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.
Tomorrow x 4
November 21, 2025The egg crack’d from side to side
November 21, 2025
(#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
A gyro bowl from Nick the Greek
November 20, 2025Another chapter in foraging for food by restaurant delivery. I had a desire for some gyros, an old favorite in the wide world of demotic cuisines, in this case Greek: from Merriam-Webster online (considerably amended):
noun gyro (plural gyros): /jíro/ [North American] a sandwich especially of lamb and beef [roasted on a spit and sliced], tomato, onion, and yogurt sauce [tzatziki] on pita bread [AZ: the name comes originally from Greek, but has been thoroughly Anglicized, so that the phonology and morphology of the Greek name are no longer relevant to the American name]
Je suis Monsieur Pantoufles
November 19, 2025Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun
pantoufle (fem.): slipper; a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors
(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)
Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.
But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.
An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. Read the rest of this entry »
Koi Palace takeout
November 18, 2025Today’s food adventure was to satisfy a yen for Chinese dumplings, at which point I discovered Koi Palace, which is apparently a local dim sum institution, with restaurants in Daly City, Dublin, Milpitas, and Cupertino, plus a takeout site in Redwood City, only a couple of miles from my house. You get to the takeout site via DoorDash on-line, and then pick up your order or (if you are me) have it delivered by DoorDash.
(I have a local wild-favorite dim sum restaurant, Tai Pan in Palo Alto (with previous mentions on this blog), but its dinner service times are uncongenial to my current daily schedule (though they do now deliver by DoorDash), so I thought I’d try something new.)
What’s your number?
November 18, 2025My excellent sister-in-law-in-law Virginia Transue, widow of a mathematician who was the son of a mathematician, mused on Facebook this morning about the extraordinarily prolific and collaborative Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös:
Paul Erdös collaborated with so many people that mathematicians are often asked what their ERDÖS NUMBER is. If you wrote a paper with him your number was 1. If you wrote a paper with somebody who had written one with him it was 2… My Bill’s Erdös number was 2, his father’s was 3
From my 7/27/09 Language Log posting “Erdös?”:
There are linguists with Erdős numbers of 2 (András Kornai), 3 (Geoff Pullum, via András), and 4 (me, via Geoff)
Pressure Drops and Itchy Spots
November 17, 2025Yesterday’s set-up (“Two afflictions”) for today’s more detailed report:
I have largely lost the last few days to afflictions
…. One of [them] comes with rapid descents into very low barometric pressures [pressure drops] (as has happened twice in the last three days, as sea storms sweep through coastal California). The other is a mystery ailment that has variously annoyed and plagued me for many years: intensely itchy spots over most of my body, but especially my limbs, sometimes maturing into actual pustules; I have taken to referring to this condition as the itchies. On the night of the 14th/15th, I had the worst attack of the itchies in my life
So today I bring you a report on the Days of Pressure Drops and the Itchies. You hope for days of milk and honey, cakes and ale, wine and roses, beer and skittles, but sometimes you get days of pressure drops and the itchies. Both of which hurt, both of which exhaust you.
Two afflictions
November 16, 2025I have largely lost the last few days to afflictions, poleaxed by pain of several varieties, immobilized by exhaustion, escaping into sleep, into music that delights me, and into familiar old tv dramas with moral lessons that satisfy my desire for order in the world.
One of the afflictions comes with rapid descents into very low barometric pressures (as has happened twice in the last three days, as sea storms sweep through coastal California). The other is a mystery ailment that has variously annoyed and plagued me for many years: intensely itchy spots over most of my body, but especially my limbs, sometimes maturing into actual pustules; I have taken to referring to this condition as the itchies. On the night of the 14th/15th, I had the worst attack of the itchies in my life, all over my body, too many to count, indescribably awful.
But … the barometric pressure rises to something tolerable, or even delightful, within a few hours. And the Assault of the Itchies tale has a delightful denouement. So I am worn out but happy. And in the midst of this, my vital signs have been splendid, in particular very low blood pressure and a stunningly good resting pulse rate.
Alas, the day has wound down — I am in good shape, and happy, but worn out — so I will put off all the exciting details for tomorrow: Pressure Drop and the Itchies.
Taking Goat to lunch
November 15, 2025Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat lives up to his name:
The crucial point: take you to lunch in the context of birthday greetings to Goat — in this context, clearly an instance of the phrasal idiom I’ll label take someone to (‘host someone at (an event), treat someone to (an event)’), and so understood by Goat (and, I think, by all readers of this strip); but then, in a kind of lexicographic bait and switch, Rat maintains that he meant only the caused-motion verb take (‘convey something to (an event at) some place’) and takes no responsibility for paying for the occasion
Then, in an appendix to this main discussion, I expose my bafflement at the treatment of the phrasal idiom take someone to in dictionaries: I can’t find one that lists it (while treat someone to is well covered).
Eric Swalwell and his facial scruff
November 14, 2025The US congressman, in today’s news because his pointed criticisms of Our Overlord Grabpussy have netted him a retributive charge of mortgage fraud, but I was about to post about him as an exemplar of liberal political critique (along with, among others, Rachel Maddow, Pete Buttigieg, and Joyce Vance) and also of nice-guy masculinity (masculinity being one of my perennial topics), with a note on a presentation of himself that employs both informal dress and facial scruff — the latter being a conventional advertisement of masculinity and toughness.