collecting tokens

Tomorrow is July 4th, which is the US is known as the Fourth of July. (Oh, right, it’s also called Independence Day.) It’s a day traditionally marked by fireworks and displays of flags. Lots and lots of flags.

Flags are often used as symbols of national and political identity, but this list isn’t about those. I figure that enough flag-waving of that sort will be going on tomorrow. Instead, I’ve lined up a few other types flags to wave around for this week’s ThThTh list.

1. capture the flag: an informal game or sport, typically played outside. Two competing teams try to steal each other’s flags.
2. flag someone down: an expression meaning to gets someone’s attention who is moving in order to get them to stop. Generally signalled by waving, though not necessarily by waving a flag.
3. raise a red flag: an expression describing a situation when a person perceives that some action or event should be taken as a warning. As in “When the man showed up at the interview without pants, it raised a red flag as to the applicant’s suitability as a funeral director.”
4. white flag: a symbol of truce or surrender. Wave the white flag (or raise the white flag) is also used metaphorically for signalling surrender or defeat.
5. Black Flag: a punk band. For a quick sample, check out a video of their song “Wasted,” which clocks in under a minute long.
6. Black Flag: a line of bug-killing products, the most famous of which is the Roach Motel.
7. International Marine Signal Flags: flags representing letters and numbers that can be strung together and displayed on a ship to spell out messages.



8. semaphore: a system of long-distance communication that commonly uses flags.
9. Okay, I admit. This whole list is just a premise to share with you one of my all-time favorite acts of flag-waving: Monty Python’s brilliant production of Wuthering Heights in semaphore.

Summer is here, at least for those of us up on this side of the equator. Summer signals a range of things. Picnics and barbecues. Trips to the beach and dips in the pool. Berry picking. Hotter temperatures. Longer days. Shorter pants.

And in some places, as Mad reminds, Shakespeare festivals.

While the bard himself may have covered his esteemed rear end with garments cut of another fashion, he no doubt would have come to love pants had he lived in our day and age. We can only imagine the great things that Shakespeare might have written had he lived in an age of pants.¹

Without further ado, and with all due respect, I offer to you a glimpse of some pants that might have been.²

Shakespeare’s Pants

Quotes, or at least the pants-less versions of them, harvested from this site.

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¹ And had he been an utter loon.

² It’s been a long time since I’ve shared my pants with you. Truth is, I’ve been sitting on these pants for many months.

I got to have me some cake this week.¹ I ate it, too. And this cake-having inspired me to think about cake. So I’ll be serving up a list of cake-oriented things for this week’s ThThTh.

Bon appétit!

A Cake List

1. Cakes are used for lots of holidays and celebratory events in many cultures. Some examples include birthday cakes, going away cakes at office parties, French bûches de Noël or German stollen at Christmas. Also…
2. Wedding cakes. Usually elaborately decorated multi-tiered cakes meant to serve all the guests at a wedding. They can be quite tall, and easily knocked over or smashed for comedic effect in movies or sitcoms.
3. stripper in a cake. A tradition (if it really happens outside of TV and movies) of having an exotic dancer jump out of a large cake-shaped container. (You can make your own, if you like.) (I toyed with making a list of movies/shows where you see a stripper cake, but could only remember “Under Siege,” where the stripper fell asleep in the cake. Anyone have any others?)
4. sexy cakes. A sketch on Saturday Night Live with Patrick Stewart as a baker of cakes decorated with erotic images. That is, erotic if you have similar ideas to the baker as to what’s “sexy”. (The video seems not to be up on the SNL website, but you can read the transcript. Come on, go read it. It’s funny. Especially if you imagine Patrick Stewart’s dignified stentorian voice for the baker’s lines.)
5. “Let them eat cake!” A phrase attributed to Marie-Antoinette, reflecting her insensitivity to the hungry masses who could not afford to buy bread. It was likely not really said by her. (And certainly not in English.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of someone using a similar phrase under similar circumstances in 1767, several years before Marie-Antoinette even arrived in Versailles.



6. the icing on the cake. An expression meaning an additional bonus, benefit, or other desirable thing. As in something good on top of something else that’s good.
7. cupcake. A small individual serving-sized cake. Also an endearment.
8. babycakes. Another, even cutesier, endearment. (Want to see something creepy? Check out this YouTube video of someone making a realistic sculpted baby cake. Perhaps not as deeply unsettling as bread made to look like dismembered body parts, but creepy nonentheless.)



9. Pat-a-cake. (or Patty-cake). An English nursery rhyme. Also used for a clapping game.
   

   Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man.
   Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
   Pat it and roll it and mark it with “B”
   And put it in the oven for Baby and me.

10. a piece of cake. An idiomatic expression meaning “easy.” As in “eating up all that chocolate was a piece of cake.”
11. have your cake and eat it, too. An expression describing a desire to have things 2 different ways that are not compatible. More along the lines of “save your cake and eat it too.”
12. takes the cake. An expression meaning “the most extreme example,” such as the winner of a contest or other comparison. As in “I thought Martin was a geek, but his brother Andy really takes the cake.”
13. Cakewalk. A game, set to music, where the winner gets win a cake. I hadn’t realized it had origins as an actual dance:
    

    Cakewalk is a traditional African American form of music and dance which originated among slaves in the Southern United States. The form was originally known as the chalk line walk; it takes its name from competitions slaveholders sometimes held, in which they offered slices of hoecake as prizes for the best dancers.[1] It has since evolved from a parody of ballroom dancing to a “fun fair” like dance where participants dance in a circle in the hopes of winning a free cake.

14. Cake. A band. My favorite song of theirs is probably their cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive.”
    

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¹ Actually, what I technically had was a celebratory fresh fruit tart, with a preamble of a couple of donuts holding some candles. But these were symbolically cake:

If you’ve ever spent any time house-hunting, you’ve probably noticed that real estate listings have a certain lingo of their own. Often, this involves descriptions of properties that have been somewhat embellished to make even flaws quirky characteristics sound like selling points. Some of these euphemisms have become standardized, such as the “handyman’s special,” a term for a home that is falling apart in every imaginable way in minor need of repairs.

In order to help you read between the lines in an MLS listing, I offer to you this helpful example and glossary.

Example: a typical MLS listing

Charming and cozy 2 bedroom house. Enjoy summer breezes in this lovingly decorated perfect starter home, with sunny, low-maintenance yard. Modern kitchen, 1 and a half baths, partially finished basement. Homey, and ready to move in!
Location features:
• easy access to freeway
• excellent cell phone reception
• close to amenities
• friendly, mature neighborhood

Glossary of Terms:
charming: run-down
cozy: cramped
summer breezes: house is drafty, may have windows missing or holes in roof
lovingly decorated: all the carpets are magenta, and there is loud wallpaper in every room
perfect starter home: you’ll want to move out as soon as you can afford better
sunny: no trees or shade of any kind
low-maintenance yard: lawn is paved over
modern kitchen: kitchen done in the Modern style, circa 1960
1 and a half baths: the second bathroom has partially-installed fixtures, or there may be a toilet in the basement
partially finished basement: basement features water-stained shag carpet
homey: house has funky smells, possible from cat urine
Ready to move in!: home has been abandoned
easy access to freeway: next to an on-ramp
excellent cell phone reception: under a cell phone tower
close to amenities: across from a liquor and/or convenience store
friendly, mature neighborhood: may be near a strip club or adult bookstore

I hope that this information will be helpful to you in your house-hunting endeavors. If you have more terms to add to the glossary, I welcome your contributions!

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This week’s Monday Mission, which I’ve chosen to accept in a roundabout way, was to write a post in the style of a real estate listing. For more listings, stop by Painted Maypole.

Thanks to maja for teaching me “low-maintenance yard” and “easy freeway access,” terms that she may have actually seen in use.

I’m seriously amused. There is a quiz out there called “The Blog Cuss-O-Meter,” which I saw at casa az last night (and at raincoaster a few days ago when I was too busy to give it a spin). I thought to myself “screw it, I hardly ever swear on my blog,” but I took the quiz anyhow. Here is the result I got:

(The site further gives this bit of info: “This is 791% MORE than other websites who took this test.”)

This surprised me more than a little, especially given that others who took this were surprised at how low a score they got. In spite of having decided, and stated, that I reserve the right to swear on my blog, I tend to shy away from using certain words in my writing that more easily leave my lips when I am, for example, driving. Hell, I wrote a whole post last week where I played with “crap” as a theme, but I somehow avoided using the word shit.

For example, I’d just like to point out that the word fuck appears to appear in only 4 posts in the history of this blog, which means just over 1% of the posts. (And one of those uses is on an image of a little candy heart. Doesn’t that make it sugar-coated?)

But I do use a lot of mild taboo words. My guess is that somehow, the ass in kick-ass, as in my tag “kick-ass women” is responsible. (Yes, I’m saying my ass is responsible.) It’s in my sidebar, so may count as being in basically all of my pages somehow. Otherwise, what do they consider?

Seriously, this makes me want to do an experiment. Anyone want to try adding some shit or something to their sidebar to see if they can inflate their score?

(Oh, and by the way, I’m back home. The conference and trip were really great. The presentations went well. I saw lots of people I wanted to see. And now I’m really fucking freakin’ damn quite palpably tired and need to get ready for the next conference, now less than 3 weeks away.)

My laptop is restored, thanks to John, and it’s been back to the grindstone. (And while Phoebe does appear to have an intestinal bug, so far, John and I both seem to be resisting it.)

In any case, no time for a ThThTh list. Instead, I hope this supplement to last week’s banana list will tide you over:

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and assistant Beaker demostrate the banana sharpener.

From the AP article:The Johns Hopskins University Center for Human Health and Technology Studies issued a report last Friday indicating that individuals participating in activities relating to the internet format of weblogs were at increased risk for a variety of health problems, including rickets, schistosomiasis, kuru, high blood pressure, Omphaloskepsis, and vitamin D deficiency. Many subjects further exhibited lethargy and reduced reaction times to external stimuli.Blogging practices most strongly correlated with risks to mental and physical health include the publication, reading and exposure to weblog entries on topics including, but not limited to, politics, humor, family, music, news and the personal lives of the weblog authors. The study identified the following practices as being most strongly correlated with mental health risks and cognitive deficits:

• Spending upwards of 5 hours weekly reading, writing or contemplating writing weblog entries
• Reading of multiple weblogs daily
• Compulsive checking of weblog entries for comments or the checking of website visitor statistics
• Posting images of one’s local domestic fauna and/or offspring
• Posting lists of any kind

When asked for details on the concurrent study for risks associated with so-called “lolcats,” images of animals which have been augmented with captions using poor grammar, Dr. Percival Jones-Quinderpants replied: “The final results of that study are not yet available, but preliminary results show that subjects may be at higher risk for certain types adult-onset language disorder, such as Lolcat’s Aphasia and hyperacronymia.”Related studies also found that subjects who spent late-night hours engaging in various online activities (such as social networking sites) were more 5 times more likely than the control group to have decreased attention spans and reduced ability to focus, leading to an inability to complete a coherent

With work keeping me crazy busy, and life in general pulling me in all sorts of directions, it’s no wonder I feel I’m going a bit bananas. And what with yesterday’s big banana-related news, it’s no wonder I’ve got bananas on the brain. Seeing as I don’t have a whole lot of time tonight, this ThThTh list may be on the short side. So please feel encouraged throw in your own bananas.

A small bunch of bananas

With 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. “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. 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.