. The language people use is a little different, but recognizable: “Help me connect with people.” “Help me get answers I need.” “Help me find people like me.” “Help me pursue my interests.”
- drop.io: simple private file sharing, free internet file sharing – Hmm, seems useful
“Use drop.io to create drops and privately share your files by web, email, phone, fax, and more. Drops are protected from search engines so you can conveniently share what you want, how you want, with whom you want.” - Undercover Black Man: Bad news for David Milch fans– “Now I hear that HBO has pulled the plug on Milch’s latest project, a New York City cop drama set in the 1970s called “Last of the Ninth.”They filmed a pilot episode… with British actor Ray Winstone (pictured) as one of the leads. Evidently HBO was not digging it.That’s a show I wanted to see. Since the ’90s, Milch has talked about creating a series based on Bill Clark’s early career in the NYPD.
Clark spent two years undercover as a white radical. He hung out with Black Panthers (including Tupac’s mama).”
- Mirror, Mirror on the Wall – Errol Morris Blog – NYTimes.com– Awesome! “Photographs make this somewhat more difficult. They are a partial record of who we were and how we imagined ourselves. …The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services — AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration. …. It is interesting that these pictures are different. They may be of the same scene, but they have different content. They speak in a different way.(The photos are reproduced here with their original captions, unedited.)”
- Tijuana Bibles– “If you are offended by depictions of sodomy, bestiality, “alternative sexual practices,” racial and ethnic stereotypes, or just about anything else, you should leave now.Tijuana Bibles were pornographic tracts popular in America before the advent of mass-market full-color glossy wank-fodder such as Playboy. A typical bible consisted of eight stapled comic-strip frames portraying characters and celebrities (eg. John Dillinger, Popeye, Disney characters) in wildly sodomistic situations. Many could be considered grossly racist, sexist, and otherwise wholly “politically incorrect.” Browser discretion is advised.”
Signs of Humor
Why not name your village something memorable? Too many places have generic names. Language is one of the best inventions humans ever came up with – why not celebrate it?
In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worcestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.
Others evoke images that may conflict with residents’ efforts to appear dignified when, for example, applying for jobs.
These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Wetwang, East Yorkshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent. And, in a country that delights in lavatory humor, particularly if the word “bottom” is involved, there is Pratts Bottom, in Kent, doubly cursed because “prat” is slang for buffoon.
As for Penistone, a thriving South Yorkshire town, just stop that sophomoric snickering.
“It’s pronounced ‘PENNIS-tun,’ ” Fiona Moran, manager of the Old Vicarage Hotel in Penistone, said over the telephone, rather sharply. When forced to spell her address for outsiders, she uses misdirection, separating the tricky section into two blameless parts: “p-e-n” — pause — “i-s-t-o-n-e.”
Several months ago, Lewes District Council in East Sussex tried to address the problem of inadvertent place-name titillation by saying that “street names which could give offense” would no longer be allowed on new roads.
“Avoid aesthetically unsuitable names,” like Gaswork Road, the council decreed. Also, avoid “names capable of deliberate misinterpretation,” like Hoare Road, Typple Avenue, Quare Street and Corfe Close.
[Click to continue reading No Snickering – That Road Sign Means Something Else – NYTimes.com]
Corfe Close is a stretch – you have to live at 4 Corfe Close, and even then say the first two words quickly. The NYT is of course too afraid of language to say “Fuck Off“, perhaps the New York Times style guide should be updated to include the substitution of fracking, as appropriate?
[via Chuck Shepherd]
“Rude Britain: The 100 Rudest Place Names in Britain” (Ed Hurst, Rob Bailey)
“Sniggering at double entendres is a loved and time-honored tradition in this country,” Carol Midgley wrote in The Times of London. Ed Hurst, a co-author, with Rob Bailey, of “Rude Britain” and “Rude UK,” which list arguably offensive place names — some so arguably offensive that, unfortunately, they cannot be printed here — said that many such communities were established hundreds of years ago and that their names were not rude at the time.
“Place names and street names are full of history and culture, and it’s only because language has evolved over the centuries that they’ve wound up sounding rude,” Mr. Hurst said in an interview.
Mr. Bailey, who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Mr. Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.
The name most likely has to do with the spot’s historic function as a source of water, a water butt being a container for collecting water. But it proved to be prohibitively hilarious.
“If they ordered a pizza, the pizza company wouldn’t deliver it, because they thought it was a made-up name,” Mr. Hurst said. “People would stand in front of the sign, pull down their trousers and take pictures of each other’s naked buttocks.”
The couple moved away.
Reading Around on January 30th
Some additional reading January 30th from 08:30 to 08:30:
- the undead are in Austin — and are city employees! – "A couple pranksters changed the message on two portable road-traffic signs in Austin, TX recently. They were warning drivers, and rightfully so, of the impending zombie attack."
Straight Outta Glasgow
“Straight Outta Compton” (N.W.A)
This amuses me, probably for the mental image (rappers in kilts, haggis studded with bling, yadda yadda)
A professor has theorized that rap music, by way of the dozens, originated in medieval Scottish pubs…
Professor Ferenc Szasz argued that so-called rap battles, where two or more performers trade elaborate insults, derive from the ancient Caledonian art of “flyting“.
According to the theory, Scottish slave owners took the tradition with them to the United States, where it was adopted and developed by slaves, emerging many years later as rap.
Professor Szasz is convinced there is a clear link between this tradition for settling scores in Scotland and rap battles, which were famously portrayed in Eminem’s 2002 movie 8 Mile.
He said: “The Scots have a lengthy tradition of flyting – intense verbal jousting, often laced with vulgarity, that is similar to the dozens that one finds among contemporary inner-city African-American youth.
“Both cultures accord high marks to satire. The skilled use of satire takes this verbal jousting to its ultimate level – one step short of a fist fight.”
[Click to read more Rap music originated in medieval Scottish pubs, claims American professor – Telegraph]
and to fulfill any lingering grad student impulses:
The most famous surviving example of flyting comes from a 16th-century piece in which two rival poets hurl increasingly obscene rhyming insults at one another before the Court of King James IV.
Titled the Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedy, it has been described by academics as “just over 500 lines of filth”.
Right? So just imagine lines like these being recited over a phat beat of knives clanging on a bottle of single malt whisky:
Into the Katryne thou maid a foule cahute, For thow bedrate hir doune fra starn to stere; Apon hir sydis was sene thou coud schute, Thy dirt clevis till hir towis this twenty yere: The firmament na firth was nevir cler, Quhill thou, Deulbere, devillis birth, was on the see, The saulis had sonkin throu the syn of the, War not the peple maid sa grete prayere.
Quhen that the schip was saynit, and undir saile,
Foul brow in holl thow preposit for to pas,
Thou schot, and was not sekir of thy tayle,
Beschate the stere, the compas, and the glas;
The skippar bad ger land the at the Bas:
Thow spewit, and kest out mony a lathly lomp,
Fastar than all the marynaris coud pomp;
And now thy wame is wers than evir it was.
Hmmm. Maybe not.
Or Else What
It’s the Future
Received an amusing email, spam presumedly, from a Hong Kong company re my domain name. Here it is in its entirety:
We are Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. which is the domain name register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “b12partners” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Dec 25, 2008.Since after our investigation we found that this word has been in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark, so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first, contact us soon. Thanks for your co-operation and support.
In order to avoid the law problems invovled,we need to confirm with you first.If you consider these domain names are not important,please don’t reply this email,we will cooperate with the third company Kind Regards, Andy.liu
Tel: +852-31757930(ext.8023)
Fax: +852-31757932
Email: Andy.liu@hknetwork.hk.cn
Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. Website: www.hknsc.hk
Yes, indeed, I’ll get right on that.
Especially since they are so serious about their claims
Toujours Tingo
“Toujours Tingo” (Adam Jacot de Boinod)
Oooh, sounds fun. Nothing like working in bizarre phrases into conversation
Toujours Tingo, a book by Adam Jacot de Boinod, lists weird words and bizarre phrases from around the world. The “tingo” of its title is an Easter Island word, meaning to borrow objects from a friend’s house one by one until there are none left.
some faves:
Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.
Mouton enragé : French for someone calm who loses their temper – literally, “an enraged sheep”.
Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone’s parents so you can have sex without them knowing.
Stroitel: Russian for a man who likes to have sex with two women at the same time.
Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door – literally, a “see-you-home wolf
Les avoir a zero: French for “to have one’s testicles down to zero”, or be frightened.
Du kannst mir gern den buckel runterrutschen und mit der zunge bremsen: Austrian for “go to hell” – literally “You can slide down my hunchback using your tongue as a brake”.
[Continue reading Toujours Tingo: Weird words and bizarre phrases – Telegraph]
Perfect for the language maven on your Xmas list…
Synecdoche
Other than the ridiculousness of citing the Washinton Times on any subject, William Safire’s overview of the Key Vocab1 word, synecdoche is amusing.
They must have forgotten my column of only 16 years ago, which explained that metonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh mee, identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it — like “the brass” for high military officers, “the crown” for royalty and “the suits” for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. “Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche,” I wrote in a display of trope-a-dope, “which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole” like “wheels” for automobiles and “head” for cattle.
Noone is a somebody who correctly notes the re-emergence of the synecdoche (sih-NECK-doe-key) in the punning title of a new movie directed by the Oscar-winning surrealist screenwriter Charlie Kaufman: “Synecdoche, New York.” Though panned in The Washington Times as “art-house pomposity,” Kaufman’s new work — whose hero is described as a narcissist haunted by the thought of death — is hailed as one of the best films of the decade by Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post. That reviewer notes that “my death is your death is her death is our death — possibly accounting for the title, which isn’t just a phonetic play on Schenectady but a speech form in which a part of something can stand for the whole.” Headline of his review: “Synecdoche: A Part of Life That Makes Us Whole.”
Other headline writers are beginning to catch synecdochal fever. A recent article in The New York Times, datelined Rutshuru in eastern Congo, reported on “white-collar rebels” known as guerrilla warriors who are now trying as civilians to administer the territory they control. The rhyming headline, bordering on today’s figure of speech: “Rebels Used to Boots, Not Suits, Seek to Govern Congo.”
We really should use synecdoches more frequently on these pages.
Oh, and Safire’s article from April 26, 1992, begins:
Wearing his usual Western attire — a plaid shirt, jeans and a quilted down waistcoat — a former rodeo rider named Cy Baumgartner paid a visit to the St. Louis Art Museum and made an interesting discovery: the horseman in “The Bronco Buster,” a bronze by Frederic Remington, was wearing his spurs upside down.
When the real broncobuster (now one word, on the analogy of gangbuster ) pointed out this gaffe to the curator, his embarrassing revelation was received with a disdain bordering on condescension. Mr. Baumgartner, who now drives an 18-wheel truck but retains his interest in the Wild West, cheerfully waved off the frigid attitude of the museum official with “I’ve been lied to by suits all my life.”
This episode was recounted to me by Eliot Porter of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch with the suggestion that I explore “the metonymical use of suit .” He enclosed an early citation in print of a 1984 A.P. Laserphoto (formerly wirephoto) of a bunch of executives marching with briefcases, beneath the title ” Suits in Step.”
First, he is right about metonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh-mee, which is the figure of speech that identifies a person or thing by referring to something closely associated with it. Older examples include the brass for high military officers and the crown for the only royalty not headed for the divorce courts.
Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche, which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole. (“I’m using the wheels , Pops, to go get a new tube ” means your high-definition son is borrowing the car to obtain a new television set.) A suit is associated with, but is not part of, a person, and suit as the figure of speech is therefore metonymic.
- from Mrs. Hettenhausen’s 10th grade Advanced Placement English class, of course [↩]