Monthly Archives: July 2006

Balm in troubled times

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog links to a performance of the Finnish Complaints Choir: “Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints…”, a 24MB download and I swear, worth every minute of the wait.

Appallingly clever

Many of us know about these excruciations on “That’s amore”…


Somehow this one fell into my ummmm mind as I was shopping yesterday (no apologies for some relaxation of the algorithmical constraints):

When a third of your herd
Hits the dust all at once [well, all at oncet]
That’s a murrain

I sent that to my friend Ken, who was able to retrieve (from his email archive) a set constructed a few years ago:

When your chicken is tossed
in a chocolate sauce
that’s a mole

At the bris there’s the trick
when the guy trims your dick
that’s a mohel

Take 2 cups Bechamel
add some cheese you can’t smell
that’s Sauce Mornay

(and this one is only locally comprehensible, being about the river that flows by Lexington VA):

Float from Goshen to James
with Confederate Dames
that’s the Maury

a refinement to the Maury one:

It has Matthew Fontaine’s
name from Goshen to James
that’s the Maury
(Matthew Fontaine Maury –19th century Father of Naval Oceanography)

another culinary one:

A chestnut glacée
if you say en Français
that’s a marron

and for the ornithologist:

Auk! it’s no puffin I know
Can’t pronounce ‘guillemot’
it’s a murre

and today Ken contributes:

When a native you see
On the coast of New Z
….

Empires of the Word

I happened upon Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: a language history of the world (Amazon link, and try some of the Explore and Browse options) in a Brattleboro bookstore and I’m gobsmacked again. In Bill Thompson’s 9-minute interview with Ostler you’ll get a running start at the flavor of the book. Just buy it –at less than $12, what do you have to lose?

Glorious hike

Skookumchuck Trail meets the ATSkookumchuck-AT junction
Betsy drove up from VA for the weekend, we met in Plymouth NH, and on Saturday we hiked up the Skookumchuck Trail to the AT, then up the north side of Mt. Lafayette and back down the Greenleaf Trail –about 9 miles, our first above-treeline hike since finishing the AT in 2003.