Another example for the Euthyphro file: an envelope of puffery from Discover magazine includes a bookmark with fifteen little-known facts. Here are two of them:
8. No American has died of old age since 1951.
9. That was the year the government eliminated old age as a category on death certificates
Truly Thou art great, O State!
But … why not eliminate all causes of death while Thou’rt at it?
If you’re familiar with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and with the musical Fiddler on the Roof, then you should enjoy this delightfully insane musical, Shoggoth on the Roof, which sets characters and situations from the former to the music of the latter. (If you’re unfamiliar with either or both, you’ll be somewhat baffled ….)
Here, for example, is an excerpt, to the tune “Sunrise, Sunset”:
Arkham, Dunwich, Arkham, Dunwich
filled with haunting fears
neighbors who hide up in the attics
inbreeding happily for years
Or this, to the tune of “If I Were A Rich Man”:
If I were a Deep One
blub blub blub blub, blub blub blub blub
blub blub blub blub, blub blub blub
all day long I’d swim beneath the sea
if I were a Dee-eep One
terrify the tourists
blub blub blub blub, blub blub blub blub
blub blub blub blub, blub blub blub
if I were an icky icky fish
scaly slippery frog-eyed kind of man
But my very favourite is this adaptation of “To Life”:
To life! to life I’ll bring them
I’ll bring all these dead men to life
and if that life has no quality
still there’s the quantity
I will bring them to life!To life, to life I brought him
I brought Dr. Halsey to life
of course I first had to kill the man
with some ingenious plan
(He just shot him!)
Okay, it’s true, I shot him
I shot him but brought him to life ….
The sound is very professional, and the voices are excellent.
When I tried to buy the CD from the website the link wasn’t working, so I bought it from Froogle instead. But the official site seems to be working again now. (And you can listen to audio samples.) So buy your copy now! Otherwise, unspeakable horror awaits you ….
1. Funny line from John Julius Norwich’s History of Venice:
Giovanni Gradenigo, nicknamed Nasone, or Big-Nose – ‘no doubt,’ suggests one turn-of-the-century historian in a moment of reckless speculation, ‘from some peculiarity of feature’ – was elected Doge on 21 April 1355 …. (p. 230)
2. Has anyone else noticed that the title of Rothbard’s history of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, is a quotation from Lincoln? Were I a Straussian I would draw the direst of inferences.
1. Batman got his powers (including his special “batty sense”) through being bitten by a radioactive bat.
2. Robin got his powers through being bitten by a radioactive robin.
3. Man-Bat was a bat who got his powers through being bitten by a radioactive man.
4. Black Canary was a canary who got her powers through being bitten by a radioactive black person.
5. Green Lantern was a lantern that got its powers through being bitten by a radioactive environmentalist.
We have a double winner!
In an undated book-of-the-month-club brochure found in a second-hand copy of John P. Marquand’s 1943 So Little Time, Henry Seidel Canby walks off with both the Unhelpful-Metaphor Award and the Prose-That-Should-Never-Have-Been-Written Award:
Mr. Marquand is the Sinclair Lewis of a slightly younger generation, which does not mean that he resembles Sinclair Lewis except in the kind of services he renders in American literature. Let us say that Lewis put vinegar and the vitamin X of satire into the fiction of the 1920’s; while Marquand sprinkles what seems to be sugar, but is actually salt, on the viands of the 1940’s, and injects the vitamin Y of irony into the veins of his readers.
Ah, must we say that?
What with the iPod, the iPhone, the iBook, it was only a matter of time before someone developed … the iRack.
And it is totally working.