Silesius of Rhodes writes:

SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING IF YOU ARE STILL GUESSING....I remember a movie by this name as being a very sick vampire flick. But I saw it when I was a kid. I remember the vampires had labs where they were "milking" the humans for blood in a very dispassionate manner. I imagine it was a B minus movie at best judging by my rear-view critical kid mind.

"He was born on the Lower East Side in 1967; he is hovering saintly on the edge of all my action."
—Andrei Codrescu, License to Carry a Gun

From the inimitable Tom Weller, author of the classic Science Made Stupid, comes this "minim" (the perfect answer to the maxim):

 

Which are funnier: Ducks or dogs?

Clue:  This is according to comedy expert Peter Bergman

Answer:  Ducks.  (The answer is in black text on the black background.  Highlight it to view.)

Citation:  Fred Goodwin, “The Infinite Mind: Humor” (1998), p. 8

I could actually SEE the answer without highlighting it today! What is going on?!? Am I developing Super X-ray Vision? Without even having to pay for the glasses! 

"That good and ill shall follow one another is our only certainty."
—Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lady of Avalon

Photo by Imago.

 

Today is International Swear Like Shakespeare Day.  Here's our tribute:

 

See our design on a greeting card.

"Somebody should write a book about the race/class/gender meanings and practice of drug use."
—Peter Braunstein, Imagine Nation, 2001, p. 40.

 

What is funnier: salmon or turkey?

Clue:  This is according to comic filmmaker Mel Brooks.

Answer:  Turkey.  (The answer is in black text on the black background.  Highlight it to view.)

Citation:  Leonard J. Rosen, Writing and Reading Across the Curicculum (1988), p. 302.

"Nice to know you went out in a blaze of glory, cookie."
—Christie Ridgway, How to Knit a Wild Bikini

Photo by Marcela Faé.

 

Shop window at the KaDeWe department store in Berlin.  Photo by photosan0.

"We are all like snowflakes."
—comedian Lewis Black

Photo source.

 

 

Which is funnier: comic actor W.C. Fields “quiescent and smouldering” or “rampant and yelling”?

Clue:  This is according to drama critic Kenneth Tynan

Answer:  Quiescent and smouldering.    (The answer is in black text on the black background.  Highlight it to view.)

Citation:  Kenneth Tynan, Curtains (1961), p. 355.

"The full clock-face of twelve notes supplies the complete chromatic scale of modern music."
—Sir James Hopwood Jeans, Science and Music (1968)

(Photo via danseperdue)

 

"There needs to be a book that teaches students, simply, how to play the game, no matter what the idealogy of the school."
—Maxine Weiss, Aug. 30, 2007.

Inspired by William Keckler.

"Somebody should write a book on ... the evolution of evolution."
—Kim Heacox, The Only Kayak, 2006, p. 162.

We're honored that poet William Keckler crowns us the "best blogger and net presence. Period."  Take in the extent of his full praise here.  We couldn't be more humbled by this defining moment!  Like Lyndon Johnson, we ask the social network for a mandate—not just to keep things going, but to begin.

I believe it was the Emperor Nero who said, "Eat it up, baby. Lick it up." Amour-propre is, as Martha will remind us, a good thing.  Kudos. I have compiled the largest library on conchology this side of Asia Minor, and has this Keckler creature deigned to acknowledge it? Hell nawl! Thalassic Ignoramus! Anyway, keep up the thaumaturgy and all that, Craig. You know how we philosophers like to be amused when we're not doing SERIOUS work. xo
Silesius

Here's a nest of intriguing bird words from natural(ist) humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.

 

Thanks to the Healing Whole blog, which recommends our game Moon-Fish-Ocean for well-being.

Which is funnier: light colors or dark colors?

Clue:  This is according to a guide to drawing comics

Answer:  Light colors.  (The answer is in black text on the black background.  Highlight it to view.)

Citation:  Suck School of Comic Art, Suck.com, (Nov. 7, 1997)

 

"Some one ought to write a book on nationality as it affects the character and the fortunes of an author or artist."
—Eugene Szekeres Bagger, Eminent Europeans, 1922, p. 220.

Q: "Everything can't be Kafkaesque, can it?  I ask myself this over and over, even though I know it's a rhetorical question." —William Keckler

A: Yes, everything is indeed Kafkaesque, except at the antipodes, where everything is reversed.

---

Gary? Shall we?

The coils of memory at the back of the exposed brain. In cross-section: ellipsis in the head. The triplet darknesses of recollection. The pins, the pining of nostalgia, the stab of regret. A world half-remembered like a hairdo of a goat at an almost-forgotten party, the barrettes and French-braided déjà voodoo of lives unburied, twilight-skinned, the zombie-like dusk of thought, neurons nostalgic for a future remembered.  ...then forgotten before it has occurred.

Zellweger voice: "You had me at 'deja voodoo'..."

Not the more hostile Italian? Translator / Traitor?

Good point!  By the way, I agree with Umberto Eco, who called translation "admirable treason."

The emotional magician wore his heart on his sleeve.  No one suspected he had a heart up his sleeve, too.

 

"Most secret of all is what's forgotten."
—John Crowley, Daemonomania

What’s funnier than “the long, grave discussions that you hear after dinner about the genuineness of the wines”?

Clue:  This is according to a nutritionist

Answer:  Nothing  (The answer is in black text on the black background.  Highlight it to view.)

Citation:  Dio Lewis, Our Digestion, Or, My Jolly Friend’s Secret (1873), p. 316

 ---

Luverly.  If all the empty spaces in the universe ever got together, we'd be in real trouble.

But if these are anti-ellipses --anti-matter ellipses-- showing how what was not there in the first place was left out, then the universe would gradually fill with our memories of tomorrow, our recollections of the future, the words between the emptinesses that we chose to leave out, the not-deer of deer not howling, camouflaging themselves behind the trees that are not there.

Optimism is a metaphysical disease. Poetry is the panacea sold in those funny little bottles. It's the alcohol in the panacea that does the real work. That's the generator of non-deer. The other stuff is closer to the coffee grounds of reality.

Deer that "howl" should be seen by physicians. Those might be lycanthropic deer.

Gary Barwin replies:

Or perhaps the deer should be seen by 'pataphysicians. They are ellipsistropic deer, and we, seemingly always forgetting, our gap-toothed minds filtering the metaphysical riches of the world, are ellipsanthropic.

When I see language in need of a haircut, I want to loan my Occam's razor out. This gentleman clearly has a Mint, but I'm not sure anything is legal tender that's coming out. When a metaphysical ship sinks, the war amid the waves is usually between the wits and the witless. The witless miraculously survive, because the wits are engaged in diving for the meaning below the wreck, or looking for the mermaid Public Transportation System. And the deer in question does not seem the least bit "ellipsistropic" to me. The ellipsis has clearly been inflicted upon the poor creature by the antecedent pronoun in the grammatical (and likely erotic) scheme of some hyperbolic (probably 19th century) purple prosateur or prosateuse. Harumph.

My Occam's razor, like some Gillette models <http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/news/fortune500/gillette/> has just the necessary five blades.

Silesius of Rhodes mutters:

You will find your answer here.

Evening Promenade, or Sea Beach Costumes, Autumn, 1810.  Via Bibliodyssey.

Were Adam’s eyes the green of paradise? Did they open on the vivid green of the Garden of Eden? God’s green mantle. Was green the first colour of perception?

—Derek Jarman, “Green Fingers”, from Chroma: A Book of Color; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009

 

Here's a delightful list of "supernatural collective nouns" (thanks Wilfried!)

... an                         of invisible spirits.

Inspired by and dedicated to William Keckler, who writes, "Very Honored, Professor! Merci!"

 

Dear Professor Oddfellow,

I would not write you if a matter of the gravest concern and import did not daily and nightly press upon my chest and constrict my very breath like a "way-too- presumptuous-dude" incubus.

A parrot-cormorant hybrid has been flying about my domicile recently...a horrible nuisance and eyesore.

I notice that it casts no shadow, but that its echoes are doubled and sometimes even trebled, so I'm fairly certain this is a creature escaped from one of your books or incantations.

It flaps from floor to floor and the only thing I could find which repels its natural and unnatural curiosity about anything I am doing (the beast has mastered the art of doorknobs with those claws!) is the sound of the homilies administered by one particularly pedantic minister down in Arkansas.

As this homily only runs at three in the morning and lasts a scant three hours, I find myself deprived of rest the remainder of the day and night, and I assure you my villainy is suffering.

If villainy needs anything, it is a good night's rest.

I notice the bird has mastered several human languages and I admit that I have found it a help in my Icelandic studies. Yestreen it was declaiming one of the ancient Sagas, albeit in a rather monotonous delivery.

Other nights it seems to be acting out some obscure Slovakian television drama or other, complete with laugh track. And worse fare. To call these raucous soundtracks vexsome would be meiosis, which I'm sure you know (I say with no condescension whatsoever) is the opposite of hyperbole.

Today it interrupted me as I was studying a dossier of medieval illustrations I have gathered providing definitive proof that many early martyred saints had begun attempts to blog. I had found clear illustrations of medieval blogging and was nearly ecstatic. Do you realize what a gift this will be to the Mother Church? I am attempting to write a monograph on the subject.

I believe there is a blogging-Purgatory connection. People in Purgatory have been blogging for millenia, but we have been confusing these messages with spam!

Rome must hear of this, and hear of this soon.

Your parrot-cormorant hybrid (and I do believe it is yours) is a handsome creature and I admit to admiring your handiwork, but I was wondering if you might convince it through telepathy or other means that other nearby dwellings might offer more appealing symbiotic "digs."

I thought it was a nice touch that the feathers have the ability to manifest images with a clarity to rival that of the flattest plasma television screen. Have you thought of marketing the beast along those lines? If you could somehow get the beast to articulate vocally in synchrony with the television program its feathers broadcast, you might be onto something.

I confess I watched a documentary on the little-known St. Thisbe of Malta upon the creature's wings as the avian was slumbering on my second floor landing this afternoon.

St. Thisbe was killed by an angry mob of theologians when he attempted to create the first God chain-letter spam. It was in the form of rocks that had Christian messages written upon them, which were to be passed on to twelve friends, who then had to copy the message onto twelve new rocks and spread the divine message to twelve friends each, etc. Here was proof of early faith spam!

It was clearly too early. The plan backfired and St. Thisbe was stoned to death with his own spam rocks, once they were traced back to him. I found this incident memorialized in a little-known etching by Goya entitled (in Spanish): "Pass this on or burn in Hell for donkey years, you cursed widget of Satan..."

Also, your winged beast thieves. Yesterday, I noticed three cupcakes, an edition of Balzac, a scatter pillow, a set of fingernail clippers and an invisibility amulet were all missing from the downstairs.

Needless to say, it is that last theft which troubles me most.

The prospect of an invisible parrot-cormorant with polyglossalaliac logorrhea haunting my dwelling is not one I wish to entertain seriously.

Any assistance you can give me upon this matter will be greatly appreciated, and know that I remain, as ever,

Yours in Logodaedaly and Phrenological Dodginess,

Wilhelm

Which word is funnier: genius or smart?

Clue:  This is according to the book Drawing on the Funny Side of the Brain

Answer:  Genius, as it is “more specific.”  (The answer is in black text on the black background.  Highlight it to view.)

Citation:  Christopher Hart, Drawing on the Funny Side of the Brain (1998), p. 107

 

"Somebody should write a book on bizarre cases of credit attribution!"
—Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, 1985, p. 358.

...but they should say that it was written by Francis Bacon or Jimmy Hoffa.

The streetlamp at the corner- store sways shadows in a big black dance, the store sign swings and creaks in the wind, leaves fly, apples thud to the ground in the orchards, the stars are blazing in the somber sky — everything is raw, smoky, and terrific.
—Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

"The sky is the limit"?  Perhaps for meteorologists and airline pilots.  Why set one's sights so low?