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1-2-2007 Dear Aunt Nettie: Who was President Ronald Reagan
quoting when he said "I forgot to duck" after he was shot by John W.
Hinckley, Jr. in 1981?
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Dear Sniper: His actual comment was "I forgot the duck," referring to the classic 1951 exchange between Groucho Marx and a contestant on the early TV program, "You Bet Your Life." A transcript of the conversation follows: GROUCHO: "So you claim to be a states' attorney, eh? Quick, what's the capital of South Dakota?" CONTESTANT: "Uh... it's not about states... it's like 'state's witness'." G: "Well, I want all the other states to witness that you don't know what the capital of South Dakota is. And you call yourself an expert!" C: " What a state's attorney does is..." G: "Don't beat around the bush- if you don't know the capital of South Dakota, just say so. It's not like your boss is watching. Or is he? Would you describe him as intelligent?" C: "Well, yes, he's..." G: "Then he's not watching. Let's try another one- what's the capital of Rhode Island?" C: "Providence?" G: "Providence isn't going to save you if you haven't studied for the test. Didn't they ever tell you that in school?" C: "I don't recall...." G: "You don't recall going to school? And they still made you a state's attorney? You must be a great friend of Joe McCarthy! Okay, one last chance. I'll name a state and you tell me the capital, and if you get it right the duck will come down and give you ten dollars. What's the capital of Omaha?" C: "I... I... forget." G: "That's okay, I forgot the duck." The phrase caught on quickly, and pretty soon, "I forgot the duck," was the standard witty response to anyone asking you a question you didn't know the answer to.
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1-4-2007 Dear Aunt Nettie:
What is the difference between poultry
and fowl?
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Dear Avian: The word "poultry" was substituted for "fowl" during the Victorian era for the same reason that "limb" was substituted for "leg" and "passed away" for "died." Victorian women were supposed to be so delicate that the mere mention of a coarse word like "fowl" would cause whole drawing rooms to collapse with the vapors, necessitating their revival with loosened stays and smelling salts. Dinner parties were especially tricky, unless conversations were kept rigidly to safe topics like the weather. If a guest were to slip and say, "Boy, this dead baby cow tastes great!" instead of carefully complimenting the hostess on the wiener schnitzel, why, all the ladies would go over like ninepins, forcing the loosening of stays and the application of smelling salts. Some hostesses would place mattresses behind all the chairs to be occupied by women at a dinner, and there were several patents taken out for chairs which would lower the occupant to the ground slowly and safely. Verbal or written communication of sexual feelings was also forbidden, so people instead used the language of flowers. Sending a clutch of buttercups to one's intended conveyed a sort of highly moral cheerfulness; a bunch of bachelor buttons signified celibacy, as the daisy conveyed an aura of innocence. No gentleman would ever send a lady an arrangement of tiger lilies and peonies, which was like a billboard suggesting a roll in the hay with the horses watching. And the prickly pear was so offensive that florists were often hanged or sent to the Tower for even possessing a photograph or sketch of the plant. All of this was blamed on Queen Victoria, who was supposed to be the role model for delicacy, and who would allegedly faint at the mention of "trousers" in her presence. The truth is that Queen Vicky smoked Spanish cigars, swore like a Billingsgate fishwife, and had the largest collection of pornography in the kingdom. Prince Albert's posthumous tell-all book, "The Consort Cavorts," showed her subjects the real down and dirty side of the monarchy, especially the Queen's penchant for hot buttered stableboys and games like Johnnie-ride-the-pony.
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1-8-2007 Dear Aunt Nettie:
What is the most plentiful metal in
the earth's crust? |
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Dear Miner: It was once thought to be crustene until scientists discovered that crustene is actually a species of beetle, so the search was on again for the most abundant metal. The French nominated camembertine, hoping to unload a batch of soft cheese that had gone all moldy and awful. The Italians nominated pastatene, pointing out that the entire Italian peninsula is held up by eons of slowly accumulated pastatene, sometimes in layers separated by tomatosausium to form the related mineral lasagnite. The Germans, of course, nominated hasenpfefferium which is extremely abundant in their land, forming domes under which beerite is often found and gaseous reserves of eructite and flatulum. The Chinese could not agree on an element; an hour after making a decision their representatives were hungry to change it again. North Korea suggested povertine, which is mined and eaten by its citizens, and threatened to blow up anyone who disagreed. India also has a great deal of povertine, but it's mixed with rich seams of outsourcium, or callcentrite, causing unsettled mineral conditions in many areas. Venezuela naturally proposed chavezite, a highly unstable petroleum-bearing stratum liable to go off in unpredictable directions at any time. Reacts with bushite to release sulfur. Russia nominated vodkite, as it has little else, but vodkite has been known to cause staggering, slurred speech and mental confusion, especially among Russians. Australia made a strong case for kangaroovium, causing share prices in that element to grow by leaps and bounds. Mexico said it had an abundance of emmigrantine, related to povertine, which it illegally ships north in great quantities. Iraq made a weak case for kaboomium!, understandable since the country has been distracted by the discovery of enormous toxic deposits of shiite and sunnium. Iran made a very loud proposal for ahmadinejadene, which is considered as unstable as chavezite, and radioactive to boot. Canada said it would support whatever the United States was nominating, since its main resources, snowene and icene, is not easily exportable. The USA casually suggested it might or might not consider hegemonium, but its Congress could not decide right now, as it was concentrating all its efforts on preventing horsemeat from being sold, flags from being burnt, and blastocysts from being dismantled. Whatever decision it might have come to would have been overruled by its leader anyway, in the name of national security. Poland said it thought rubber would make a dandy metal. No wonder the country has the reputation it does.... 
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1-10-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Ruler: "Not much," according to official documents, and there's an interesting story connected with that response. You see, when the Stanley Powerlock® satellite was launched in 1981, scientists had hoped to discover why the Moon is so much bigger and closer at the horizon than when it's way high up in the sky. After a successful lunar landing, one end of the tape was hooked to the edge of a crater. Once secure, the body of the tape measure lifted off and was returned gently to earth, unspooling the tape as it went. Scientists clustered around the returned measurement module, anxious to know the distance to the Moon to a sixty-fourth of an inch. Alas, in their haste to read the tape someone inadvertently leaned on the yellow return button, and ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!! the tape was respooled before you could say "metric system." Aghast at their blunder, and fearing the wrath of the accounting department, they acted quickly to protect themselves and their careers by agreeing to "enfudgeify" all future responses to questions about the Moon's distance. That's why all lunar distance data is codified in terms like "not much," "about the same as last year," "our best guesstimate is...," "are you familiar with base-14 calculations?" "let me get back to you on that," "our measurer person is out this week," and "national security concerns prohibit a response."
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1-16-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Rapid: It depends on the species. The Speedy Sardine can hit up to 85 mph. The Aerial Anchovy can do 75 mph with a tailwind. The Rapid Ray may hit 45 mph, but thanks to its large "wings" it can stay aloft until it perishes of dehydration. The Swift Shark is relatively slow at 33 mph, but is considered the deadliest of the flying fish, especially over crowded summer beaches. The Galloping Goldfish has a top speed of only about 17 mph, making them easy to catch with butterfly shrimp nets for home aquaria. (The "Butterfly" Shrimp is a misnomer; btw; its yellow coloring, rectangular shape and buzzing sound account for the name. All species are flightless. Many just lay there.) There are rumors of a Supersonic Squid, but none has ever been found, and photographs are too blurred for positive identification. However, SOMETHING tentacular hit the aircraft carrier USS Codswallop at 3:47 am on November 22, 1958 in the South China Sea. The impact site suggests that, whatever it was, it was traveling at around 800 mph when it hit. At the other end of the speed scale, the Dirigible Drumfish and the Zeppelin Zebrafish have no intrinsic means of propulsion, depending on sea breezes to provide movement. The Nimble Nautilus is technically not a flying fish but a mobile mollusk, although accounts of it leaving the ocean surface using its water jet have been verified. The largest flying seafood is not a fish at all, but a sea mammal. The Wright Whale, named after the eponymous founders of human aviation, needs about 20 linear miles to build up sufficient speed to leave the water, and ichthyologists disagree as to whether it exhibits true flight or is simply a glider, like the Gliding Grouper of the Florida Keys.¹ At any rate, when these 50-foot-long, 60-ton creatures lift into the air, it is perhaps the most awe-inspiring sight one can experience on the open sea. In 1992 a Carnival Cruise Line passenger vessel reported a pair executing the fabled Mating Flight off the coast of Ecuador, a sight rarely seen by human eyes. They were traveling about 12 mph at the time. ----------------------- ¹ See also the Flatulent Flounder and the Wind Wrasse, two other species whose flying abilities are often debated.
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1-19-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Monte: It was Hubert Heaver-Wentle, who used his mother's family's great wealth (amassed by cornering the late 19th-century wentle trap trade) to run for nomination in 1896, 1900 and 1904 races. In the first race he easily outdistanced the out-of-shape William Jennings Bryant-Gumball, who also used his mother's family's great wealth (amassed by cornering the late 19th-century gum vending industry) to run for the nomination, but was unable to catch the fleeter William McKinley-Potatopeeler, who used his mother's family's great wealth (amassed by cornering the 19-century tuber denuder market) to buy special Greek running shoes, which gave him an edge. In 1900 Heaver-Wentle ran again, and once again faced William McKinley-Potatopeeler, whose vice-presidential mate, Theodore Roosevelt-Teddybear, was a professional jogger, giving competitors little chance of victory. Roosevelt-Teddybear used his mother's family's great wealth (amassed by cornering the fin de siècle plush toy market) to fund his portion of the race. A still-out-of shape William Jennings Bryant-Gumball came in third, huffing and puffing and wishing he had evolved better lungs. McKinley-Potatopeeler did not compete in the 1904 race, having been assassinated in 1901, which disqualified him. His former vice-president, Theodore Roosevelt-Teddybear would prove to be impossible to beat, as he had been running around the Washington Monument since the 1900 election and was "as fast as greased lightning," according to the Smithsonian Institute's Department of Adipose Atmospheric Electrical Discharges. Bryant-Gumball would be passed over for the nomination to run this time, the Democrats choosing the speedier Alton B. Parker-Pen, whose campaign race was sponsored in part by his mother's family's great wealth (amassed by cornering the turn-of-the-century fountain pen market). A surprise candidate in the 1904 race was Eugene V Debs-Ball, a popular entertainer and recording star ("Eugene Debs-Ball and the Sociable Socialists") who had the 1903 hit, "Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground," a touching tribute to William McKinley-Potatopeeler's assassination. Debs-Ball used his mother's family's great wealth (amassed by cornering the early 20th-century debutant ball commercial business) to fund his race, but he really had little chance against Roosevelt-Teddybear, plus he had the misfortune of having a shoelace come untied midway down the track. To the end of his days he blamed his defeat on a betrayal by his trainer and shoeshine boy, Rastus Kiwi-Shinola. Theodore Roosevelt-Teddybear also won on the basis of his optimism about the stock market. When asked his opinion, he always said, "Bully!"
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1-22-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Reader: Romantic fiction, westerns and cookbooks. Jefferson didn't know much about literature, but he knew what he liked. He fancied a good bodice-ripper at bedtime, which really used to annoy Sally Hemings, who had to get up at dawn and didn't appreciate him leaving the lamp on half the night. Westerns were for rainy afternoons. Jefferson felt that the invention of the six-gun would end war as we know it, and he designed the wide avenues at the University of Virginia so they could be used for gunfights, which also explains the presence of the Saloon on campus, and what he called the Hoosegow. Cookbooks, oddly enough, did not belong in the kitchen at Monticello. Jefferson kept them in his study under lock and key. Few people know that he was a victim of Literate's Bullemia, a dreaded affliction in which a person reads a dozen different recipes, then spends an hour in the bathroom with an eraser. As President, he used to go on "reating" jags lasting an entire afternoon, which is why the Monroe Doctrine wasn't named after him because he didn't show up for the naming ceremony one afternoon and Jimmy Monroe snuck his name in, the little minx. There was a fourth and fifth category of reading matter which was suppressed after his death. Jefferson had an extensive collection of outhouse humor publications, including "WC Privy's Original Bathroom Companion," "Flushed with Success," and "Three-Holer Howlers." The fifth category, his comic book collection, was given away by his mother, and would have been worth a fortune today.
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1-24-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Geographic: Belguim? The town in Wisconsin? Of course it exists! Belguim raises personable cows, makes fine cheese, and if the fog lifts tourists can still see the remains of the pier where ships loaded during the Civil War, and where the "Pride of Sheboygan" ferryboat almost stopped one day in 1951 due to mechanical failure. It's also the home of the Fighting Marmots, the middle-school volleyball team which swept the Ozaukee County championships in 1966. You may be confusing it with Belgium, also known as the International House of Waffles. Belguim doesn't feature waffles, though. The town specialty is sturgeon burgers. Since the lake sturgeon is an endangered species, most restaurants substitute canned penguin imported from Tierra del Fuego. They cancel out the notoriously oily, fishy taste of penguin by dipping the burgers in lye just before putting them on the griddle, and serving them up with ample quantities of pungent Thai fermented pork sauce, which is relabeled as "Belguim Burger Béarnaise." It fools the tourists. Residents know that you can get an authentic sturgeon burger at Andy's House of Big Food by ordering "moose meat over easy," a coded expression designed to confuse environmentalists. Try it if you find yourself in Belguim on your way to someplace important. Andy's accepts food stamps, or you can barter with .30-06 ammo. Doesn't exist, indeed!
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1-29-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Tripper: From here in Redbone, Arkansas, Oregon is one of those "out there" states which should rightfully belong to Japan or China. Quite a few Arkansahoovians believe that California is a myth. So, since I know nothing about the place, I was forced to use online information. From that I have discovered that: * Fish will only fly over bear paws if it's a busy day in an expensive Chinese restaurant. Why anyone would want to order bear paw as an entrée is beyond me, but these days most everything is beyond me. * I have no idea who or what a Manute Bol is. The closest I could come to online was "malamute boil," which is either an affliction of Alaskan sled dogs or a potluck if the supply of bear paws runs out. * Oregon trees are indeed tall, as trees tend to be, except for those weenie shrunk-down Japanesey trees they grow in pots in California, if indeed there is a California. * The climate in Oregon leaves something to be desired, as it rains most of the year and is overcast the rest. People born there can live their entire lives without once seeing the sun. If the sun ever did break through, it would probably cause mass panic. * Portland is the only important city. As a matter of fact the entire rest of the state is considered superfluous except as scenery. * The principal cash crop is marijuana. The second biggest crop in terms of yield per acre is wild moss, which is harvested and sent to the putative citizens of California for use in salads, which is what they live on, if they exist. The third biggest crop in terms of yield per acre is mildew. * The only native livestock is the giant earthworm, which has eaten all the other species. The earthworms have profited from the dankness and dirt to grow to amazing size, some of them 40 feet long and weighing over 500 pounds. Worm-breaking has become a popular rodeo event since all the horses were eaten. * Portland has one restaurant for every resident, most of which are empty, except for McDonald's, which is not technically a restaurant but a fast-food joint. * The principal industry in Oregon is keeping out alleged Californians. Most people are employed in this trade. Other industries include barbed wire manufacturing and land mine assembly. * Almost everyone is literate, which comes in handy if a volcano is about to explode, an earthquake is due, or a tsunami has been spotted off the coast. The only illiterate ones are illegal Mexicans, and who cares about them? * Oregon is one of only two states without a sales tax. It's not necessary because the state has a generous income from drug smuggling. * It's pronounced Or-gun. * Everyone in the western part of the state, the only part that counts, is an eco-freak. Western Oregon is the only place in the world where they recycle Kleenex. Teams of the otherwise unemployable wash, dry, sanitize and repack Kleeneces. Used matches are also rebuilt, and the state newspaper, "The Oregonian," conveniently turns back into wood pulp after three days. * The seashore is so spectacular that resident Oregonians are not permitted anywhere near it so as not to bother the tourists, who bring money. * The state drink is bottled water. Even the tiniest convenience stores carry several hundred brands, and supermarkets have thousands, all guaranteed to be genuine water. Visitors are sometimes surprised that bathrooms and kitchens have no taps, and that washing machines have a funnel built in to take straight Evian. Which is of course recycled and returned to store shelves the following day. * There are no slums, which are recycled into second homes. The fate of the slum dwellers is unknown, but they are believed to account for the presence of a homeless "Vietnam vet" beggar on every streetcorner, some of whom are in their 30s and must have been drafted as embryos. * Everyone rides bicycles or takes public transportation, as automobiles were outlawed several years ago. The public transportation system is so pervasive that most citizens have a bus stop just off the living room. * In autumn leaves fall only into approved recycling bins so they can be stapled back onto the trees come springtime. * Finally, if you have to ask how much it costs to live here, you can't afford it....
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2-1-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Floral: The common dandelion, which has varieties as small as the Dandyette and as large as the Trampolinedelion. Dandelions have a surprising number of uses, from dandelion salad and dandelion wine to DandylineR paper products, the Dan DeeR line of men's colognes, and, of course, the rapper Dan D, the first plant to reach Billboard's Top 20 with his performance of "******** ** ****!" Larger varieties of dandelion are used as wallpaper and carpeting in many countries, and "dandillows" are now available in the bedding section of stores like "Bed, Bath & Begonias." Although the 1957 Belgian attempt to market the dandelion-powered "Paardebloem" economy car was a failure, its lack of success is blamed more on the limited number of dandelion refilling stations than on design and manufacture. After all, the much more conventional Edsel motorcar was likewise released in 1957, cost six times more than the Paardebloem, and was still a dud. And the Dutch "DAF," released in late 1957, which ran on daffodils and had unique wooden tires and an Edam dispenser in the dashboard, sold precisely 3 cars in the USA, despite an intensive advertising campaign. ("Think Globally, Drive Daffily!") Economists who study automobile marketing and sales trends later determined that 1957 was a year with "bad mojo," and that any new car introductions in that year were doomed. During the Flower Power craze of the 1960s, several Carnaby Street tailors introduced dandelion clothing. The disadvantage was that immediately after the first cold snap, the clothes would turn into a ball of fragile tufts which drifted away at the slightest breeze. Only Cher was able to wear them effectively after October. During the same era dandelion was promoted as an organic coffee substitute ("DanDecaf") and Soviet scientists claimed they could vulcanize dandelions to form a sort of rubber. The 1969 spring line of new Lada automobiles were all equipped with this novel new rubber product. Alas, after the first cold snap (mid-July), the tires turned into a ball of fragile tufts which drifted away at the slightest breeze. Russians, long used to Soviet consumer product failures, shrugged their shoulders and drove around on the rims until they wore down, then simply drank vodka instead of going anywhere. Trivia: Dandelions were the first plant to be unanimously voted into the Should Be Extinct, Dammit! protection category by the EPA.
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2-4-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Inhaled: It depends on the body. Some people, like rhinoceroses, have super-heavy skin. Others, like the extinct Irish elk, have antlers that weigh as much as 75 pounds, attached to a 5-pound skull with a little itty-bitty brain inside. Now, some people will say, "Hey, doofus, antlers ain't organs!" but they reveal their own ignorance, as antlers play an important part in this particular cervid's temperature regulating mechanism, so there! Now, blue whales, their heaviest organ is their tongue, which weighs as much as 3 tons! Hoo, boy! Couldn't you blow some raspberries with that sucker! In jellyfish, their stinging tentacles weigh more than the rest of their body. And if some know-it-all dunce-type says, "Hey, dimwit, everybody knows that tentacles ain't organs!" we can riposte with, "Oh yeah? Without tentacles to catch krill or whatever they eat, they would starve to death, so it is so an organ, neener, neener, neener!"¹ Now, in other sea creatures, like the hermit crab, the shell they live in and carry around is their heaviest organ. And I can just hear some of you saying, "Organ? Those shells aren't even from the same species, you stultified numbskull!" To which I reply, "Oh, sure, you just watch a naked hermit crab and see what happens. In 2 seconds, GULP!, they're swallowed up by a grouper or something, which makes the shell the most important organ they got, as well as the heaviest, smartass!" In plants things are different. I mean, a tree is just one big organ, right, from the tippy-topmost leaf to the deepest darkest apical meristem buried in the dirt. It don't have to calculate what part is which-- you take away any part and it's kerflooey! Except leaves in Autumn. They don't count. And fruit. Some fruit-bearing trees, like the watermelon, have such heavy fruit that the whole tree is mashed flat and can only squiggle across the field. It must feel like some kind of fool, I tell ya. I can hear all the other trees, some of them 200 feet tall, calling out, "Hey, 'melon, what you doin' down there? You look like some kinda vine, all flat like that. Why ain'tchu up on you feets, you lazy bastich?" And the watermelon tree says nothing, but plots dark revenge. Lastly, in the insect kingdom, ruled over by Queen Bee and King Cricket, the heaviest organs don't amount to a hill of beans, since insects are such lowlife anyway. Except the lobster, in which the claws are the largest organs. And if you don't believe me, you just slip those thick rubber bands off their wrists and see what happens. They'll grab holt of your organs and then you'll be singing a different tune. And you'll be singing it soprano, too!² Oh, and somebody has pointed out that I left out birds. In birds, their fur is the heaviest organ, which is why you never see them with fur coats in the summertime. ------------------------ ¹ Quoted in the Journal of Coelenterate Physiology, June, 1997, pg 215ff. "Aspects of Maternal Dominance in Scyphozoa, with Special Attention Paid to the Role of Tentacles as Organs, Neener, Neener, Neener." ² This statement has absolutely no connection to a noted crime family in Newark, New Jersey. No connection whatsoever. Really! There's no need to send anybody around to check it out, and if that somebody is carrying a baseball bat, we no longer live here, anyway. Moved, left no forwarding address. Signed up for the Federal Witness Protection Program, too. And had plastic surgery. Perhaps residing in Tibet. Who knows?
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2-6-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Chance: Although some Continental art programs can get away with showing several pictures and frames per second due to their citizenry's familiarity with great art, American TV cannot. Even with very simple pictures-- a Rothko, perhaps-- it's necessary to keep the image on the screen while a voice-over explains what it is and who did it. And frames? Hoo boy! Not one American in a thousand can tell Baroque from pickled oak. I mean, in Great Britain they have a museum at Beningbrough Hall in Yorkshire just for frames! (The audience will please refrain from stereotypical Yorkshiremen jokes.¹) Painting, shmainting!-- in many cases the Beningbrough museum curators have spray-painted over the picture with dark gray automotive primer so as not to distract from the beauty of the frames in its collection. Americans? They buy frames at Wal-mart and think they're just as fashionable as all get-out. Now, when you combine a great picture with a great frame, then you're cooking with gas! Remember that fancy-assed painting of Louis HIV in full court drag? The frame on that baby weighs 85 pounds and has more gold leaf on it than Zsa Zsa Gabor's mummy case. When you flash that sucker on European TV for just a millisecond, everybody says, "Dude! That was Louis HIV in full court drag in that gonzo 85-pound frame!" In America you could leave it up there for a week and the only reaction from a channel-surfer would be, "I gotta get me some of that beer," before he switched to "Celebrity Hopscotch." And that's classical art! When it comes to modern or post-modern art, most of which doesn't even have frames, then your American viewer is ass-over-teakettle lost at sea. There's a lulu of an "installation art" piece over at the Tate Modern: a completely empty room with a couple of flashing lights in it. When a proper Brit sees that popping up on his art program, he or she knows instantly what it is, because they saw it in "The Sun" when the Tate paid £100,000 in ratepayers' pelf for it in 1999. And what's the proper Brit's response to the image on the screen? "Bleedin' Tate is barking mad," is one of the few we can print, and it's dead-on accurate. Show an American viewer the same image and he or she will only wonder where Martha Stewart gets her ideas..... --------------------- ¹ Well, okay, just one. A Yorkshireman wins the lottery and decides to spend part of it on home decor. So he buys a Constable to hang in the bathroom."If the family likes it well enough," he says, "we may bring it into the house.
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2-9-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Sparky: Almost one. Transistors back in those days weren't the skinny, paltry things you see today, no siree Bob! Back in 1958 they really knew how to make 'em, and they used real materials, too, like galvanized iron, cold rolled steel, barbed wire, genuine pink beach sand from the Bahamas, hand-cut rectifiers and hand-packed capacitors, Fahnestock clips (when's the last time you saw a genuine Fahnestock clip on a computer chip, hm?), a rugged steel-and-Bakelite potentiometer, and reliable 6SJ7Y vacuum tubes with solid glass insulators. Those were transistors! Back in 1958 us kids would wait at the drugstore for the latest issue of Amateur Transistor to arrive (it was only a dime in those days!), then rush home to build the latest model, using parts we found around the house, like the coils from Mama's steam iron and the gears from the big grandfather clock in the hall. And Oh! the joy we experienced when all the parts were in place and solidly soldered down. I remember taking one of mine to show-and-tell in the 6th grade, loading it carefully into my Radio Flyer wagon and covering it with wax paper to keep the rain off. How impressed Sister Himmler was! And when I plugged it into a wall socket and the tubes took on that warm glow that showed it was working properly, then slowly the whole thing began to transist, well, there are few moments like that in life. It kept on transisting while I pointed out the various components and explained how they worked. Several boys volunteered to work the potentiometer to tune it in better, and Suzie Ledbetter offered a bobby pin so I could adjust the framistat (in my haste I had left the framistat wrench set at home). Just before the noon whistle blew for lunch I added a pint of mercury and a handful of ferric oxide and the whole class went Ooooooooooooooooooo! as the gevartikin inflated to its full six-foot diameter. I brought it home during lunch hour and plugged it in to surprise my mother. How she laughed and laughed! Later, when my father came home from work he was so impressed he took me down to the vacuum tube store to get my own "blue glow" superheterodyne tube and exciter coil. He assured me that if I kept up the good work I was sure to get a job that paid Big Bucks someday. What a great day it was! When I said my prayers that night I included John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain, the inventors of the transistor. I hope they enjoyed their Nobel Prize as much as I enjoyed my transistor!
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2-12-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Scribbly: Tetraethyl lead was once used extensively as an additive in pencils for its ability to increase the pencil's hardness rating, thus allowing the use of higher finger pressure ratios for greater efficiency and readability. It was also thought to protect pencils against wear, especially mechanical pencils where lubrication was difficult. The use of tetraethyl lead as a pencil additive was discontinued in the 1970s when it was discovered that it led (pun unintended but unavoidable) to significant paper pollution. This was particularly noticeable in schools, where pencil lead concentrations were high. Toxic levels of tetraethyl lead caused younger children to become bored and distracted. The only cure was for them to stay at home and watch cartoons and daytime TV, which led (sorry) to such a steep fall in overall IQ scores that media scare stories were produced, with talking heads using their frowny bad-news faces to suggest that Something Should Be Done Or We're All Doomed. When it was revealed in 1977 that 88% of America's schoolchildren thought that John Travolta was the president of the United States, Congress leapt into action to ban tetraethyl lead in pencils by 1980 before they were voted out of office and a mere Hollywood entertainer elected to the highest office in the land. Today only Yemen, Afghanistan and North Korea use leaded pencils, and just look at them!
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2-15-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Neurotic: I personally (and impersonally) think that clowns are one of the great scourges of the modern world. Perhaps they had a place in society back when they could be ritually slaughtered at the end of a performance, but today political correctness has pretty much put the kibosh on human sacrifice. I have never met a child who was not traumatized by clowns. There's something fundamentally wrong about grown men dressing up like that and cavorting around. Sick, if you ask me. And if you don't believe me, just read these testimonials: "I think all clowns should be kilt ded. -- Jimmy H. age 5 "The clown at the sirkus was so skary I did a number 2 in my pants." -- Elroy T. age 7 "Hate clowns! Hate hate hatehate clowns!" -- Emily P. age 3 "Can clowns be set on fire? I think they should be. I think they would look pretty burning and screaming." -- Julie Mc. age 8 "This man in our nayberhood usta dress up as a clown and play funny games with kids. Then the plice came and took him away." -- Kevin R. age 10 "Clowns try so hard to win the acceptance they were denied in childhood by mocking the role of adults, but inside they are roiling oceans of conflict and shame. Their exaggerated actions are the desperate child's plea, 'Look at me, Mama, look at ME.'" -- Sigmund F. age 71 "Mama caught me trying on her makeup and said I would grow up as a fagit. Are clowns fagits? They use lots of makeup." -- Dwight T. age 11 "There was this klown at the sirkus. I had bad dreams every nite after I saw him. My mama says I might have to go to a sykologist if I dont stop having nite mares." Donna H. age 9 "They got this clown for my birthday. He had a big red nose like my uncle Harry. He smelled like wisky like my uncle Harry too. And he was about as funny as uncle Harry, who isn't." -- Chuck S. age 12 "Why do they disgize theirselfs? What are they triing to hide?" -- La Tonya A. age 10 "They had clowns. I hid under my chair." -- Bessie N. age 4 |
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2-19-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Tippler: I ask you, in all seriousness, if you've ever seen a dead wino? My great-uncle Fribble was not a connoisseur of red wines, but a common sewer. Each year the Gallo company would send him a Christmas card, he was such a mainstay of their business. Well, one day in 1916 great-uncle Fribble felt the patriotic call and signed up for General Pershing's American Expeditionary Force to go whomp the Hun. Nothing was heard from him in all of 1917, and he was presumed dead. In 1918 that whole branch of the family died off from the great influenza epidemic, and great-uncle Fribble was forgotten utterly. Lo and behold! in 1981 he returned, still wearing his puttees and singing about the mademoiselle from Armentières. We were understandably stunned, but great-uncle Fribble (who must have been 89 or thereabouts, although he still looked like the boyish lad we had waved off at the docks so long ago) explained that on his first leave in Paris he had found a really cheap source of Bordeaux in a tiny shop in the Quartier Pigalle, and frankly saw no reason to leave until the owner's grandson had finally died and the shop was closed down. His only question was whether Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected. But even stranger than that is an account I read in the New York Daily News several years ago. It appears that the officers of the law had drug in some wino from the Bowery on a charge of suspicion of conduct unbecoming a human being or some other variation on aggravated mopery. The wino, who spoke with a thick Dutch accent, reported his last known address as "a tenant in Lambert van Valckenburch's house, opposite Kip's Bay plantation," an address not found on any recent street map. He reported that, as a licensed porter of ales and spirits, he was taking a hogshead of red wine to "Pegleg Pete" Stuyvesant's bouwerij, who was planning a kegger to celebrate his son's graduation from the Dutch Reformed mission school. Well, the day wat hot, and nearly at the end of Het Marckvet where it met Pearl St, he felt a powerful thirst come over him as he labored that fine June day, and he stopped under a shade tree for a rest, and to "suck the monkey," as porters called it: drilling a tiny hole with a gimlet in a large cask, inserting a straw to sip the contents, then closing the hole with candle wax. At this point, the wino claimed, a feeling of "unutterable lassitude" overcame him, and he knew no more. After that things became hazy. He remembered uniforms changing from Dutch to British to some new one he didn't recognize. He recalls marveling at gas lights, then at their electrical replacements, and being struck with wonder at the first horseless carriage he saw, and absolutely bowled over by airplanes. Well, at this point the skeptical police called in a police historian, who spoke with the wino for an hour, then went off to the library to check some old texts. He returned near the end of the day with the astonishing news that he had traced the wino to a porter for the old Bull's Head tavern in New Amsterdam named Wouter Tienhoven, circa 1650! The astonished scholar rushed back to the cell where the apparently ageless porter was being held, but alas! the old wino had been kept from his sustaining beverage for too long, and had crumbled into a heap of grey dust and dry bones. |
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2-21-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Airy: Nonentium, an isotope of vacuumium. During the Cold War American and Soviet scientists were locked in a contest to discover or create the first lighter-than-air metal which was also tough, durable and versatile. The intent was to create large artillery pieces which could be easily transported simply by tying a length of string to them and towing them to the battlefield. Another plan was to build a heavily-armored dirigible for use as a floating gun platform. And, of course the space program of the successful nation would benefit mightily, as even the heaviest module or satellite could be lifted into orbit simply by cutting its restraining ropes in a suitably open area with no winds. It had been known for years that vacuumium had many of the required properties, but existed only in the form of a viscous, untamable jelly. Its only known application was as a practical joke. A couple of scientists would distract another scientist, and the prankster would slip open the victim's lunchbox and replace the strawberry jam in his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with vacuumium jelly. And oh! the laughter in the lunchroom when the poor victim opened his lunchbox and his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches would shoot up to— and sometimes through!— the ceiling, The Soviets did the same, but since bread, peanut butter and jelly were all unavailable because of the wartime emergency protocol, they had to smear the jelly on the bottom of vodka bottles to get the same effect. There is still an international debate as to which side was the first to successfully separate out the nonentium isotope from vacuumium.¹ The International Extremely Secret Patent Infringement Court of the United Nations has been meeting off and on since 1957 to try to settle the row, but with little success, since neither side will discuss anything but the weather due to national security concerns. Even discussions about the weather ended in 1977 when Moscow was flooded with record-breaking rainstorms immediately after the US had launched its latest weather satellite, events which the Soviet ambassador said "had the CIA's fingerprints all over it." In any case, clandestine reports were soon circulating that a fully-armored blimp had been spotted hovering over Area 51 in Groom Lake, Nevada, and similar reports filtered out of the Soviet UFO headquarters in Syktyvkar. Rumor had it that the Soviet project was nicknamed "Death Star," which terribly upset American scientists and the military, who had only managed to come up with the lame "Operation Lead Balloon" to hide and highlight their activities. Nevertheless, each side knew that the other side was making great progress on this "weapon of all weapons."² Fate oddly stepped in at this point. In November, 1981, Israel tested one of the nuclear weapons it didn't have off the coast of South Africa. Immediately, the world over, all nonentium disappeared, converting itself into xenon, nitrogen and fulminarium, a new element with a half-life of two-tenths of a zillionth of a second, rendering it useless for any purpose other than being discovered by nuclear physicists. Any people and non-nonentium objects in the American and Soviet sky-dreadnoughts immediately fell to earth. It didn't take long for the CIA and the KGB to realize that their killer weapons application was a killer dud. Even a Kim Jong Il-sized nuclear weapon ("M-80 firecracker" in IAEA terminology) was big enough to vaporize all the nonentium on Earth, eliminating its potential as a weapon. Funding was immediately cut off, and both sides switched to Plan B, except that it was still being held up in the USA due to opposition from FDA evangelicals. -------------------------- ¹ Italy even got into the act, claiming that nonentium was identical to nullgravium, which had been discovered in Tuscany in 1598. ² Italy again protested, saying that the phrase "armamento di così fan tutte armamenti," was a well-known phrase in the Italian underworld, particularly in Sicily. The Italian response was to immediately double the cost of olive oil on the world market, driving prices up to over $95 a barrel in olio futures on the spot market. Indignant American lawmakers immediately took Italian bread off the menu in the Congressional Cafeteria and renamed Italian dressing Liberty Garnish, served on a loyalty oath. |
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2-23-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear ACE: It stands for Doppelganger Nano-Assembly and was named after its function, which is to duplicate others identical with itself on a very small scale. As opposed to RNA, Robot Nano-Assembly, used to create plots for inferior science-fiction movies. As an acronym, DNA has many other uses. It is essential to the functioning of the Defense Nuclear Agency, and indispensable in computing, where it represents everything from Dynamic Network Analysis to Departmental Network Administrator. It is easily reversible, where it becomes the second most popular word in the English language, after the reversed acronym for Embedded Hyper Text. |
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2-26-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Infielder: While there's no steroid-enhanced major league baseball team in the state of Oregon, there are some good minor- and paltry-league teams. The minor league American Automobile Association (Triple-A) team is the Portland Beavers, featuring such local stars as "Swats" McKenzie and the part-time outfielder "Bosco" Gundermann. All players wear the stovepipe hats from which the team draws its name, accented with spats, celluloid collar and watch fob. You may remember the fuss last year when Tyrone LaRue used his hat to snag a runaway ground ball, and the rules committee had to take their case all the way to the Baseball Supreme Court for a decision. You don't get action like that from the Chicago Cubs, let me tell you! Their winter season will be getting underway as soon as they have all 11 players out on bail. In the single-A (Adultery) paltry league there's the Eugene Emerils, composed entirely of area chefs, including "Cilantro" Mendez and "Buttered Parsnips" Luchese. The games aren't much, but the menu selections are tremendous, and it's the only ballpark where the food vendors have a wine list. For a special treat, wait for Fan Appreciation Night. Last year everybody got veal saltimbocca with roasted rosemary potatoes smothered in shiitake mushrooms, caramelized onions and Gruyère, accompanied by a '59 Beaujolais. At the 7th-inning stretch there was chocolate tiramisu torte with wild cherry sauce and a '68 Imperial Tokay. During the winter season you can count on heftier choices, like boeuf bourguignon, carbonade de boeuf, and the shortstop's specialty, bacon-wrapped loin of pork Wysocki with a marmalade glaze and lardons of genuine lard. The coach recommends a good mulled cider or hot spiced wine as the perfect complement. |
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2-28-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Crenshaw-head: Few people realize that Marshall Crenshaw is also the amateur agronomist who bred the hybrid melon that bears his name. He's rather modest about it, and the subject doesn't often come up during recording sessions. Crenshaw was unhappy with the melons available to him, and he longed for one that would have the perfect blend of canteloupicity and honeydewity. After years of labor carefully breeding and crossbreeding different varieties of melons on the fire escape of his Bronx tenement, he finally achieved what he sought in a hybrid of a casaba melon and a Persian melon. Somewhat daunted at first, yet eager to share his new discovery with a waiting world, he began hanging around the kitchen doors of famous restaurants, giving out free samples and hoping the new variety would catch on. He had cards made up with a picture of the new variety with "Have Melon, Will Travel" printed above it, which he sent out to major hotels and restaurants across the land. At last his break came when the Frog and Peach restaurant¹ in New Brunswick, New Jersey, ordered two crates for its summer menu. After that New York's trendy SoHo district restaurant, "The Unshod Clam," asked for a dozen crates, and soon Marshall Crenshaw could hardly keep up with the orders, and had to hire a dozen handlers to help with breeding of the casaba and Persian melons, which do not naturally reproduce in the wild and have to be forced with cattle prods, or enticed with centerfolds from the Burpee catalogue. As an interesting bit of trivia, Crenshaw (the man, not the melon) sponsored and performed in the band "Blind Melon," which had a monster hit in 1992 and then was never heard of again. It is believed to be living under an assumed name in Montana. ----------------------------------- ¹ Not at all related to the more famous Frog and Peach restaurant of Dartmoor, Devon, in southwest England. |
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3-5-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Decanter: Galileo hypothesized that the Moon was not truly made of green cheese, but was composed mostly of rock with traces of rennet here and there. Some gentlemen named Rocco from the Inquisition informed him that denying the greencheesity of the moon, a fact firmly established by Aristotle in his treatise, "De Lunibus," could cause Galileo's height to be extended by a foot or so on the rack, preparatory to remedial instruction performed with red-hot pincers. Galileo immediately issued a retraction, saying that he didn't know where he had gotten such a crazy damnfool idea, and confessed that he was an alcoholic and pain medication abuser who would immediately enter a rehab center. Galileo's next book, "How Green Was My Lunar Valley," features a detailed proof of the moon's greencheesiness, including hypotheses as to just what type of cheese it is. He tentatively identifies it as a nice Gorgonzola, but he hastens to point out that it could, "equally well be a thick slice of provolone, or — hey, let's go out on a limb here — even a Swiss, which would account for the craters. No, wait, not craters! No craters, no way! Carbon dioxide bubbles caused by the ageing process, yeah, that's it, but don't take it to the bank until I've checked Aristotle. He's my main man. If Aristotle says gruyere, it's gruyere! Don't need no rack to convince this boy! No sir!" |
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3-9-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Stretchy: That's what I'm here for. The Spandex is a relative of the Ibex, and flourishes in the same mountainous regions of North Africa. The principal difference between these two species of mountain goat is that the Spandex has extraordinarily stretchy skin, sort of like an extreme shar-pei, those dogs that look like they're wearing a much larger dog's skin. The evolutionary advantage of this sort of skin becomes immediately apparent when you see the Spandex being attacked by a gang of feral Airedales or other predator. The Spandex calmly allows the predator to chomp onto its loose skin before it takes off in a series of lively bounds. The Airedale, of course, instinctively sets its foreshanks in the fully upright and locked position to resist, thus sealing its doom. For after about eleven bounds, the Spandex reaches the limit of its stretchability, and, like an overextended inner tube, comes snapping back at about 86 mph, plowing into the startled Airedale and sending it into the rest of the pack like an axe through ninepins.¹ In the resulting confusion the Spandex slips quietly away. Should the Spandex be outnumbered, or attacked by a much larger animal like a cave bear, it has recourse to another clever trick. It bounds over the nearest precipice and free-falls until its skin blossoms out in the streaming air, opening to form an organic parachute, which lowers the Spandex to a gentle landing on another crag far removed from the threat. Although the Spandex is not hunted for its meat,² the rise of exercise facilities and dance companies in the United States and Europe has caused the Spandex to be hunted almost to extinction for its hide. ------------------------ ¹ A North African expression of dubious origin. ² It smells like roasting pork when it's cooked, getting the Muslim hunters of the region into big trouble with the sharia courts. A desperate tribesmember will sometimes cook Spandex when other game is not available, but is forced to keep up a steady nervous patter during the cooking process. "My, oh, my, this SPANDEX is going to taste wonderful when this SPANDEX is fully cooked to an internal temperature of 172°F as SPANDICES are supposed to be cooked, according to Julia Child in 'Mastering the Art of SPANDEX Cooking,' in which she also comments on how much a roasting SPANDEX smells like the flesh of another, abominable unclean forbidden haram beast, even though it's clearly a nice tender SPANDEX which is being cooked...." Since it takes about four hours to properly roast the animal, tribesmembers often run out of monologue, at which point they're dragged off mute and exhausted to the local imam. |
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3-13-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Skygazer: Now, now-- pedestrians have rights too, except in New York City. Lord Rayleigh of England is the physicist responsible for the fact that the sky today is blue. Anyone who has seen photographs from the late 19th-century or early 20th usually comments on the gray color of the sky, a sort of washed-out tattletale gray that everyone complained about but nobody could do much to change. Painters prior to Rayleigh used to add various colors to the sky in their outdoor paintings, but this was considered cheating, which is why most painters of the time stayed indoors and worked on still lifes and portraits. It was boring but the money was good. In 1904, fresh from his discovery of Argon, a Balkan country which had been lost to history since an avalanche in 1217 cut them off from the rest of Europe, Rayleigh set his sights on brightening up the sky. He thought green would be restful on the eyes, but the Royal Academy of painters pointed out to him that Paris green, which they would have to use in great quantities to render green skies, was expensive as heck and poisonous to boot. They suggested a nice cheap azure, so that's what Rayleigh used as a goal. By 1906 he had isolated the element which he unblushingly called rayleighium, even though the name in print looked like a disease germ. Quantities of finely-ground rayleighium were scattered throughout the atmosphere, using high-altitude balloons and powder shpritzers, and on August 4, 1907, the world awoke to blue skies.¹ Regular reapplications of rayleighium have kept the sky blue to this very day. ---------------------- ¹ The song "Blue Skies, Shinin' on Me, Nothing but Blue Skies Do I See" was written to commemorate the event. |
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3-15-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Woodrow: Pork. Chippendale, a devout Muslim, was torn between his faith and the genius of his art. He had tried making balsa wood furniture, but it was too insubstantial, plus any mischievous boy with a rubber band and a propeller could send a chair across a room or out a window with relative ease. He tried petrified wood, but it wore all his tools down to nubs before he could finish the first finial. Ditto ironwood. Other woods of the New World proved equally disappointing. He despaired at ever developing a signature wood to complement his signature style. Then one day after evening prayers he chucked (literally, not figuratively) an odd-shaped bit of wood into his favorite lathe, Mortimer. From the feel of it he thought it might be slippery elm, another New World wood he had not experimented with. Well, lo and behold! within a few minutes he had turned out a magnificent cabriole chair leg. The new wood produced a white, slightly grainy finish not unlike alder, but much classier. "It's the other white wood," Chippendale thought to himself. While he pondered how to best use his new discovery an apprentice began poking about in the shop, breaking his concentration. The master brusquely asked the young infidel what he was looking for, and the lad knuckled his forelock and said he was searching for the hog leg he had promised to bring his granny for dinner. Thunderstruck, Chippendale realized that his perfect new furniture material was the loathsome flesh of the unclean creature which splits the hoof but does not chew the cud! After giving the boy a shilling to replace the jambon as well as keep his mouth shut, he collapsed in an agony of indecision. The Muslim in him said to abandon all thoughts of using the new material, while the businessman in him said that he was about to make a killing beyond the dreams of avarice, as Dr Johnson put it. We know from history that the businessman won out, although Chippendale took a solemn oath to dedicate one-half of his earnings from furniture made with the detestable substance to zakat to purify and redeem his soul. Chippendale went on to have a long life and a brilliant career copying others' furniture styles, and his delightfully ornate pork furniture thrilled first England, then Europe, then the world. Yes, there were the occasional side pieces which were spirited out of the house by the larger class of dogs and buried in the back yard, and, yes, on warm, humid days the furniture was best left in a cool room or stored in the cellar, but overall it was a huge success. One day over drinks with his fellow cabinetmaker Tommy Sheraton, the latter made the pun that the wood that had made him a success had "made a hog o' me." Not to be outdone, Chippendale riposted that he understood completely, because his wood, which had allowed him to become a successful imitator of Sheraton's original styles, had "made epigome." The pun was so dreadful that Sheraton shot him on the spot and he was buried later the same day in an undisclosed location, as per Muslim burial custom. |
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3-18-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Windy: The first name occurs at around 17 mph, but it's mostly a mild sailboat owner's oath. The second name occurs at approximately 29 mph, by people in speedboats, especially those attempting to run at right angles to the gusts. It's a bit stronger than the first oath. The third name is invoked at 41 mph by boat owners attempting a tricky docking maneuver to escape the storm. It borders on obscenity. The fourth name, somewhat obscene occurs at 58 mph by those taking a three-hour cruise on the SS Minnow. The fifth, definitely obscene name occurs at 72 mph by anyone in a kayak. The sixth obscene name is proclaimed at 89 mph by owners of beachfront property. The seventh, very obscene name is hurled as an invective at 118 by pilots of aircraft. The eighth obscene name, generally an expletive deleted in print, is screamed at 243 mph by anyone who had ignored weather reports to go hot-air ballooning that day. The ninth obscene name is sent up in Spanish as a plea at 298 mph by window-washing crews on skyscrapers. The tenth, and final, ritually obscene curse, a veritable anathema maranatha, is shouted from pulpits at 392 mph as proof positive that finally an end-of-the-world prediction has been right. |
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3-21-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie:
What should we do? |
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Dear Worrywart: I'm a bit ahead of you on this one. I sent a letter to the White House Global Warming Research Center, figuring they would be in the best position to deal with long-range threats. Here's the response I got from the Response-O-Matic® letter machine which answers all White House and Congressional mail: [I'll snip all the insincere touchy-feely stuff about concern for our citizenry, responding to threats swiftly, assuring me that voting Republican is the best way to deal with the situation, blah, blah, blah.] Here's the guts of it:
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3-24-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Glockenspieler: You can't go wrong with the epic, tragic and vaguely entertaining story of Euphonium Ophicleide Bombardon IV (1732 - 1819). Coming as he did from a long line of brass wind instrument players and manufacturers, "Euphie" Bombardon shocked his parents at the age of 15 by stating flatly that he hated the sound of brass wind instruments, hated the people who made them, and that he wished to spend his life doing something more rewarding. So at the age of 16 he apprenticed himself to a maker of bird houses and cuckoo clocks, becoming a journeyman birdhouse/cuckoomann at the age of 28, and attaining master status in 1764 at the age of 32, at which time he was elected to the Guild of Vogelhäuschen/Cuckoomeisters of Leidendorf. Back home, his parents, devastated at the thought that the famous line would end with their deaths, decided on a desperate course of action. They withdrew Euphie's sister, Ranceputtel, from the convent where she was learning to become a virgin, changed her name to Euphonia, and sent her to the best wind-instrument-player-training school they could find, the renowned Academie Blatthaus in Vienna. Well, mirabile dictu, young Euphonia turned out to have the perfect lip for wind instruments, the very same lip which had seen her packed off to the convent when her mother despaired of marrying off a daughter who had such a strong resemblance to a camel. Euphonia graduated from the Blatthaus with honors, and began working with her father to design ever-louder and brassier instruments for the family business. Meanwhile, Euphonium, now a middle-aged builder of birdhouses and cuckoo clocks, had a bout of despair, realizing at long last that he was meant for more than making sure wooden birds cucked the right number of times at the proper hour and designing homes for tenants who always left the place in a mess and flew the coop when the rent came due. A broken man, he returned to his family, pleading for forgiveness and asking for the lowliest job in the factory. Well, of course they all laughed at him and pummeled him with stops and pistons and key caps, suggesting that he go find work in a WOODwind factory, since that was all he was good for. Finally his sister Euphonia, realizing that it was Euphonium's decision all those years ago to leave the family business that allowed her to rise to the pinnacle of success in the field, relented a bit, giving her brother the lowest place on the assembly line, where he broached and reamed and polished spit valves to the end of his days. |
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3-27-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Abductee: There are even stranger tales. A 3-year-old boy fell over his tricycle in Huntsville, Alabama, but landed in Utica, New York. He and his family now reside at Groom Lake, Nevada, where the boy is undergoing intensive testing. His instantaneous jump across 843 miles is not the only case on record, though. Angela Lambsprattle, age 10, of New Dubuque, Texas, was jumping rope with her friends Kimberley Loggsnift and Amanda Puttle, both age 10, on the evening of September 4, 2005. As Angela reached the number 137 in her jump-counting, she abruptly vanished. Two hours later her parents got a collect call from a confused transit policeman at the North Zhongshan Road station of the Xinzhuang Metro in Shanghai. Precisely at the time of her disappearance from New Dubuque, she popped into the middle of a Line 1 subway car, still jumping and counting with her eyes closed until she was startled by the screams of the early Monday morning commuters. The American Embassy in Shanghai was arranging for her transportation back to New Dubuque when several special agents from US Air Force Security intervened. Neither Angela, her friends, nor their families have been seen since, and New Dubuque, Texas, no longer officially exists, according to the Postal Service. Even stranger is the case of "Baby X Smith," who was born on a Delta airlines flight to Boise, Idaho on January 7th of this year. The baby girl was perfectly healthy, according to paramedics who met the plane when it touched down at Boise Airport, and she had become the darling of the flight crew and passengers during the remaining 47 minutes of the flight. The strange part was that her mother had gone into labor and missed the connecting flight from Omaha, Nebraska. It's the only case on record where a birth certificate was issued in two different cities a thousand miles apart at the same time. The baby was reunited with her mother the following day and named "Delta" in honor of her peculiar arrival before both mother and child vanished mysteriously. h |
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3-29-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Retro: It would depend on whether you mean the book, the movies or either of the two TV shows. It's unlikely that the grandfather in the original short story/novel would have said "Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!" since the story is set in Yorkshire and Scotland, neither of which uses English as its primary language. Any stereotypical grandfathers would probably have used expressions like "Chuffing Huck" or "Buckin' Nowt," rather than taking Jehoshaphat's name in vain. The movies are a different story. The grandfather in "Cujo: The Revenge of Lassie," may have been trying to say "Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!" but it came out as "AAAAAAAAAAARRGHHHH!" since his face was being torn off at the time. There was no grandfather in "How Lassie Got Her Groove Back" that I can recall. And the grandfather in "Lassie: An Inconvenient Pooch" is more concerned with global warming, although he does say "Jumpin' Thermostats!" a few times, which is close if you don't listen too carefully. As for the TV shows, the earlier one, where Tommy Retching plays the idiot kid who always needs rescuing, had George Cleveland playing the "Gramps" role. I don't recall him ever saying "Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!" although he did say "Consarned Cattle!" in one episode ("Lassie's Heart Transplant - 1956). After Cleveland's death in 1957 they attempted to keep him in the show for continuity's sake, but makeup artists had less to work with than they do these days and his face kept slipping off during close-ups. He was finally buried after the touching episode, "Lassie's Heimlich Maneuver." With Gramps gone, the studio decided to jettison the whole crew, especially after Tommy Retching refused to shave off his moustache. So everyone was killed off in the touching episode, "Lassie Burns Down the Barn," and a new family appeared miraculously in the following season, which had seven-year-old Jon Provoked as the idiot kid who always needed rescuing. There was no stereotypical grandfather in that series, so there was no need for anyone to say "Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!" Is it possible you may be confusing the whole "Lassie" shtick with the "Flaming Carrot" comic book? There was a Jumpin' Jehoshaphat infrahero in issue #16. It would be hard to confuse the two, but you may be able to buy stronger dope in your neighborhood than I can here.... |
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4-1-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Foolish: On this date in 1748 the ruins of Pompeii were found in a slum district of Naples after having been dropped from the tax rolls at some indefinite time in the past. When questioned by Channel 11's Eyewitness News Team,¹ Neapolitan City Manager Giovanni Cacciatore simply shrugged his shoulders and passed the blame to the Bureau of Tax Assessment & Collection, saying "You think it's easy keeping track of everything that happens in a city the size of Naples? Sure, we lose a neighborhood from time to time— who doesn't? But we always manage to find it again, don't we? Unlike America, which lost Cleveland in 1683 and they're still looking for it."² Residents of Pompeii admitted that the neighborhood had been going downhill for the past millennium or so, but always attributed it to benign neglect, not flat-out abandonment. Umberto Pasquale, 36, said he thought it was unusual that the potholes in the street weren't being filled in, "not even during election years," but with typical Pompeian fatalism he accepted potholes as inevitable. His slave Marcus said that abolishing slavery would go a long way toward improving matters, although he was unclear on exactly how. Mrs Domitia Abbondiza declined to be interviewed, but expressed the opinion that all politicians and reporters should do something anatomically impossible, and also with any horses they may have ridden in on. To make up for its inadvertent neglect, the City of Naples plans to build the obligatory neighborhood community center as soon as funding can be found for a Pompeii Bureau of Public Works. Residents claim that they could better use improved garbage collection. "We're really buried down here," said one citizen, gesturing at the absence of visible buildings. ¹ "Canale 11's Testimone Oculare Notizia Squadra," as it was known in Italy back in those days. The Italians were far ahead of the rest of the world in the development of hard-hitting, on-the-spot video reporting, but by 1803 they had pretty much gone back to newspapers. As an early 19th-century Neapolitan wit once quipped, "È difficile verso avvolgere pesce in un 90cm schermo di plasma video." ("It's hard to wrap fish in a 36-inch video display.") This is every bit as true today as it was in 1803. ² Manager Cacciatore's American geography is a bit shaky. It was actually Akron which went missing in 1683. Cleveland pretty much stayed put. Akron was allegedly spotted twice in the early 19th century, but city planners consider it extinct today.
Although this ancient wall painting found in the ruins of Pompeii seems to indicate a soothsayer predicted that Mount Vesuvius would explode, destroying the city, the simple truth is that inept bureaucracy was to blame for its downfall. |
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4-3-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Quintilingual: Mel's latest project is also sort of an apocalypse, based on the imminent collapse of the Earth's magnetic field, which is sooner or later to plunge us into a cauldron of apocalyptic doom. The proposed title is "  ,"
but around the production company it's known as" "or
"The Passion of the Gauss." It begins with the discovery in 1845 of the impending crisis by good-looking, stalwart young German physicist Karl Friedrich Gauss, and recounts the battles he fought to alert the world before the collapsing magnetic field would drive homing pigeons insane and render cell phones useless (Gauss was way far ahead of his time). He must overcome the skepticism of the scientific community and defy the Church, which still insists that compasses operate by faith and good works. Love interest is provided by the mother of Marie Curie, a closet physicist in the strait-laced world of early 19th-century Poland. She insists that magnetism is a form of electricity, and invents the diesel-electric-maglev locomotive to prove her point, using information garnered from Rocco Diesel, her lover and future father of Rudolph. But Gauss pooh-poohs (gnarf-gnarfs in German) the idea, saying that only a woman could come up with so lame-brained a scheme, unaware that at that very moment Griselda Einstein, mother-to-be of Albert, has conclusively proved this very concept, calling it the Theory of Relatives to acknowledge the participation of Harry, Isaac, "Toodles," and Esmeralda Finqueborne Einstein. In keeping with Mel Gibson's other incomprehensible historical movies, the dialogue will consist entirely of mathematical equations. Audience members are advised to bring slide rules if they wish to follow the Gauss-Jordan matrix solutions presented on the screen. Popcorn is free, courtesy of a grant from the Jolly Time Corporation for Public Mathematics. |
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4-13-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Drifter: As a charter member of the Liberate Time Zones! Association, I feel obliged to point out that "official" time zones are the root cause of so much violence and unpleasantness today. If everyone were free to establish his, hers or its own time zones as an essential part of one's personal space, think how much nicer it would all be. Since twelve of the last fourteen wars have been fought over official time zones, their elimination would be the greatest contribution to lasting peace the world has ever seen. Think of all the defense budgets which could be converted to more practical applications, like gardening or badminton. In any case, there is little merit in getting worked up over the officious time zones of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, as rising sea levels will soon make them irrelevant. American S'mores® is a registered trademark of the Hershey Company, and has no specific time zone. |
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4-17-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Piscine: The Whale Anchovy (Engraulis godzillacholus), which has been fished to the brink of extinction to garnish those giant pizzas that people are always making hoping to get into the Guinness Book of Records. The average size for this species is 18-32 ft, with a weight of 10-16 tons. The largest specimen measured was slightly over 39.4 ft in length. It is said to grow larger, but no one has actually measured a whale anchovy over 40 ft and lived to tell about it. Whale anchovies feed on plankton as a rule, but much prefer sheep, which leads them to extremely devious hunting tactics, like pretending to be a meadow, or holding up pictures of the Good Shepherd which they pilfer from churches. In a famous incident, a whale anchovy off the coast of Portugal managed to get hold of a wether bell on the black market, which it employed so cleverly that it was able to lure 87 sheep into its cavernous maw before it was driven off by sheepdogs with flamethrowers. Whale anchovies have also been known to dress up as archbishops and hang around on the Blessing of the Sheep day, but this is uncommon, as even the dullest peasant's suspicions are bound to be raised by a 30-foot archbishop smelling of plankton. Very little is known about the home life of this giant fish. It forms family groups consisting of a mother, a father, a nagging mother-in-law, a doting grandparent and 600 to 800 children, which accounts for the size of its playgrounds and the length of its PTA meetings. In many families both parents work, or one of them-- usually the male-- will take two jobs to support its enormous brood, which is why they're so often found working the graveyard shift at Arthur Treacher's and Long John Silver's. They prefer to vacation off the coast of the Baja Peninsula in Mexico between September and December because hotel prices are cheap in the off-season. Their immense families often take up every available inch of space on the beaches, leading to strained relations with tourists of other nationalities and the native residents, who have been known to mutter imprecations in the local dialect over their glasses of mescal and pulque. Apart from humans attempting to enter the record books, the whale anchovy has no natural enemies, at least since the mosasaurs died off at the end of the Cretaceous. There are, however, several species which won't give a Whale Anchovy the time of day, much less sponsor them for country clubs. If the giant fish does indeed die out, the Whale Sardine will become the largest fish in the world. The Whale Sardine, always loving the limelight, is said to be getting impatient, and several of them have been found at airport check-ins with sheepskins wrapped around bundles of dynamite. |
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4-20-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Addled: I believe you may be referring to Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey, (December 10, 1851 - December 26, 1931). Melville Dewey was one of three identical triplets. When they were three months old a careless serving wench upset an oil lamp causing a major conflagration in their posh New York home. As ill luck would have it, the triplets were being bathed at the time. Their panicky governess, eager to get out of the house as soon as possible, forgot to slip the crucial birth-order-identification bracelets onto each twin's wrist before spiriting them away to safety. Once the fire was extinguished and order was restored, the parents of the triplets were faced with another crisis: they had three naked baby boys utterly indistinguishable from one another. No one could figure out who was Huey, who was Louis, and who was Melvil! At the time this was resolved by arbitrarily giving each child a number, which was tattooed on the sole of his foot to prevent future mix-ups. Now let us move ahead 20 years. The three children, now stalwart young men, were abruptly thrown into another crisis with the death of their parents in a runaway locomotive accident. When the will was opened, they discovered to their horror that their father, Donald Dewey, had invoked the clause of primogeniture regarding their inheritance: the eldest was to receive everything, and the other two, to quote the terms of the will directly, "...whereas were not to receive but squat, withal." Now, you would have thought that their parents would have corrected this after the bath mix-up of 1852, but the old man had kept putting it off with one thing and another, and now it was too late! Logically, the Court, faced with this unique situation, should have divided the estate equally amongst the three stalwart young men. Melvil was all for this, but the other two resisted it fiercely, as Hubert had mountains of gambling debts to pay off, and Louis was something of a ladies' man and was being blackmailed by 12 different butlers and gamekeepers. Melvil had lived a modest life and had set a bit aside with which he hoped to reorganize the family library someday. Well, the court battle over the estate was epic, as lawyers tried every means to identify the firstborn. The judge immediately suspended any reference to the numbers tattooed on the boys' feet, as they had been applied wholly at random and were thus "noc in hestero pulvus,"¹ as he put it. At last, as in Dickens's "Bleak House," the legal challenges ended only when there was not a dime left to apportion among the three stalwart lads. The lawyers took the money, Hubert took his own life in despair, and Louis's life was taken from him by an outraged husband. Melvil was left alone with the library, which was his by a separate codicil of the original will. At this point Melvil became reclusive, rarely leaving the shelter of the bookshelves. He also became preoccupied with the order in which the books were shelved, assigning elaborate numbers to each volume which sometimes stretched to 5 decimal points. he agonized over these numbers, often telling the few servants who stuck with him that order and sequence were all that mattered for success in life. It was obvious that the dreadful legal experience had unhinged his mind, and he was soon clapped into the Duckhaven Asylum for the Mentally Whoopee, where he rearranged the asylum library to the end of his days. The servants sold the important books in the library and had the rest pulped. Fortunately, Melvil's elaborate system of classification had been preserved, although no use was made of it until 10 years after his death, when the US government suddenly needed a way of classifying wartime parts and supplies in a manner which assured maximum paperwork with a minimal ability to locate anything. Melvil Dewey's Decimal System was perfect for the task, and has been used ever since. ------------------------------------- ¹ "none valid without crushed rain," one of the more obscure legal terms inherited by English Law from the Etruscans. |
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4-22-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear On the Fence: Sending people who want to work back to Mexico is counterproductive. We should send them directly on to Quebec. Quebec desperately need workers, as the province is filled with natives who feel they should be paid for not working, as they are in France. It would restore the balance, not to mention eliminating the language problem, as nobody has been able to understand a Quebecker for decades and it doesn't seem to matter. Quebec also has carloads of money, as the Canadian government has recently decided to simply pay them to be quiet, rather than go through the expense and complexity of mass deportations back to the old country, where Quebeckers feel they belong. "They're Qu'ackers," as Prime Minister Harper put it, shrugging his shoulders in pseudo-Gallic indifference. |
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4-25-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Scholar: Although he started out as a professional arm-wrestler, George "Armstrong" Custard (1839 - 1876) realized that this was not promising as a long-term career, as there is always a stronger arm out there somewhere. Drifting about in search of a permanent occupation, he was advised by his father, Ylem, inventor of the Custard apple, to explore the needs of the post-Civil War business boom. The younger Custard observed that the frantic pace of business caused office workers to miss meals, impairing their productivity. Soon he had outfitted a wagon with a variety of tasty, inexpensive meals and snacks, and had a roaring business going which soon forced him to buy more wagons and hire additional help, then to abandon the sales end of the operation to concentrate on business strategy. He introduced the Koffee Kart to office buildings, and the Elevator Express, which traveled between floors all day, allowing busy workers to snatch a snack as they ascended or descended. He did not forget the executive suite, either: his Management Meals became so popular that men would often bring home unconsumed portions to show their wives that they really HAD had it for lunch. The less astute would even suggest that their wives might take some pointers from Mr Custard's catering service, a suggestion which often ended with frying pans and rolling pins being used as lethal weapons. For the summertime vacation crowd George had his aptly named Custard Stands, which sold icy frozen custard treats up and down the Jersey Shore and New York beaches. Before long he was rolling in money, and, like many nouveaux-riches, became preoccupied with extravagance, frippery, and folderol. Not satisfied with a mere 47-room estate, he ordered a summer home in Banff to be constructed entirely of acorns, a spring house in Sarasota constructed of alligator hides, and an autumn house in Maine, which was made of live lobsters. Inevitably, the inevitable happened: his auditor came to him one day with the news that he was insolvent, overdrawn, broke, bankrupt, in hock to his eyeballs, flat busted and on his uppers. Custard could not accept this state of affairs and became quite delusional. After being turned out of his Upper Broadway mansion he had a new mansion built on Skid Row entirely of whiskey bottles, which he hoped to finance by starting a catering service for derelicts and winos. Alas, his luck had run out, and in 1876 he ended his life by drinking a quart of spar varnish, hoping to be remembered, if not for his prodigal life, at least for his beautiful finish. In 1956 the New Jersey Historical Society restored one of his vending booths on the shore at Atlantic City to its pristine 1871 glory. As it is the only one left in existence it is, of course, known as Custard's Last Stand.... |
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4-29-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Relaxed: Surprisingly, the recliner was invented in the Middle East, by Abu Sa'id ibn Aboa al-Chair, (967-1049). In his autobiography, "The Recline of the Rest," co-authored by Oswald Spengler, al-Chair describes his frustration with the seating arrangements in 10th-century Persia.
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5-6-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Bored: William Wing "Old Blizzards" Loring (1818 - 1886) was a Major General in the Confederate Army who was the first to use weather as a battlefield tactic. Loring had been raised by the Paiute Indians after his father lost him in a poker game at a casino along the Oregon Trail. He was assigned to the rainmaker Soaking Breeches, who taught him all he knew about rain, drizzle, mist, heavy dew, gullywashers and cloudbursts. By 1850 Loring felt he had exhausted the talents of his old mentor, and started a correspondence course with Ojibwa University, where he took a Master's in Climate Modification. His graduate thesis, "Weather or Not?" is considered a classic in developing the rules for the application of magical determinants in weather systems. He applied for, and was accepted to, the Doctoral program at Navajo Agricultural & Mechanical, but he was stumped for a thesis topic. His advisor suggested he take a sabbatical in the Old World to pick up some suggestions from the Celt and Druid schools, who used a more holistic approach to weather management. While at the Sorbonne he heard a café chanteuse singing one of François Villon's poems set to music, and was intrigued by the refrain, "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?" ("But where are the snows of yesteryear?"). After a few more absinthes it struck him that the use of *past* weather systems had barely been touched in magicometeorology. He returned to Navajo A&M and set to work. After a few years of intensive study he was able to recreate stunning weather systems from as far back as the Ice Age, and in 1861 was awarded his Doctorate on the basis of his reconstruction of the "Lost Blizzard of Wupatiki," which had perplexed rainmakers and weather scholars for generations. But by now the Civil War had broken out, and Loring was commissioned as a brevet Major in the Confederate forces, mainly because of his understanding of Indian languages, a great help in espionage behind the enemy's front lines. He concealed his other talents until the pivotal Battle of Goatsucker Ridge on August 5, 1862. With his forces exhausted, outnumbered and cut off from their supply train, it seemed that surrender was the only sensible recourse, and it was then that Loring's star rose. Performing the powerful Remembrance of Springs Past dance he had learned at the Sorbonne, he was able to recreate the springtime blizzard of 1737, an awesome storm which had dumped 12 feet of snow on the same region and was still discussed in hushed tones by both Indian and pioneer. Well, to say it was a victory would be like calling the sinking of the Titanic many years later a "maritime incident." The Union troops, buried under a dozen feet of snow and 40-foot drifts, were helpless, while Loring's troops, who had been instructed to dig igloos and communication tunnels before the first flake of snow had fallen, were in total command, taking Goatsucker Ridge without a single shot having been fired. Once the enemy troops were secured, he called up a hot, dry khamsin wind and the mighty snowstorm returned to its ancestral dumping grounds of yesteryear, leaving the battlefield warm and dry. It was this action which gave him his celebrated nickname, "Old Blizzards," and caused his story to be perpetuated around campfires wherever soldiers gather, to this very day. |
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5-9-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Breezy: "Planet of the Winds," which circles the star Epsilon Eridani in the constellation Eridanus, where 350 mph winds are described as a calm day by meteorologists on TV. Planet of the Winds is unique in that it has no material rocky or metallic core, as most planets do. It's composed entirely of air in motion, plus some water vapor and trace gasses. The life forms which have evolved there are entirely aerial, as they would need to be. Most are giant gasbags filled with metabolized hydrogen, and are susceptible to the lightning storms which girdle the planet's equator. When a giant gasbag inadvertently strays into this region it is sometimes struck by lightning and exploded, causing the dramatic splashes of light which have been noted by Earth's astronomers. There is also a form of intelligent life, the Eridani Eiderduck, which uses the bones of exploded gasbags to build housing, transportation and electrical generating stations. It is not a populous species, chiefly because the bird's nuptial flight during the mating season frequent brings them into contact at combined speeds of up to 3,000 mph. It is also difficult for the female to maintain eggs in a nest, or for the male to nourish her with gasbag streamers and fragments of eiderducks which were smashed to flinders during a mistimed nuptial flight. The inhabitants have an elementary religion based on their fervent desire to be captured by space aliens and taken to a planet with decent weather and something you can walk around on. |
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5-12-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Astro: It stands for "L (50) over X (10)" and the answer is V. After the debacle of losing the Mars Orbiter due to a mixup between metric and American standards of measurement, and since Americans are constitutionally unable to comprehend the metric system, NASA thought that Roman mathematics would be a good alternative. All went well until someone attempted to find the cube root of MXCLVII.ix in a hurry. That's why the Pluto Express satellite was quickly renamed the Solar Explorer, the mission of which was allegedly to discover how long it took for a $125 million satellite to be converted to a thin metallic vapor. (3 weeks, 4 days, 7 hours, 34 minutes, 10 seconds) Scientists are eagerly awaiting the return of the vapor via the solar wind, as it is expected to tell them a great deal about bureaucratic bungling and national stubbornness. |
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5-13-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie:
--John in Johnstown |
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Dear John:
Most of what we know comes from "Captain" John Smith¹, and "Captain" Smith
was an inveterate self-aggrandizer who lied his breeches off whenever he
needed to make himself look good to investors back home. He arrived in
Virginia in chains in the brig, not the best way to gain confidence. |
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5-20-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Needy: This took some digging, as few libraries have newspaper collections that go back that far. However, through sheer perseverance I discovered a microfilmed copy of The Galilee Enquirer of Mars XXIII, DCCLV, of the Roman Era in which there's a report of what they call a "drive-by miracle" ("mirabilis guidioltre") on the dies Mercurii of that week. This would be about the first week in March of the year 0. Apparently a very drunken soldier ("miles ubriaconissimus") was wandering by a house singing the dirty version of "There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" ("Illic ero a fervens vicis in vetus urbs is nox noctis") when he noticed his wine jug was empty. As he stood there weaving back and forth, wondering what to do next, a young mother of the Hebraic persuasion opened the upstairs shutters and held out a male infant for bedtime emptying. A thin stream of liquid was seen arcing through the air under the street lights, and a passing passerby remarked to his companion that, as it fell, it changed from a pale yellow to a rich dark red, "very like a well-aged Falernian," ("valde amo a vino sennesex Falernianas") as he put it, referring to the highly-respected Neapolitan vintage of the era. Well, the soldier just stood there watching as his jug refilled itself, then cautiously took a sip and loudly shouted, "Why have I kept the best wine till the last?", a phrase which would be repeated in Aramaic at a wedding in Cana 30 years down the road, albeit in second-person plural ("hominem secundus pluralis"). Little did he realize it, but at that moment he was cured of cirrhosis of the liver, nor did his hemorrhoids ever bother him again, mirabile dictu! ("mirabile dictu!"). This is as close as I can get to the first miracle without a refill on my bourbon.... |
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5-25-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Vidiot: Now, you have to understand that when television was first invented it was thought of as "the greatest educational tool ever invented," so the shows were quite a bit different from anything you see today. Every broadcast was designed to edify, uplift and inform the viewer. So you had shows like Kraft Television Theater, Serving Through Science, Life Is Worth Living, Odyssey, Gas Company Playhouse, The Voice of Firestone, and lots of other boring crap. Half an hour of it would put even insomniacs to sleep. Eventually network executives woke up to the fact that what audiences really wanted were mindless sitcoms aimed at slow 12-year-olds and punctuated with cigarette commercials. But for a brief time there, you could see some really odd programming. In 1946 Redbone, Arkansas, had only one broadcast station, Channel 3½. You had to be real careful with the tuning knob, because if you landed on Channel 3 or Channel 4 all you got were test patterns punctuated with cigarette commercials. Channel 3½ had only one edifying, uplifting and informing program, thinly disguised as entertainment. It was "Frontier Solipsist," a half-hour show about a cowboy in the Old West who goes through life thinking that only he exists, and that the rest of the world is a figment of his imagination. This worked out rather well, as early shows had no money for location shooting, backdrops or even horses and six-guns. The star of the show (and only actor) was called Nil Cipher, who rode and roped and did all those other cowboy things, events which existed only in his imagination. Now, you'd think that the sight of a man dressed up in a cowboy outfit discussing the nature of reality with other cowboys who happened to be nonexistent, all of this presented in black-and-white on a 10-inch flickering screen would bore anyone to tears and send them right back to Channels 3 or 4 to watch the test patterns. But TV was so new back then that it captivated the attention, regardless of what was being shown. Even a program based on phenomenological ontology in a cowboy outfit. I remember one episode, "Stampede at Rustler's Creek," which had been written by Edmund Husserl and directed by Martin Heidegger, based on a concept for a short story by Jean-Paul Sartre. In it the hero, Nil Cipher, questions his need to speak at all, as, according to his philosophy, there is no one to listen and that way he could save his voice for the cigarette commercials. This leads to a confrontation in the Logic Branch Saloon when "Red" Noema, an outlaw Berkeleianist, points out that by speaking, and more importantly, by listening to his own voice, he creates the necessary illusion of external reality so important to objective solipsism. They are about to settle this quandary in the classic Western manner with a shoot-out in front of the saloon, when it dawns on Nil that, regardless of whether he wins or loses the duel, he will be committing virtual suicide, unless the solipsistic many-worlds paradigm is valid, in which he will and he won't. We leave him pondering there in a shower of electrons governed by wave-particle duality until the set is turned off. Personally, I preferred the test patterns and dancing cigarette packs.... |
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5-28-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Possessed: N'gongn'gong on the shores of Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania, although it was known as N'gk'n'k'g'gong'n'k ("Rockpounders Ridge") when it was founded on July 16, -1,624,381 by a tribe of Homo habilis ("Don't ask, don't tell") stone axe industrialists. They found there a source of truly excellent flint for manufacturing their products, and before long their salespeople — readily identifiable by their checkered suits and zebra-skin sample cases — were sojourning up and down the East African coast peddling their wares and taking orders for wholesale consignment lots. These itinerant axe salesmen were the source of the original traveling salesmen's jokes, especially the ones that involve farmer's daughters, although in the years before agriculture they were known as hunter-gatherer's daughters jokes. N'gk'n'k'g'gong'n'k grew by leaps and bounds. By -1,401,339 all available cave space had been sold or rented, with or without hot and cold running cockroaches. This housing shortage led to the condominium craze of -1,401,337, in which people were convinced to purchase the caves they already owned, while sharing them with different families who also thought they were the owners. There soon followed the Occupancy Wars of -1,401,336-34, which was noted for its dreadful carnage, as the Second Amendment of the Condo Dwellers Constitution permitted unlimited storage of state-of-the-art flint axes on the premises. The domestication of fire in -873,726 changed N'gk'n'k'g'gong'n'k forever, as it allowed central heating in the cave complexes around the axe works, and gave employment to the young, who had to rustle up firewood three times a day or face the newly-invented razor strop. (Hairlessness was in vogue, and screams from the full-body waxing parlors disturbed wildlife for miles around. Currycomb futures plunged, setting off the Great Olduvai Depression of -873,722 to -872,301.) After this economic disruption things settled down for several hundred thousand years until the Age of Metal in -82,309, which threatened to destroy forever the sedate life but productive of the N'gk'n'k'g'gong'n'kians. Protectionists hurried through laws which made possession of a metal tool punishable by having one's cattle mutilated. Children were encouraged to follow metal-users through the city chanting "Metal bashers/ Metal bashers/ Cooks they tools/ In charcoal ashers!" and similar insults. But there was no denying progress, and by -73,422 N'gk'n'k'g'gong'n'k was a shadow of its former self. Even the rise of tourism in -24,888 did little to revive its fortunes, and expressions like "Strictly from N'gk'n'k'g'gong'n'k," became popular to indicate a wretched place which everyone had heard of, but no one would admit to being from. Modern-day N'gongn'gong is still a sleepy little village on the shores of the Olduvai. In 1957 the inhabitants raised enough money to have a sign made and placed at the entrance to the village, describing it as the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth, but aside from attracting archaeologist's conventions little has changed. You can buy plastic stone axes at the numerous souvenir stands scattered here and there, but they're made in China and don't have the heft of the real thing. |
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5-31-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Kong: Few people remember that the Empire State Building was constructed around the 102-story Elisha Graves Otis memorial elevator. This splendid structure was designed by the Soviet architect/sculptor Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin in the manner of his "Monument to the Third International," a 1,300-foot rotating memorial planned for Moscow. Tatlin's magnificent freestanding elevator had only one tiny flaw. The architect had wished to play on Otis's first name, but he had confused the Biblical prophets, thinking it was *Elisha* who was swept into Heaven, not Elijah (the names are almost identical in Russian Cyrillic). So in keeping with what he thought was the Biblical story of Elisha being swept heavenward, nevermore to return, Tatlin did not provide Down elevators, arguing that it would work against the context of the Biblical story. Well, inevitably there was the infamous stranding of art critics and tourists at the 102nd floor. Worse yet, there *was* no 102nd floor-- the elevator doors opened on a sheer drop to 5th Avenue below. This led to the proliferation of the notorious "I (skull) NY" T-shirts which had a negative effect on tourism. So in 1927 the city of New York decided to surround the Otis Memorial with a building to hide the desperate and dying on the top level. It was completed in 1931. In keeping with the provisions of the Otis Foundation and the Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin Trust, the building has no Down elevators to this very day. |
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6-3-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Energizer:
All batteries evolved from a common ancestor, most
probably the proto-electric eel of the Late Buzzonic. The first
fossil evidence is the electric carp and the electric ray of Egypt,
which were harnessed to run the elevators in the pyramids. The
so-called "battery of Baghdad"¹ is not considered to be in the
direct evolutionary line of the true batteries, as it may have been
little more than a glorified curling iron, according to discussions
in the journal Paleocharge, although another group suggests
it may have been a medical device to deal with cases of intractable
constipation.²
The modern battery, Voltapackus drycellus,
arose after the destruction of the Wet Cells during the droughts of
the Upper Zappic. The first Voltapackus was the V.
drycellus tripledeecell, a huge, lumbering creature
characterized by two protuberant dome-shaped contact points in its
upper body (cf. Frederick's of Hollywood or Victoria's Secret). The
slimmer, faster-moving V. drycellus deecell evolved to take
advantage of more compact nesting locations like flashlights. No
fossil evidence has been found of the V. drycellus doubledeecell,
although excavations continue in promising locations.
The V. drycellus ceecell was an evolutionary
dead end, neither big enough to have the endurance of its larger
relatives, nor small enough to power the compact devices of the Age
of Miniaturization. They flourished briefly between the end of the
tube era and the beginning of the transistor era, mostly to power
radios brought to beaches by teenagers.³ The V. drycellus
aycells began with the tiny AAA species of the Disposable Era
and mutated into the lithium cell and nearly-invisible hearing aid
battery.
The AA battery, despite its strong superficial (ie,
long and tubular) resemblance to the AAA, has been conclusively
shown to be a member of the Defensus ackackus genus, also
confusingly known as the shore battery due the location of
so many fossilized remains intermingled with the extinct ceecell
variant mentioned above. The AA battery apparently had an entirely
different function, as noted in G Pompom's definitive Flak
papers, qv.
-------------------------------------------------
² The 'Baghdad battery' evidence: defecate or discommode?
vol LIXVII, no 381, pp 47-89ff
³ Seashells, C cells by the Seashore: transitional forms of
electrical entertainment found in the Coney Island strata of the
pre-rock range M Ampere and G Ohm, Paleocharge vol
LIXV. no 274, pp 431-2ff
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6-7-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Isolate: On Aloof Island, a territory of Denmark in the Spitsbergen Sea. The natives who maintain the station have been described as indifferent, uncaring, distant and reserved, believing themselves to be better than the rest of the Earth's inhabitants. Upon visiting the weather station during a courtesy call, Admiral John Sfumato of the USS Parsnip described the inhabitants as "insufferable." Oh, they do a good enough job of maintaining the weather station, but the routine tasks are done with such an air of painfully obvious condescension that you know that the islanders would be perfectly happy if the weather station and the rest of the known world vanished tomorrow. |
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6-10-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Vagabond: It depends on which coasts you mean. In Italy, for example, even-numbered roads run from the Ligurian coast to the Adriatic coast; odd-numbered roads run from the Tyrrhenian coast to the Ionian coast; rational numbers apply when driving from the Salerno Gulf coast to the Taranto Gulf coast; irrational numbers prevail when trying to drive from the Roman coast to the Venetian coast, particularly in the summer when the traffic is horrendous and road rage inevitable. Imaginary numbers define the coastal roads between Verona and Campobasso, which are landlocked and have no coasts; Fibonacci numbers are used along the Fibonacci Coastal Highway, named in honor of the great Pisan mathematician Lester Fibonacci. Special speedometers must be used on the Fibonacci highway, as mileage markers indicate numbers in which each numeral is the sum of the two preceding ones. Traffic cops love the Fibonacci Coastal Highway, as drivers can go from a modest and legal 89 kph to 144 kph without even thinking about it, as there are no intermediate numbers. |
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6-13-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Flora: Mistletoe, not being a flowering plant, cannot be the "state flower" of any state, with the possible exception of the state of arousal when hung over a doorway as an osculatory during Winter Solstice rituals. The plant has many medical uses, as one can tell from its common or familiar names: Devil's Fuge, Satan's Purgative, Troll's Spittle, Vomitorix, Ultraflatulene, Leper's Blight, Lettuce of Spasms, Cow-burster, and Blind Man's Regret. In the Victorian "Language of Flowers," if you send someone a sprig of mistletoe you are expressing the wish that the recipient's dog be run over by a truck. In combination, mistletoe and purslane express borderline personality disorder, mistletoe and duck's clap the desire to assault someone with an umbrella, and mistletoe, borage and pond scum the fervent hope that the recipient will soon ingest badly-prepared sushi, heavy on the fugu. The European mistletoe is a completely different plant species, sometimes known as a suidaphage from its habit of stalking and devouring wild boar. In the wild the plant is usually found nailed to oak trees, which is why in England it's known as "Parson's Vendetta." Its only practical use is for poisoning cats. |
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6-17-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Videophile: Oh, it was lots of fun. I'll never forget the episode that got Mr Wizard hauled up before the McCarthy commission: [circa 1952] TIMMY: "Gee whiz, Mr Wizard, me and the gang wanted to ask you how hard it is to build a real atom bomb like we seen on TV! It must be real, real hard!" MR WIZARD: "Oh, it's not so hard, Timmy, if you break it down into several small steps. The tough part is getting the materials. Luckily I have some friends, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who sent over several pounds of this highly-refined uranium-235 they got from their Uncle Joe who lives in Moscow. I think that's in Idaho." TIMMY: "Golly gee willikers, Mr Wizard, you mean these crummy gray lumps of stuff is at the heart of an atom bomb! Billy said it was stuff that looked like flaming lava with big purple rays shooting out of it!" MR WIZARD: " No, Timmy, Billy is obviously thinking of the Cherry Jell-O Jubilee his Mom made for the Fourth of July picnic, with the purple sparklers stuck in it." TIMMY: "Hey, that's right, Mr Wizard! It's hard to remember all this hard stuff sometimes!" MR WIZARD: "Well, that's what scientists do, Timmy, they remember the hard stuff. Now, what do you think you have to do to make these innocent pile of gray metal explode with the violence of several thousand tons of TNT?" TIMMY: "Gosh, Mr Wizard, I bet you have to dump it out of an airplane like we did to the Japs!" MR WIZARD: "No, an airplane isn't necessary to start a chain reaction, Timmy. Remember the film I showed you last week, with the room filled with mousetraps loaded with ping-pong balls, and all it took was throwing a single ping-pong ball, representing a neutron, into the room to set off the chain reaction?" TIMMY: "Yeah, that was swell! So all we need to make an atom bomb is some mousetraps and ping-pong balls?" MR WIZARD: "Uh... no. What we need are some neutrons. And where do you suppose we can find them? TIMMY: "I dunno. Send in some boxtops, maybe?" MR WIZARD: "Actually, Timmy, we have all the neutrons we need right here, locked up in those chunks of uranium-235." TIMMY: "Wow! How do we get them out, Mr Wizard? With a can opener?" MR WIZARD: "Ha-ha, Timmy, that's a good one! No, all we have to do is bring the lump of U-235 at that end of the room close to the lump at this end of the room and the reaction will start automatically. Now you wait right here while I go get my geiger counter and we can watch it happen. In the meantime, don't try to move those bars of metal together, or the radiation will have you singing soprano for the rest of your unnaturally brief life." [exits] TIMMY: "Great googamooga, kids out there in TV Land! What do you suppose would happen if I disobeyed Mr Wizard and dropped this one bar of metal on top of the other bar of metal? Let's find out! Oof, it sure is heavy! Good thing I ate my Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, this morning. Now let's drop it on the other bar. I wonder what Mr Wizard meant about singing sopr |
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6-22-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Ageing: About as much as children consider themselves pediatrics. If I had to pick an "ic" to be, it would be "relic." And this whole business of making "ics" out of categories of people bothers me. First geriatrics, then "anorexics" for people who can conceal themselves behind a broom handle, then "bariatrics" for people who couldn't conceal themselves behind a broom factory. This could, of course, get out of hand:
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6-24-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Anacrostic: "Choke" and "axolotl." Carroll was passing an exotic pet store one day when he heard a sort of whiftling grump. Amused by the sound, he entered the store to discover a Mexican salamander in obvious respiratory distress. Applying a move he had learned from his fellow clergyman Dr Eustace Heimlich, he was able to rescue the beast. The grateful store owner assigned all rights to the sound in perpetuity to Carroll and his heirs and assigns, if any. Carroll used the word to replace "snarskitch," which he had used extensively in an earlier book, "Alice's Adventures in Oz." "Snarskitsch" was a portmanteau word as well, being composed of "snarl" and "kitsch," meaning a sort of sentimentally vulgar throaty growl. Although Carroll never registered them as neologisms, his books are filled with hundreds of other portmanteau words, many of which were briefly in fashion. When Queen Victoria opened parliament in 1883, she used a Carroll word, "fusscrunch" to describe the often scurrilous debate that preceded the deadline for vote on an issue. Lord Chesterfield used "hackspittle" to describe his competitor, Lord Luckystrike's brand of cigarette. During the Boer War Carroll's tripartite portmanteau "blattwhamglop" was adopted by troops in the field to describe the sound of an artillery shell hitting a horse dead center. Early aviators used "screeshplat" to describe a power dive into the runway. Had he bothered to patent his creations, his contemporary heirs and assigns, if any, would have become jillionaires off a single word alone: spork, which Carroll improvised to counter his friend Edward Lear's "runcible spoon." The latter, although not technically a portmanteau word, was quite handy when dealing with a stiff custard trifle. |
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6-30-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Dagwood: The mysterious "Kilroy," whose depiction of a bald-headed, long-nosed, three-fingered caricature peeking over a fence accompanied by the motto "Kilroy was here," became the signature of American colonials who wished to separate from England. "Kilroy" is obviously a thinly-veiled reference to the hoped-for assassination of King George III (English "kill" + French "roi"). Whenever this combination was chalked on a wall, carved into a tree, or published in a newspaper, it meant "Here also are found those who wish to attain liberty via regicide.*" No one knows who the character is supposed to represent, but historians have long hypothesized that it's Mrs Paul Revere, wife of the Boston silversmith/town crier and later founder of the seafood company which bears her name and is still in business today.
*There have been some hypotheses suggesting
that this reaches much farther
back into history
than the American revolution. |
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7-4-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Transgressor: A somewhat outdated copy of "Lonely Planet: Inferno" which Dante had found in the bus station. Although the currency exchange chart was no longer valid, and the Slough of Despond had been paved over, it was still pretty reliable. Here are some extracts from the guidebook: CLIMATE "Hell's notorious climate sees little relief from the heat, but it's a somewhat dry heat from May to October. The dusty and really dry months yield days above 204°F as extra-hot and sandy harmattan winds blow incessantly between December and February. The hottest time of the year is between March and June when the mercury can rise well above 340°F in the capital, Dis." DOCUMENTATION "Tourist visas are mandatory if you have not abandoned all hope of leaving. Lose your visa, and you might spend the better portion of eternity trying to get an exit permit. There are few Infernal embassies around the world so getting a visa requires careful planning, but they can be obtained from North Korea, which prides itself on being 'a little bit of Hell on Earth.' Remember to bring a gold solidus to pay Charon (pronounced 'Karen' in the local dialect), driver of the tour boat. You can't cross the Styx otherwise. Used solidi in numismatically Fair condition can be obtained at any rare coin shop for between $75 and $250, depending on the provenance. Do NOT buy solidi from street peddlers or so-called 'currency agents.' You're likely to wind up with a brass counterfeit and be totally embarrassed when Charon rejects you with an unholier-than-thou sneer just as you're about to board the boat." PEOPLE "You will be stared at constantly, as there are few tourists in Hell, and your pale complexion will set you apart from the natives, who range in color from second-degree blistered pink to charcoal briquette black. By Divine Law there is little interaction between tourists and residents, since some denizens are shysters who would try to get you to change places with them or offer to carry your passport. You will note the variety of religions represented: Hell is proud of its diversity, and is an equal-opportunity place of damnation." MUST-SEES "Satan, frozen to the waist in the center of the ninth circle is understandably the principal attraction, but there are many other unique neighborhoods and sites for the persistent tourist. (Btw, bribery is unknown in Hell, one of the things that make it special). Our favorite is the Malebolge, or eighth circle, home of some of the most creative torments you'll ever see. And don't pass up the Second Circle just because it's near the entrance to the park; it's the home of the lustful, blown about in a perpetual hurricane, and a livelier sex show you'll rarely see outside Patpong. Not for the kiddies. MUST-MUST-SEES "The snowball. You won't believe your eyes." |
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7-6-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Mas: Any color she wanted to! She was the Empress or Pharaohess, or whatever, for heaven's sake, she didn't have to play by the rules! If she got up in the morning and wanted to paint her eyelids sky-blue-pink, you better believe the whole household busted ass to find some sky-blue-pink before she had breakfast. Think Britney Spears with the power of life and death— hoo, boy, there's an image! Sometimes she would even make up colors just to give her entourage a hard time. "I think," she would say to her slavettes, "I think I would like to paint my eyelids sroosh this morning," And before she sat down to her breakfast of oryx on the half shell, there would be a little silver ramekin or phial of the perfect shade of sroosh, with the steam still coming off it. We don't have that kind of royalty no more. If Queen Elizabeth II wants to paint her eyelids celadon one morning, she has to wait on line by the makeup counter at Marks & Spenser to buy a ramekin or phial of L'Oreal, just like everybody else. Then she takes the bus back to the palace just to show her unity with the people I bet! Cleopatra, she used to call up her full retinue and load up the royal barge just to cross the street— place was wall-to-wall eunuchs with ostrich-feather fans beatin' the air for all they was worth, slaves pullin' on them solid gold oars, overseers overseein' to beat the band, just so's she could go to the newsstand across from the pyramid where she lived for a copy of the Egypt Press-Herald and Bugle. They sure knew how to live in them days. We got nuthin' like that now, lessen' you count Michael Jackson, and NOBODY counts Michael Jackson no more.... |
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7-9-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Sourpuss: Oh, my, does that bring back memories. My grandmother used to put up sauerkraut juice every Saturday morning, just like clockwork. If I had hadn't been particularly loathsome that week I was allowed to help. Now, you have to remember that these were the pioneer days, when you couldn't just skip down to the corner store and buy some canned sauerkraut and simply pour off the juice, oh, no! We had to do everything from scratch, so the first step was to plant some cabbages. While they were growing I would walk to the nearest town, which was about 137 miles away. When I got there I would go to the apothecary (that's what we called them back then) and fill my Granny's order for lactobacilli, pediococci and leuconostoc, the bacterial strains essential to good pickling. Granny was what you would call a scientific pickler, unlike most of the other farm wives, who pickled by faith, the laying on of hands and full-body immersion in vinegar while singing Gospel songs. When I got back with the packets of bacteria the cabbages were fully grown and ready to be harvested, cored, dewormed and sliced, then placed into the pickling vat, along with Granny's secret blend of thirteen herbs and spices and the bacteria. Water was added to the tippy-top, and a thick cover was floated thereupon, held down by an anvil or two to prevent the bacteria-activated cabbage from escaping and wreaking havoc amidst the cattle. The cabbage fermented this way for five weeks, or until the smell was beginning to peel the wallpaper in the barn. (Granny was a fastidious housekeeper; not only was the barn wallpapered, it had wall-to-wall carpeting and candle sconces in each stall.) Then it was time for the best part: the pressing of the sauerkraut! All the fermented cabbage was placed in an apple press (Granny was so fastidious she ironed her apples before putting them into storage each fall), and we all turned the handles that spun the screw that mushed the sauerkraut that lived in the house that Jack built, forcing the sparkling juice out the spigot on the bottom of the press. We pressed and pressed until the cabbage was as dry as hay and could be feed to the cows. (They hated the stuff and retaliated by giving nothing but sour cream for weeks afterward.) Later we put the juice into quart whiskey bottles, corked the bottles, labeled and dated them and sealed them with wax. When Granny finally passed on in 1936 there were 148,782 bottles of sauerkraut juice in her root cellar. It took us weeks to dump it all into the swamp, and the frogs were never the same afterwards. |
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7-13-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Atoning: In the future we can expect to hear apologies from the following: Pennsylvania: "We are SO sorry. Had it not been for the discovery of oil in our distinguished state we wouldn't be in the global petro-mess we're in now." Florida: "We sincerely apologize for our location. Had we really thought it through in 1559, we would not have situated ourselves on a major hurricane path." Vermont: "We sincerely apologize for being voted the Best Place in America to Live. We are taking steps to assure that such an award is never again a threat to Vermont and its people, and have retained New Jersey to aid in the reconstruction." Texas: "We are just all broken up over the fact that we stole ourselves from Mexico in a less considerate era, but we would also like to point out that whatever goes around comes around, and in just a few years, given current trends, we will be Mexican again." New Mexico: "Yeah. What they said." Oklahoma: "If we could change one thing in our history, it would be that Rodgers & Hammerstein song. We sincerely apologize to anyone who moved here expecting to find a place 'where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain/ And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet/ When the wind comes right behind the rain.' This is, we realize today, just a cheap way to disguise our tornado season, and has led to disillusionment on a grand scale." Maine: "We really, really should be part of Canada. I mean, look at a map! Look at our weather! Look at our Frenchmen yearning to breathe free!" New Jersey: "For being. Just for being <sob!>. Guilt and remorse are never far from any New Jerseyite." Hawaii: "We never intended to become a Japanese amusement park. We had the same hopes and aspirations as any young state, but as the Japanese poured in to apologize for Pearl Harbor, we needed more golf courses, more super-roller-coasters, more hotels, more fake wahines and staged luaus. Hell, our leis are now made in Cambodia! It just got away from us sometime in the '80s, and we're very, very sorry." North/South Dakota: "We confess that we should not be so empty. I mean, we have the same number of Representatives as a real state, and there are only 2,300 of us here, plus cattle. A few thousand bucks at election time will buy the votes of the whole bi-state area. That's simply not American!" |
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7-16-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Illiterate: This is a good place to mention the plight of the Guffaw, which was nearly hunted to extinction in the 17th century when its fleece was discovered to make ideal thimble-liners for the seamstresses of the Holy Roman Empire. It was nearly hunted to extinction again in the 18th century when its skin was found to be perfect for the merkin pouches so popular with gentlewomen of the era. It had barely recovered and was still breathing heavily when it was nearly hunted to extinction yet again during the 19th century, as its blubber could be rendered into "the most sweet and melodious of lamp oils."¹ Having been saved from extinction by the skin of its teeth, it was once again driven to the brink of extinction during the 20th century when the skin of its teeth was found to be an ideal substitute for celluloid in collars and billiard balls. So great was the demand that both the False Guffaw, (or Lesser Snigger), and the Premeditated Chortle (or Whooping Titter) were also driven near to extinction, even though they would have preferred to walk, if given the choice. Nor has anything has been heard from the Cachinnating Giggle since 1934, when it made a collect call home from an undisclosed location. Having made it to the 21st century, the Guffaw is understandably a nervous wreck, hiding under the bed or in the closet at the slightest noise, wearing fake beards when forced to leave the house, and whimpering helplessly on the phone to uncaring telemarketers. Although fairly safe in the West thanks to Endangered Species and Affirmative Action legislation, a new threat is on the horizon, as the Chinese have discovered that Guffaw fingers are undetectable when used in Creamed Wombat in place of duck lung to thicken the whipped mung froth. The Mocking Hoot is also believed to be in danger due to its resemblance to the Guffaw, especially after a few Mai Tais in a smoke-filled waterfront saloon. ----------------------------------- ¹ "You Light Up My Life: A Brief History of the Guffaw and Its Impact on the Illumination of Manuscripts and Parlors, 1804-1884" by Ranstom Pulgordney, DDT, FBI, BBD&O. Broadmoor Asylum Press, Crowthorne, Berkshire, UK, What-have -you. |
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7-20-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Abductee: The first unidentifiable frying object was spotted at a Presbyterian church carnival in August, 1859, just outside Dubuque, Iowa. It was between the "Whirl 'n Barf" ride and the Love Offering "Dunk-the-Pastor" Steeple Fundraising Challenge. The sign over the UFO concession said "Genuine Atlantic City Salt Water Taffy!" but, as salt water taffy is rarely fried-- even in New Jersey-- it was thought to be an old sign which had been pressed into service to attract attention to whatever it was that floated in the vat of molten lard. Some of the more adventuresome in the crowd actually paid their 3¢ for one of the UFOs, hoping that it might reveal its secrets upon closer observation, but all they learned is that if you fry something and cover it with powdered sugar at a carnival in August in the Midwest, someone will buy it. This incident is believed to be the origin of things like fried dough and funnel cakes and elephant ears and other UFO fare which are only seen at midsummer carnivals, often under signs that read "Same Lard Since 1859!" or "Genuine Old-Fashioned 100%!" or "Concession For Sale Cheap ~ See Owner." Oh, and that Dubuque Presbyterian church carnival that started it all? During the noon prayer break some mischievous boys exchanged the locations of the dunk tank and the lard vat. The downside of this little prank was that Parson Fouchét soon held the title of the only French, fried parson in America. The upside was that the Love Offering "Dunk-the-Pastor" Steeple Fundraising Challenge collected $835.40 that afternoon, a sizeable sum in 1859 currency, as no one had really cared all that much for the pastor, although everyone agreed that his countenance was much improved by the powdered sugar. |
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7-25-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Toasty: Old enough to know better. Like so many impressionable teenagers in 15th-century France, Joan was a big fan of "Jacquesasse," an entertainment program featuring guys doing really appallingly stupid things. Joan was already an anti-feminist and cross-dresser, sometimes wearing armor as she led the cattle out to graze each morning, and had learned to spit between her front teeth by the age of nine. Many times her prosperous boatbuilder father, Noah of Arc, had had to bail her out of the local hoosegow (Fr: l'ousgau) after bar fights with other délinquents juveniles. She attributed her bad behavior to evil spirits, saying on more than one occasion, "De Debbil made me do it" ("De Debbil ont me fait ça"). Things went from bad to worse, and her father despaired of ever marrying her off to a local merchant, as she could already beat most of them in arm-wrestling. He approached a local nunnery, but they claimed she would never fit in, given her penchants for gin, Italian cigars, and playing games of "chicken" (Fr: poulet) on city streets late at night with her father's carriages. They suggested he give her some traveling money and point her at the nearest Crusade, but according to The Vatican Gazette there wouldn't be another Crusade starting up in the foreseeable future, if ever again, as they had lost money on every one. Besides, the Vatican had already recovered so many pieces of the True Cross (Fr: le vrai enchilada) that they were thinking seriously of holding a garage sale to unload the surplus. Fortunately or unfortunately, the problem was about to resolve itself. That week's episode of "Jacquesasse" was entitled, "So You Wanna Be a Heretic?" and young Joan watched in fascination as the host was immolated by actors in the roles of the Cardinals de St Louis, a farm team of the Spanish Inquisition. Even though the stunt carried the warning "Do not try this in your hovel!" and was followed by a detailed explanation of how it was done, including a demonstration of the fire suit (Fr: le suit zoot), Joan realized that her moment of glory had come. She gathered some cronies together, dressed them in scarlet, named them Cardinals Ximinez, Biggles and Fang, and ordered them to tie her to a stake in the barnyard and pile fagots (Fr: des pansies swishes) around her and torch her off. Well, try as she might she couldn't undo the ropes which held her, although to be fair young Brutcru, playing the role of Biggles, had soaked them in water to make them more supple, so they didn't burn though until Joan herself was a large charcoal briquette (Fr: Biftek à la mode des tourists Anglais). Later on the producers of "Jacquesasse" paid the Vatican to make her a saint in order to avoid a wrongful death lawsuit by her father. |
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7-27-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear High: The Atchison, Topeka & Everest Railroad, a joint venture between Amtrak and the Elevated Sherpa Line of Katmandu. With the ascent of Everest becoming so commonplace (Headlines: "Blind Dwarf Climbs Everest in Wheelchair," "Toddler Climbs Everest on Pogo Stick," "Paralytic Nun Climbs Everest on Nose Despite Frostbitten Sinuses") the subsidized American artificial railway entity Amtrak (Motto: "Losing Money More Efficiently Than Ever!") decided it was time to introduce full-scale tourism. Funding was assisted in part by a grant from McDonald's in exchange for exclusive rights to the top of the mountain, where it plans a family-style restaurant complete with an oxygen-mask-equipped Playland®. To celebrate the opening of the new franchise, the company is introducing the "King of the World"™ Combo Meal at all its 300,000,000 locations. The KotW Combo features "two all-mountain-goat patties, antifreeze-free Chinese sauce, iceberg lettuce, Tibetan pickled cheese, on a sesame seed bun," accompanied by a Tibetan Tea Shake™ topped with rancid yak butter for authenticity. All rancid yak butter is USDA approved. Starbucks, which lost the bid for the prime location, will have franchises at Base Stations #1, #2 and #3, all of which will have Wi-Fi access. Starbucks is introducing its new Tub-o-Brew™ multi-extra-grande-venti-size for soaking frozen extremities. The railway itself has been described as the 14th Wonder of the World, right after the waterslide at Six Flags over Texas in Waxahachie. Based on the tried and tested cog railway system, it briskly moves travelers between Katmandu and the assorted base camps and amusements in hermetically sealed cars which couple automatically with the pressure domes at each stop. For those wishing to spend more time acclimatizing themselves to the altitude to avoid the embarrassment of hemorrhaging lungs, there is a Trump Everest located adjacent to each stop. For tourists on the cheap, there are also Motel 6 Mile offerings, with complementary rancid yak butter at breakfast. |
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7-31-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Tourist: Bologna. Settled by Etruscan sausage-makers fleeing the Vegetarian Invasion of 289 BCE, this tiny nation, nestled between Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica and Argentina, is "a bit of the old world you'd hoped had gone away," according to "Lonely Planet: Plague Spots and War Zones." The people of Bologna have retained the Etruscan language and many of the quaint customs which have made them extinct everywhere else, like premature burial, chromosomal deformities and bungee-jumping. Needless to say, they still make the wonderful sausages which gave their home city its first name and its second name, and to this day they still have a way with b-o-l-o-g-n-a. Although these days it's more likely to be made with llama, anaconda and illegally-imported chupacabra than swine-flesh, as the porcine people do not flourish at altitudes in excess of 17,000 feet. As with any old Italian city, the market is the center of business and social activities, including coca transport, gun-running and white slavery. It's best to smile a lot and overtip on all occasions to avoid the embarrassment of finding yourself naked and in chains on an auction block being felt up by speculators. The market is also the place to find wonderful old-world craftsmanship in things like stone axes, wampum, delicate white-clay opium pipes and Tupperware. As for dining, you have, of course, come to the heart of sausage country. Each restaurant has a signature bologna dish, and you'll find such surprises as Bologna Flambé aux Cerises, Bologna à la mode de Morningside Heights, and my personal favorite, Guinea-pig Bologna Stuffed with Anchovies and Pork Rinds in a Special Sauce and Covered With a Thin Candy Shell. If you'll be on the road, pick up a supply of sun-dried bologna jerky in case you get lost in the abundant unmarked, winding and unending forest pathways. Bologna jerky is also the national currency of the country, and rural trattoria menus will often carry only a selection of prices, indicating the amount of bologna jerky you will be served. Do not express surprise that your order is filled from the cash register. There are, of course, modern fast-bologna franchises in the capital city like McOffal's, KFB and Taco Bellogna. Avoid the Bologna Blizzard at BQ, though. The whole peppercorns get stuck in the straw. |
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8-4-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Mower: You were extremely fortunate. The black-striped side-banded lesser mower viper (Tondeoserpens melanovirga fronsparietii) is one of the deadliest predators of motorized garden equipment in the US and Canada. It carries a toxin so powerful that a single bite has been known to kill a large riding mower in under an hour. There are even cases where small automobiles have been brought down, although these usually recover, except for Minis, which have a systemic vulnerability to the toxin, as the snake is not found in England and no legacy resistance has developed. The Tondeoserpens locates its prey using infrared sensors located in deep pits alongside the upper jaw, which is why night mowing is no defense against the creatures. It attacks the hottest part of the mower, usually the cylinder head, fastening its fangs into the spark plug lead and injecting a lethal dose in less than half a second. The snake then retreats to tall grass where it remains hidden until the carcass is cool enough to devour whole. Although there is no defense against the venom, mowers can often be protected by relocating the muffler near the spark plug lead. The hot muffler will confuse the Tondeoserpens and it will strike the muffler causing no harm to the mower itself. The intense heat of the muffler will often flash-fry the snake itself, which can be safely devoured whole as soon as the carcass has cooled down. A chilled dark ale makes an excellent accompaniment. |
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8-8-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Airy: The "Milling of the Wind" was one of the greatest investment bubbles ever created, almost as damaging as the tulip bulb frenzy of 17th-century Holland. Investors were persuaded that there was a chance to make a real killing in the market by getting in early in the field of wind-processing. It began in 1701 in Belgium, when Hoorst Schmidt, a Dutch Hollandaise from the Netherlands, set up an investment house which, he assured potential investors, would double their money in 45 days. Schmidt had engineering drawings for his "Wind Mills" prominently displayed in the sales office, and full-color brochures printed up which showed the apparatus in action, milling wind by the square ton at great profit to all. Well, the Belgs, always an impressionable people, lined up with their life savings, in some cases forming long lines that reached around the block. And on the 45th day, the original investors did indeed receive double their money, which they immediately plowed back in to wind mill stocks. It was a classic Ponzi scheme, even though Joe "Show Me the Money!" Ponzi wouldn't be born for a couple of centuries. Needless to say the rapid and generous first payout attracted even the most suspicious investors. Alas, at the 90-day payout point Hoorst Schmidt was nowhere to be found, his empty office festooned only with bright streamers surrounding a large "So Long, Suckers!" sign in Old High Belgic calligraphy. Well, the furious investors hunted high and hunted low, but by that time Schmidt was safely ensconced in a tax haven in the Bahamas, immune to prosecution. He died there at the age of 93, surrounded by his "Bahama Mamas" as he called them, never having experienced a second's remorse. Although all this happened 300 years ago, the effect of his monstrous swindle is still felt in investment circles. To this day, if you approach a prosperous Belg with a sure-fire, double-your-money-back investment scheme, he is likely to respond with "Hoorstschmidt!" |
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8-14-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Flyer: Wilhelmina Cohodoboñico, the Dutch-Portuguese flamenco dancer who was the heartthrob of so many WWI pilots. She also inspired two maneuvers used during aerial dogfights, the Wilhelmina, which involved stomping on the rudder pedals in 5/7 time while pulling the stick back to its fully upright and locked position, causing the plane to resemble a bottle-nosed dolphin "walking" across the surface of a performance tank. This would so astonish enemy pilots that they would often stand up to applaud, falling out of the plane in the process. The other was the more complicated Cohodoboñico, a maneuver perfected by American pilots in France near the end of the war. While being pursued by a German Fokker, the American pilot would fly into a French barn and hide in the hayloft. Then when the German plane swooped into the barn, the American plane would spring up and topple several bales of hay onto the German pilot, who would suffer such a debilitating hay fever attack he would fly smack into a Charolais dairy cow, destroying his plane and himself and providing steaks for the Allied victory barbecue afterwards. |
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8-18-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Subterranean: Unddunderdundunduddundudunderund. It's onomatopoeic for the sound of thunder. Rarely used in literature: "Unddunderdundunduddundudunderund," said Tom, thunderingly. "Unddunderdundunduddundudunderund!" Harry shouted, casting the spell of intolerable borborygmi on Professor Snipe "Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder: Unddunderdundunduddundudunderund." ~ T S Eliot "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" (1922) "Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Unddunderdundunduddundudunderund and Blitzen!" ~ "A Visit from St. Nicholas: the Director's Cut" "Unddunderdundunduddundudunderunderball" ~ rejected name for Jamed Bond film "Behold Mjolnir, you feeble Frost Giants! It is I, Thor, Mighty God of Unddunderdundunduddundudunderund!" ~ Valhalla Comix #47 "On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin'-fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like unddunderdundunduddundudunderund outer China 'crost the Bay!" ~ Rudyard Kipling "Mandalay, the Collected Typos" (1911) "Tage des Unddunderdundunduddundudunderunds" ~ German title of Tom Cruise movie (1990) |
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8-22-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Etymologist: Accidentally created in 1981 during a particle physics experiment at FermiLab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) in Illinois, the yrinth is believed to be a denizen of Ylem, itself discovered by George Gamow in 1958. Considered a harmless pest by lab workers, the yrinth apparently gets all its nutrients from sucking ions out of electrical outlets. It also attracts fireflies by imitation, and when they get close enough it zaps them with a harmless electrical charge and just laughs and laughs as the poor creatures light up like a neon bar sign before flying staggeringly away, sadder but wiser. One would think that the lab yrinth would be a subject of intense observation, but it has a cunning trick of turning invisible when looked at directly, making microscopic investigation all but impossible. Sidelong glances have revealed it to be about 4 inches in height, although "height" is a relative term, because in Ylem it also means the number 14, overweight, and distantly related to a cocker spaniel, although "cocker spaniels" in Yelm are the size of blue whales and live by a controlled fusion reaction in their third stomachs. Only one attempt has been made at dissection, by the late Dr Ramses Lupinhoff, who was turned into pure atomic bismuth¹ as soon as he attempted the operation. His statue is the one you see near the exit to the employees' parking lot. The original 1981 research project which brought the yrinth into our dimension has been run backwards in the hopes of causing it to revert back to the Yelm, but so far this has only produced clouds of a noxious green gas which smells like old gym socks and causes laboratory personnel to experience an inexplicable yearning to play the mandolin. With the completion of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland next year, atomic particle physicists hope to expose the yrinth to sufficient radiation to either drive it back to Ylem or cause it to spontaneously reproduce into approximately a trillion copies of itself. The odds are 50-50 in either direction. Announcement of a successful transport of the creature back to its home realm will be published as a paper in the Journal of Theoretical Physics soon afterwards. If spontaneous reproduction occurs instead, it will probably not be announced, as all sources of electricity will have been hijacked by a trillion voracious yrinthi. --------------------- ¹ Actually there was a quantity of maple syrup produced as well. One school of thought holds that Dr Lupinhoff may have had breakfast at IHOP before coming to the lab that morning. Another hypothesis is that it was an artifact of his being from Vermont. The maple syrup was eaten by lab rats, who showed no ill effects at first, then began bowing towards Vermont five times a day with their noses in the cage litter. |
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8-26-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Piquant: Although technically a condiment and not a spice, fermented fish sauce takes the lead as the most commonly-used seasoning in the world. The Romans knew it as garum, and had borrowed it from the seafaring Phoenicians before utterly destroying them and their culture. Today fermented fish sauce is used around the world, it being the only thing you can really do with fish past their sell-by date. Ketchup is the Malay word for fermented fish sauce, although if McDonald's ever tried to substitute it for that tomato stuff in the packets, they would be sued out the wazzoo. Americans do not like ancient traditions all that much, especially not on a bacon double cheeseburger. In Asia fermented fish sauce is known by many names, and is always present on the kitchen or restaurant table. American marketing gurus soon learned to adapt their products to local tastes, which is why Kellogg's Corn Flakes® are advertised in Bangladesh alongside a beaker of fermented fish sauce as "part of this complete breakfast." Kellogg's is also experimenting with a fermented fish sauce Pop Tart®, which they plan to market in Southeast Asia as soon as they adapt the cooking instructions from microwave to smoldering cow dung. They hope to match the success of their Korean product, Kimchee Chocolate Habanero Pop Tarts®, which are extremely popular with children there, despite being in technical violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty with a Scoville rating in excess of 300,000. The other top-selling spice is Worcestershire sauce, although that is technically a fermented fish sauce as well, if you bother to read the label. |
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8-31-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Numeric: From whence? What are you— French? It's from the opening line of 18th-century English wannabe poet Thurgood Madrigal's epic: "On Sand." He had a hundred copies privately printed, but died with 99 unclaimed. Its overwhelming unpopularity is generally attributed to the subject matter, and the fact that Madrigal's day job was a beachcomber at Brighton resort on the English Channel. Here's the rest of the opening:
...it goes downhill from there. |
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Don't undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others. Anyone
who's smarter, better, or more talented than you is an elite and should
be drug down to your level ASAP. |
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9-7-2007 Dear Aunt Nettie: What beverage did Pope Clement VIII
officially recognize as a Christian drink in an edict issued in 1592? |
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Dear Drinker: Surprisingly, it was Coca-Cola®. This was taken as a sure sign of Clement's ability to see the future when speaking ex cathedra. Clement was also the author of the hymn Orbis Terrarum Decurro, which you may remember from Sunday School: Ego amarem ut docui orbis terrarum decurro In perficio consensio Ego amarem emo orbis terrarum a Coke Quod servo is vexillum. Ut verus res. Which is usually translated into English as: I, [Clement,] would desire that the whole world sing In harmonious perfection I, [Clement,] would desire to purchase for the world a Coke And keep it [the world] company. For truly, it is the genuine article |
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9-11-2007 Dear Aunt Nettie:
What is the Internal Revenue Service's
"Dinah Shore ruling"? |
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Dear Taxing: First of all, it's pronounced "DEE-nah," not like Jacob and Leah's unfortunate daughter. It refers to an Athabaskan language of the American Southwest, spoken primarily by the Navajo.¹ You see, in 1922 the Internal Revenue Service was asked to rule on whether Dinah-speaking Navajo who lived on the shores of the Colorado River could legally claim a property subsidence deduction due to the failure of the Federal government to halt the erosion of the Grand Canyon. The IRS agreed that the Colorado River erosion was the worst they'd seen, reaching to a depth of a mile or more, forcing Navajo farmers to till the sides of the canyon to get in a decent crop of corn each year. But was it grounds for a deduction? ² Well, the IRS hemmed and hawed, and consulted with the Bureau of Land Reclamation and the US Department of Agriculture and the Arizona League of Perpendicular Farmers, finally coming to a decision in 1924. They ruled that the farmers on the Dinah-speaking shore of the river were indeed entitled to claim the property subsidence deduction, although the Zuni-speakers on the other shore could not, as they had given up farming to concentrate on tourism and whitewater rafting expeditions. The Dinah Shore ruling thus became part of the US Tax Code, and can be viewed in Book 12, page 13,388, paragraph 471, line 39, subsection 53ff. --------------------------------- ¹ Not to be confused with the Hopi, as in the song, "Someone's in the Kachina With Dinah." ² The reader is encouraged to make up bad puns involving the word "ground." |
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9-14-2007 Dear Aunt Nettie:
Where did the term "sheepherder" come
from, since sheep are gathered in flocks and not herds? |
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Dear Sheepish: It's another case of a simple word with two different applications. There are those who herd sheep, the shepherds. And there was an entirely different class of worker years ago who heard sheep. You see, in the rolling hills of England it was very difficult to visually keep track of sheep. One had to rely on their cries or calls to locate them and determine their distance from the main ovine conglomeration.¹ That's where those who heard sheep came in. It was a particularly useful talent to have, especially during the era of thick London fogs, when one who heard sheep had it all over those who simply used a foghorn and listened for the echoes. In a 1798 poem William Longfellow Wordsworth wrote a paean to those who heard sheep: "When I was young, a single man, And after youthful follies ran, Though little given to care and thought, To the sheep I listened, as I ought; One from the other I soon could tell, E'en through the dark, or over dell; And soon I had a hardy herd A louder flock I never heard, But then there came a bitter day; When men came and took my sheep away, And pummeled me with boot and staff And left me lying in the chaff; For, tho' I kept them well and fine, I must confess the sheep weren't mine." ------------------ ¹ Not to be confused with oovoid conglomerate, which is a kind of lithified sedimentary rock. |
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9-17-2007 Dear Aunt Nettie:
What singer recorded under the alias
Apollo C. Vermouth? |
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Dear Pseudonymic: It wasn't an alias, it was Frank Sinatra's real name, a closely-guarded secret throughout his performing career. You see, when a young male child was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1915, the 18th child in a family of itinerant ne'er-do-well costermongers, his parents were at a loss as to what to call him, having used up all the common names by #17. So his father closed his eyes and pointed at random to the advertising page of the local newspaper, the Hoboken Larynx-Dispatch & Bugle. Then his mother did the same, giving him his last name.¹ Finally they tied their index fingers together and stabbed out to give him a middle name. It was unfortunate that Crenshaw melons were on sale at the A&P that week. So the baby ended up being named after the newly-opened burlesque theater in Harlem, a winter melon, and a sweetish Italian wine used in microliters as a ingredient in extremely dry martinis. One would think that he would have had a hard time in school with a moniker like that, but he went to a neighborhood pagan parochial school where Apollo was a perfectly normal name, and vermouth a respectable offering to be poured out to the god whenever oracles were sought. He kept his middle name a secret, not wishing to push his luck. After many years he was apprenticed to a hurdy-gurdy man who could not afford a monkey. When he wasn't busy cadging pennies from passersby, he would sit in a corner in his little circus suit and sing sad songs to himself. Then one day he got his big break when the hurdy-gurdy man had a stroke and died. Not knowing quite what to do, young Apollo kept up his daily routine, going to the same streetcorner every morning dressed in his circus suit and cap, dragging his chain behind him. But without a hurdy-gurdy to front for him, he was just another monkey in a circus suit, and his take for the first day consisted of three washers, two parking-meter slugs, and an "Alf" Landon campaign button. In his despair, he forgot to sing his songs quietly to himself, belting out "I'll Never Smile Again" to an astonished lunchtime crowd in Hoboken's historic Benedict Arnold Square. Well, the rest, as they say, is history. He was immediately signed by Shellac Records of Hoboken and acquired a crooked business manager who suggested he change his name so as not to run into copyright problems with the burlesque theater and the Italian wine people And that's how Franksin Atra got his name and his start. He changed it to "Sinatra" a few years later after the threat of a lawsuit by the American Tort Reform Association. --------------------------------- ¹ The family had run out of last names as well. |
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9-21-2007 Dear Aunt Nettie:
Where does the funny-sounding word
filibuster come from? |
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Dear Busted: From the Latin filius, meaning "son," and the Latin child's nickname "Buster." It's the title of a long-forgotten work by Julius Caesar, considered by scholars as a practice run for his blockbuster, The Gallic Wars. It traces Buster's activities during the summer of 57 BCE, when he was at summer camp while his father labored on the eponymous wars and his mother was at a fat farm in Ravenna, desperately trying to get in shape for the winter orgies. Despite Caesar's talents as a writer, he just couldn't overcome the boring awfulness of his subject matter. Take this one passage as an example: << Meus filius eram in Ars et Faber is dies , lacer inter eneneuodo a lanyardum pro suus abbas spatha vel inscrivium ex arbus balsineum arca archa, forsitan ut ingero in suus matris pro Mithras' Natalis ut Decembrus. Is opus sui in talis a civitas essait sumo ut is madidus suus tunic, secundum opinio receptivia ex castra consuasor. Huic delictum is eram denegare bellaria procul prandium, quod eram a venustus composita alo-fructus. Tunc dies is pluvia. >> "My son was in Arts and Crafts this day, torn between braiding a lanyard for his father's spatha or carving a balsa wood box, perhaps to inflict on his mother for Mithras' Birthday in December. He worked himself into such a state trying to choose that he wet his tunic, according to the report I got from the camp counselor. For this transgression he was denied dessert at dinner, which was a lovely cherry-fruit compote. The following day it rained." You can see what he was up against. |
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9-25-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Trouper: It was written for Molly Brown, known as "the Unsinkable," because of her survival of the Titanic disaster. Molly milked her survivorship for all it was worth, appearing on pre-radio talk shows, and eventually working up a vaudeville skit involving tap-dancing crew members and an actual Titanic lifeboat. When Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart wrote the script and the score of their proposed musical, based on "A Night to Remember" by Walter Lord, they immediately turned to Molly Brown as a source of information and inspiration. The original name of the musical was the more nautically appropriate "Hello, Davit," but the songwriter had a devil of a time coming up with rhymes for "davit," in English, although Hebrew has hundreds. Eventually the title was changed to "dolly," as a tribute to those rolling platforms used aboard ships to move luggage, cargo, etc. Molly Brown had her name legally changed to Unsinkable Dolly Brown to keep up appearances. Well, as we all know, the show was a roaring success, leading Herman and Stewart to attempt similar musicals, like "Teahouse of the August Moon," commemorating the sinking of the Toya Maru, and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," dedicated to the loss of the RMS Lusitania. Both were prodigious flops, forcing the two men to write for sitcoms simply to keep a roof over their heads. |
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10-1-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Sunday: Literally that. The custom springs from the heath spas which were a national craze among the privileged classes in Europe at the end of the 19th century. People would pay outrageous sums of money to go to places like Biarritz and Karlsburg and sip sulfur- or magnesium-tainted water from polluted springs while discussing how wealthy they were, and how much better off the working classes would be if they simply learned to inherit money rather than work for it. At other parts of the spa you could sink into the luxury of a piping-hot mud bath, which combined polluted water with tannery sludge. While soaking and listening to their bones dissolve they would discuss the lack of hygiene amongst the poor. This was great fun, and these laconic discussions eventually led to such social amenities as the spacious showers at Treblinka and Birkenau. It was only a matter of time before the owners of these regal spas combined the two indulgences. The first bucket of mud was served to Prince Wilhelm Götterdämmerung of Weaselisia after he complained that the coffee was too weak.¹ It is believed that the waiter was deranged. Prince Wilhelm, rather than make a scene, was forced to drink the stuff, and admitted later that it might have helped his liver. In spa world, what a Prince did everyone soon did, and overnight every table in the vast dining room had a bucket of mud on it, either as an apéritif or as dessert. Chilled mud soon became all the rage after someone spotted Prince Ruprecht of Wazoolia emptying ice cubes into his bucket in the hopes of deadening the taste. Like all crazes, the chilled bucket of mud soon made its appearance on the mahogany tables of the nouveaux-riches, then on the walnut tables of the bourgeoisie, then on the deal tables² of the common people. Finally it trickled down to the very poor, who would pretend they were better off than they were by having a bucket of mud on the orange crate, even if they has no bucket and it wasn't real mud anyway. Soon the fad crossed the pond and showed up in American ice cream parlors. In those simpler times anything that was done in Europe became de rigueur with America's smart set. Creative soda fountain jerks³ came up with all sorts of variations on the mud theme to attract business. The "Mississippi Mud" was beaten with the soda-jerk's feet and sprinkled with grits and pralines. The "Mud Puppy" was adorned with that new American taste treat, the hot dog. The "Mudslide Slim" was a dietetic version. Then one day the inevitable happened. At a small soda fountain in Conger's Grove, Pennsylvania, on a busy Sunday afternoon, a soda jerk named Marvin Freen discovered he was fresh out of mud. Worse yet, the street urchin who was supposed to resupply the store said that the drought had dried up the old swimming hole— "as dry as a cork leg," the boy put it. Driven to desperation, young Marvin defied logic and replaced the mud in the "Mud Volcano" he was preparing for Ida Sue Groggins, the richest, prettiest girl in town, with chocolate, hoping she wouldn't notice. Well, she did notice, as the grit and slimy things were obviously not present, and, mirabile dictu, the sundae was better than anything she had ever ordered at Ye Olde Malt Shoppe. In small towns of that era whatever the richest, prettiest girl in town said was good, well, it was like it came from the burning bush, and soon chocolate, that little known and generally despised chemical compound, became the crème de la crème of the ne plus ultra. Mud soon became utterly unfashionable in fountain drinks, and pretty, rich American girls touring Europe would turn up their pert noses at a mud-based dessert, saying in their frostiest, haughtiest tone of voice: "Ain chew got no chokalit? Back in Risin' Gorge, Alabama, where ah comes frum, nobody who's nobody would touch common mud, not iffen you topped up they cornpone wif it!" And thus was the American Century born. ---------------------------- ¹ Complaining was an essential part of spa life; if anyone was actually contented or— perish the thought!— happy, the spa would have been struck off the list of Where to Go to Be Seen as quickly as you could say "unfashionable" in French. ² I don't know what deal is either, but you can't read Dickens or Dostoyevsky without discovering that common people had deal tables. No commoner will ever sit down at anything but a deal table, where he will "sup on pulse." You've got me there as well. Perhaps "pulse" was a synonym for mud. ³ It wasn't considered a term of opprobrium back then as it is today. "Jerk" is the American pronunciation of "djerque," which in French is used to indicate one who makes his living working behind a soda fountain pulling those tall handles down to release carbonated water. |
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10-5-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Concerted: The horses. Unbeknownst to many of his supporters, Coolidge was a fanatical follower of horse-racing events, once wagering the entire budget of the Department of Micronesian Affairs on a trifecta at Hialeah, which he lost, and was forced to siphon off the budget of the US Strategic Mohair Reserve to cover his bets. He lost almost the entire Presidential housekeeping budget backing "Seventh Sister" in the fifth race at Churchill Downs, which is why banquets at official receptions in the White House in 1923 usually consisted of Uneeda biscuits and ginger ale, and why Mrs Coolidge dressed like that. His obsession with betting on the ponies led to the embarrassing event when the Senate was in session debating funding for the Muscle Shoals power plant, with Coolidge presiding on a dais at the front of the assembly. He had placed the funding for the Passenger Pigeon Memorial & Eternal Flame on "Castaway" in the third race at Aqueduct, and was secretly following the running of the race on a tiny earphone connected to a new-fangled wireless set. "Castaway" moved up to second place and was closing in on the leader, "Scotch Laddie," but not fast enough. Seconds before the end of the race Coolidge jumped to his feet before the entire Senate, yelling, "Move yer bloody arse!" at the top of his lungs before suddenly remembering where he was. The incident was later immortalized in the successful stage musical, "My Fair Lady," although the location was switched to the Royal Ascot and the character of Coolidge was played by Eliza Doolittle. Coolidge's greatest folly occurred during the summer of 1929, when he put the entire US Stock Market Emergency Contingency Backup Fund on "Aloha My Sweet," in a claiming race at Pimlico, losing once again. In late October of that year, when the trustees of the fund sought to stop the massive losses on Wall Street with an injection of federal cash, all they found in the vault were cobwebs and an IOU bearing the Presidential seal. The rest is history. Coolidge is best known for his comment, "The business of America is horseflesh." |
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10-12-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Wally: G Terwilliger Bauschen, who owned the Bauschen Loam company of Tiddlywinksburgh, Kentucky. His loam collectors— jocularly known as "loam rangers"— were always complaining about being poked in the eye by tall grass as they labored in his vineyard, as it were.¹ Safety glasses and goggles were impractical, as the copious sweating involved in this kind of midsummer bent-over labor forced endless pauses to clear the lenses, badly cutting into production and worker's pay, which was measured by the round ton. One day Bauschen was putting a new lens in his Studebaker's headlamp (he could easily have hired someone to do it for him, but he was affectionately known as a cheapskate bastard to his friends and loved ones, which led to him having very few of either). He looked at the shape of the glass protective lens and thought to himself, "This would make a great glass yarmulke for hydrocephalic Jewish kids." But the rabbi looked at him like he was totally meshugga, so he went back to putting the lens in the headlamp. Then it struck him that the lens was the same shape as the eyeball, and one sufficiently reduced in size would fit perfectly over the cornea, held in place by surface tension and, if necessary, some inexpensive rustproof office staples. Eureka! Well, he pestered a local glassblower until the poor man agreed to make him a couple of tiny Studebaker headlamp lenses, which Bauschen said he would pay for when his ship came in, hoping the glassblower wouldn't notice that Kentucky is landlocked. As soon as the tiny lenses cooled down sufficiently he hastened back to his Olde Loame Shoppe and clapped them onto the eyeballs of the first laborer he came across. Well, as the later book and movie would relate in abundant detail, the tiny lenses clung so well to the worker's eyeball that staples weren't needed, and Bauschen realized he had tumbled onto a discovery with the potential to make him a millionaire. He talked to an official of the local bank— jocularly known as a "loan arranger"— and built a small factory to manufacture the "Bauschen Loam Anti-contact Lens" to protect field workers from having their corneas punctured by grass stems. It was a roaring success, and Bauschen was soon able to send a hefty payment to his elected representative in Washington, DC, who made it a mandatory part of the new OSHA regulations. There was one tiny, insignificant flaw in Bauschen's product. You see, the cornea of the eye, like all parts of the human body, needs a constant supply of oxygen to function. The anti-contact lenses prevented oxygen from reaching the cornea, so his field workers eventually went stone blind and became a burden on the state. Bauschen called this the inevitable cost of doing business and solved the problem by hiring only illegal Mexican laborers who could be deported when they were no longer able to work. His invention made him a millionaire many times over, but in his later years he began to have pangs of conscience about the fate of so many helpless peons. So he generously founded the G Terwilliger Instituto para Ciegos y Inútil (Institution for the Blind and Useless) in Mexico City, making a further killing on the baskets they wove in the facility's sweatshop, which he sold to Pier One at a fantastic markup. --------------------------------- ¹ Bauschen actually did own a vineyard, but it's not relevant here, so we'll stick with the metaphorical one. |
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10-15-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Asperger's: Surprisingly, the sparrow family, a splendid example of mimicry at work in nature. Originally "sparrow grass," asparagus (the jumped-up fantsy-antsy Latin term applied by double-dome university types) first came to the attention of observant peasants when they noticed that at certain times of the year all thriving sparrow grass plants would suddenly burst asunder at the tip if not harvested in time. This event, they noticed, was always accompanied by an increase in the local sparrow population. Finally a sharp-eyed provincial happened on a patch of sparrow grass at the precise moment when the top burst open and a tiny sparrow crawled forth. After pausing some moments to let its wings dry, the new-hatched sparrow took to the trees. Fascinated, the peasant watched as yet another sparrow emerged, then another. The mystery had been solved! Actually two mysteries, since it also explained the presence of bones in sparrow grass picked just before the moment of full ripeness and promptly boiled. Naturalists of the time added it to the list of spontaneously-generated animals like barnacle geese, flies from spoiled meat, frogs which are generated by water lilies, mullet which is generated by sand, and oysters which spring from shallow-water slime. |
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10-20-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Topaz: Sherwin-Williams Holiday Turquoise #57 in Dura-Cote Exterior Alkyd Gloss. Alonzo Baldachino Sherwin-Williams acquired the rights to turquoise from the Navajo during the Depression for peanuts, then ended up leasing it back to the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes during the tourist invasion of the 1950s. Among the Navajo today he is remembered among as "Big Khamdumpabbawhump," loosely translated as "Cross-eyed Swine Fornicator." In the same era Sherwin-Williams bought the rights to Hopi kachina dolls, which he tarted up and manufactured in pink plastic as the Barbie® series, an immediate money-maker since its introduction in 1959. To the Hopi he is fondly remembered as "D'harabust'u'lumpa" or, "One Who Would Sell His Own Grandmother." |
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10-23-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Leery: There are three, actually. The arboreal cow, of course, which dines exclusively on udder vetch, making its milk lethal to anyone foolish enough to climb a tree to milk one. The milk is also said to bestow immortality on the drinker, but only very, very briefly. However, it is also thought that this is a rumor spread by arboreal cows to lure the gullible into the trees where they nest. The combination of false immortality and genuine death is said to cause an expression on the face of the stricken which arboreal cattle find hilarious, and the sound of their laughter accompanying the crashing of yet another dead body through the branches to the ground is a sure sign of the proximity of one of these devious creatures. Second is Perkin's Lesser Spinach Whale, also known as the Wrong Whale to distinguish it from the proper kind. It was the terror of whalers in the days of sail because of its bite. After overturning a longboat and biting the legs off each of the sailors thrashing frantically in the sea, it would inject a poison which would cause the person to become crippled from the waist down. You could recognize one of these unfortunates by the haunted look on his face and the presence of two insensible peglegs, which made ballroom dancing nearly impossible and getting a pedicure completely out of the question. The third beast, the were-waffle, is not as well known as the other two, and many wildlife specialists doubt its existence at all, believing it to be a story spread by the public relations department of Denny's to drive customers away from IHOP. According to the legend, the were-waffle appears to be a perfectly normal hamster until the light of the full moon causes it to transform into a stack of Belgian waffles, where it will curl up on a plate and wait for someone to come along and say, "Ooh, a plate of Belgian waffles!" and attempt to eat them. At the first touch of maple syrup the were-waffle will lash out, injecting a toxin which causes the major organs of the hapless diner to pop outside the body. Once restored to hamsterhood, the were-waffle will pick over the best bits to take back to its burrow to feed its young. |
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10-26-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Gyro: You must remember that kids today have far more distractions than kids did back then, when there was only TV and rock 'n roll as alternatives to study and homework. Plus schools today teach political correctness before any other subject, which takes up 90% of their learning time and leaves them with a view of the world unrelated to reality. Children in, say, India, excel in science because they don't have to worry about political correctness, thanks to the caste system there. As for a solution, I'm as stumped as you are. One school administrator has suggested combining science teaching with poetry as a way of delivering scientific subjects painlessly into the pampered brains of our youth. Here's his attempt at serving up botany by modifying the already botanical "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer:
Personally I think they should reintroduce caning in the classrooms.
Back when it was legal kids learned like a house afire.
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10-31-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Forth: It happened during the Great Horse Glut immediately following the Civil War, when hundreds of thousands of former cavalry mounts were abruptly dumped on the market causing the bottom to drop out of the equine futures trade. Horse prices plunged precipitously, along with several Wall Street investors bankrupted by the surplus. Others were reduced to selling hay on street corners or holding up signs at intersections reading, "Will Groom For Food." The low point occurred on August 6th, 1867, when J P Morgan was forced to sell Sonny Boy, Triple Crown winner and voted Most Likely to Succeed by the Racehorse Breeders Association of America, for 25¢ in order to meet a call option exercised by his broker. The horse had cost him $16,000 only two years before, and Morgan had also spent a small fortune in bribes to have the horse assigned to the Alabama National Guard to keep him off the battlefield. The Kentucky Breeders Association Journal ran a picture of Sonny Boy on the cover of its next issue, with the headline: QUARTER HORSE? The name caught on and became a popular catch phrase among pre-Gilded Age cognoscenti before trickling down to common street argot. "Would you buy it for a quarter?" became a common appraisal of inferior horseflesh. Vaudeville comedians Sally "Laughing Girl" Stembler and Edward Meeker had a stand-up routine where Miss Stembler is a confused old woman in a butcher shop which is actually a front for an illegal betting parlor. Meeker plays the just-off-the-boat Jewish bettors' go-between pretending to be a butcher, speaking in Yiddish-accented broken English. The skit was so funny that the performance had to be stopped midway through to allow the audience to catch its collective breath, and the Edison Cylinder the two later made of the act sold nearly 10,000 copies, a record for the time.¹ One of the high points of the skit comes when the bogus butcher, utterly perplexed, shouts out, "You vanna buy a quarter horse?" It's said that when President Ulysses S Grant heard that line during a command performance in the White House theater, he was "fit to bust a gut," and spilled whiskey down his boiled shirt front. "You vanna buy a quarter horse?" became the "Where's the beef?" of the 19th century. ---------------------------------- ¹ Or a cylinder, I suppose you'd say back then. |
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11-2-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Colonel: It depends on what you mean by "odd." According to Ripley's Believe It or Not, a Mrs Amelia Schotzendragh of New Tulip, Kansas, once found an ear of corn with the kernels arranged in a Fibonacci Series, which, as you'll have to admit, is pretty odd. Then there was Mr Poonah Wapaswami of Beggar's Elbow in Tamil Nadu, India, who found an ear of corn growing on his subsistence farm, the kernels of which formed an imaginary number. (That's a complex number whose square is a negative real number.) Also in India, Sri Krishna Ramalamadingdong at the Ashram of the Golden-roofed Pagoda noted that an ear of corn he was about to pop into the kettle formed a Diophantine equation (an indeterminate polynomial equation that allows the variables to be integers only), but he ate it anyway as it was the only food in the house. Only afterwards did he recall how odd it was, but by then it was too late. Miss Floradora Bassoon of New Wilderness, Québec, Canada, was shucking a harvest of Shoepeg maize when she discovered to her a-maizement that the rows of kernels formed the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem. This last example can be seen in the Museum of Mathematical Uncertainty in Ottawa. |
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11-6-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Teratologist: The 529-headed horror-movie actress Marla Bunstable Groggins. Marla preferred to stay out of the limelight, as her condition often induced heart attacks in adults and lifelong psychoses in children, but she was so incensed at the animal breeder's blatant disregard for her fundamental humanity that she made a rare public appearance to denounce him, causing 23 heart attacks at the press conference and innumerable lifelong psychoses among children who had paused briefly on a news channel while looking for cartoons. Marla is best known for her starring role in the 1948 film, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in which she played Night. She also starred in the 1955 low-budget horror movie, Beast with a Million Eyes, and in the 1960 German horror film The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (English title of the dubbed version). More recently she has had cameo roles as the Beast of the Apocalypse in several filmed versions of Tim La Haye's best-selling Book-of-Revelation-themed Left Behind series. |
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11-10-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Indicted: Aggravated mopery. This became a problem in the nation's capital after the end of the Civil War, but Victorian prudery prevalent in those days prevented the formation of an open Mopery Service. The Secret Service set up a color-coded chart of increasing severity to alert the public as to the daily mopery status. An appropriately-colored flag was flown from the dome of the Capitol every morning. The colors were: Puce = Low Mopery, such as titular indiscretion Celadon = Guarded Mopery, as in walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose Ecru = Elevated Mopery, legally defined as "aggravated mopery with intent to creep." Heliotrope = High Mopery, including loitering at a dangerous speed and failure to heed a dwarf Vermeil = Severe Mopery, exposing oneself in front of a blind man on a public highway The Teapot Dome Mopery Scandal of 1921 involved so many leading Republicans that it was declared no longer a crime but a logical way of doing business. The Secret Service was assigned to watching politician's wives for signs of phthisis, and walking the presidential dog. |
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11-13-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Gallic: In the depths of the Great Depression it was common for politicians to use food imagery to entice starving crowds to vote for them. It's a rhetorical device called association by apposition, as in the contemporary sentence, "Blah blah blah Saddam blah blah 9/11 blah blah Saddam blah blah blah blah 9/11 blah blah Saddam blah Saddam 9/11 Saddam blah blah blah," intended to associate subjects which would normally have nothing in common. The chicken/pot association was intended to surreptitiously blur the line between voting and getting a square meal. In addition to the above, politicians used variations on the theme, like, "a haunch of venison in every closet," a salami in every drawer," a duck up your chimney," "two geese in the parlor," and "egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam on the small shelf above your outhouse." The last was used by John Jacob Hormel of pork shoulder fame, when he was a candidate for the Senate seat from Minnesota. Hormel won the seat by a landslide, as his opponents had restricted themselves to weak and insipid associations like "some kohlrabi on the davenport, maybe," and "perhaps a potato," But Hormel had over-promised, and the people waxed wroth when they ran to their outhouses the day after the election, peered at the small shelf located there, and saw only commonplace dust and dried-up spiders. Insane with rage, betrayal, and hunger they stormed Hormel's factory, cornered the president in his corner office, and flung him onto the processing line, where he was quickly converted into thirty-seven small blue cans with attached keys for opening. As small blue cans could not legally hold a seat according to Senate rules, the position was awarded to the runner-up in the election, Sebastian "Parsley with Clever Radish Roses," Montmorency. He was spared the awful fate of poor Mister Hormel because he knew that workers were used to having their wages garnished.... |
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11-16-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Ample: The original word, byandlarge, has an interesting etymology. It originally referred to the twins Armand and Edmund Byand, who represented the state of Wisconsin during the late 19th century. Armand was seven feet tall and Edmund was three feet tall, so to differentiate between the two people began referring to them as "Byand, large" and "Byand, small." After they were lost at sea while on a fact-finding mission to Tahiti, the words moved into the public domain. "Byand, large," has evolved to "buy, and large" advice usually given to investors by stockbrokers during a bull market. "Byand, small" has mutated into "Byand's Mall," one of the larger shopping centers outside Milwaukee. Not to be confused with the completely unrelated "Byand's MAWL," a proprietary name referring to the inventor of the Magnetic Aircraft Weapons Link®. |
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11-20-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Afloat: The name originally planned was The Thorium Thingers, to reflect their interest in the actinide series of the Periodic Table of Elements, since Plutonium Pops had already been taken and Ununseptium sounded too medical to catch on quickly. The put-down came from the lead¹ singer of another heavy-metal group, Bismuth, who said that the target audience the new band was attempting to reach wouldn't know the word thorium if it had a mantle up its gaspipe, and they should choose an element where recognition was a lead²-pipe cinch. The apparent misspelling, LED, was a marketing ploy: by associating themselves with light-emitting diodes they were hoping potential buyers would confuse them with Electric Light Orchestra, a much more popular group. The Zeppelin part is a play on the names of the two lead³ performers, Jimmy Blimp and Robert Dirigible. ----------------------------------- ¹ Lead as in the opposite of follow, not the 82nd element ² Lead, as in the 82nd element, not the opposite of follow ³ See footnote #1 |
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11-22-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Celebretous: Albert Sovain, the noted Huguenot explorer and companion to Father Isaac "Jugs" Jogues, a pioneer Canadian bootlegger and vendor of firewater to the Iroquois and Mohawks. "Daddy Jugs's" selfless courage and dedication was responsible for the alcoholism and despair which later destroyed these tribes. Sovain himself was more interested in exploiting the novelty value of the Indian tribes. He contacted a Chinese manufacturer who was able to supply plastic tomahawks, bows with suction-cup-tipped arrows, and nylon war bonnets, which Sovain then sold to gullible settlers as "genuine Indian artifacts." He was so successful that his name became associated with cheap remembrances of exotic locations. To this day tourist traps sell authentic plastic "sovainirs" made in China. He is also believed to be the first to sell "My wagon train was captured by the Iroquois and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!" prank gifts. |
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11-26-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Retro: Because they they had been beaten in every music competition they ever entered, even those in Germany, where the population is tone-deaf from years of listening to concertinas and oom-pah tunes. In Bavaria their original composition, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" ("Ich woll't zu Anhalt ihrer Arbeitskraft") lost out to the traditional Bavarian pretzel-folding song, "A Busserl is a schnuckrig Ding" ("A Bustle Is a Seductive Thing"). It was at this point that Pete Best, their long-suffering drummer, decided to part company with John, Paul and George and join "Die 3 Lustigen Moosacher" ("The 3 Viagra-enhanced Moose-pursuers"), a Bavarian band which he said was going to the top of the charts despite the Swabian yodeler who doubled on the sousaphone. |
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12-2-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Student: Fikret Dzhamil Amirov-Kirovabad (1922 - 1976), known as "Frisket," to his close friends and associates, was Azerbaijan's most popular streetcar conductor. Soon after taking the job in 1935 (he lied about his age, thinking he was joining the army), he began singing the names of upcoming trolley stops, rather than simply announcing them as other conductors did. Passengers would actually applaud after his brilliant rendition of "Boriskärapajajztinofskitiantcy Boulevard, South," and his brief but plaintive "Annamakhovati Terminal, all out!" would cause the more sensitive riders to break out in heartfelt weeping. "Frisket" was often approached by the owners of music halls and, later, recording companies, who offered him a shot at a better life, but he steadfastly refused, citing his devotion to the Bandislaristav Traction Engine Company and his chronic, insuperable stage fright. Apparently in third grade he was cast as Moshka the Matchmaker in PS #103's "Holiday Hijinks," and froze up so badly they needed crowbars and lube oil to get him out of his costume, and it was years before he could hear the word "theater" without wincing and toppling over. The Second World War was bad for Azerbaijanis, particularly streetcar conductors. Amirov-Kirovabad tried several times to join the military, but as soon as anyone mentioned "European Theater" or "Pacific Theater" he would wince and topple over, which made him rather useless in a war where wincing and toppling over were considered signs of bad sportsmanship. Plus lying down on a battlefield might cause one to be seriously injured, according to the military's insurance company. So Amirov-Kirovabad spent the war on his streetcar, which was disguised as a haystack to avoid strafing. Now, logically, a haystack moving through the center of town should have attracted the attention of fighter pilots, but this was wartime, and things were different. His passengers came to rely on "Frisket's" melodious cries to help them endure the miseries and privations of the war and hold fast to their resolve. The Azerbaijani Ministry of Homeland Security gave him its coveted "Blind Patriotism" medal for his efforts in this field. After the war the hay was removed from his streetcar and life slowly returned to normal. "Frisket" retired after 50 years of dedicated service, and was given the Transportation Ministry's medal, recognizing him as a "Working Class Hero, Second Class." He and his wife Lyudmila, a former Moscow kvass vendor, prepared for life as Soviet retirees, often going into town together to see what the stores were out of. "Frisket" barely noticed the changes after Communism collapsed, as he had been dead for 14 years by then. |
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12-7-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Mountaineer: It's necessary to parse, or at least marinate, this word to extract the sense and flavor of the expression. It refers to the feud between the Pikes and the Peaks in 18th-century America. The patriarch of the Pike clan, Ebenezer Ephrayim Mollusceater Pike, accused the patriarch of the Peaks, Abimelech Abednego Chipdip Peak, of stealing a #12 pullet from his emergency backup chicken fund. Patriarch Peak denied this, and moreover accused Patriarch Pike of pinching a piglet from his pack of preserved piggies. Well, words flew back and forth, with Pike calling Peak a puling pullet-pilfering pillager and Peak calling Pike a pig-plundering purloiner. The feud escalated until every Pike on the pike side of the peak and every Peak on the peakéd side of the 'pike were up in arms. Patriarch Pike and Patriarch Peak met at the border road with all their families behind them. "Ar yew again' us?" asked Patriarch Pike. "Aye," said Patriarch Peak, "We're all again' ye." From which the word "Allegheny" is derived. The feud continued until 1958 when the border road became part of the national turnpike system and was named Peak's Pike in honor of the past patriarchs. |
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12-11-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Moggy: Well, that calls for some ancient American history, which they apparently don't teach in schools anymore. In the mid-1960s, the American moog shortage became acute, with long lines at moog replenishing stations and a general air of despair upon the land. Old-timers sat around telling youngsters about the abundance of moogs in their youth, but the youngsters paid no attention, being more interested in rock-and-roll and hula hoops. So President Lyndon Johnson decided to invade Vietnam because Vietnam had moogs up the wazoo and besides, he had always wanted to be a War President. But in a tiny garage in Mundane, Iowa, the answer to the moog shortage had already been provided without a nickel's worth of federal support, relying on good old American know-how, ingenuity, and perseverance. Tarquin "Lapstrake" Fnp realized that it would be possible to synthesize moogs using common, off-the-shelf components and ingredients. President Johnson escalated the war, promising Americans "a moog in every pot." Fnp became instantly famous, of course, and wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. His synthesized moogs were all but undetectable from the real thing, and ended up being actually cheaper once the cost of transportation had been deducted. Plus they ran on rechargeable batteries! President Johnson bombed Vietnam up one side and down the other, promising that just another 100,000 troops would secure victory and an endless supply of moogs for the American people. Fnp then introduced his "green" or bio-moog, which was 100% organic and actually drew greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere during assembly and operation. President Johnson saw "a moog at the end of the tunnel," if just another 100,000 troops were sent to Vietnam. Fnp was urged to run for the highest office in the land on the Incorruptible Moogery ticket, and won by a landslide, garnering more votes than even John Nance Garner had. A thunderstruck Lyndon Johnson was inconsolable. "All I ever wanted was a secure supply of moogs for the American people, and this is how they react," he said in a bitter exit speech, "another 100,000 troops was all I needed to impart lasting peace, whether the #*%*^*$%^$ Vietnamese wanted it or not." Johnson dropped dead a few moments later out of sheer pique. America today is known as "The Moog Capital of the World." |
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12-14-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Festivus: It was the fiercely anti-Druid John "Quinsy" Adams, who blamed his lifelong throat affliction on a spell cast upon him by a hooded Celtic beggar of that sect whose entreaty for a halfpence he ignored while on a Cook's tour of Cornwall. Adams' sudden rages against the blue spruce were well known in Washington political circles. Anyone who invited him as a guest was warned of his odd predilection by White House staff, who sometimes offered to disguise any blue spruces on the property as poplars or aspens before the presidential visit.¹ He was once roughed up by a group of landscapers when he began furiously kicking a tree in Kenilworth Park. Luckily he was recognized before serious harm was done. On a trip to Colorado Territory in 1827 his aides were forced to sedate him and drape his coach with black bunting while passing through the magnificent Valley of the Spruces there. Adams died of apoplexy in 1848 after being presented with an Advent wreath by a well-meaning but unenlightened neighbor. ------------------------------- ¹ We get the term "spruced up," from this activity. |
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12-19-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Pious: Hmmm... that question cannot be answered directly due to the competing systems of sainthood. The American Kingdom Club (AKC), which keeps track of saints in the United States and Canada, publishes a registry of accepted breeds of saints, as does the complementary Royal Kingdom Club (RKC) in England. However, there are differences between the two which have never been resolved. For example, the RKC recognizes Stylites as a separate breed, which the AKC does not. Conversely, the AKC accept Dunkers, while the RKC treats them as an Anabaptist/Pietist cross. In terms of sheer numbers, the AKC comes out on top, with 1,013 recognized breeds of saint, while the RKC is a close second with 976. The eleven-breed discrepancy is explained by other countries' registries, like India's, which includes Pariahs, the wretched saints that live their entire lives in the streets of Calcutta. Neither the AKC nor the RKC recognize the Pariah as a saint, but more of a kind of parasitic vegetable. |
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12-23-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Devotee: Rin-Tin-Tin. Few people realize that there even was a 1943 version of Casablanca. The studio, facing wartime pressures, slapped together a remake a year after the original hit. By then Humphrey Bogart's stunt double had been drafted, Ingrid Bergman had fled back to neutral Sweden, Claude Rains had surrendered, Conrad Veidt and Paul Henreid were being held as German spies, and Peter Lorre was in prison for a string of child murders. So the film was carried pretty much by Dooley Wilson ("Sam")¹ and Rin-Tin-Tin ("Rick Blaine"/"Ilsa Lund"/"Victor Laszlo"/"Captain Renault"/ "Major Strasser"/"Ugarte"/"Signor Ferrari"). Rinty also did a cover of Max Steiner's original music for the 1942 version of the film, and conducted the Warner Bros orchestra. ----------------------------------- ¹Wilson had not been drafted because Eliot Carpenter, who played the actual piano that "Sam" pretended to play, received Wilson's draft notice, a Hollywood tradition at the time. |
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12-30-2007
Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Vegan: There was no such person. It's from the English word sear, meaning to scorch the surface of, and the French word loin, meaning "at a distance." So the combined word sirloin means "to char from afar." The term was originally applied to the device used by teen-age UFO vandals to mutilate cattle on American ranches. Later it was used to refer to the extra-crispy cuts of meat produced by the searing rays. Ranchers discovered that they could open boutique restaurants by the side of the highway to sell these char-broiled steaks while leaving the rest of the cow to recuperate, although until the end of its days it would have this haunted look in its eyes. |
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