Category: fun

breaking the spell of procrastination

I’ve lateley spent some time thinking about procrastination. And not just about procrastination, but about procrastination. The word, that is. Perhaps because I’ve been spending a lot of time procrastinating. Inspired by Sage‘s Word Wise Wednesday tradition, I thought I’d share a bit that I’ve learned about the etymology of procrastination. Remarkably, the meaning of the word has not drifted far, at least according to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

procrastination
1548, from L. procrastinationem “a putting off,” noun of action from procrastinare “put off till tomorrow,” from pro- “forward” + crastinus “belonging to tomorrow,” from cras “tomorrow,” of unknown origin. Procrastinate is recorded from 1588.

It’s terribly unmysterious.

I was quite interested to note, however, the description of the word as a “noun of action.” In my experience, it often seems to be more of a noun of inaction. And what’s more, observe that one can spell the word inaction from a selection of the letters of the word procrastination. Coincidence? I think not.

Because let’s face it, without inaction, procrastination just wouldn’t be the same.¹

You may also be interested to learn that, in addition to inaction, the following words (and many, many more) can be made by using letters of procrastination:

pasta, carrot, onion, poi, toast, pots, coin, top
trap, scrap, ration, nation, station, Patton, stint, coot
tint, print, caption, croon, tiara, stair, star, icon, coop
scoop, poo, poots, crap, strip, carrion

and, you may be happy to learn

stop

And do you want to know what got me a-ponderin’ about procrastination, and the words one can spell from its letters? I realized that one can spell…pants.

Pants!

And of course, realizing that made me want to come up with a full-blown anagram for procrastination with pants. It’s been tricky, but here are my candidates.

Croatian roi pants²

coir pants ration³

I think my best attempt is this one:

Rio pants action: R

————————-
¹ Actually, without inaction, procrastination would end up something like prorast. And where would that get us?

² Using the a French word roi, meaning “king.” Or alternately “Croation iro pants,” using a Japanse word, iro, meaning “color.”

³ Where coir is a fiber that might be a bit rough for pants.

I’m a word freak, don’t you know

A few weeks back I wrote a post in which I claimed that some posts a few folks wrote (for a meme) had used too much of a thing. Too much, in fact, to fit the name they’d used for that meme. So I wrote a post of my own, played that same game, and stuck to the rule.

Well, I had fun with that post. I had to choose my words with care. And then I thought it might be hard to write a whole post that way. But I thought I’d give it a try. It’s not as hard as I thought. As I sit here, I can find quite a lot of words to use. (The sad thing is, I can’t name the thing, the rule, since to tell you would break that “one” rule of this post. You’ll have to guess what it is. Or in case it’s not clear, just go back to that old post. )

Since I may find it hard to write with much depth, as I find that there is a tense or two that I can’t use, I think I’ll tell a tale. Here goes.

There was once a young girl who loved words. She loved to say them, write them, and play with them like toys. She’d bounce them, flip them, or squish them up. She liked to roll them off her tongue.

She could talk all day, and use lots and lots of words. But the sad thing was, she did not have much to say. At least not much that was worth while. Most of what she said made no sense at all.”Truck, muck, shoe, socks!” she would say to her dog. “Boo, blue, too, true,” she’d tell her mom. “Dude, prude, dance, pants” she’d shout to the man at the store. All day long, words would pour out of her mouth. Lots of words, short words. But not much sense. Blah, blah, blah, blah, she might as well have said.

One day as she was on her way home from school, she saw a strange red cat. She stopped to have a look at the way the bright red fur shone in the sun. As was her way, she spat out some words of no sense. “Bird, turd, drop, fraught,” she sang.

“What do you mean by that?” asked the cat.

Kate, for that was the girl’s name, paused. She had not known that cats could talk. “Cow, crow, coo, phlegm,” she said, once her first shock had passed.

“Why do you talk like that? I don’t get it,” The cat said.

“Hmmpf,” Kate said. “Well, I’m not sure. I know I like to play with words, though,” she told the cat. (For she could make some sense when she chose to.) “It’s fun. Roof, tooth, duck, shale.”

“Oh,” said the cat. “I see what you mean.” He thought for a bit and said: “Flip, trip, burp, plow.”

Kate smiled. “Scoop, stoop, tree, sine,” she said right back. And the two of them walked off hand in hand.

The end.

“Wait,” you say. “Cats don’t have hands.” Well, that’s true. But I made the rest of it up, too. So there.

One last thing. Can you give a thought as to how to end this phrase:
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their _____.

a shocking excess of syllables

I stumbled across a couple of meme-like posts last night that sparked both my interest and my concern. First this one, which referenced this one. The task described on the blog icedmocha was to:

Answer all thirty-five questions using only one word. It’s harder than it looks. Give it a try on your blog.

An interesting challenge. A provocative proposition. The particpants I read (the first two I saw, plus this third one) had come up with some fantastic single-word responses.

The problem? The posts, and apparently the meme, are entitled “Monosyllabic.” In spite of this, I witnessed a large number of polysyllabic words. Shocking, shocking. As someone who spends portions of her professional time finding syllables, hunting them down and tracking them in the wild, I felt it my duty to round up some bonafide monosyllables of my own.

1. Where is your cell phone?     bag

2. Relationship?     yes

3. Your hair?     brown

4. Work?     sounds

5. Your sister?     cool

6. Your favorite thing?     sleep

7. Your dream last night?     strange

8. Your favorite drink?     ale

9. Your dream car?     Peel’s

10. The room you’re in?     den

11. Your shoes?     docs

12. Your fears?     war

13. What do you want to be in 10 years?     prof

14. Who did you hang out with this weekend?     Phoebs

15. What you’re not good at?     hate

16. Muffin?     please!

17. One of your wish list items?     trip

18. Where you grew up?     earth

19. The last thing you did?     work

20. What are you wearing?     pants

21. What aren’t you wearing?     socks

22. Your pet?     gone

23. Your computer?     mac

24. Your life?     whole

25. Your mood?     calm

26. Missing?     Red

27. What are you thinking about right now?     words

28. Your car?     gray

29. Your kitchen?     mess

30. Your summer?     short

31. Your favorite color?     blue

32. When is the last time you laughed?     noon

33. Last time you cried?     days

34. School?     grad

35. Love?     John

There we go. 35 monosyllables that are more-or-less true responses. Another challenging task would be to come up with monomorphemic responses to those same questions. Or to come up with 35 questions, the answers to which could all be pants.

monosyllabic1.jpg
A view of a production of the polysyllabic monosyllabic, displayed in Praat, with approximate syllabification into 5 syllables marked. (No commitment to the affiliation of potentially ambisyllabic consonants intended.)

pants1.jpg
A view of a production of the monosyllabic pants, displayed in Praat, with syllabification into 1 syllable marked.

learn to dance in 3 easy steps

Okay, so maybe these videos won’t teach you to dance. But they are lots of fun to watch:

  1. The Jan Pehechan-Ho dance scene from Gumnaam (1966) (and featured in the movie Ghost World )
  2. Christopher Walken dances to Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”
  3. OK Go, their famous treadmill dance to “Here it goes again”. (Hat-tip to jeanerz, who thought she was the last person on earth to have seen this, but who was the first who showed it to me.)

I yam what I yam

It’s time for another helping of Themed Things Thursdays. It being vegetable week here, in honor of my first pick-up of my CSA veggies, this Thursday Theme for Things is vegetables. Okay, the list is a bit heavy on the onion bits (with apologies to those who don’t like onions), but you can pick them out.

some vegetables

  • beans
    Jack and the beanstalk, a fairy tale featuring magic beans that grow a towering beanstalk.
  • corn
    Children of the Corn (1984) A movie based on a Stephen King story. Horror in the corn fields.

  • spinach
    The cartoon character Popeye (The Sailor Man) gets super-duper strong when he eats a can of spinach. Even has a little song he sings when he gets all juiced up: I’m strong to the finish, ’cause I eats me spinach…
  • broccoli
    Powerpuff Girls episode 17 “Beat Your Greens“. Alien broccoli attacks.
  • cabbage
    The Kids in the Hall offers Cabbage Head, a man with cabbage for hair. (There are also the Cabbage Patch Kids, scrunched-up looking dolls that were all the rage in the 80’s, and that now have their own urban legend.)
  • pumpkin
    Peter Peter pumkin eater. A nursery rhyme. Also a song you can play on the piano using only the black keys.

    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

  • peppers
    Peter Piper A nursery rhyme and tongue twister: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”
  • carrots
    Bugs Bunny is known for his trademark carrot-munching. But did you know that his carrot-munching was a Clark Gable immitation?

    bugs

    Bugs Bunny’s nonchalant carrot-chewing stance, as explained many years later by Chuck Jones, and again by Friz Freleng, comes from the movie, It Happened One Night, from a scene where the Clark Gable character is leaning against a fence eating carrots more quickly than he is swallowing, giving instructions with his mouth full to the Claudette Colbert character, during the hitch-hiking sequence.

  • potato
    Everybody’s favorite spud has got to be the ever-dignified, interchangeably featured Mr. Potatohead (Apparently, there are many new Potatohead varieties that have sprouted, including the venerable Star Wars Darth Tater
  • sweet potato
    “Sweet Potato,” by Cracker. (Off the album “Kerosene Hat”) A rockin’ romp of a song. Be my sweet potato, I’ll be your honey lamb

  • yams
    Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. Yams play a central role in the Nigerian community depicted in this novel. (See? I can get all literary, too.) (By the way, these yams aren’t the same as sweet potatoes, which are often called yams in the US)
  • turnip
    You can’t get blood from a turnip, or “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip” (You can also find more garden-variety cliches) An expression meaning that it’s not possible to extract something from a source that doesn’t contain that thing.
  • onion
    1. The Onion (“America’s finest news source”) My own favorite Onion article? This eerily prescient one from January, 2001.
    2. Shrek (2001) An animated movie featuring an ogre who likens himself to an onion:

      Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
      Donkey: They both smell?
      Shrek: NO! They have LAYERS. There’s more to us underneath. So, ogres are like onions.
      Donkey: Yeah, but nobody LIKES onions!

    3. The End: Book the Thirteenth, the final installation of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket begins with the following layery, teary-eyed, oniony sentence:

      If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.

  • bok choi
    Bok Choi Boy, the story of a young lad raised by vegetables to become a legendary leafy-green fighter for truth, justice and better nutrition. (Okay, I made this one up.)
  • a whole bunch o’ different oversized veggies
    June 29, 1999 written and illustrated by Caldecott award-winnder David Wiesner. A picturebook featuring gigantic vegetables raining down from the skies. A beatifully illustrated, beautifully absurd book:

    Cucumbers circle Kalamazoo. Lima beans loom over Levittown. Artichokes advance on Anchorage.

    Check out some of the illustrations on the publisher’s webpage for the book.

    • site statistics

    dances with cheese

    Yes, it’s cheese week here at collecting tokens. Because I apparently just can’t get enough cheese.¹

    Anyhow, inspired in part by the pants game (wherein a word in a known quotation, expression or title is replaced by the word pants) and in part by a post² I came across on adding the word cheese to movie titles, I offer up my own list of movie titles. (I got all these movie titles, or at least a previous version of them from the AFI’s 100 years 100 movies page. So these are high quality films that I’m making a cheese mockery of.)

    Classics of Cheese Cinema

  • From Cheese to Eternity (1953)
    Passion. Betrayal. Cheese.
  • Bonnie and Cheese (1967)
    Partners in crime, partners in cheese.
  • Apocalypse Cheese (1979)
    A dark and dangerous mission of cheese.
  • A Streetcar Named Cheese (1951)
    Glimpse the cheesy underbelly of New Orleans.
  • Rebel Without a Cheese (1955)
    Trouble’s coming. And it’s bringing crackers.
  • Wuthering Cheese (1939)
    A haunting tale of star-crossed young cheese lovers.
  • Gone with the Cheese (1939)
    An epic saga of love, war and cheese.
  • The Wizard of Cheese (1939)
    If ever a wonderful wiz there was…wait, would that be the CheeseWiz?
  • It’s a Wonderful Cheese (1946)
    A sentimental film that shows a glimpse of a world without cheese.
  • 2001: A Cheese Odyssey (1968)
    The awe and mystery of a cheese unlike any other.
  • Raiders of the Lost Cheese (1981)
    When they find it, they really don’t want to smell it.
  • The Silence of the Cheese (1991)
    Is the cheese quiet now, Clarice?

    • —————
    ¹It has occurred to me that I must consider cheese to be a funny word. Much like pants, squid, banana, duck and monkey. However, I don’t see any mention of cheese on the Wikipedia inherently funny word article.

    ²Really, I promise to stop this daily linking to Words for My Enjoyment. What’s funny is that I first came across the blog via my takehome final, as mentioned previously, but then found it again totally inadvertantly and coincidentally while doing a google search for “cheese” and “movies”. (Did I mention that there’s aren’t too many cheese movies?) It was almost as if it was written in the cheese…Wait, “Written on the Cheese.” I think that’s a movie, too.

    extra cheese

    You know what really cheeses me off? When I finish a list and realize I’ve forgotten something.

    It’s like going to the grocery store to buy bread, eggs and milk, and then remembering I need cheese too as I’m driving on my way there, but I figure I’ll wait to add it to my list, since it would be hazardous to write while driving, even if it is only one word, and then when I get there, going into this trance as I wander the aisles with my shopping cart, and wondering what it means that supermarkets now play music that was actually popular when I was in high school, and feeling up the melons and squeezing the toilet paper, then browsing the cereal aisle and feeling nostalgic for the days of my youth when lucky charms were an exotic unattainable bowl of cereal at the end of the rainbow because my mother insisted on having us eat healthy cereals like wheat chex and when I finally tried them, they really weren’t that thrilling, and resisting the urge to buy cookies and redi-whip and donuts, and before you know it, I’ve filled up the cart and then I head home with my bags of groceries, and after I put away my bread and my milk and my pint of organic blackberry sorbet, which seemed like a healthier choice than the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but screw it, I bought that too, and bananas and maple syrup and zucchini and oatmeal and frozen peas, and then find a crumpled up paper in my pocket, and it’s my grocery list with its three measly items (bread, eggs and milk) scribbled on it, and realize that I’ve forgotten the eggs, and (crap!) I also forgot to get more cheese.

    You know what I’m saying?

    Anyhow, I realized that I left off some key pieces of cheese from yesterday’s cheeseful bounty. Such as:

    1. Richard Cheese, a musician who, along with his band Lounge Against the Machine, provides cheesy lounge music reinterpretations of so many your favorite contemporary songs. Also in the music category is the band The String Cheese Incident. Then there’s the apparently sadly now-defunct Cheese Patrol, a

      yearly homage to all the songs that people vociferously hate but secretly know all the words to. These are the songs we grew up with; overorchestrated. overwrought, oversynthed, over the top.

    2. Somehow I also managed to leave off the appearance of the cheese guy in the Buffy episode “Restless“, as well as a few other cheesy references. And in my research I came across this brilliant essay “An Analysis of Cheese as Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Apparently, the layers of cheese in the Buffy series run far deeper than I’d realized.
    3. For more on cheese philosophy, you can check out this essay “on the non-existence of cheese.” Is there proof of the existence of cheese in the universe? Perhaps not.
    4. Then there’s the Cheese Burglar. But I’m not really a big fan of the cult of which he is a member. So instead I offer this cartoon mouse classic, The Cheese Burglar (1946). (You can even see it on YouTube. Though I admit to not having watched anything close to the whole 7 minutes.)
    5. I actually like the animation of this (shorter) shortThe Cheese Trap better, which features a cg version of the board game Mouse Trap, one of my childhood favorites.
    6. Do you hanker for a hunka cheese? Do you remember this rather creepy cartoon psa from the 70s? You might also be interested in the hunk-hankerers guest appearance on the Family Guy.
    7. Yesterday’s cheese did not include much in the way of cheese activities for those of you with too much time and not enough cheese on your hands. Options include: a quiz to let you know what kind of cheese you are. (There’s also a similar-veined one-step cheese “comparator,” but the reviews are not stellar.)
    8. There’s even an experiment with cheese that you can perform at home on your own. (However, the author does recommend exercising caution if you are lactose tolerant.) (And no, my dear seester, this is not the same cheese experiment you tried with me that one time when we were little. I’ll write about that later.)
    9. Most thrillingly, you can actually watch cheese *live* online. That’s right, you can watch watch cheddar cheese aging. Not only is it just as exciting as it sounds, it is also apparently the cool thing to do. (If you don’t have the months to spare to see the change in progress, you can also check out this time-lapse video encapsulating 3 months of the cheese-aging process.)
    10. And even though I offered it up yesterday, no cheese list would be complete without The Cheese Shop sketch. This time, I serve it up in its youtubiful glory:

    breaking research from the geekology laboratories

    I mentioned yesterday that there are tests out there to help you determine how you fit into the geek/nerd/dork paradigm. There are many, many tests out there. I may explore these more, but here are a few (with my own results, when available).

    Geek, nerd or dork tests

    1. The “original geek test”
    I like this one. And I actually like that you get bonus points for being a female geek. (Ha!)
    I scored 23.07692%, which puts me at the (unmodified) “Geek” level. (There are, of course, higher levels of geek. You also get to have, should you choose, a button with your test results. Behold mine!
    i am a geek

    2. The Geek Test: How geeky are you?
    This one is a shorter test, and may be derivative of the preceding test. (Or maybe they both are derivative of some previous source. Scientists at the North American Geekology Laboratories are furiously researching this question as we speak.)
    Here are my results:

    Geek Test Results
    You are 47.5% geeky.
    OK, not that geeky at all, are you? I’ll bet you even have a girlfriend (or boyfriend).
    The current average score is: 31.55%
    Fact: 35.45% of people who took this test admit to wearing a costume “just for fun”.

    3. A nerd test, called the “nerd purity test“:
    Here are a few sample questions:

    Do you have a Rubik’s Cube?
    Can you solve it?
    Without the book?
    Without looking?
    Do you have acne?
    Do you have greasy hair?
    Are you unaware of it?

    And here are my results:

    Your Nerd Purity Test Results
    You answered “yes” to 26 of 100 questions, making you 74.0% nerd pure; that is, you are 74.0% pure in the nerd domain (you have 26.0% nerd in you).
    Your Weirdness Factor (AKA Uniqueness Factor) is 11%, based on a comparison of your test results with 576688 other submissions for this test.
    The average purity for this test is 73.8%.
    The first submission for this test was received June 16, 1994.

    4. Another nerd test, this one called The Nerdity Test:

    THE NERDITY TEST
    Version 5.x.cubed.minus.3.x.all.divided.by.2
    10 December, 1993
    HTML-Version: 7 May, 1996
    CGI-Enabled: 13 March, 1998
    JavaScript-Enabled: 25 October, 2000

    This one looks pretty good, and gets extra points for the version number. However, I didn’t finish taking the test due to time constraints. (Also, when I clicked on the “credits” link for one of the questions, I accidentally cleared out my answers for the test at the point, and didn’t want to go back.)

    5. Blogthings had a pretty lame one. I’m not convinced by my results, even though the “nerd” percentage is somewhat similar to the previous test score. But come on. “no one would ever call you a nerd”? Oh, how wrong can they be:

    You Are 24% Nerdy

    You’re a little nerdy, but no one would ever call you a nerd.
    You sometimes get into nerdy things, but only after they’ve become a part of mainstream culture.

    6. To balance things out, we have a dork quiz:
    This one is not interactive, but the questions do look fun, like:

    9. Who do you most closely identify with?
    a) Kermit.
    b) Gonzo.
    c) Scooter.

    7. I’m actually most partial to the OKcupid Nerd? Geek? or Dork? test
    I like it that this considers nerd, geek and dork to be dimensions, and helps you to place yourself on those axes. This one has some pretty funny questions, like:

    When you encounter something you don’t know, do you often try to find out what it is? (Like an unknown word in a dictionary or event in an encyclopedia.)

    Wait a second-there are people who would answer “no” to this question? I’ve often wished I had access to imdb while watching movies in a theater…

    Do you enjoy quoting books/movies/tv shows, etc. in your conversations/letters/emails?

    (Possibly.)

    This test also claims to give a score about how you ranked on the three variable (nerdiness, geekosity and dork points) compared to others of your age and gender. Note that my score shows higher than 99% for all three. Which I thought was interesting. So I was curious about how I’d score if I were a male. Still got the same. So I actually tried retaking the test from a nearly totally different persona, a sort of suave but kinda dumb athletic type. And still, I get over 99% on the three variables. This suggests to me that a) this feature is probably broken, and these levels are probably not actually a reflection of the test-taker demographics b) I am really a nerd, geek and dork to follow up on this and c) I really should be getting back to the work I need to be doing and stop taking these damn tests.






    , you’re now logged in!


    Below you’ll find your test result. After, continue on to your
    homescreen to discover what we’re about.







    Modern, Cool Nerd

    78 % Nerd, 65% Geek, 47% Dork

    For The Record:

    A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

    A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.

    A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

    You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

    Nerds didn’t use to be cool, but in the 90’s that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn’t quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and “geek is chic.” The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!

    Congratulations!

    Thanks Again! — THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST






    My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
    free online datingfree online dating
    		You scored higher than 99% on nerdiness
    free online datingfree online dating
    		You scored higher than 99% on geekosity
    free online datingfree online dating
    		You scored higher than 99% on dork points

    Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

    morning bowl of flakes

    Last week, I told you about a book I have in my collection written by none other than J. H. Kellogg, a book of “plain facts” about sex which offers inadvertent amusement on nearly every page. Last week, I offered up some choice bits I’d found. And as a game, I asked for people to give me numbers so that we could look for something entertaining from those pages. We had 5 participants, who each requested 1 or 2 numbers each. Here are the results:

    maverick roark requested pages 3 and 12. Page 3 is the title page, which I’ve typed out in entirety.

    Plain Facts for Old and Young by J. H. Kellogg, M. D.
    Member American Public Health Association, American Society for the Advancement of Science, American Society of Microscopy, Member Mich. State Board of Health, Medical Superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitrium, Author of Numerous Works of Health, Etc.
    Published by I. F. Segner, Burlington, Iowa, 1882.

    Just so we know he’s qualified to say that sex should be avoided.

    Page 12 gets you this bit from the table of contents:

    The Social Evil.
    Unchastity of the ancients–Causes of the “social evil” –Libidinous blood–Gluttony–Precocious sexuality–Man’s lewdness–Fashion…

    NotSoSage requested a bit from page 323. This one is from the chapter called “Solitary Vice”:

    The entrance of a single corrupt boy into a school which may have been previously pure–though such schools must be extrememy rare–will speedily corrupt almost the entire membership. The evil infection spreads more rapidly than the contagion of smallpox or yellow fever, and it is scarcely less fatal.

    Mind you, we’re not actually talking about an STD or some such here, we’re talking about the spread of the “solitary vice” itself.

    ericalee requested pages 46 and 72. These are from the chapter “Sex in Living Forms”, which actually does seem to contain some fairly scientific information. Page 46 is mostly about plants:

    Nothing is more interesting in the natural world than the wonderful beauty, diversity, and perfect adaptaility to various conditions and functions, which we see in the sexual parts of plants.

    He does get a bit excited about plant sex…

    Page 72 covers male anatomy:

    As the production of seminal fluid is more or less constant in man and some animals, while its discharge is intermittent, the vesiculae seminales serve as reservoirs for the fluid, preserving it until required, or allowing it to undergo absorption.

    Hmm…I didn’t really find anything amusing on this page. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of anatomy would, though.

    bs requested page 208, which is in the chapter “Incontinence”:

    No continent man need be deterred by this apocryphal fear of atrophy of the testes, from living a chaste life. It is a device of the unchaste–a lame excuse for their own incontinence, unfounded on any physical law.

    I hadn’t realized how old the expression “a lame excuse” was…

    jwbates requested 69, which is also from the “Sex in Living Forms” chapter:

    We have sufficient evidence of this in the fact that among barbarian women, who are generally less perverted physically than civilized women, childbirth is regarded with very little apprehension, since it occasions little pain or inconvenience.

    Yes, well, you know how barbarians are…it’s amazing they notice at all when they’ve just given birth.

    Okay, them’s the numbers you requested. Thank you for playing. Come play again with me soon. (Because as we learn from Kellogg, you wouldn’t want to play with yourself.) If you throw some more numbers (between 1 and 512) at me, I’ll offer up some more nuggets next week. We’ve barely scratched the surface!