In the tradition of my 12/7/18 posting “O rosemary, my rosemary”, this Christmas tree from bon appétit magazine:
(#1) Savory Cheese-Filled Croquembouche
[ba‘s text:] This croquembouche is constructed with cheesy gougères [baked savory pastry, made of choux dough mixed with cheese] and an herbed cheese filling. It’s the showstopping holiday appetizer you didn’t know you needed.
And then ba‘s call to earnest self-improvement for the holidays:
(#2)
A juxtaposition of two sets of greetings for the season, each expressing thanks for the recipient’s work.
Item A, two pieces of e-mail to Emily Menon Bender, from completely unfamiliar organizations, thanking her for her publications in computational linguistics: some new cross between holiday cards from commercial associates (maintaining the business relationship) and what Margalit Fox calls “demented p.r. releases”, what amount to cold calls (by electronic means or ordinary mail) soliciting the recipient’s business.
Item B, a brief e-mail to me from a complete stranger thanking me for my blog postings. Thanks to the fact that the sender has a name even rarer than mine, I was able to verify that he was not only a real person but a very interesting scholar — and the note moved me far more than he could have imagined, coming after a long dispiriting week. (What’s more, it turned out to latch onto my morning name from the 18th, (Lady) Ottoline Morrell.)
Having tackled the Christmas season as a whole, Sandra Boynton examines one specific day: on FB yesterday, with “A helpful tip on National Pfeffernüsse Day” (December 23rd):
(#1)
On peppernuts. And on the recipe register (here: Recipe Object Omission in roll thoroughly in confectioners’ sugar).
(Minimal linguistic content. But it’s certainly seasonal.)
I have an admitted fondness for cheesy shark movies (which is almost all shark movies). But I don’t think I’ve been sufficiently clear about my distaste for almost all Christmas movies; I have a low tolerance for sentimentality. I recently re-watched Love Actually as an exercise in MST3K-style snark, which entertained me, but still left me sad that so many accomplished and engaging actors should have become enmeshed in the thing. (Yes, I know, the movie is wildly popular.)
The seasonal-sentiment component of today’s Christmas movie, Santa Jaws (a 2018 release on the Syfy Channel), is relatively small, and its preposterous-premise component is extraordinarily high (better to read the plot summary first, to get your guffaws out of the way ahead of time), but then cheesy shark movies as a genre have preposterous premises and incredible plots, so I can tell you that within the constraints of the genre this flick is well-done, with nice performances from the cast.
(#1)
(Warning: brief reference to sexual body parts in a caption.)
As I observed yesterday, in the posting “22-festoon!”, today (December 22nd) is the holiday of Festoonus, celebrating “the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance”, with “elaborate light shows, decorating your bodies, sharing exotic food, dancing, and making public and communal art and music”. Inevitably, there are people who are intensely devoted to, identified with, the holiday. These are the Festoonists.
First, season’s greetings from the person responsible for “Hippo Birdie Two Ewe(s)!”. Then, a duplicitous stop-motion animation penguin bearing gifts.
Adrienne Shapiro and her husband Kit Transue (my stepson) festooned in lights in a wonderful tribute to the season (today being the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, a day to shine light against the dark):
(#1)
And here I get to explain that today, December 21st, is Festoonus Eve, aka PeneFestoonus (‘almost Festoonus’, with the prefix pen(e)- ‘almost’ of peninsula, penumbra, penultimate, and penecontemporaneous) or the Day Before Festoonus.
It began with a plant at the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, a plant that reminded me of a cedar shrub, with scale-like leaves. This turned out to be Fabiana imbricata violacea (or Chilean heather — it was in the central Chile section of the garden, in fact), in the Solanaceae, the nightshade family (also including tomatos, potatoes, tobacco, petunias, and much more). Then in the South Africa section, a rather similar shrub, with scale-like leaves; this turned out to be a variety of Coleonema pulchellum (or confetti bush), in the Rutaceae, the rue or citrus family (which generally have broad leaves).
The coleonema was growing together with some (broad-leaved) plants with interestingly contrasting foliage: some scented geraniums and some Martin’s spurges. Bringing in two more plant families — respectively, the Gerianaceae (or geranium family) and the Euphorbiaceae (or spurge family).
All this led me to Calluna vulgaris, or heather (given that I already had “Chilean heather”), in still another plant family (the Ericaceae, the heath or heather family), with needle-like or scale-like leaves. And of course to cedars, with their scale-like leaves. Well, the cedars I first thought of were “Japanese cedars” — Cryptomeria japonica, in the Cupressaceae (or cypress family). But wait! The well-known cedar trees, the cedars of Lebanon, are Cedrus libani — with needle-like leaves, in the Pinaceae (or pine family).
Ah, needle-like leaves — not just in (some) conifers, like the fir tree (in the Pinaceae), but also in other families: for example, in rosemary, in the Lamiaceae (the labiate or mint family, otherwise mostly broad-leaved).
Two themes here: leaf types (broad, needle-like, scale-like) and plant families (including a number not already in my inventory, even though the plants in them are very familiar). Plus, of course, the familiar agony about common names (think about those heathers, and those cedars). Details follow.
Thanks to Facebook friends who provided a link to an xkcd cartoon from way back (5/27/11): #904 Sports:
The point is that sports color commenators treat essentially random day-to-day fluctuations as indicators of trends — because they have lots of time to fill and not a lot of substance to fill it with (play-by-play coverage is something else), and because like all of us they are narratophiles (lovers of story) and seek to find a coherent narrative in pretty much anything that happens. Meanwhile, color commentators can fall back on all that accumulated data, to wield fan statistics as another time-filler.