Category: ThThTh

all my eggs in one basket

whole_egg_simple.pngWith Easter around the corner, and with nesting on my brain, it seems like a good time to break out the eggs. While there are loads full of eggs out there, to help moderate our cholesterol intake, I’ll restrict this ThThTh list to a dozen egg things.

A Dozen Eggs

  1. Easter eggs. Eggs that have been dyed and/or decorated as part of Easter traditions. Linked by some to the concept of rebirth. Linked by others to an anthropomorphic bunny.
  2. Easter egg: a hidden message or bonus in video game, DVD, or other (ususally digital) media. (Can you find my Easter egg?) They can also be found in print or other media, scuh as maps, as a means to protect from copyright infringement.
  3. Fabergé eggs. Elaborate jewelled eggs made by Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé, many of which were commissioned by the Russian imperial family. They often had surprises hidden inside.
  4. Chocolate eggs. Not actually eggs flavored with chocolate, which probably comes as a relief to many, but egg-shaped chocolates. I’m partial to Kinder eggs. A type of chocolate egg containing a plastic yolk with a surprise inside. When I was little, the toys were much cooler than the prizes you could find in, for example, Cracker Jacks. Cadbury Creme Eggs are pretty tasty, too, but the yolk contained within is messier to play with.

    5. egg_blue2.jpgegg_yellow.jpgegg_purple.jpgegg_green.jpgegg_pink.jpgegg_orange.jpg

  5. “the egg scene” from Angel Heart (1987) (clip on YouTube) “You know, some religions think that the egg is the symbol of the soul,” says Robert Deniro during the scene where he malevolently peels and eats a hard-boiled egg.
  6. Humpty Dumpty. A nursery rhyme about an egg.

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
    Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

    It has quite a bit of lore associated with it. (Did you know it was a riddle in earlier forms, with the eggness of Humpty being the answer?)

  7. Palestinian egg story: A Palistinian folktale about an egg trying to discover its identity. I was exposed to it during a field methods class, where we worked with a speaker of Palestinian Arabic. I particularly remember the line [ʔɪnti mɪʃ Хudra], or “You are not a vegetable.”
  8. Eggbert, the Slightly Cracked Egg, a picturebook by Tom Ross, illustrated by Rex Barron. A story of an egg who is an individual. And a slightly cracked one.

    9. egg_pink.jpgegg_blue2.jpgegg_orange.jpgegg_purple.jpgegg_green.jpgegg_yellow.jpg

  9. Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr. Seuss. A story of an elephant who is talked into sitting on a nest.
  10. Look – (Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers (1968). An Avengers episode with an archive of clown faces painted on eggshells. (This was actually a Tara King episode, but one of the better ones.)
  11. “She was a bad egg.” An expression meaning “she was a bad person,” and a quote from the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) by Gene Wilder when Veruca Salt was dumped down the chute after being identified as faulty by the egg-dicator.
  12. “Egg Baby” Parenting an exercise or assignment sometimes used to teach teenagers about parenting and responsibility. Kids are given an egg to “care for” for a set amount of time. Featured in “First the Egg” (1985), an After School Special starring Justine Bateman. Also in the Buffy episode “Bad Eggs.” Of course, in this case, the eggs turn out to be evil demon spawn.

eggs_carton.jpg

images (edited 2/7/2010, since people were wondering): The white egg is a public domain image from wpclipart.com, and the single colored egg images are ones that I made based using that image. The photo at bottom is mine.

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.

stalking_tiger.png

roar

lion2.pngHere’s my first ThThTh list of March. In like a lion, as they say. Or in with a list of lions, which they don’t really say. But I’ll say it. Or I just did. Here are some lions for you.

  1. Leo. The astrological sign of the lion. Based on the constellation.
  2. The Cowardly Lion from L. F. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (Also in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz.) A lion who wants to get courage.
  3. Aslan. The lion in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the other six books in the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis.
  4. The Lion King (1994) . An animated Disney movie, and a broadway play based on the same.
  5. The MGM Lion. This lion mascot (actually several different lions since 1924) appears roaring in the MGM logo as part of the (much parodied) opening sequence of Metro Goldwyn Mayer film productions.
  6. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight“. A famous song with a more complicated history than I’d realized.. The original version “Mbube” was recorded in South Africa in 1939. Many versions, some also going by the name “Wimoweh,” have since been recorded around the world. Best known perhaps is the version by The Tokens. (Hear it on YouTube in a video with a singing hippo and dancing dog.)
  7. The lion’s share. An expression meaning “the biggest portion.”
  8. “The Lion’s Share“. A song off 10,000 Maniacs’ album Blind Man’s Zoo.
  9. Fed to the lions or Thrown to the lions. Expressions meaning that a person has been placed in a metaphorical position of danger or a situation for which they are not well prepared. (Ancient Romans threw people to the lions as a spectator sport, and in a less figurative way.)
  10. “The Slave and the Lion.” An Aesop’s fable about an escaped slave who removes a thorn from a lion’s paw, and thus gains the lion’s loyalty. And avoids getting eaten when he is thrown to the lions.
  11. “The Lady and the Lion.” A fairy tale told by the Brothers Grimm about a young woman who is held captive by a lion, who turns out to be a cursed prince. The story has much in common with versions of the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale. A retelling of the story is available as a picturebook.
  12. The Lion and the Unicorn. Symbols of the United Kingdom. The lion gets to wear the crown on the UK Royal Coat of Arms. There’s also the related nursery rhyme:

    The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown
    The lion beat the unicorn all around the town.
    Some gave them white bread, and some gave them brown;
    Some gave them plum cake and drummed them out of town.

leo2.jpg

ribbit

Here it is, February 28th. What is typically the last day of February. However, this year, as I’m sure you are aware, is a leap year. So we get another day this month, making this year 366 days long.¹ Anyhow, this leaping business of leap year has inspired me to think about frogs.² And thus you get a froggy ThThTh list.
florida_tree_frog.jpgflorida_tree_frog.jpgflorida_tree_frog.jpgflorida_tree_frog.jpgflorida_tree_frog.jpg

A Few Frogs

  1. leap frog: A game you play by leaping over crouched people. (I can’t really describe it. Go see what Wikipedia says.)
  2. Frogger. A classic 80s arcade game. The goal is to get a frog to hop safely across a road and a river without getting squashed or dunked. You can play online.
  3. Kaeru: This Japanese word means both frog and return, leading to frog charms being carried for luck by travellers.
  4. The Frog Prince. A fairy tale about a princess prince-turned-frog-turned prince. It has some variations I’m less familiar with:

    Although in modern versions the transformation is invariably triggered by the princess kissing the frog, in the original Grimm version of the story, the frog’s spell was broken when the princess threw it against a wall in disgust.[1] In other early versions it was sufficient for the frog to spend the night on the princess’s pillow.

  5. The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, a book by Beatrix Potter. Mr. Fisher is a frog who goes fishing for his meal, but after some mishaps, opts to dine on grasshopper.
  6. Frog and Toad. Characters from the series of books (including Frog and Toad are Friends) by Arnold Lobel. They are a frog and a toad. Who are friends.

    7. crane_frog4.jpg     beatrix_potter_jeremy_fisher_cover.jpg     frog_and_toad.jpg

  7. Kermit the Frog. The beloved Muppet, created by Jim Henson. The orginal version was made from a discarded coat and ping pong balls.
  8. Michigan J. Frog. The singing frog from the classic Warner Brother’s cartoon.
  9. Keroppi Hasunoue. A Sanrio character. (It’s not actually clear to me what he is a character of, beyond toys and other merchandising.)

    10. kermit28.gif     mjfrog3.gif      keroppi.jpg

  10. Froggy, a character in various books by Jonathan London, such as Froggy Gets Dressed.³

    11. magnolia.jpg

  11. The frog scene from the movie Magnolia (1999). It rains frogs. Really big frogs. It gets messy.
  12. Frog Went A-Courting. An English folk song.
  13. Five Little Speckled Frogs. A children’s count-down song:

    Five little speckled frogs,
    Sitting on a hollow log,
    Eating some most delicious bugs,
    Yum, Yum.
    One 1 frog jumped in the pool,
    Where it was nice and cool,
    Now there are four 4 speckled frogs,
    Glub, glub.

  14. A frog in one’s throat: an expression describing the gurgling and croaking⁴ that people sometimes get when talking with phlegm in the throat.
  15. Crunchy Frog: a Monty Python sketch about a chocolate confection with a dead frog center.

    We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest-quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose.

———————–

¹ Has anyone else noticed that this is perhaps an unfortunate year to choose for the inaugural year of Blog 365, where people commit to blogging daily for the whole year? But I see they have a planned day off for tomorrow.

² Because they leap.

³ We recently got a different Froggy book for Phoebe from a Scholastic catalog, namely Froggy Eats Out, and were a bit dismayed by the message of this particular one. In it, Froggy behaves like a brat and embarrasses his parents so badly at a nice restaurant that they must leave. They then reward him by going out to a burger joint, like Froggy had originally wanted.

⁴ Or irregular phonation. Which sounds less frog-like than croaking and gurgling.

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.)

          &*%#@$!!

heart in my hands

figure12.png Happy Valentine’s Day. Or what’s left of it.¹ Well, today is a day most strongly associated with one symbol: the heart. Whether it’s heart-shaped boxes of cheap-ass waxy chocolate, chalky-tasting little candy hearts with messages, or the good old-fashioned construction paper heart cut-out, Valentine’s Day is an affair of the heart. Or at least the heart shape. Because let’s face it, the actual organ itself gets the short shrift. So this ThThTh list is for you, you hard-working, blood-pumping bundle-o-muscles.

A list for the Heart

  • “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allen Poe. The sound of his victim’s beating heart haunts a murderer. (There’s a Simpsons episode that features a diarama of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Someone out there has also made a Tell-Tale Heart scene Legos.)
  • Angel Heart (1987). This movie has a bit about someone eating a human heart.
  • The episode “Hush,” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is the one where everyone loses their voice. The villains in this one steal people’s voices in order that they may accomplish their goal of collecting 7 human hearts without the inconvenience of screaming victims.
  • There’s also the famous scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) in which a man rips the still-beating heart out of another man’s chest as part of a sacrificial ritual.
  • Aztec sacrifices: check out the Wiki bit (and do note the “[citation needed]” bit. I really have know idea whether this is true.)

    The Aztec civilization used the heart as a sacrificial token during the sacrifice of a human being. The priest used a stone knife to cut into the thoracic cavity and remove the heart, upon which it would be placed on a stone altar as an offering to the gods. The greatest sacrifice under the reign of Montezuma involved the removal of the hearts of over 12,000 enemy soldiers.[citation needed]

  • Las Dos Fridas (The Two Fridas): a painting by Friday Kahlo with two versions of the artist with heart exposed.(Go have a look.)
  • Looking for something to impress the cephalopodophile in your life? Consider one of the lovely tentacled-heart images of Ben Lawson. (ht to raincoaster and MasterCowfish.)
  • Still want to give your true love the semi-traditional gift of candy? Why not consider the gummy heart, or the one-pound solid milk chocolate human heart?

    • —————-

    ¹ Here it is, almost 11:00, and I’ve been meaning to toss up a list all day. My plan, you see, was to post something heart-related. John suggests that I should prioritize sleep over posting a list. Pah! I scoff at your well-reasoned suggestion. And anyhow, I’ve got most of the damn thing already outlined.

    image: The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Child’s Day, by Woods Hutchinson,

    rats!

    Happy New Year, and welcome to the Year of the Rat! In celebration of this holiday, how could I not offer up to you a platter of rats? No, not to eat, silly. That would be gross. This is a generous helping of rat-themed¹ things for a festive ThThTh list.²

    • Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien. The Newbery Award winning children’s novel about a mother mouse and a colony of highly intelligent rats.
    • Templeton, the rat from E. B. White’s beloved book, Charlotte’s Web. Was voiced by Steve Buscemi in the 2006 movie based on the book.
    • I don’t give a rat’s ass. An idiom meaning “I don’t care,” akin to “I don’t give a flying fig.” One of those expressions that is always used with the negative. For example, one would not likely hear “I give a rat’s ass.” Or maybe one should. I could design a line of greeting cards, perhaps for Valentine’s Day: “I give a rat’s ass about you.”
    • ratty: An adjective to mean dirty, messy and/or worn out. Also a nickname for a cafeteria at my undergrad University. The Sharpe Refectory was long ago nicknamed the Sharpe Rat Factory, later shortened to The Ratty. The nickname was used so frequently that it was easy to forget that it wasn’t the cafeteria’s official name.
    • Ratatouille (2007) Pixar’s latest animated movie is about a young rat who loves to cook.

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    • Willard (1971), and its sequel, Ben (1972). There was also a 2003 remake of Willard, starring the appropriately creepy Crispin Glover. These were movies about the friendship between a man (or boy) and some rats. (Oh, and the rats are vicious killers. Note that you can find these movies on imdb via the plot keywords “eaten alive by rats.”)
    • “You dirty rat!” a phrase popularly attributed to James Cagney, though apparently a misquote:

      It should be noted, however, that he never actually said, “You dirty rat!”, a popular phrase associated with him….The phrase actually originated in the 1932 film Taxi!, in which Cagney said, “Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I’ll give it to you through the door!” often misquoted as “Come out, you dirty rat, or I’ll give it to you through the door!”

    • Rodents of Unusual Size (ROUS): Oversized rats (well, it’s not specified that they’re rats, but they look pretty rat-like in the movie) from the Princess Bride.

      • rats_of_hamelin.jpg

    • The Pied Piper of Hamelin. A legend, sometimes written as a fairy tale, about a man who freed a town of its rat infestation by playing his pipe to lure the rats to drown themselves in the river. When the town refused to pay the agreed upon fees, the Piper then lured away the town’s children.
    • The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett. A Discworld book for young adults about some rats (and a cat) who work a Pied Piper scam.
    • I Was a Rat, a children’s book by Philip Pullman (of The Golden Compass fame). About a boy who was once a rat. A bit of a fairy tale retelling from an unusual perspective.
    • “Adventures of the Rat Family,” a fairy tale by Jules Verne
    • Amy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A character who turned herself into a rat to escape being burned as a witch, but didn’t manage to turn herself back into a human afterwards. Was then kept in a cage as pet by Willow for several years. When she eventually returns to human state, says “I felt like I was in that cage for weeks.”
    • “I think I smell a rat,” a song by the White Stripes. For Amy (see above item) clips set to the song check out this YouTube video.)
    • A few more rat-related items include: mazes, the rat race, The Rat Pack, and pack rats. There was also the rat who ate the malt in “This is the house that Jack built”

      This is the rat,
      That ate the malt
      That lay in the house that Jack built.

    rat_frenzy1.jpg

    ¹ YTSL mentions, though, that this can also be considered to be year of the mouse. All the more reason to get around to a mouse list some time soon.

    ² Last year, I gave a list of pigs for Year of the Pig.

    grrrr

    Bear with me. Or, bears with me. Well, not really with me. But on the list. Yes, Themed Things Thursday¹ is coming out of hibernation, as I come crawling out of my work-induced cave of fatigue and grumpitude. And what better way to come out of a cave than being pursued by a whole lot of bears?

    Some Bears ²

  • Winnie-the-Pooh: Pooh has to top any list of bears in my book. The bear from the books by A. A. Milne. (I prefer not to think about the Disneyfied version.)
  • Grizzly Adams: A TVshow about a man and bear.
  • Gentle Ben: A lesser-known show about a boy and a bear.
  • Grizzly Man A movie about a man who decided to go and live with bears. Eventually, the bears tired of him. From what I understand, he met a…um…grizzly…end.
  • Yogi Bear: A cartoon about a bear, smarter than the average bear, so he says. Stole pic-a-nic baskets. Yogi Bear was always allegedly “in the ranger’s hair.” But I don’t believe he ever actually ate the ranger. (I watched this show as a kid, but I’m not sure I liked it. I feel like I felt some empathy for Boo-boo Bear, the side-kick.)

    • snowwhiterosered.png

  • Goldilocks and the 3 bears:
    The classic fairy tale of breaking and entering. While a family of bears is out for a walk while their porridge cools, a little girl heads into their house where she steals their food and breaks some furniture.
  • Bears are also prominent in several other fairy tales, like Snow White and Rose Red.
  • Bear Snores On: A kids’ book (by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman) about a bear who snoozes through a party in his cave, when various other animals sneak in to get out of the winter storm.
  • There are a whole bunch of other bear books for kids, several of which are berry-oriented, like Blueberries for Sal, Jamberry, The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear.
  • bear hug: A hug characterized by a real squeezing of the arms, rather than just a symbolic arm-wrapping. As one might imagine it would be like if hugged by a bear. Though without the mauling.
  • “B is for Basil, assaulted by bears:” A page from The Gashleycrumb Tinies, Edward Gorey’s alphabetic masterpiece.
  • Fozzie Bear: a muppet who likes to tell bad jokes. (Wocka, wocka, wocka.)
  • fuzzy wuzzy, a children’s rhyme:

    Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear
    Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair
    Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t very Fuzzy, was he.

  • “Bears Discover Fire:” A Hugo Award-winning short story by Terry Bisson in which bears…discover fire.
  • Bears are fairly popular mascots for sporting teams, especially brown bears, or Bruins (cf. the Brown University Bruins, UCLA Bruins, the Boston Bruins, or the Chicago Bears. And cf. also “da Bears” sketch from SNL)
  • teddy bear: A popular type of stuffed animal, named for Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
  • Gummy Bears: fruit-flavored, brightly-colored, gelatin-based candies shaped like little bears.

    • brown_bear_3.png

    ¹ Yes, I realize it is now no longer Thursday. But I ran out of time, and I’ve had this draft going for over a week.

    ² This list is about bears, not bears…

    fresh from the oven

    To cheer you up on this holiday season evening, allow me to offer you a platter of freshly baked cookies. Actually, I don’t have any cookies, but I can offer you this Themed Things list of cookie-related goodness.

    Some Cookies for You

  • That’s the way the cookie crumbles: an expression suggesting the resigned acceptance that an undesired event or outcome can’t be changed.
  • “Faraway Cookies:” Sandra Boynton’s touching love song about a yearning for cookies. (Off Philadelphia Chickens):

    Oh, Chocolate Chip Cookies
    so high on the shelf
    hiding inside of the jar
    I’m not tall enough
    to reach you myself.
    So near, and yet so very far

  • Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? A song usually sung with young kids. Usually without any actual cookies or theft thereof.
  • Cookie Monster: a blue Muppet from Sesame Street who likes to eat cookies. And other things. Also known for his battle cry of “cookies!!!!” (He also sings, which you can hear on YouTube.)

    • cookie_monster.jpg gingerbread_man.jpg

  • The Gingerbread Man¹:
    An folktale about a human-shaped cookie who comes to life and runs off, taunting those who chase him:

    Run, run, as fast as you can!
    You can’t catch me!
    I’m the Gingerbread Man!

  • Cookies for Santa: A tradition of leaving a glass of milk and a plate of cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve.
  • A quiz to let you know what kind of cookie you are, stolen out of Raincoaster’s cookie jar. It would seem that I am a fortune cookie.
  • I like to imagine improbable fortune cookie fortunes, but in case I can’t think up any of my own, there are fortune cookie generators available. This one is also one I lifted from the Raincoaster cookie jar. (She’s going to have to find a safer place to hide her cookies.³) This is the fortune I got:
    My Fortune Cookie told me:
    You will pay for your sins. If you have already paid, please disregard this message.
    Get a cookie from Miss Fortune
  • In Amy Tan’s book The Joy Luck Club, one of the characters works in a fortune cookie factory and tries to nudge a suitor to propose by carefully planting fortunes in his cookies.
  • Girl Scout Cookies. Traditionally sold by Girl Scouts. (In fact, during my brief tenure as a Girl Scout at the tender age of 10, the only Girl Scout activity available to me was selling Girl Scout cookies.) I am also reminded of this scene from The Addams Family movie (1991):

    Girl Scout: Is this made from real lemons?
    Wednesday: Yes.
    Girl Scout: I only like all-natural foods and beverages, organically grown, with no preservatives. Are you sure they’re real lemons?
    Pugsley: Yes.
    Girl Scout: I’ll tell you what. I’ll buy a cup if you buy a box of my delicious Girl Scout cookies. Do we have a deal?
    Wednesday: Are they made from real Girl Scouts?

    • chocolate_chip_cookie.pngchocolate_chip_cookie.pngchocolate_chip_cookie.png

    ¹ If you want to see some very attractive gingerbread men, Mad just posted some photos that make me want to get baking. Or at least make me want to visit someone who does some baking.²

    ² As further proof that this is the season for cookies, BipolarLawyerCook has posted not once, but twice on cookie-related topics. Cookies!!!

    ³ Except maybe for these cookies made from jellyfish. I think they’re pretty much safe wherever.