what i found behind the drywall

because it’s cold as balsamic salad dressing outside right now, i’ve been working on an indoor project: remodeling an extra bedroom and turning it into a sit-up studio slash fajita station. mostly this means arranging throw pillows and grills but it also means i got to demolish a (hopefully) non-load-bearing wall. what i found behind the drywall was an unintentional time capsule: 30 or so mysterious, hand-typed quiz cards. the plot—like grandma ganan’s holiday gizzard gravy—thickens quickly.

presented above are a few fine specimens. what is the provenance of this wonderful little deck? my fajita friends think they are from the 1960s and my sit-up bros have noticed a few new-york centered questions—but other than that we can only speculate and wonder.

children’s books on my mind for “reasons” these days

as a faux-classicist, i’m particularly enamoured with baby books written in dead languages. so it’s little wonder that first thousand words in latin caught my bloodshot eyes. it’s awful that the publisher of this book skimped paying the proper fee (a $50 gift certificate to ruby tuesday’s) to a qualified latin scholar—however as far as unintended translation gaffes go, buying this book might just be worth it. (even it it means your little baby will grow up to equate mud with moral filth)

see also: to craunch the marmoset.

communal meal prior to informal gathering: articles

the superficial point of this post is to tell you about a book worth reading/purchasing/purchasing for everyone on your secret santa list. the book is potluck supper with meeting to follow: essays (hereafter pswmtf:e). the author is my bromantic internet bro, andy sturdevant.

inasmuch as the twin cities are a microcosm of everywhere and andy is a microcosm of everyone, this is the best book—on how everyone from everywhere ponders everything—that 22 united states of american dollars can buy.

but what this post is really about is what all good posts are about: me. in the last year, “circumstances” challenged me to pare down my entire library to just 99 books—3 shelves worth. i live in a himalayan library castle after all so this was no small feat. my reasons for ultimately undertaking the challenge were a complex stew of hitching a ride on the minimalist bandwagon (bndwgn), wanting to own my books and not have them own me, constant moving, getting involved in community bookshare programs (aka libraries), environmentalism (not really) and raising the average amazon rating of my books from two yellow stars to four point nine yellow stars (out of five point zero yellow stars). 

in the last few months i’ve gifted some old, heavily-marginalia’d favourites, donated some coffee table clunkers, squirreled away some guilty pleasures, and even trashed <gasp> some gardening narratives that i got on ebay which smelled like kitty litter. eventually i was left with just 99 books.

my collection will always be in flux. i may tire of josé saramago, i may get weirdly into christopher moore or elfpunk—but i’ll always try to level off at 99 books. which brings me back to the superficial point of this post. in order to add potluck supper with meeting to follow: essays to my boiled down library i had to get rid of something. and after deliberating about it for three days straight, the thing i finally got rid of was the story of o by pauline réage with an old ticket to ted leo and the pharmacists bookmarking my favourite passage—that’s how much i’m looking forward to andy’s book. 

caught orange-handed

i just stumbled into this unintentionally great book cover: the first scanned page of the mad pranks and merry jests of robin goodfellow (1841). observe:

• finger condoms
• white space
• orange space
• a thumb condom
• a gentle book goosing 
• john boehner flesh tones
• sorry ladies, this man hand is married

and the central mystery of the piece: how do we interpret the fact that he isn’t wearing a finger condom on his marriage finger?

the first limerick

as far as i can tell, this weird, slant-rhymey, pro-tobacco, geographically questionable, dripping-with-bodily-effluvia limerick from 1606 is the first printed limerick:  

O metaphysical tobacco
Fetched as far as from Morocco
Thy searching fume
Exhales the rheum
O metaphysical tobacco

however, it’s not a very pleasing example. for starters, morocco is only mentioned for a cheap rhyme. but even worse is that the first line is simply repeated for the last line. if you or i tried to pull this lazy stunt back in 7th grade poetry camp, we’d’ve been kicked to the curb with a barbaric yawp (this is a breaking bad allusion).

prominent early century limerick researcher carolyn wells notes that limericks like ‘o metaphysical tobacco’ “lack the distinguishing trait of the modern limerick, which is a first line stating the existence of a certain person in a definite place.” she dates the first published modern limerick to this 1834 chant:

There was a young man of St. Kitts
Who was very much troubled with fits;
The eclipse of the moon
Threw him into a swoon,
When he tumbled and broke into bits.

consider however that limericks with their jokey, narrativey, super-rhymey nature are an oral tradition passed around schoolyards and campfires. it seems reasonable to assume that the limerick existed well before 1606—probably in the form of nursery rhymes which still echo throughout our oral sphere. therefore for the earliest oral limerick, we can turn to halliwell (as we have done many times in the past) and find this one among several ancient mother goose rhymes which were probably “current about the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries”:

Diddledy, diddledy, dumpty!
The cat ran up the plum-tree;
Half a crown
To fetch her down,
Diddledy, diddledy, dumpty.

now if you’ll excuse me, i’m off to meet a man from nantucket. there’s something peculiar about his anatomy but for the life of me i can’t remember what. i’ll be sure to inquire and report back.

__

thanks to ragbag junior word sleuth ed spittles for putting me onto the wells article.

years in which the moon is full on hallo'ween

1925 - what were you doing on h'alloween 1925? i had tickets to a houdini show at the moulin rouge but missed it because i was on the titanic hanging out with the cast of downton abbey. #history

1944 - although i can’t find a source for this, several well-respected war historians have told me that for hal'loween 1944, hitler dressed up as a sexy pumpkin

1955 - in 1955, dwight eisenhower was president of the united states

1974 - this was the only time in at least 1,000, years that hallowe'en, a full moon, and friday the 13th all coincided ON THE SAME DAY!!! 

2020 - by this time it will have been almost 46 years between full moon halloweens’. also: bobbing for apples will be cool again.

2039 - if you plan on trick-or-treating on this day in 25 years, watch out for werewolves and/or weremice (bats) because the full moon activates their powers

2058 - the full moon on 10/31/2058 will mark the start of armageddon which will conclude on november 5th of the same year

2077 - here is a good costume idea for 2077: a witch who is part robot

2096 - it is said that ‘halloween 2096 may not happen because of global warming. it’s up to you to do what’s right for mother earth.

hippomania

true story about the hippo who inspired the hippopotamus polka:

• he traveled the nile with a herd of cows serving as his wet nurse
• he was traded to the london zoo for several greyhounds
• he could understand basic coptic commands such as “promenade, pivot, and pas d’allemande”
• his name was obaysch. shepard fairey once made a famous poster inspired by him
• charles dickens was jealous about all the attention he received
• he subsisted on a diet of ground maize and raw skunk meat 
• he had a daughter named guy fawkes

__

source

in researching some of the names mentioned in the dictionary of manicuring and pedicuring (1996), i came across marian newman, and boy if this isn’t the best blurb that i ever read about anyone. ever.

the dictionary of manicuring and pedicuring (1995) is a verifiable treasury of nail nomenclature (nailmenclature?). for instance, did you know that the head of a nail clipper is called a beak? or that there are different classes of lever arms? also: longenituls fulcrum?