- Realms of Fantasy back from the grave again…again? Naturally, there’s lots of reason to be dubious.
- Also dubious: this “apology” from Cooks Source. (First mentioned here Monday.) When you’ve been demonstrably proven to have a history of stealing your content from other sources, and your only excuse is an indignant cry of “the internet is public domain and you should be thanking us!” — a bizarrely dumb thing to hear an editor say — then you really don’t get to paint yourself as the wronged party, much less complain that your “issues and photos [were] used without [y]our knowledge or consent.”
- Editing Monty Python & the Holy Grail:
I would like to get back to the Censor and agree to lose the shits, take the odd Jesus Christ out and lose Oh fuck off, but to retain ‘fart in your general direction’, ‘castanets of your testicles’ and ‘oral sex’ and ask him for an ‘A’ rating on that basis.
- Is Stephen King America’s favorite author?
- And finally, from someone else who made that “favorite authors” list, a look at how J.K. Rowling plots. [via]
language
One fish, two fish, red fish, stamfish
Today was kind of weird, both a regular Monday and everything that comes with that, and almost a Friday, given that I’m off from work tomorrow. Unfortunately, it’s for a doctor’s appointment. I was originally going to be off this coming Friday, the start of a three-day weekend, but I rescheduled when I needed to make this appointment. That seemed easier than taking an additional half day this week, which also would have left me with one half-day less to use later on, in the likely event that I need to make any additional appointments.
So it’s kind of like Friday, although also not anything like it at all.
The word for the day on my Forgotten English desk calendar is “stamfish,” meaning “to talk in a way not generally understood.” I’ll leave it to you to decide how much I live up to the ideal in Matsell’s 1859 Rogue’s Lexicon.
Dungow-dash
Today was kind of a bust as a vacation day, and pretty much what I expected from my doctor’s appointment. It went well enough, and it’s always good to get a medical opinion that isn’t a faceless internet site, but not much has changed except their office reception area.
I have a scrip for a new MRI — and won’t that be fun? — which, after a little light insurance authorization at their end, I should be able to schedule early next week. Hopefully that means I can get back to my spine doctor, to figure out if it’s the disc or he wants to send me to someone else, before the end of October. I should be more than fine until then; it’s less dealing with the mild (if persistent) discomfort that bothers me, and more the uncertainty and possible need to take more days off.
We’ll see. Nothing I can do about it until Monday.
The Forgotten English word for today is “dungow-dash,” meaning:
When the clouds threaten hail or rain it is said, “There is a deal of dungow-dash to come down.” From dung, filth.
That according to an 1826 Glossary of Some Words Used in Cheshire — and if that’s not an authoritative source, I don’t know what is. It rained a little here today, though hardly enough to start resorting to nineteenth-century Cheshire slang. (Although I understand that in some wilds of the world it actually snowed!) It was chill and windy here more than anything — windy enough to knock out the power, first at the doctor’s office for a moment, and then again while I was on my way home. Which meant that when I got home — with a few groceries in tow, I should add — I couldn’t get in the house. I only had keys for the side door, which is inside the garage, whose door is electrically operated. I walked around the house for ten or fifteen minutes, contemplating both melting ice cream and breaking windows, and accidentally making enough noise to bother the dog, who was safe inside the kitchen I couldn’t get to. Luckily the power came back on before long, and none of the groceries were ruined beyond salvage. And I didn’t have to wait several hours for one of my parents to return home…or go about the clumsy process of breaking into my own house.
Anyway, that was Friday. Not a particularly exciting day — I slept pretty late, had a chicken sandwich for lunch, went to the doctor — but at least not a filth-falling-from-the-sky kind of day.
Wednesday various
- A vexation of zombies! Supernatural Collective Nouns. [via]
- Wow, H.G. Wells would hate American journalism today!
- Swanky new Vegas hotel’s ‘death ray’ proves inconvenient for some guests. Imagine that. [via]
- That Johnny Depp, what a mensch! (I still don’t want to see the next Pirates movie, though.) [via]
- And finally, via Reuters: “A man carries a shark through the streets of Mogadishu September 23, 2010.”
I love how there is absolutely no context given for this.
MelshGruber
Sometimes I think my Forgotten English desk calendar is making things up. About a month ago, it was “fourteen hundred,” which was supposedly “the cry uttered on the London Stock exchange when the presence of a stranger [was] detected. It was supposed to be derived from the fact that the number of members of the exchange was, for long, limited to 1399.”
The word for this weekend is “melsh-dick,” meaning “a wood demon who is supposed to guard over unripe nuts.” No, seriously. “‘Melsh Dick‘ll catch thee lad,’ was a common threat used to frighten children going nutting.”
Children just don’t go nutting as often as they used, do they? There’s just not as much call for demons to protect hazelnuts “from the depredations of mischievous boys.”
I wonder if that’s what the mischievous boys I saw across the earlier tonight were doing. It looked like they were trespassing on our neighbor’s property, using the fact that the house has been dark and for sale since he passed away in July, as an excuse to drink in the backyard — or, for all I know, try to break in. I only saw them briefly, rushing from around the side of the house, and speeding off, so I don’t want to assume too much. Maybe somebody called the cops, or maybe it was all perfectly innocent. I don’t think hazelnuts grow in this area, but you never know. Not with young boys and their depredations. And not with Melsh Dick lying down on the job.
Otherwise it was a quiet Saturday for the most part, largely spent writing and hanging around the house. I did mail out a few more copies of Kaleidotrope this morning, which should be everybody except new subscribers (hint hint) and a few reviewers. I was tempted to go see The Social Network this morning — the matinee, weirdly, was actually 10:30 — but I wasn’t sure that my back could take it. I’m still not sure, but it has seemed better today, maybe thanks to the heating pad I’ve been using since last night.
This evening, my parents and I had a very nice dinner out, then I came home and watched MacGruber. It was okay. Some of it, the sillier parts, were almost inspired. But I can’t help but feel Nathan Rabin was right when he noted that “It’s so obsessed with getting the hair, clothes, beats, clichés, music, and conventions of cheesy ’80s action movies in the Cannon vein right that it sometimes forgets to include jokes.” It also sometimes mistakes dick and fart jokes for good jokes, but that’s almost to be expected.
If nothing else, the celery was funny.
And what more can you ask from a day than funny celery and protected hazelnuts? What more indeed?