Hangul
Subtitle: This post is not about snow.
“[King Sejong] began work on a replacement writing system in 1420. His reasoning was simple. Korean didn’t exist in written form at all; there was a very rich language being spoken out there, but no one could read or write in it because there was nothing to read or write it in. Those few people who could write had opted, some centuries before, to use Chinese characters—characters that, as a writing system for Korean, were entirely unsuitable.
The two tongues are wholly unrelated: Korean is a Ural-Altaic language, linguistically connected, though only rather vaguely, to Turkish, Mongolian, Finnish and Magyar. Chinese, on the other hand, is a Sino-Tibetan tongue, with ties to Burmese and Thai and Tibetan.”
-Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, Simon Winchester
In the depths
“I become lost in imagining an unknown river with headwaters in dreamed-up mountains of alabaster ad sapphires and ending in a sea of emeralds. Lord, grant me to see an unknown fish at my feet. Was not a scaly, breathing animal caught of the coast of West Africa an actual fish that otherwise exists only in fossilized form? A Chinese general has his troops assembled and summarily baptized two hundred thousand men with a garden hose. In the depths of my heart I decided that my favorite plant was the fern, and not only because of its name: fern beaded with rain. I carry my world with me in a little net made of liana fibers. Death is hereditary.”
-Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog
Bearvoyance
“Usually there is, on the pillow, a very elderly teddy bear called Mr. Wobble. Traditionally, in the lexicon of pathos, such a bear should have only one eye, but as the result of a childhood error in Glenda’s sewing, he has three, and is more enlightened than the average bear. ”
-Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett
A stupid prudery
“Figuring out how to put sex in the dictionary—which terms to include and how to define them—is actually one of the most challenging tasks we face.”
[via]
The article linked above is Not Safe for Prudes.
Cocked at a disturbing angle
Flames
Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.
His ranger’s hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.
His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher’s mitts,
crackle into the distance.
He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.
He is going to show them
how a professional does it.
-Billy Collins
I love this poem. Truly and with all my heart. There are some more Billy Collins poems here.
Edited to add: And here is another favorite.
Goober.
J: Driiiiiiive cayerful!
T: Draaahve cayerful now, ya’ heeyur?
J: You be sweet now.
J: Y’all come on with us.
J: Don’t be a stranger!
T: Oh my god, I heard “You be sweet now!” about 500 times. Jeet yet?
J: Try to ack like sumbody.
T: My favorite is still “You BEST ack like sumbody.”
J: BES. You BES ack like sumbody.
T: I stand corrected. Goober.
Please explain this to me.
Protest sign (seen on local news) outside of Wakefield High School where President Obama made his much ballyhooed speech to school children:
“OBAMA WILL HELP KEEP OUR CHILDREN STUPID.”
Wit [updated]
So I’m in this book, Twitter Wit, that comes out today. There are some exceptionally funny people out there so it never occurred to me I would be asked to contribute anything to this project, nor did I have the nerve intelligence presence of mind to submit my own stuff for it. Thank goodness the editor followed up with me. I never know what other people think is funny.
My contributor’s copy arrives soon and I’m looking forward to seeing what funnier people have said.
Update: Oh holy shit, I really am in the book. Those of you who know me well know I don’t believe anything until I see it.
Pages 39 and 123 if you’re interested, and I know you are.
I always wondered about this.
“Also two brothers named Newse came there to make a plantation. Once before, in Ireland, they had founded a town, naming it Newcetown, where it still stands. So now to their new settlement they gave the name New, and since it had an anchorage they called it Port, and it became New Port Newse. The brothers were unfortunate, and men forgot them soon; but men remembered Captain Newport, who had done much to found Virginia. So they began to think and write Newport’s Newce, perhaps even to confuse the second part with Neuse River. Then in trying to make sense they wrote Newport News, and so it remained. Thus with men and names, as with fishes in the sea, the greater often swallow up the smaller.”
-Names on the Land, George R. Stewart
Sugarbaker Mad Libs
NPR brings the funny waste of time. Assemble your own Julia Sugarbaker rant with the following list of things:
- an appetizer
- a famous criminal
- an inexpensive retailer
- a small amount of money
- a metal
- a breakfast cereal
- an environmental problem
- a popular gadget
- a junk food
- a reality show
- a kind of candy
- a sporting event
- a historical figure named “John”
- a celebrity named “John”
- an article of clothing
- a home electronics component
- a chain restaurant
- a city in the southern U.S.
- a popular toy
- a literary figure
Here’s mine:
I would rather spend two hours sharing Chex Party Mix with Baby Face Nelson than watch a woman who apparently purchased her intellect at The Deb Shop for 45 cents chase twenty-five men with biceps made of lead and heads packed with Cocoa Puffs.
Because when future generations look upon what we have left for them, which may by then be little more than groundwater pollution and millions of non-biodegradable flash drives, I fear they will conclude that they would have welcomed bread and circuses if only they had realized the alternative was Andy Capp’s Hot Fries and Rock of Love.
[sits down and crosses arms, but then immediately stands back up]
And let me tell you a little something about romance: Handing out roses like you are a mascot throwing Malted Milk Balls to the assembled hooligans at a cage match is not my idea of romance. Romance is a man who knows the difference between John F. Kennedy and John Denver and who is capable of putting on socks without scratching his head as if he is connecting a wireless router without the instruction manual.
So do not ask yourself why I do not particularly enjoy a television show where the assembled male candidates represent romantic prospects inferior to the workers on the night shift at the P.F. Chang’s in Baton Rouge. Ask yourself whether, after a lifetime playing with a cultural Tickle Me Elmo and dancing on the grave of Samuel Pepys, you will ever…recover…your dignity.
