much and earnest

(Source)

When somebody is a little bit wrong–say, when a waiter puts nonfat milk in your espresso macchiato, instead of lowfat milk–it is often quite easy to explain to them how and why they are wrong. But if somebody is surpassingly wrong–say, when a waiter bites your nose instead of taking your order–you can often be so surprised that you are unable to say anything at all.

- Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Second), ch. 5

Hehe. Wishing WordPress could handle the video HTML code, I must instead send you away from the blog. But it’s worth the trip.

I recently found this comic in a 2004 Commonweal article. I think the anonymity of the saint is intentional.

Nights and early mornings in the desert can get a bit chilly. This morning I left the kitchen in the middle of making breakfast:

Me: I’m going to put my shoes on – my feet are cold.

Noelle: Will you put some music on? My soul is cold.

So now we’re listening to an iPod Genius playlist, based on a Stacey Kent song.

How every fool can play upon the word!

- Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 3.5.37

Lady Wickham, the distant party in a brief telephone conversation, frightenedly asks Bertram whether the “awful news” in this morning’s (UK) Times is true. Not having read today’s Times (he never does), Bertie fails to answer. But due to the distant party’s sudden fainting, he has no need to. After hanging up, he finds a copy of the paper and sits down to read:

At a cursory glance, what might be called swoon material appeared to be totally absent from its columns. The Duchess of something had been opening a bazaar at Wimbledon in aid of a deserving charity, there was an article on salmon fishing on the Wye, and a cabinet minister had made a speech about conditions in the cotton industry, but I could see nothing in these items to induce a loss of consciousness. Nor did it seem probable that a woman would have passed out cold on reading that Herbert Robinson (26) of Grove Road, Ponder’s End, had been jugged for stealing a pair of green-and-yellow checked trousers. I turned to the cricket news. Had some friend of hers failed to score in one of yesterday’s county matches owing to a doubtful l-b-w decision?

It was just after I had run the eye down the Births and Marriages that I happened to look at the Engagements, and a moment later I was shooting out of my chair as if a spike had come through its cushioned seat and penetrated the fleshy parts.

“Jeeves!” I yelled….

- P.G. Wodehouse, How Right You Are, Jeeves, ch. 2

More here.

…the man who sees a cucumber and thinks it a woman is labeled mad because this happens very rarely.

- Folly, in Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly

I stopped my daily readings of many blogs (made much simpler by Google Reader) about five days ago, when we left Lexington for Memphis. As a result I have only just learned that the good German doktor has bidden us farewell.

I expressed my hope for it a few months ago. Now he’s done it. My brother-in-law Tyler (whom my wife and I recently made an uncle; pictures; Tyler’s reaction; my father-in-law’s reaction) is back in the blogosphere with Daily Belly Button Lint in Kuwait.

Tyler is teaching a few classes to middle-schoolers over there. Noelle and I enjoy his updates and occasionally brilliant humor (twelve months later, this one still makes me laugh).

He’s quite busy at the moment, but don’t be turned off by the delay between posts. His belly button lint is worth your time.

By the way, I think “belly button lint” is a fantastic description of most of what we do in the blogosphere. Mea culpa!

…is revealed here. Please read it and laugh. And learn a few new vocabulary words.

The last thing between me and the completion of my first year of graduate school is a 25-page paper for my John Donne seminar. I’m planning to contextualize one of his sermons (he was a minister in the Church of England for the last 15 years of his life) in a 17th-century Anglican service of worship.

So today, Noelle and I did our grocery shopping accordingly:

• Six bottles of IBC Cream Soda
• One box of Pop-Tarts (strawberry flavored)
• One ten-pack of mini Butterfingers
• One eight-pack of mini Snickers
• And, of course, the obligatory two half-gallons of vanilla and mint chocolate chip ice cream.

We’ve never done any food-splurging like this before, but you never know just what you’ll need to get through a week of reading and paper-writing.

HT: Crunchy Con

“If Dickens was alive today, he would probably have built the place himself,” Hutchins said of the theme park in Chatham, once a big unemployment blackspot after the dockyards closed in the 1980s but now a major regeneration target. [...] He was very much a populist.

Hutchins may be right. Dickens would have leaped at any chance to increase the size of his audience. But he probably also would have made the park fantastic. I’m not sure that anyone else can – at least while retaining its Dickensian nature.

Here’s the whole article.

(HT: Mere Comments)

In fact, if Homestar Runner is a kind of latter-day Peanuts, it seems that somehow it’s a Peanuts in which Lucy has become the star.

If you can resist a teaser quote like that, you’re made of stronger stuff than I. Here’s the entire article (from The Scriptorium).

Gmail Paper? C’mon.

Ha. I can relate to this. My experience was with Road Runner, one of Time Warner’s babies.