For real

Two weeks on the road visiting family both immediate and extended. Drove home through the rain to join my granddaughter teaching her boyfriend rummy 500. Later opened a folder of scanned images and saw for the first time photos of long-gone ancestors from before the Great War. Went to bed temporarily qualmless and sinking. Opened a book first thing this morning to read a short piece about Kafka by David Foster Wallace. And he (Wallace) writes “… our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” I’m adrift here, in a good way, with nothing to add.

Nobody expects this

Back in the 15th century, expeditions from Spain were all over the world discovering new places. As history makes clear, this is because they were very inquisitive. Occasionally to a fault. Anyway, this led to words from the Spanish language entering general usage even for English speakers. For instance, on encountering a big lizard basking in the sun, one sailor might have said to another, “My, but doesn’t he look comfortable,” hence the modern term “Comodo Dragon.” Or even closer to home, in Europe: In Spanish, Germany is called Alemania, which makes sense because those people are crazy about beer.

Danny Boy

Originally, there was this folk tune called London Derriere, which was inspired I assume by a Piccadilly strumpet with a singularly impressive behind. It was collected in the 1855 book “The Ancient Music of Ireland” from the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland, but didn’t generate much chart action until 1913, when a Englishman named Frederic Edward Weatherly published his version with new lyrics all about Irish people. It was a 1965 hit single for Detroit native Jackie Wilson, making it all in all one of the most egregious instances of cumulative cultural appropriation ever.

Told by an idiot

See, this is why I don’t go out to shows anymore. Somebody had tickets they weren’t using, so we went out the theater to see a play performed live, with actors, on a stage. And it was like a person isn’t even allowed to have a conversation even if they paid for their damn seat which mine was free but it’s the principle. Anyway, the show was a total ripoff, where this one guy basically stole every line Michael Fassbender spoke in his 2015 movie Macbeth which I guess they figured nobody had seen. How do they not get sued?

Yo. Word.

Octothorpe is the word for a hash or pound sign. Jentacular is the word for of or pertaining to breakfast. Nelipot is the word for a barefoot person. Psithurism is the word for the sound of the wind in the leaves. Somniloquence is the word for sleep talking. Taciturn is the word for being of few words, while pauciloquent is the word for taciturn. Logolepsy is the word for a fixation on words. Logogriph is the word for a word puzzle. Logorrhea is the word for the excessive use of words. And verbatim is the word for word for word.

Oscillating so rapidly from shame to pride that I am a blur.

So dude is terribly constipated. Impacted. (Don’t worry. This is not a poop joke. That’s as graphic as we get, right there. Keep reading.) He figures this is bad enough to require some form of intervention. But a friend recommends trying an herbal cure and she brews him some special tea. (This joke assumes friends routinely discuss the condition of their bowels.) He’s skeptical, but drinks it. And the stuff works. He feels great. “What was that?” he asks. “I made it myself,” she explains, “from this fern right here.” “Wow,” he says, “With fronds like these, who needs enemas?”

Curb your anxiety

Do you suffer from the nagging fear that you will somehow bump into a shiny parked motorcycle and knock it down into an adjacent parked motorcycle thereby initiating a chain reaction that causes a great many shiny expensive motorcycles to fall down like a row of dominoes, leading to your being mercilessly pummeled by a gang of enraged bikers? Relax. This probably won’t happen. Parked motorcycles are actually pretty stable. Even if you managed to knock one over, it probably would just lean on the next one, causing you to be mercilessly pummeled by one, at most two, enraged bikers.