Is there a Facebook for grownups?
This is a bleg. Jesus, I hate the word “bleg.”
Anyhow, I’m one of those sad, feckless people who dropped out of college and couldn’t think of anything better to do than stay in my college town. It was as good as anywhere, really. Every once in a while, someone from the distant past will give me a call. It always goes like this:
Me: “I’m still in the same old place.”
Them: “I figured you would be.”
Mmm. Thanks. Well, now I won’t be. I’m moving! To someplace else! Ha hah!
I’ve been extraordinarily careful since back in those freewheeling days when everybody posted under real names. Now a Google search of my real name and all reasonable variations thereof turns up nuffink. So I need to file a sort of cyber business card somewhere. I don’t want to update it or network or anything, I just want people who know me to find a contact email when they search my name.
Is there something out there like that? Because the ‘social networking’ sites all seem to be populated with infants.
Meanwhile, have you ever dreamed of teaching your cat to shit in a salad shooter? Sure, we all have. Well, now you can, with the Craptapulator! Yes, one look at this Byzantine torture device, and all kinds of crap will come flying out of your cat!
Gnus found this on Dan’s Blah Blah Blog. Charlotte shares with Dan’s cat the tendency to pee around rather than in the litterbox. In Charlotte’s case, it isn’t malicious. She’s just very, very stupid. I’ve watched her do it. She stands with all four feet planted surely in the litter, hangs her little pink bidness over the side and cuts loose. I don’t think she’d pee in the same zip code as this motorized gumball machine.
August 9, 2007 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 12
The gentle whimsy of days gone by
Sometimes the best way to appreciate the past is directly. Instead of reading a book about 1890, read a book from 1890. Only, they used such awfully big words and difficult sentences then. I’d rather look at the pictures.
Like this picture. Note how the creepy deaf person and his primitive finger-talking are kept safely behind iron gates. With his own kind. It’s just better that way (she looks like she smells a turd, doesn’t she?)
This and other adventures in the mind-bending iconography of our great-grandparents can be found at PennyPostcards.com. I’m not sure the site has been updated since I first found it, but I can always spend a happy hour flipping through its pages. I have a short memory.
The graphic arts of the Nineteenth Century are the spookiest; the category weird seems entirely superfluous. They’re all weird.
I’m having a hard time translating the captions (even adding Babelfish to my Tennessee High School French isn’t powerful enough, believe it or not), but there are odd themes emerging here. Gambling. Drunkenness. Vanity. If I’ve got my old timey symbolism right, these French people with antlers must be cuckolds.
What the hell? What happened to “having a wonderful time, wish you were here”? I have to assume people bought penny postcards to taunt each other through the mail, presumably anonymously. It must have been common, because there’s a whole range of unpleasant postcards.
Damn. That’s enough to make an onion cry.
August 8, 2007 — 6:18 pm
Comments: 9
Be a part of philological history
Work on the Oxford English Dictionary was begun in 1857, when members of the Philological Society of London became sufficiently annoyed with all the existing dictionaries. The aim was to cram in 1,300 years worth of every single goddamned word in the English language they could get their hands on, including earliest usage and quotations. Nothing much came of it for the next thirty years.
Eventually, the great work was accomplished through the use of volunteer readers. Hundreds and hundreds of them, who mailed in words and quotations on little bits of paper called quotation slips. These were mashed into chunks of dictionary called fascicles and published one by one. The 125th and final fascicle was published in 1928.
One of the most prolific contributors was Dr. W.C. Minor, who provided thousands of entries. The editors later discovered he was an inmate at my next home, the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. He was an American Civil War vet who went mad and shot some poor bastard more or less at random on the streets of London. Lexicographer by day, crunchy nutball after dark. Simon Winchester wrote a very interesting book about it a few years ago. Well, I thought it was interesting.
The current edition of the OED is 20 volumes and over 300,000 words (also available online and by CD). The Oxford University Press has never made a net profit on sales of the dictionary.
It seems likely Woody’s World of Penis Euphemisms has never made a profit, either, but Woody’s goal is somewhat more modest: to collect every single word for penis, like, ever. He’s asking for submissions. Can you help?
Urban dictionary was first. Hmph. And they can bite me.
August 7, 2007 — 5:51 pm
Comments: 73
Today’s smart young weasel is on the move!
Dammit, nobody told me liquor stores will just give you cardboard boxes if you ask them. It’s taken me ten years to drink enough cheap booze to move house.
Yes, that’s right — after ten years of desperate scheming, Weasel is finally moving to England, land of socialized medicine, Benny Hill and Mr Brain’s Pork Faggots.
A dozen years ago, I and my Beloved (who is a Brit, but an otherwise unobjectionable person) worked out that we could combine our two unimpressive piles of crap into one huge, spectacular mountain of crap.
We never dreamed that happy day would be this long in coming, but everything is complicated when you’re older. You have to embezzle funds slowly or some nosey git in Accounting is bound to notice something. Plus, there are taxes to dodge and elderly parents to smother. Honestly, you have no idea.
I hadn’t mentioned it because we’ve come close before, only to have the deal fall through. Buying real estate in Britain is tricksy business. But I’ve decided if we don’t get this house, I’m going to fly over, rampage through the estate agent’s office with a tomahawk, burn the house to the ground and spend the rest of my life incarcerated, preferably in Broadmoor, where so many of my heroes have lived.
So, see, I’ll be moving to England in any case.
Join me, won’t you? It’ll be fun. In a “watching a train wreck” sort of way. This will be a fantastically complicated process, with the buying and selling and renting of properties, with visa applications and quarantines and immigration authorities, with packing, giving, throwing and otherwise getting rid of a lifetime’s accumulations (anybody need a quart of nitric acid?). Everything must be done in a specific order with military precision or tragedy ensues.
And I’m sure to need more boxes…
August 6, 2007 — 5:36 pm
Comments: 34
Friday snot blogging
My stoopid boss gave me his stoopid cold. Of course, when he had it, he worked through it. We do that. It’s the office ethic. Which is why we keep giving each other colds.
I would’ve done, but the sore throat woke me up at midnight. No sleep + bad cold + dual-cat vet appointment first thing = to hell with it, I’m not going in. I haven’t taken a sick day in I don’t know how long. Considering I slunk around the house miserable and sulky today, I now remember why.
August 3, 2007 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 28
Trilogy of Terror
Earlier this week, Weirdomatic published a series of creepy ads from times gone by. You probably saw it; the link was going around. In fact, they got so much traffic it knocked their server down and they had to throw up a temporary Blogspot page for that one post. Check it out if you missed it; there’s some fun stuff there.
I wanted to call your attention to three images that especially creeped the bejesus out of me. They all involve children, food and madness. Take this little girl. This isn’t how you look at bread and jam. This is how you fix your gaze upon the world-crushing tentacles of Cthulhu. That sammich must be positively non-Euclidean. This is what it looks like when you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back. And she’s the abyss.
I can’t imagine there was ever a bread called “Cellophane.” It must be an advertisement for cellophane, that marvelous, hygeinic modern packaging material that drives small children yodeling mad.
And speaking of creepy teeth…we weren’t, but I did think that little girl had the creepiest teeth ever, until I saw the porcelain tiles on this strapping lad. His teeth are so terrifyingly wrong that a forkful of spaghetti is recoiling in fear. Check it out.
I don’t know how the food stylist made pasta defy gravity, but I imagine the photographer was thinking, “see, he’s shoving that spaghetti in his mouth so fast, it’s blowin’ in the wind.” That or, “he’s screaming ‘thanks Mom!’ so enthusiastically that spaghetti is whipping around like a sail in the breeze.”
Look, he’s clutching a half-eaten weiner in his fist. And there’s another weiner, and a Vienna sausage, lying right on the fabric tablecloth next to him. As god is my witness, I will never be hungry again.
This little girl Cannot. Fucking. Believe. that piece of ham. Nothing in her five fucking years on the planet could even BEGIN to fucking prepare her for that fucking piece of ham. Fuck.
She is hamsmacked. Hamblasted. Hamstruck. Behamnifyed. Hamazed. Hamstonished.
Awww…I’m just joking. She’s obviously not even looking at the piece of ham; her eyes are unfocused, off in the middle distance. It’s an expression poised so poignantly between rapture and terror, I’m guessing her water just broke.
I can’t begin to explain these ads. My only thought is, maybe it was so difficult to get kids interested in food that images of children staring at comestibles with psychotic lust was a selling technique.
Man, we fixed that problem, didn’t we?
August 2, 2007 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 38
Elsewhere in the news…
Nothing very exciting here, just an afternoon trawl through the world of journalism. I’ve got a bookmark list that would choke a goat.
Norwegian princess talks to angels. You know what struck me as really strange? She’s a trained physical therapist. What kind of job is that for a princess?
It’s the Popephone! And it’s for you. “Organizers of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Austria next month are offering the faithful a foretaste: daily cell phone text messages with quotes from the pontiff.”
Nepalese man slices off right hand and presents it to Kali. Some religions are harder to practice than others.
World’s largest hand-woven carpet unveiled in Tehran. It’s five and a half tons. Three hundred and ninety-nine feet long by 145 feet wide. It took 1,200 Iranian carpet weavers a year to make it. It’s going in a mosque in the UAE and I’d hate like hell to be the one who had to Hoover it.
British teachers’ union way too big for its britches. Calls for YouTube to be shut down to forestall “cyber bullying.” Some days, you want to queue them up and walk down the line, slapping.
I had to read this lede three times before I understood a word of it: “A one-legged man who was run down by a drunk woman after she hijacked a horse-drawn carriage has said he’ll be able to get out of the way if it happens again – with a new mobility scooter donated by regulars at his local pub.” That is so Brighton.
First Khmer Rouge leader charged. Seriously. First one. This isn’t some new outbreak of Khmer Rougery, either. This is the first of the whole murderous pack of commie nutjobs from the mid seventies to go on trial. Pol Pot died years ago, and the rest of the psychos are wandering around free.
Phew! Lighten up, Weasel. A few from Fazed. Babies eating lemons. I’m not much on babies, but watching a bunch of these poor little bastards get the citrus willies made me go “awwwwwww.” The mask illusion. A slowly rotating Charlie Chaplin mask. Your brain absolutely refuses to let you see a concave human face, so when you get ’round to the back of the mask, it tells you terrible lies. From the New Yorker, what you thought people were thinking about you when you were a kid.
That’s it. Enough. Now we drink.
August 1, 2007 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 4