for bestiary: the surinam toad, an ugly frog that lays its eggs inside of itself

if you dare click play, eat some saltines® and get a bucket ready because watching the surinam toad give birth to toadlings will most likely cause uncontrollable retching. grosser still is how the eggs form like festering pimples on the lady-toad’s back. ahh… the miracle of life!

an iris by any other smell

some flowers are named after objects that they resemble, some are even named after the way that they feel, but my favourite flowers of all are the ones named after their odor. in this latter category none is more exemplary than the roast beef plant—an iris that is said to have a pungent beefy musk.

In his English translation of Rembert Dodoens’s A New Herbal (1619) Henry Lyte, calling it `Stinking Gladin’, pulled no punches. He said that the leaves were “of a lothsome smell or stinke, almost like unto the stinking worme”.

first butterflies that defecate butter and now plants that smell like roast beef!?! what a marvelous age of discovery it is for this indoor naturalist!

i wonder if the roast beef plant goes well with armoracia rusticana.

a superhero for wordaholics

letterman (the younger brother of david letterman) first appeared in animated skits on the electric comapany in 1972. he was voiced by gene wilder (willy wonka) and his adventures were narrated by joan rivers (also willy wonka).

a typical segment shows his arch enemy (an arab stereotype) called spell binder (voiced by zero mostel) using his magic wand (stored beneath his turban) to change a key letter in the word (e.g., “custard” to “mustard”). bedlam ensues—the people who were enjoying flavorful custard suddenly and unknowingly begin eating red-hot mustard, causing them to turn red and burn from the mouth. enter letterman (in his all-too-literal varsity sweater getup) who restores the altered letters much to spell binder’s dismay.

actually, now that i think about it, the true hero of these episodes is not the doofus do-gooder, letterman BUT the witty trickster, spell binder.

and you thought that taking the know your dvořák quiz was the maximum amount of mirth that you could have on the internet… well guess again, pipsqueak. i give you the know your odyssey translation quiz.

the following are seven famous translations of the epic’s opening line. can you match them to their translators? (note, for each answer that you get wrong, poor odysseus must wait an additional year before returning to his special lady friend (and to ratchet up the gravitas, he’s not allowed to engage in any autoerotic proclivities))

αʹ Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

βʹ Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.

γʹ Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man
Who, having overthrown the sacred town
Of Ilium, wandered far and visited
The capitals of many nations, learned
The customs of their dwellers, and endured
Great suffering on the deep

δʹ The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall

εʹ Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.

ϝʹ The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
That wander’d wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sackt and shiver’d down;

ζʹ The man, my Muse, resourceful, driven a long way
after he sacked the holy city of Trojans:
tell me all the men’s cities he saw and the men’s minds,

the translators: george chapman (1616), alexander pope (1713), william cullen bryant (1871),  robert fitzgerald (1961), richard lattimore (1965), robert fagles (1996), and edward mccrorie (2004).

answers can be found here. also: which translation do you think is the tops? (for my money, it’s fitzy-fitzgerald’s but maybe this is because this was the first interpretation that i read. related: doesn’t it always seem that the first version of a song that you hear is always the standard and all covers become inferior?)

for wunderkammer: a northrop frye postage stamp

my seventeen year search for the elusive northrop frye postage stamp is finally over thanks to gold star comment-writer, slobone. also minted is frye’s fellow countryman (and intellectual sparring partner) marshall mcluhan. and now i am off to petition the united states government to start making its own line of literary theorists stamps instead of ugly little birds and boring flowers that nobody cares about. philately + literary criticism 4 life.

beta-testing a new puzzle

many are the puzzles that i attempt to solve, far fewer are the ones that i actually do solve—but a still smaller category are the puzzles that i write myself. i developed the following puzzle last night while suffering from insomnia and staring at a digital clock.

the setup: each numeral on a clock is composed of digital sections (eg. 8 has seven sections; 9 has six). using the 12-hour clock…

easy: determine the difference (in minutes) between the time with the fewest total sections and the time with most total sections.

hard: determine the time with the single greatest net change in sections from the minute before it (e.g. the net change between 3:34 and 3:33 is 1 section).

comments are now enabled (for 1 day only) in anticipation of the avalanche of answers, feedback, and derivatives that you might have.

UPDATE: the correct answers to both the easy and hard questions appear in the comments, so if you want to submit your solution without reading anyone else’s you can always email me via email.

ejective adjectives -or- the volcanic explosivity index (from wikipedia)

in a blurb such as this, a juvenile yuckster might try to work in a correlation between a v.e.i. intensity of 8 (mega-colossal) and his latest ultra-plinian venereal crescendo. but honestly friends, i am above indulging in such a quip. on an unrelated note, the citrus splash flavour of scope® mouthwash has been discontinued.

trivia tuesday

what is the only organ in the human body that is present 4 (four (iv)) times?

hint: it was also the last organ to be recognised.

further hint: i had never heard of it until yesterday.

last hint: the answer is the parathyroid gland

in honour of coining -or- the mile high club for logicians

i mentioned yesterday that i spent a good deal of my return flight questioning sachiv about his father’s reverse-œdipus issues. but what of my other flight? well, i WAS going to watch the benjamin button movie starring danny devito BUT on the day that i left, my father sent me this puzzle which i decided to work on instead.

you are given 12 coins. 1 of the coins is irregular and weighs either slightly more or slightly less than the other 11. you are also given an old-fashioned scale of the type that has come to symbolise the legal profession. your challenge is to determine which of the coins is irregular and if it weighs more or less than the others IN ONLY 3 ROUNDS OF WEIGHING ON THE SCALE.

it seemed easy enough but it took almost the entire 4 hour flight to arrive at an answer that still needed further retooling once i made it to a beach. if you can’t take the suspense, my solution is here [warning the solution is ALOT more complicated than i originally thought].

mets ton doigt ici

i neglected to mention during yesterday’s post, that i have a known record of both furtling and conspiracy to furtle. while in brussles a few years ago, and as a goof, i bought myself a very cartoony guide for kids to “the birds and the bees” (this is a euphemism for sexual congress). one of the gags is the diecut page seen above. click here to see the furtling that transpires when one puts one’s finger into the hole.

[WARNING: the picture of my finger in the preceeding link MIGHT be mistaken for a central forelimb if you are in a WORK environment]

a delicacy i have yet to try: chinook olives

Speaking of the Chinooks, Paul Kane describes a delicacy manufactured by some of the Indians among whom he traveled, and called by him ”Chinook olives.” They were nothing more or less than acorns soaked for five months in human urine.

from: the use of human ordure and human urine in rites of a religious or semi-religious character among various nations (1888) [this is a real book]

related: lant