Today on Facebook, Hana Filip passed on a two-sentence poem in prose (an English translation from the German original):
Jan Antonin Baťa, or Bata, the genius entrepreneur who founded the Bata shoe emporium, had in his main headquarters in Zlín (Moravia, Czech Republic), an elevator in the size of a fully equipped office. While sitting in this office, he could move up and down his headquarters building and visit its different departments.
(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):
Yesterday, a news story (from an Ohio site) with this summary of its subject, Madelyn Varela:
Ohio’s viral lesbian cheesemonger
This builds in sound from its onset to its cheesemonger climax, which was something of a surprise (just on likelihood, I was expecting goatfarmer); and its content comes across like a series of random pings: Ohio; then a lot of followers (viral here means, roughly ‘widely circulated, with many followers’); then, whoa, a dyke; and, who would have guessed, a seller of cheese (in a word, a cheesemonger). A lovely bit of found poetry.
So, of course, I gilded it.
Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.
(#1) Alfred Tennyson,”The Lady of Shalott” (1832)
A Joe Dator cartoon in the latest (11/24/25) print issue of the New Yorker poses the question, “What if Humpty Dumpty had survived his fall?”
Humpty Dumpty is an egg. An egg contains a developing chicken embryo. The embryo will eventually mature, crack through the egg, and emerge as a chick. (There is even theme music for this scenario, Mussorgsky’s “Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks / the Chicks in their Shells”, from “Pictures at an Exhibition”.)
JD shows the first moment of emergence, the chick’s head bursting through the chest of a dismayed Humpty Dumpty, who is toppling backwards in his chair — a scene that will be viscerally painful for modern audiences familiar with the 1979 movie Alien, with its famously grotesque Chestbuster scene, but will in any case evoke a fatal heart attack :
(#2) Humpty Dumpty and his female companion at table, when the mortal wound opens up; it will crack him from side to side
Faced with this judgment on Facebook today about the Spelling Bee puzzle from the New York Times,
(#1) POETITE: not a word (in the Spelling Bee dictionary)
Dennis Baron owlishly protested with word play incorporating a pun on concrete:
It’s the stuff concrete poems are made from.
Well played, Dennis!
The trigger was singing the shapenote hymn Millbrook, 484t in the 2025 edition — yes, the latest revision, successor to the 1991 revision — of the Sacred Harp yesterday; I was at home, following along via Zoom with the Palo Alto singers (who were at the UUC church in southern Palo Alto). Four connections here:
— 1, the song comes from the 2013 Shenandoah Harmony book (where it’s 264b), which I’d sung from on occasion (so it was in fact already a favorite); I don’t know why it’s named Millbrook (from Millbrook AL? Millbrook Village NJ? from some specific millbrook?)
— 2, the song has the same name as the much more widely known utterly secular composition “Millbrook” (1998), by singer / songwriter Rufus Wainwright, referring to the very tony New York village of Millbrook — so, two musical Millbrooks
— 3, the village of Millbrook is the home of the Millbrook School, a private boarding school that’s interesting in its own right; and there’s a connection to Rufus Wainwright, who’s a 1991 graduate of the school
— 4, Bill Richardson — a friend from a boys’ summer camp (ca. 1950) / Princeton (ca. 1960) / Wyomissing PA (vs. my West Lawn PA, a couple miles away), now Golden CO vs. Palo Alto CA — is a much earlier graduate of the school (in 1958)
An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:
(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)
(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)
The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type. But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.
A comic poem and a cartoon for October.
A while back (7/10, to be exact), two Sacred Harp singers came by my house to pick up the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the edition we’ve been singing from for 34 years (a wonderful object that I was giving away to reduce my household belongings dramatically), and like the bright-eyed Mariner ensnaring the wedding guest trapped on his stone (who cannot choose but hear), I engaged them in an hour or so of animated chat, to relieve my loneliness, after which we sang three songs from that Sacred Harp.
In e-mail afterwards, thanking them for their friendship and forbearance, I asked them a strange question:
While you were with me, did you notice anything odd about one of my hands (my right hand, specifically)? Or about how I used my right arm?
One replied:
we both noticed several fingers were bent. I assumed this was from arthritis, so if there’s more of a story I don’t know it or I’ve forgotten.
I then told them a story that I was convinced I’d posted about, on Language Log or this blog, but apparently not, so now I’m now telling it to you too.
