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.

the well of idioms may be about to run dry

I’m afraid I may have upset the apple cart with yesterday’s scandalously wasteful overuse of idioms. (I mean, I packed in the idioms like sardines, all higgledy-piggledy as if they grew on trees.) Because as some of you know, this country is suffering from the ravages of an idiom crisis:

Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies

WASHINGTON—A crippling idiom shortage that has left millions of Americans struggling to express themselves spread like tugboat hens throughout the U.S. mainland Tuesday in an unparalleled lingual crisis that now has the entire country six winks short of an icicle.

To do my part to conserve, I’ll resolve to work on recycling old careworn and threadbare clichés, and coining my own beet-juggling idioms. For more details, please tumble your aardvark over to the full story at The Onion.

nutty as a fruitcake, happy as a clam

I’ve been keeping something under my hat. I’ve been going on lately about how I have a lot on my plate, crabbing that I have may have bitten off more than I can chew. Sometimes I run around like a chicken with its head cut off. And then I’ve also been feeling pretty under the weather, with my head in a fog half the time. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles. And as things stand, come hell or high water, I’m about to open up a whole new can of worms.

I can certainly be one to beat around the bush, and you may well wish I’d just let the cat out of the bag and talk turkey. I mean, here I am, dragging things out at a snail’s pace, as slow as molasses in January. I could just sit around and chew the fat till the cows come home. But I suppose I should just come clean, take the bull by the horns, and spill the beans. So here’s the dirt, in a nutshell: I’ve got a bun in the oven.

Life of Pie

The Pi Pie Extraordinaire, aged 3 days, finally left this world after a brave struggle against consumption. The brave Blackberry-Apple Pie made it into Pie-hood against the odds. Conceived in late-evening silliness, assembled in the mayhem of a chaotic kitchen with the disadvantages of a severely cracked top crust and a shortage of frozen blackberries, the Pie still reached that coveted state of golden brownness, and emerged from the 400 degree oven only slightly marred. Born in the later hours of Pi Day, the Pi Pie proudly bore the mark of Pi. Those closest to the deceased knew the Pie as being a warm and tender individual beneath the crusty exterior, with a sweetness that was only accentuated by the tartness of the Berry heritage.

The Pie is survived by the Tokens household, several dirty plates and forks, and a disposable aluminum pie pan. “It is better to have loved Pie and lost Pie than to have never eaten Pie at all,” said Alejna, sadly brushing a tear from her eye and a crumb from the corner of her mouth.

——————–

This slice of silliness is being served to you as part of the current Monday Mission, which ordered up posts in the form of an obituary.

In other news, I’m pleased as pie to share that my caption won the most recent Teeny Manolo caption contest.

Winners receive the coveted TeenyManolo iAward Air, a virtual prize of stunning hypothetical magnificence and staggering imaginary prestige.

Go have a look and see my award-winning caption.

Happy Pi Day!

pi.jpgIt’s Pi Day, people! Woohoo! It’s 3-14. And I didn’t even see it coming. (And here I just mentioned a book called Life of Pi yesterday. Of course, that was a pi-free Pi reference.)

Here are some tasty pi goodies for you to help you celebrate your day:

  • Be sure to check out the official Pi Day website. (Thanks to Tina of Omphaloskepsis (one of the grandest blog names out there) for pointing me there.)
  • I highly recommend the musical pi stuff, like pi rap videos, and the pi(ano) song, where someone has converted the digits of pi to a melody.
  • You can also see a hundred thousand digits of pi. Here’s a preview:

    3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716
    9399375105820974944592307816406286208998628
    0348253421170679821480865132823066470938446
    0955058223172535940812848111745028410270193
    8521105559644622948954930381964428810975665
    9334461284756482337867831652712019091456485
    6692346034861045432664821339360726024914127
    3724587006606315588174881520920962829254091
    7153643678925903600113305305488204665213841

  • Not enough digits for ya? How’s about a million?
  • Kate Bush has a song called “π”. Or “Pi,” if you must stick to ASCII. In it, part of the refrain is seeing 150 digits of pi. Shockingly, it seems that she has, according to Confusablility, gravely erred in her digits:

    I got hold of the lyrics and checked them against an online version of Pi. All was well for the first 53 decimal places but then Kate sang “threeeeee oneeeee” when she should have sang “zeeeeeeerooo” instead. She recovered for the next 24 digits but then it went to hell in a handbasket when she missed out the next 22 digits completely before finishing with a precise rendition of her final 37 digits.

  • Inga of Arbitrary Ruminations is celebrating the day with a list of Pie quotes, which may be safer.
  • Or you might want to watch a movie. Like Pi (1998). A movie sadly lacking in pie.
  • I think that later today, I will have to bake a pi. I mean, a pie. Seriously. I’ve keep meaning to bake a pie, but haven’t found the time. But now the pi forces are conspiring to make pi a piority. I mean, priority.
  • Finally, let me leave you with this classic pi joke:

    A young man goes off to college from his rural home. When he comes back for a visit, his less educated father wants him to show off his fancy learning. “Say something smart, son,” he commands.
    The young man thinks back to his classes, and figures a formula from math should sound impressive enough. He offers up the formula to calculate the area of a circle. “Pi r squared,” he says.
    His father looks embarrassed, and shocked. Shaking his head gravely, he says, “What are they teaching you, son? Pie are round, son. Cornbread are square.”

π π π π π π π π π π π π π π π π π π π π

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

allow me to bore you

YTSL of Webs of Significance tagged me (ages ago) for this “unimportant things” meme, the task of which is to list six unimportant items about myself. Seeing as I talk about myself all the freakin’ time, it’s become harder to come up with lists of things about myself that I haven’t revealed in a post. (cf. 6 weird things about me, 7 little known things about me, and 6 guilty pleasures I indulge in.) Whereas it would greatly amuse me to make things up, and maybe I’ll do that one of these days, I have decided to dredge up more insignificant factoids.

  1. I sneeze when I eat dark chocolate. As in the really dark, 70% cacao or above, kind. Strong mints have the same effect. If I eat white Tic-Tacs, I will sneeze exactly once per Tic-Tac that I eat, within a few seconds of putting it in my mouth.
  2. I don’t like bell peppers. I particularly don’t like green bell peppers. I find it irritating that a lot of vegetarian food has lots of peppers in it.
  3. I have crooked teeth. Not hugely crooked, but enough that you will rarely see me smile with my teeth visible in photos.
  4. My body doesn’t self-regulate its temperature very well. My hands and feet tend to get very cold in the winter. In the summer, I often overheat, since I tend to sweat very little.
  5. I have very dry skin. This, along with the previous item, makes me feel somewhat reptilian. (Well, not really.)
  6. But, speaking of reptiles, I like lizards. (I’ve never had one as a pet, though. They felt a bit like pets in Hawaii, though, the way the ran around on the walls. This may be the source of my appreciation for lizards.) I have somewhat of a collection of things with a lizard motif, but am glad they are somewhat subtle in our home. Some of my friends and relatives have given and/or made me some really cool lizard things over the years.

This meme comes along with some rules, which you can see at YTSL’s if you like. (Ha! I’m breaking a rule just by not posting them. I am a rebel!) But I’ll mention the tagging bit: “Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.”

I’ve decided to have a bit of fun with the idea of “six random people.” I have (more arbitrarily than randomly) chosen the last 6 people to use the tag “randomness” on WordPress.com at the time that I checked. I tag, and offer to you, this list of six lovely semi-randomly chosen lovers of randomness (along with their last posts of randomness).

  1. ladyhustler of Simple Complexities (how to write a Haiku)
  2. maddie of alive & amplified (This distance)
  3. theblossoms of Blossom-ing (schizophrenic)
  4. Carrie of in the process of living (Looking forward.)
  5. blandable of Bland Musings (Poetry Saga part Deux)
  6. Olivia of Olivia’s Total Randomness (Things I Love)