Holy...

The New Mother.　You should just read it. It is perfect and evil. When you read it, imagine reading it when you were a child.

(What reminded me of it was this post on Kindertrauma.)

I bet it's something dirty

"Unworthy of being repeated." This looks promising!



(Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature Science and the Arts, v. 50, 1873)

Encountered while looking for information on the "Haxley Hood," a rustic new year's entertainment in the village of Haxley where locals compete kick to a piece of leather down the street towards one or more bars.

UPDATE: Not dirty and not that interesting.

Apparently there's a pinheaded local legend that she was an atheist who said "If there's a God let seven ash trees grow from my grave." If you're going to make up a legend about a local tree, long-dead-old-time-legend-maker-upper, please make up something better than that. Honestly. Not worth posting images of the text, but you can read a description and an refutation in Notes and Queries or William Chambers' A week at Welwyn. Googling her name, it turns out the same stupid little legend is still being passed around today.

There's also a nice picture of the grave today here at Barking Tig's Flickr page, along with a lot of really nice pictures of old churches and stained glass.

I'm disappointed, I was totally expecting it would be something soooper crazy and unspeakable.

Vos têtes! Quel dommage.

One of the pleasures of studying a "classical" language--here, "classical" just means "nobody talks it anymore"--is the example sentences in the textbooks. You study French, it's all Monique and Jean-Claude and Jean-Pierre and Jean-Luc deciding whether to meet at la bibliotheque or la piscine. My first Japanese textbook (excellent, but from the 1960s) was mostly Tanaka-san and Yamamoto-san and White-san and Black-san asking each other how many city blocks to the bank (which was on the left, next to the library, it turned out). Sometimes Brown-san would show up and ask how much a chair cost. More recent Japanese textbooks are enlivened by part-time jobs at restaurants and bringing back souvenirs from Osaka.

Study a dead language, though, you're in different territory. Start high school Latin and you'll probably be talking about spears and slaves and Gauls and wild animals in the forest on Day 1. The only thing I remember from classical Greek is απολολα: "I am ruined, utterly." (I'm not sure I actually remember the word, but I remember the translation.) Anglo-Saxon, you're awash in blood and endless sorrow and alliteration before you've finished writing your name in the front of the book. (I'm assuming.)

Anyway, in Classical Japanese: A Grammar by Haruo Shirane, just 30 pages in we find this:

頭　蹴わられ、腰践みおられて、おめけ叫ぶ物おほかりけり。Kashira KE-wara-re, koshi fumi-ora-re-te, omeki-sakebu mono ookari-keri.

There were many (ookari-keri) who had their heads (kashira) kicked and split open (ke-wara-re-te), whose hips (koshi) were stomped on and broken (fumi-ora-re-te), and who screamed (omeki-sakebu). (Heike, vol. 5, Fujikawa, NKBT 32:374.) (Ke-wara-re is the ren'yokai of keru, the mizenkei of waru, "to split open," creating a compound verb, and the ren'yokei of the passive auxiliary verb ru.)

And it's not like some big reading lesson, either, it's just to illustrate a verb conjugation. You study French, it's like three semesters before you learn how to talk about heads getting kicked open. IF THEN.

COLOR TELEVISION

Middle of the frame, MAGNAVOX COLOR TV. A store in Santa Monica I'd never noticed before. I can't remember the last time I've seen COLOR TV on a sign outside an appliance store. COLOR TV. A phrase you mostly encounter these days on faded signs outside old and very crummy motels, and when they play "Money For Nothing" on the radio.

I'm the CRUISER. You're the LOSER.

Pete Shelly's "Homosapien."  I think I spent about 2 years in the mid-90s with this song on endless repeat.  Very likely the best song ever.  Almost certainly not the best video ever.  I'm guessing the spinning wheel and the Commodore PET were quite a contrast at the time, but now they seem like pretty similar kinds of objects.

Why, daddy? {Updated]

[UPDATED 6/7/10:

Sometime in the past couple of weeks this book went from Full View to Snippet View on Google Books, which is why the pictures no longer make sense. Lesson for me: save the images next time so they can't change out from under me.

So anyway, this post no longer makes sense. Sorry!]

When I was a kid I had a library discard copy of this 1945 joke book:



Later in life I would encounter Bennett Cerf every now and then in the form of an anthology or an introduction. Little by little his anthologies, long out of print, are vanishing from libraries. I remember without pleasure his oddly condescending introduction to the old Portable Dorothy Parker--presumably he didn't realize when he wrote it which of them would be better remembered. He's far from forgotten, but he's certainly fading out at a reasonable clip--how many more years before he's familiar only to scholars, erased from the world of ordinary reading? Since I encountered this book so young, though, he'll always seem a little bit exciting to me, sophisticated and faraway.

Anyway, here's my favorite joke, not just in this book, but in the world:



Outstanding.

There were a few jokes I didn't understand. As the years wore on every now and then it would suddenly dawn on me what another one meant. When I came across it today and started reading through, most of them were obvious (generally mild sex jokes that were beyond me when I was eight). Some weren't so easy. This one I found absolutely baffling as a child, and finally understand (though it took me a couple of minutes even now):



Maybe you're cleverer than me and you're already laughing, but if not....


SPOILER


SPOILER


SPOILER


She thinks he's the iceman. In the days of iceboxes, the iceman was the guy who brought you the ice that kept everything cold--he was also the guy you slept with, the way in later years you would sleep with the milkman, and today you would sleep with, I don't know, the pool guy.


This next one, though, I still don't understand. I just have no clue. I don't even know how to start investigating.





Am I missing something obvious?

It's kind of nice. Childhood mysteries generally evaporate--sweet for a few of them to remain baffling.

Motorcarese as She Is Spoken

From today's Daily Mirror, what looks like an English As She Is Spoke reference (Google Books, new edition with valuable additional information, the real original):

If "* as she is spoke[n]" was used the way I think it was, I would assume that what she's saying doesn't make sense, but I'm completely unable to tell whether it does or not.