Katexic Clippings

Mullah Nasruddin and the Hot Peppers

The Mullah Nasruddin, the one-man Three Stooges of Sufi holy wisdom, wanted to buy something, so he strolled to the market and there saw a splendid bushel basketful of red peppers. He asked how much they cost. Only one dinar, exactly how much money he had! He went around inquiring what other baskets of things cost, and all of them were much more expensive.

And so he bought the beautiful peppers and went home. Soon a neighbor walked by and saw Nasruddin sitting in front of his house with a half-empty basket of peppers in his lap, eating them and crying miserably. “Mullah Nasruddin, why are you eating those peppers?” the neighbor asked. Nasruddin looked at him tearfully and said, “I went to the market and bought them. I paid a full dinar. Surely one will be sweet!”

—from “Foreword” (The Missouri Review, 1994)

panjandrum

Robin Hood - Evil Prince John

panjandrum /pan-JAN-drəm/. noun. A powerful, usually pompous and overbearing, official. Also, rarely, a rocket-propelled cart used during World War II. The word was supposedly created by playwright Samuel Foote as part of a nonsense line to put to the test actor Charles Macklin’s claim to remember anything upon hearing it once (see first example below).
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Links: August 6, 2017

  1. The 2017 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year prize winners are all wonderfu…but the grand prize winner is extraordinary.

  2. Powell’s Compendium of Readerly Terms contains punny entries such as wordigo, readultery, camareaderie and many (well, 39) more. [Thanks, Reader S.!] || See also, a punny bonus.

  3. Did you know Banksy operates an “art hotel” in Bethlehem? Open for the year of 2017, at least. It’s just as—Banksian—as you’d expect. → The Walled Off Hotel

  4. The British Library flickr account has more than a million (1,023,714 images in over 1000 albums at the time of writing) free images for your browsing pleasure. Clamorites might enjoy starting with Book Covers, Illustrated Letters & Typography, Ghosts & Ghoulish Scenes and Maps, found by the community.

  5. I’m not sold on the sales pitch for the book, but I do love writing letters…and combining letter writing with random acts of kindness sounds like fun. You can play too! → Secret Letters to Strangers Month – Global Kindness Initiative

  6. You might remember the beautiful Keaton Music Typewriter shared here a few years ago (because you memorize every link, right?). Turns out there is one for sale for just $12,000. || See also: a ► video demo of the typewriter in action.

  7. I once gave a presentation that changed my own life…and it involved automatons, simulacra, technology and we, the ghosts in the machine. So the mechanical age “pre-history” of artificial intelligence fascinates me. And hopefully you. → Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence

  8. The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run. Via [Reader B.], who adds, “Bonus for the Dead Hand theory.”

  9. List: 20 Literary Would-You-Rathers

  10. Today in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee publishes a short summary of his new “World Wide Web” project to a public USENET news group (remember those?), describing a “world” that consisted of “documents and links” that could be “clicked by a mouse” to follow links to “other documents.” Today you can navigate 8K porn with your voice and pay with BitCoin while bots concoct a custom fake news stream just for you. Ah, progress.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“► The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a 1910 American silent film and the earliest surviving film version of L. Frank Baum’s made by the Selig Polyscope Company without Baum’s direct input. ¶ It was created to fulfill a contractual obligation associated with Baum’s personal bankruptcy caused by ‘The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays…'”