Category: books

along came some spiders

spiderweb1.pngHalloween’s around the corner. One thing this means is that people break out the creepy crawly decorations to get festively creepy. It’s harder to get much creepier or crawlier than spiders. So I offer you a whole mess of festively creepy crawly eight-legged critters for this week’s Themed Things Thursday. Enjoy. (Or shield your eyes, depending on your feelings towards spiders.)

A Few Spiders

  1. Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White. A novel featuring a very smart spider who could weave a remarkable web. One of my favorite books of childhood.
  2. Little Miss Muffet
    A nursery rhyme about a little girl who was frightened off her tuffet by a spider.

    3. black_widow.png       black_widow.png       black_widow.png                 black_widow.png

  3. “The Spider and the Fly”, a poem by Mary Howitt. A poem best known for a first line that doesn’t actually appear in the poem: “Step into my parlour, said the spider to the fly”. Here’s how the text actually begins. (You can read the full text here.)

    Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
    ‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
    The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
    And I’ve a many curious things to shew when you are there.”
    Oh no, no,” said the little Fly, “to ask me is in vain,
    For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”

  4. Seven Spiders Spinning, a kid’s novel by Gregory Maguire, an author best known for writing Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
  5. Anansi: A spider who is a trickster character in many West African folktales.

    6. peter_sm4_8001.jpg

  6. Spider-Man. (Or Spiderman.) The superhero of comics, cartoons, and the more recent live action movies. A man was bitten by a spider and got spider-themed superpowers. Such as a spider sense. Which tingled. (When I’ve been bitten by a spider I’ve gotten a red welt. I guess you could say it tingled. But I wouldn’t.)
  7. “Spider-Man,” the song. The theme song from a cartoon version of Spider-Man. Since performed by a variety of artists, including Moxy Fruvous and the Ramones.

    Spiderman, Spiderman,
    Does whatever a spider can
    Spins a web, any size,
    Catches thieves just like flies
    Look Out!
    Here comes the Spiderman.

  8. “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” A children’s folk song. About a small spider, itsy bitsy even, who went up a spout. Then down, then back up.
  9. “Spiders,” a song by Joydrop

    When love was fresh like a web we’d mesh
    Nothing felt better than your flesh against my flesh
    One fatal slip one rip a tear
    Touch me now and every single hair on my body stands on end
    So don’t touch me anymore
    ‘Cause it feels like spiders
    Like spiders all over me
    Like spiders
    Like spiders all over me

  10. It: a book by Steven King and miniseries based on the same. Involves a big evil spider. (And a clown.)

    11. spider_1.png

  11. Shelob: A giant, nasty spider from the Lord of the Rings
  12. Aragog: A giant, nasty spider from the Harry Potter books and movies
  13. Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)
    A TV movie with William Shatner, about evil, venemous spiders that infest a town.
  14. Arachnophobia (1990)
    A movie about evil, venemous spiders that infest a town.
  15. A few other random spiders include: spider(a type of pan, basically a frying pan with legs), web spider, Alfa Romeo Spider, Spider (2002), and spider veins.

turning into a pumpkin

pumpkinshoes.jpgI mentioned briefly that I’m going to be a bridesmaid in a wedding coming up soon. Well, that “soon” has now become “this Sunday.” Which is, technically, very soon. As is the standing tradition, in U.S. weddings at least, I will be wearing a dress chosen by the bride. As it will be an October wedding in New England, the bride has chosen fall colors. My dress is in burnt orange, a very pretty color, though a somewhat unusual one in my wardrobe. And is also often the case for such occasions, I am to have shoes that match my dress. This means that I have needed to get some dyed. I picked up my shoes yesterday afternoon. And I have to admit that I was quite startled to see them. You see, they are orange. I now have shiny orange shoes. I don’t think you can ever be fully prepared to see orange shoes.

Anyhow, this weekend I will be donning the orange, and perhaps as such, feeling a bit like a pumpkin. Hopefully an elegant pumpkin, mind you, but a pumpkin nonetheless. But seeing as it’s October, pumpkins are all the orange rage right now. And in honor of their orange pumpkiness, I bring you a pumpkin-based Themed Things Thursday.
pumpkin_pie.jpg

  • pumpkin
    A vegetable. Or a fruit. Depending on your choice of taxonomy. Generally eaten cooked. Used in lots of baked goods, like pumpkin pie.
  • Pumpkin (2002)
    A movie starring Christina Ricci.
  • Pumpkin
    A song by Tricky off Maxinquaye (YouTube video)

    • pumpkin_carriage.jpg

  • Cinderella’s carriage
    In many versions of this fairy tale, Cinderella’s fairy godmother turns a pumpkin into a carriage to carry Cinderella to the ball. Cinderella must leave the ball before her ride turns back into a pumpkin. Leading to the expression turn into a pumpkin, meaning depart, go to bed or otherwise turn in for the night.

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  • The Headless Horseman
    A ghostly character from Washington Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow“, who carries around a pumpkin head.

    • 200px-jackpumpkinheadpng.png

  • Jack Pumpkinhead
    A character from the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. Later had his own book, Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, though it wasn’t by Baum.
  • Pumpkinhead (1989)
    A horror movie involving a demon dug up from a pumpkin patch.
  • The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead
    a song by XTC. (YouTube video) Later covered by Crash Test Dummies.
  • Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
    A nursery rhyme. Also a song you can play on the piano using only the black keys.¹

    Peter Peter pumpkin eater
    Had a wife and couldn’t keep her
    He put her in a pumpkin shell
    And there he kept her very well

    • peter_peter_pumpkin_eater_1_-_ww_denslow_-_project_gutenberg_etext_18546.jpg       great_pumpkin.jpg      nightmare_before_christmas_poster.jpg

  • The Great Pumpkin
    A mythical holiday character that never appears in the animated Peanuts special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)
  • Jack, the Pumpkin King
    A character from Tim Burton’s animated movie The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

    • pumpkin_porch.jpg

  • jack-o-lanterns
    It’s a Halloween tradition to carve a face into a pumpkin. These are then typically set outside, with a candle inside. It’s also a Halloween tradition for mischievous kids to steal other people’s pumpkins, and smash them.
  • Smashing Pumpkins.
    A band. Performs songs such as “Tonight, tonight” and “Tarantula” (YouTube videos)
  • punkin
    An endearment or nickname based on the word pumpkin, which is sometimes pronounced without the word-medial [p]. Gives us [pʰʌŋkɪn] (Where the nasal has then assimilated to the place of articulation of the following consonant, a velar. Not that you asked.)

    • phoebe_cat_pumpkin.jpg

    ¹ I admit that I’m recycling this particular item from my vegetable ThThTh list. But recycling is good, right? Or should I be composting, since it’s vegetables we’re talking about?

    unread, unread

    This here is a meme (or whatever you like to think of it as) based on the top 106 unread books from Library Thing. (At least as of the date when this was started. The earliest I could find was a post from October 1st at Once Upon a Booshelf, saying the meme had been found at Lady Strange. I couldn’t find, it there though.) I myself found this at Lori’s Book Nook, and then re-found it shortly thereafter at casa az.

    Here are the instructions, as found chez az:

    Bold what you have read, italicize your DNFs, strikethrough the ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf.

    (Note that DNF=”did not finish”)

    My Reads of the Unread

    + Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
    + Anna Karenina
    +Crime and Punishment
    + Catch-22
    One hundred years of solitude
    + Wuthering Heights
    + The Silmarillion
    Life of Pi: a novel
    + The Name of the Rose
    Don Quixote
    + Moby Dick
    + Ulysses
    + Madame Bovary
    + The Odyssey
    + *Pride and Prejudice
    + Jane Eyre
    A Tale of Two Cities
    + The Brothers Karamazov
    Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
    + War and Peace
    + Vanity Fair
    The Time Traveller’s Wife
    + The Iliad
    + *Emma
    + The Blind Assassin
    The Kite Runner
    Mrs. Dalloway
    + Great Expectations
    American Gods
    + A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
    Atlas shrugged
    Reading Lolita in Tehran
    + Memoirs of a Geisha
    Middlesex
    + Quicksilver
    + * Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
    The Canterbury Tales
    The Historian
    + A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    Brave new world
    The Fountainhead
    + Foucault’s Pendulum
    + Middlemarch
    Frankenstein
    + The Count of Monte Cristo
    + Dracula
    A Clockwork Orange
    Anansi Boys
    + The Once and Future King
    The Grapes of Wrath
    + * The Poisonwood Bible
    1984
    Angels & Demons
    + The Inferno
    + The Satanic Verses
    + Sense and Sensibility
    + The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Mansfield Park
    + One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
    To the Lighthouse
    + * Tess of the D’Urbervilles
    Oliver Twist
    + Gulliver’s Travels
    + Les misérables
    + The Corrections
    + The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
    + The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
    + Dune
    + The Prince
    The Sound and the Fury
    Angela’s Ashes
    + The God of Small Things
    A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
    + Cryptonomicon
    Neverwhere
    + A Confederacy of Dunces
    A Short History of Nearly Everything
    Dubliners
    + The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    + Beloved
    Slaughterhouse-five
    + The Scarlet Letter
    + Eats, Shoots & Leaves
    + The Mists of Avalon
    Oryx and Crake : a novel
    Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
    Cloud Atlas
    The Confusion
    + Lolita
    + Persuasion
    + Northanger Abbey
    The Catcher in the Rye
    On the Road
    +The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    + Freakonomics
    + Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
    The Aeneid
    + *Watership Down
    + Gravity’s Rainbow
    + The Hobbit
    + In Cold Blood
    + White Teeth
    Treasure Island
    + David Copperfield
    The Three Musketeers

    Notice that I haven’t crossed out any books to mean “I hated them.” It’s hard for me to say that I hate a book. The only book I can think of, off the top of my head, that I really hated was The Horse Whisperer. Piece of total crap. I wanted my time back.

    On this list, there were a couple of books that I found painful to read, though I could appreciate the writing and the storytelling: Crime and Punishment and Confederacy of Dunces. I seem to have trouble with anti-heroes. I had the same problem with The Mayor of Casterbridge.

    Notice also that I have marked a lot of books with a plus (+) that I have not read. This is partially John’s fault. I have marked them as “on our bookshelf”, even if they are not books that are ones that I selected. And even if they are not technically on a bookshelf. (We have a lot of books. Some of them live in stacks on the floor.)

    squawk

    pirateparrot.jpgHere it is, the day after International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I’ve still got pirates on the brain. But rather than bringing you a list of pirates for this week’s Themed Things Thursday, I’ll bring you a list of the frequent pirate’s companion: the parrot.

    A Flock of Parrots

    1. Parrots are frequently to be seen on the shoulders of pirates¹, specifically of fictional pirates. Captain Flint was a pirate’s parrot in Treasure Island, the pirate novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. More recently, we’ve seen the pirate in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
    2. Parrots, especially African Grey Parrots, are well known as birds who can imitate human speech.
    3. This is no doubt the source of the use of the word parrot as a verb (transitive), meaning repeat without really understanding. As in “They parroted my parrot jokes, but none of them laughed.”
    4. You can find a variety of parrot jokes out there. (These even a site with pirate and parrot jokes.) This is probably my favorite parrot joke.
    5. Polly want a cracker? The stereotypical parrot sentence, whether said to a parrot, or by a parrot. Possibly popularized in Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
    6. Poll or Polly has been a common parrot name for centuries, with an early documented use from 1611.
    7. Also in the nursery rhyme:

      Little Poll Parrot
      Sat in his garret
      Eating toast and tea;
      A little brown mouse
      Jumped into the house,
      And stole it all away.

    8. Then there’s the song “Polly,” by Nirvana

      Polly wants a cracker
      I think I should get off her first
      I think she wants some water
      To put out the blow torch

    9. Or Paulie (1998), a movie about a parrot.
    10. Parrots have been featured in various folktales from around the world, like 2 Buddhist folktales from India “The Brave Little Parrot.” (who puts out a forest fire²) and “The Steadfast Parrot” (who is faithful to a tree) and an
      Italian folktale (involving a prince who has himself turned into a parrot).
    11. Other moderately famous parrots include Waldo the Parrot, from Twin Peaks (who seems to have been present, and biting, the night of Laura Palmer’s death) and Parrot, the parrot with biting sarcasm from the Terry Pratchett novel Faust Eric
    12. Parrot Heads are the nickname given to fans of the musician Jimmy Buffett
    13. And to round things off, I bring you Python’s parrot. The ex-parrot. He is decidedly not pining for the fjords.

    ————————–

    ¹ Or about the arms and head, especially of those posing as pirates.

    ² Kind of like a friend of mine did recently, except he used a plastic bag to put out the fire.

    10 little piggy-pig-pigtail-people

    As might be inferred from my last post, I am decidedly pro-pigtail. In celebration of pigtails, I bring you the following pigtail-themed list.

    The 10 people on this list have one thing in common. Or two things, really. Pigtails. Whether it’s two braids, or two little pony tails, these folks know how to do the two-do with style.

    1. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy’s pigtails with their blue-ribbon bows are iconic, and a standard feature of Dorothy costumes, along with the blue gingham dress and ruby slippers. Many illustrations of the original book (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum), also show Dorothy in pigtails.

      2. dorothy.jpg dorothy_book.jpg

    2. Ronald Ann from Berke Breathed’s cartoon Outland. She started off with 3 pigtails, but her do evolved to the classic 2.

      3. outland_ronald_ann.jpg

    3. Laura of Little House on the Prairie. I’m familiar with the TV show Laura, as played by Melissa Gilbert. I can’t speak for her hair in the books on which the show was based. (I loved her braided pigtails when I was about 11, and would occasionally wear my hair that way.)

      4. laura_little_house.jpg pippi.jpg

    4. Pippi Longstockings. The super-strong Pippi, of the books and movies, has bright red pigtails that defy gravity.

      5. brady_cindy1.jpgcindy1.jpgcindy2.jpg

    5. Cindy from the Brady Bunch, in the early days. The youngest one in curls. Which were often in pigtails.

      6. nbsp;

      Then there are various girly-girl cartoon & animé characters wear pigtails, like…
      sailor_moon.gifbubbles.gif

    6. Bubbles, the Powerpuff Girl. The sweet girly-girl one, and
    7. Sailor Moon, who has really, really long blond pigtails.

      8. And lest you think that pigtails are just for toddlers and schoolgirls, I submit to you the following pigtail-sporting women:

    8. Jennifer Schwalbach Smith (aka Kevin Smith’s wife) wore pigtails with her black leather catsuit in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) (I actually found a picture of Kevin Smith in pigtails, which was not something I expected to find.)

      9. jennifer_smith1.jpg buffy_pigtails2.jpg

    9. Buffy, on occasion, also sported pigtails. Like in the episode “Fear Itself,” a bit which you can see on YouTube. (Okay, so Buffy’s dressed in a Little Red Riding Hood Halloween costume in this one, but other times she wears pigtails when not dressed as a little girl.)

      10. michelle_yeoh1.jpg

    10. Michelle Yeoh in Supercop/Jing cha gu shi III: Chao ji jing cha/ Police Story III: Supercop: I mentioned once before that my favorite scene in this movie is a fight scene where she’s wearing her hair in braided pigtails. Those braids go a-flyin’ as she kicks some serious ass.

    throwing some tomatoes

    tomato_pd.jpgIt shouldn’t come as much surprise that I have tomatoes on the brain. After getting 10 pounds of tomatoes from the CSA this week, on top of the several pounds I left from last week’s 10 pound haul, I have tomatoes in lots of places. I’ve been making lots of things with tomatoes: tomato salad with mozzarella and basil, tomato sandwiches, roasted tomatoes with garlic…It seems only fitting that I should also make me a tomato list. So, this week’s Themed Things Thursday is all about tomatoes.

    1. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg. A novel featuring a restaurant that serves fried green tomatoes. (I expect they served other things, too. But the title doesn’t include the full menu.)
    2. Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) A movie based on the Fannie Flagg novel.
    3. The Tomato Collection. An album by Nina Simone. It actually seems to have nothing to do with tomatoes beyond the title, but I love Nina.
    4. The campfire song “Lord Jim”

      I know an old bloke and his name is Lord Jim,
      And he had a wife who threw tomatoes at him,
      Now tomatoes are juicy, don’t injure the skin,
      But these ones they did, they was inside a tin.

    5. “Let’s call the whole thing off.” The song written by George and Ira Gershwin. Sometimes known as “the tomato song,” due to this bit:

      You like potato and I like potahto,
      You like tomato and I like tomahto;
      Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
      Let’s call the whole thing off!

      Tomato, tomahto…or, as the Wikipedia tomato entry has, with somewhat dubious IPA:¹

      You like /təˈmeɪtoʊ/ and I like /təˈmɑːtəʊ/

    6. Don’t like tomatoes? Perhaps this website is for you: tomatoes are evil. You can purchase anti-tomato propaganda and play anti-tomato games.
    7. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978). The cult classic movie. A comedy sci-fi horror thriller romance. Oh, wait. Probably not the romance. Spawned (or sowed?) several tomato–based sequels, including one called Killer Tomatoes Eat France!² The second movie, or the first sequel, starred, of all people, George Clooney.
    8. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. (1990) A short-lived cartoon TV show featuring the voice of John Astin. (John Astin was also in all 3 movie sequels.)
    9. I think the best way to end this list is to give you this: the theme song to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!

    ——————————————————–

    ¹ I’d be inclined to use square bracket here, rather than slanty ones, for a start, as the slanty ones suggest a phonemic (rather than narrow phonetic) transcription., and the 2 variants of /o/ (əʊ and oʊ) are not phonemic. At the same time, the onset of that last syllabe is transcribed with a t, which seems unlikely in American English. I’d go for a flap. And I produce strong aspiration on the first /t/.
    You know, you say /təˈmeɪtoʊ/, I say [tʰəˈmeɪɾəʊ].

    ²By the way, that exclamation point is part of the title. As someone who rations out my exclamation points, I feel compelled to insert this disclaimer.

    have you read the manual?

    New technology is often met with resistance and some confusion. Happily, there are usually people available to provide technical assistance. Apparently such help has been around a lot longer than I’d realized:

    Lifted off the dusty shelves of the raincoaster library.

    pigeon post

    On our recent trip, we saw many exciting things in France and Germany: monuments, museums, landscapes, rivers, you name it. For Phoebe, however, the highlight of the trip was getting to see so many pigeons. She saw pigeons all over the place! (See her chase a pigeon in the short, short movie I posted earlier this week.)

    Loved by some, hated by many, pigeons are a ubiquitous in cities the world all over. Some folks have been known to call them “rats with wings,” while others happily share their breadcrumbs with them. After its trip away, Themed Things Thursday flies home this week with a list of pigeons.

    • Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems. A picturebook about a mischievous pigeon who would like to drive a bus. (There’s a sequel, too, The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog, in which the pigeon, and I hope I’m not giving too much away here, finds a hot dog.)
    • Wringer, by Jerry Spinelli. This Newbury Honor book is about a forbidden boy-pigeon friendship in a town that hosts an annual pigeon shoot.

      • pigeon_messengers_engraving.jpg

    • Ewan McGregor’s character in Little Voice (1998) kept pigeons as pets.
    • Valiant (2005) was a movie about a heroic World War II homing pigeon (voiced by Ewan McGregor…am I sensing a pattern here?).
    • Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, by Tom Lehrer. A song:

      When they see us coming,
      the birdies all try and hide
      but they still go for peanuts
      when coated with cyanide

    • Rapper Pigeon John is not really a pigeon, at least as far as I know.
    • Some may remember Sesame Street’s Bert dancing a pigeon-like dance to “doin’ the pigeon,” a clip of which is available on YouTube. (You can also see actual pigeons dancing, if you want to compare.)
    • There was an 80’s kids’ TV show called Pigeon Street. (The intro is also up on YouTube.)

      • dove.jpg

    • In spite of their bad reputation as a species, certain pigeons have received an especially elevated status for birds. Namely, bird of peace. In this context, the pigeon is referred to as a dove. A dove being a white pigeon.
    • Doves are featured in various myths and religious tales, such as the well-known story of Noah’s Ark. Land was found with the help of a dove, who flew back to the ark with an olive branch.
    • There is also a flock of pigeon-oriented idioms and terms such as:
      pigeon hole, stool pigeon, pigeon-toed, pigeon-chested, setting the cat among the pigeons, and pigeon blood ruby.
    • Brian Pigeon: There is even a blog out there written by a London pigeon. Check it out for a pigeon’s eye view of the world.

    pigeons_row.jpg
    Pigeons at Beaubourg.

    psychic baby (qu’est-ce que c’est?)

    You know how when you’re expecting a phone call, or waiting for someone to show up at the door, it’s hard to settle down and concentrate? Well, that’s how I usually feel when Phoebe’s having a nap.

    Even though she usually naps for about an hour and a half, the time zips by. I get her settled, putter around for a few minutes, and usually open up my laptop. To, well…putter. Before I know it, 45 minutes have elapsed. And I think about getting to work. Knowing that I probably have only about 45 minutes.

    Today, we were down at John’s parents. (We’d gone down for the weekend to get in a visit before our big trip.) The plan was to head out to the rehab center to visit John’s dad after Phoebe’s nap, and then to go directly home. So, once Phoebe was napping, my puttering included some packing and getting organized. I read some stuff online, answered a couple emails, and did some other puttering and even some work-related stuff.

    It looked like Phoebe was going to have a longer than usual nap. She was upstairs, and the baby monitor was with us downstairs.

    I’d started reading the new Harry Potter last night, and managed to read about 15 pages before I fell asleep. In this unexpected quiet time, the book beckoned. John was sitting reading his copy of the book. (Yes, we did buy two copies yesterday.) I commented to him that I felt like whenever I settle down to do something focused, Phoebe always wakes up. “I feel like if I sit down to read, she’ll wake up.”

    After some more deliberation, and couple more minutes of quiet from the baby monitor, I decided to pick up the book. I sat down. I said to John: “Do you want to time this?”

    I started to open the book.

    “Waaaaaahhhhhh!!” said the baby monitor.

    I slammed the book shut. And there was silence.

    Tell me, how did she know?