Month: April 2004
Motor d’un cavall
Però d’on és la matrícula?
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Condescending southerner David Green (he’s Manchester-based) has a piece on the Beeb listing the delights that await Rivaldo when he finally signs for Bolton Wanderers. What many people this morning find difficult to understand is why Rivaldo can’t be arsed to travel those extra 10 miles up the A666 to the Anchor Ground, home of…
Maartje Draak (1907-1995) was a brilliant Celtologist who is remembered principally for having laid bare the debt of the courtly romance to folklore. Draak is Dutch for “dragon”, and she is said on occasion to have begun lectures with the words: “My name is Draak and I deal with fairytales.”
The Mexicain, advertised in La Vanguardia on April 24th 1904, is the kind of miracle cure for obesity about which one would like to know more. Was it a modern-type fat-buster, or did it simply cause chronic diarrhea? So, if you’re a descendant of Dr Jawás (but not if you’re a Star Wars nerd) or…
Sorry, but I just couldn’t resist this photo, which was sent to me by le Big FFF, who received it from someone else a long time ago. I think it’s probably early 70s Anglophone West Africa, but your guess is as good as mine:
If you search Google for “Flurble gronk bloopit, bnip Frundletrune” it asks – quite fairly in my opinion – whether you meant “Fluble gronk bloopit, bnip Frundletrune“. Let’s see what kind of ads that generates. Via Syntactic Saccharose.
The objective of Euratom is To ensure a regular and equitable supply of ores, Sorry, the phone’s ringing.
Mark Liberman has a devastating post that goes way beyond the other day’s rather unconcluded up business. What I wonder, though, and briefly so, is why “to * up” ghits about so much more than “to * down“, to say nothing of that unloved beast, “to * it all around”. Dinner is emerging from the…
The noble Iggy notes that Korean “parents are turning to surgery to sort out misplaced l and r sounds.” Apparently The procedure, which takes twenty to thirty minutes under local anesthetic, involves snipping the thin tissue under the tongue to make it longer and supposedly nimbler. This is an interesting idea. For example, are there…
I once saw a pocket trumpet miraculously transformed by a car into something vaguely resembling a plate, but back in 1753 James Hanson and his father were condemned to transportation for trying to achieve the opposite without paying for the raw materials. This text is from the online proceedings of the Old Bailey: (M.) James…
Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians