Category: silliness

stripey

Lions and tigers and bears! (Oh, my!)

Last week we covered lions. Not too long ago we covered bears. It seems about time I should get to the tigers. So here they are, populationg a ThThTh list in all their stripey goodness.

  1. Year of the Tiger. The tiger is one of the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac. The next Year of the Tiger is 2010, which is not all that far off.
  2. “The Tyger,” a poem by William Blake:

    Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
    In the forests of the night,
    What immortal hand or eye
    Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  3. “Tiger, Tiger,” a song by Duran Duran off their album “Seven and the Ragged Tiger”
  4. Tiger. The nickname for Mac OS v10.4. I still haven’t upgraded.
  5. “The Lady, or the Tiger?.” A short story by Frank R. Stockton with a surprise ending. It has also become “an expression, meaning an unsolvable problem.”
  6. “Eye of the Tiger.” A song by Survivor. From the Rocky III soundtrack.
  7. Tiger’s eye: a chatoyant gemstone. Sort of stripey and brown.
  8. Tony the Tiger. The mascot for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal, featured in commercials. Says of the flakes: “They’re grreat!”
  9. A variety of tiger folktales can be unearthed, such as How Tiger Got His Stripes, a Folktale from Vietnam, the Cambodian “The Origin of the Tiger,” and “The Tiger’s Whisker,” a Korean folktale.
  10. The Story of the Little Black Sambo, by Helen Banneman.
    A story about a boy who meets (and outwits) a bunch of tigers in the jungle. In the end, the tigers turn into a big puddle of melted butter, which the boy’s family uses to make pancakes for dinner. Originally written by a British woman in India, the story has a complicated story of its own, due to the controversy about racism and racial stereotyping in the character names and original illustrations. (The name of the protagonist, contained in the book title itself, is considered to be a racial slur.) Recent updated versions have kept the tigers, but lost (at least in many people’s eyes) the racist overtones. (To see how people respond to this book today, it’s interesting to read the reviews on Amazon of the original, as well as the updated books The Story of Little Babaji and Sam and the Tigers. You can also read the full text, without illustrations.)
  11. Eeny, Meeny, miny mo: A children’s chant, used to select (or rule) out people as part of a game. (To pick who is “it.) Also somewhat tainted by racial controversy, though I’d never heard of the offensive variants till I was an adult.

    Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
    Catch a tiger by the toe
    If he hollers, let him go
    My mother says to
    pick the very best one
    and you are not it.

  12. Life of Pi, by Yan Martel. The main character gets to know a tiger when both are shipwrecked.
  13. Shere Khan. Mowgli’s nemesis (a tiger) in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories.
  14. Leo the Late Bloomer, by Robert Krauss, Jose Aruego. A picture book about a tiger cub who takes his time growing up.
  15. Hobbes. Calvin’s tiger companion. Looks like a stuffed toy when other people are around.
  16. Tigger. The beloved and very bouncy tiger from A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Woods. Close friend to Winnie the Pooh.
  17. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” (2000). A movie directed by Ang Lee, and one of my favorite movies. (It’s a movie with kick-ass women, to boot.) It doesn’t really have any tigers in it, aside from in the title.

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in the absence of Garfield

Have you seen “garfield minus garfield“? I find the comics to be much more interesting this way. For example:

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(And look. Yesterday’s was about pants, too.)

Oh, I forgot to thank John (not Jon) for bringing this site to my attention.

Would you could you?

green_eggs.jpgHappy Seuss Day!

Today was Dr. Seuss’s birthday. Last year, I celebrated the day with a list of a few things Seussy. This year I’ll offer up a small serving of green eggs and ham for your enjoyment.

  • Jesse Jackson’s inspired reading of Green Eggs and Ham. (Sorry about the poor video quality. It’s what I could find.)

  • Weird Al’s video of Green Eggs and Ham. (To fully appreciate it, you might want to check out U2’s “Numb” video.)
  • Also, be sure to check out this brilliant post from Books Are Pretty, which discusses this “grim tale of stalking and harassment…”

more than one way to shovel a driveway

It was snowing heavily when I woke up this morning. I’m not sure how many inches accumulated before things turned to rain. Then the sun came out. The result was that by late afternoon, everything was covered with about an inch of very wet, very dense slush-snow. Since John has been sick for the last couple of days with a fever, it was up to me to get the driveway cleared before the inevitable night-time freeze.

If you have ever shoveled slush, you will know that it is very heavy, and slides off the shovel pretty easily. Which made it pretty hard to throw as you might do when shovelling fluffy snow. So I spent a lot of time scraping up a shovel-load of snow, and walking it to the side of the drive to dump it. It was very slow going. After clearing the area in front of our garage, I was mightily bored. So as I worked towards clearing the way up to the street, I got a bit more creative.

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Ok, I had a bit of reason for doing this. Namely, I wanted to get up to the mailbox without traipsing through the snow, which can lead to harder shovelling. The side paths were to walk over my shovelfuls. Of course, once I’d started a pattern, I felt like going a bit further with that.

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And since I’d bothered to go inside to get my camera, why not go all out?

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As I was working on that last bit, a couple of people out for a walk strolled by and said “hello.” I can only wonder what they thought of me.

(Just so you know, I did actually finish clearing the driveway.)

The Golden Pants Award

golden_pants.jpgJon Stewart: …and the award for the Most Distinguished Pants Blog, the coveted Golden Pants Award, goes to alejna of collecting tokens. [cue cheesy music]

alejna: [choking back the tears] I can’t believe what an honor this is for me. It seems like just yesterday that I first tried on pants blogging. Now with 31 pants posts under my belt, I feel that I’ve come far in the world of pants blogging. But I know that there are many more important issues of pants that need to be laid bare. I will continue to strive to dress them…I mean address them in the dignified manner which they so richly deserve.

I would like to thank the Academy of Pants. I’d of course like to thank my mother, who put me in my first pair of pants. I’d like to thank all my friends and family members who encouraged me in the pursuit of pants, with the occasional kick in the pants. Thanks to those who brought pants crises and pants celebrations to my attention. And thanks, above all, to my various pairs of pants, which were always there to cover my ass in times of need.

—–

This week’s Monday Mission, which I chose to accept in part because I have many other things which I should be doing and this seemed like more fun, was to write a post in the form of an acceptance speech. I’d also like to extend my thanks to Painted Maypole, for the specific inspiration for this post. When she wrote her pants entry for last week’s Mission, I told her I felt like I’d been awarded the Golden Pants Award. It seems only fitting that I should have my acceptance speech ready.

dot dot dot

exclamation_point1.jpgThere are times when the world conspires to make me ponder a topic for a list. This week the world apparently wants me to reflect on punctuation.

I’m quite fond of punctuation, really. Not so much the prescriptive uses of it. I like the informal uses of it that reflect the prosody of spoken language. You can break up a sentence or phrase with periods to show the strong emphasis of making each word its own intonational phrase. (What. The. Hell?) There’s the use of parentheses or commas for, you know, parenthenticals. (And I’m quite partial to parentheticals.) Or you can use ellipses to signal that you’re trailling off…

So I offer you a ThThTh list with an abundance of punctuation marks.

First, I offer to you the Evidence of Punctuation Conspiracy:

Further punctuation-related things include:

  • The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. This blog is a “great” place to see of all sorts of abuses of quotation marks.
  • Apostrophe Abuse. Its the cats pajama’s in terms of misused apostrophe’s.
  • The Ominous Comma. A blog. While not actually about punctuation, it gets points for having such a cool punctuation-related name.
  • Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. A book on punctuation that is said to be entertaining. (Yes, I should have read it. I have it. But haven’t read it. It will probably tell me to stop with the sentence fragments. Or some such. Screw that.)
    • There’s a punctuation “game” based on the book. (I use “scare quotes” here to suggest that there is not a lot of “fun” or “playing” involved.)
    • More fun is the panda joke that is the inspiration for the book title (offered up by Geoffrey Pullum of The Language Log) .
  • “I love you period,” a song by Dan Baird

    I love you period
    Do you love me question mark
    Please, please exclamation point
    I want to hold you in parentheses

  • Let’s not forget the colons and semi-colons of the island nation of San Serriffe:

    The native people of San Serriffe are the Flong. However, the dominant group are of European stock, the descendants of colonists, known as colons. There is also a large mixed-race group, known as semi-colons.

  • Finally, I offer a bit of cartoon swearing. As in using punctuation marks in place of swear words, usually in a cartoon. (This allows me to end the post with a bang. Or 2.)(Sorry, a little punctuation mark humor.)(No, I’m not sorry. I’m dorky like that.)

          &*%#@$!!

What’s your point?

I found this punctuation mark quiz at raincoaster‘s earlier this week. I was going to post this as part of a bigger list today, but my list was getting out of hand. So decided to pop it up now. (From the train. Hah! My commuter train now has free wireless.)

I am a question mark.


You Are a Question Mark


You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning.
And while you know a lot, you don’t act like a know it all. You’re open to learning you’re wrong.

You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more.
You’re naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises.

Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking.
(But they’re not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!)

You excel in: Higher education

You get along best with: The Comma

I’m quite amused to see that I excel in higher education. I wonder if such excellence is measured in terms of years spent pursuing degrees. ‘Cause I’m getting quite a few years under my belt. The bit about collecting lots o’ data is…um…right on the mark.

So, do you dare to try the quiz? Who will get the dreaded colon?

sharing the pants

This week’s Monday Mission was to write a post in the style of another blogger. I found myself stumped by this task. Or perhaps too lazy to really give it a try. Or perhaps too tired. (Would you like an exhaustive list of my lame-ass excuses? I could do it, you know.)

Anyhow, even better than having found the motivation to write a brilliant post, I have instead been honored by Painted Maypole herself, esteemed hostess of the Monday Missions, as the blogger whom she chose to imitate. And imitation, we all know, is the sincerest form of flattery. And I must say that I am flattered to the bottom of my pants.

So, please go pay her a visit. Pants off to you, Painted Maypole!

It would seem that my pants have been falling down again, and it’s been a while since I’ve given you the sort of pants-laden content you’ve come to expect. However, I’m quite pleased to say that there will be more pants here in the near future. (My lovely friend Jean even sent me a special treat that I will have to share. A friend with pants is a friend indeed.)