“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise——“
“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.
“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily. “Really you are very dull!”
—Lewis Carroll
—found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
fizgig
fizgig · /FIZZ-gig/ · /ˈfɪzgɪg/. noun and adjective. A frivolous or flirtatious girl. A silly notion. A firework that fizzes. A spinning top. A harpoon or spear (also fishgig). In Australian slang, an informer. Perhaps from fizz (a hissing sound or disturbance), from obsolete fise (to break wind) + gig (multiple meanings, including frivolous person and whipping top), origin unknown but possibly onomatopoeic.
[Read more…]Links: May 24, 2020
- Mail Art, a Quirky Pursuit That Hasn’t Been Popular Since the ’60s, Is Suddenly Having a Renaissance Amid the Worldwide Lockdown Thanks, Reader J.
- Tiny Animals on Fingers ※ Angela Lansbury as teapots Thanks, Reader B.
- Fractal wrongness is “the state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.”
- Russian Doll words (not about dolls) ※ Russian Artists Michael Zajkov’s Ultra-Realistic Dolls (all dolls) ※ My Secret Life as a Reporter for “Doll Reader” Magazine (a little bit about dolls)
- LibraryThing was GoodReads before there was a GoodReads, much less before Amazon barged in, and it is now free to all forever.
- The ancient Greeks saw all the colors. ※ The Ancient Romans Gave Us “Bones of the Dead” Cookies ※ Colonialism Shaped Body Shaming ※ The Black Death Yielded British Pub Culture
- William Warren’s Shelves for Life are “designed to be taken down and reassembled as a coffin,” presumably for the owner, but possibly for that one friend who never returns the books they “borrow.”
- “Deep-speare!” → This AI Poet Mastered Rhythm, Rhyme, and Natural Language to Write Like Shakespeare
- Door Dash is Evil ※ Grubhub is Evil ※ Copyright Claims are Evil ※ The SCAN System Used by Law Enforcement is Evil ※ Supermarket Organic Veggies are Evil?
- Today in 1844, Samuel Morse sends the first long-distance telegram from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in Washington, D. C. to the Mount Clare railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland, tapping out, “What hath God wrought” in his own eponymous dot & dash code. Originally Morse’s telegraph system used paper tape, but operators soon realized they could make out the letters from just the clicking of the receiver, simplifying the system considerably. In 1861, the Western Union Telegraph System completed the first transcontinental U. S. telegraph line, and by 1866 the first permanent trans-Atlantic cable was completed. Buoyed by Thomas Edison’s invention of the Quadraplex system allowing four simultaneous messages to be transmitted, the telegraph had transformed global communication by the mid-1900s. ※ Learn Morse Code using Google Creative Labs’ Morse Typing Trainer. ※ For the less industrious among us, there’s the Morse Code Translator, which can encode and send messages to your friends (or enemies). ※ Check out this collection of Strange CW (Telegraph) Keys, including (working) models made from rubber stamps, lollipops, bananas, a handsaw and more. ※ FYI: the longest palindrome in Morse Code is “intransigence.”
Wander
► Wander “through beautiful spaces accompanied by the world’s favourite voices.”
FIRE (POZAR)
David Lynch wrote, drew, and directed this short film and it is every bit as Lynchian as anything could be. → ► FIRE (POZAR)