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Annals of identity
From several friends on Facebook, links to stories about merman Eric Ducharme, for instance an International Business Times story of 4/4/13 by JR Tungol that begins: Some people enjoy reading, while...
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Word geographies
Some good words here about Asya Pereltsvaig’s explorations in word geography, from the etymology section of her Languages of the World site, which has some cool maps. In no particular order (some...
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Chinese lazy susan
In the Bay Area section of the NYT on February 11, Bernice Yeung’s “Lost for Years, a Trove of Chinatown Art Is Tracked Down”: It’s a modern detective story, set in San Francisco’s atmospheric...
View ArticleMultiple-level coordination
A few days ago I started writing up a note about Chinese stereotypes of Westerners, especially Western men, from my experiences teaching at Beijing Language Institute (as it was then) in 1985. The...
View ArticleOrigin myths
From my back files, in a story in the April 19, 2010 New Yorker (“The Memory Kitchen: A chef recovers the foods that Turkey forgot” by Elif Batuman, about Istanbul chef Musa Dağdevireyn): “Our people...
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Avocado Chronicles: 4 avotoast
Although, or perhaps because, I live in one of the world’s avocado toast hot spots, I’d hoped to avoid posting on the silly fad for avotoast, but then this Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon — with its pun...
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Contamination by association
(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.) Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden: (#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols...
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Bowls of gumbo
In the mail from bon appétit magazine this morning (Daylight Saving Day in the US), this hymn to the gumbo restaurants of New Orleans: (#1) Artwork for the story, “The 8 Best Bowls of Gumbo in New...
View ArticleLisztomania enters the 21st century
As a follow-up to my posting yesterday, “Anti-Ode to Liszt” (slamming his piano transcription of the Ode to Joy section of Beethoven’s 9th symphony), an amazing New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, in print...
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Is the farmer busy or pretty?
An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question): Ruthie is laboring at a...
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