From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Continuous logicians do it to variable degrees of validity.
(Inspired by Saint Marko of the Street Corner.)

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

"You have with you the book you were reading ... which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other." —Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler  (We've mentioned that this book is a masterpiece, right?)

What he saw, not only of reality but even in his imagination, was often blurred by fever, but within that vague dimness his cancer appeared to him as a flourishing bed of yellow hyacinths or possibly chrysanthemums bathed in a faint, purple light.
—Kenzaburo Oé, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, translated by John Nathan, 1977.

Never play Poker with a pyromaniac.  He'll see your bet and raze it.

"Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable." —George Eliot

The sunsets in that African hell proved to be fabulous. They never missed. As tragic every time as a monumental murder of the sun! . . . For a whole hour the sky paraded in great delirious spurts of scarlet from end to end; after that the green of the trees exploded and rose up in quivering trails to meet the first stars. Then the whole horizon turned gray again and then red, but this time a tired red that didn’t last long. That was the end. All the colors fell back down on the forest in tatters, like streamers after the hundredth performance. It happened every day at exactly six o’clock.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey To The End Of The Night, 1934, translated by Ralph Manheim, 1983.

"How to establish the exact moment in which a story begins?  Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.  Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue." —Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler  (We need not mention how wonderful this book is.)

Saint Ravioli
Patron of Pasta Making.

This puzzle grid reads, "It is in giving that we receive." The grid contains a word for a baby growing incisors. It also contains a word referring to paying a social call. Can you find them?

All letters in the word must touch (in any direction), and no square may be reused.

Click to display solutions

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

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

Can some types of knowledge be considered "luxuries"?  Here's Robertson Davies' take on "ornamental knowledge":


via Omegaword.

Which philosopher is funnier: Spinoza or Voltaire?

Clue:  This is according to a Torah scholar.

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

Citation:  Jacob Neusner, The Life of Torah (1974), p. 100.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"'Escape' is one of those words I cannot hear without abandoning myself to endless ruminations."
—the immortal Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler

More and more as I grow older I see the beautiful dream of life expanding till it is much more important than gray life itself — a dark, red dream the color of the cockatoo.
—Jack Kerouac, Journal, July 4, 1949; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.

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Rick Dale writes:

Very cool post!  Thank you!   Perhaps you'd enjoy my Kerouac-obsessed blog at www.thedailybeatblog.blogspot.com.

"I've never told you but back in London (that time she was in hospital and refused to see me) she almost gave up the ghost pfft." —Gérard Bessette, Incubation

Om is where the heart chakra is.

by Gerald Davison

The Spectral Colors of Brocken Bows and Glories

Imagine hiking on a sunny mountain and witnessing an unforgettable phenomenon worthy of a Hollywood special effects team: as a bank of chilly fog rises from a couloir, your shadow grows to gigantic proportion (hundreds of feet high), surrounded by a prismatic halo.

In olden times, the spectre was considered to be of supernatural origin and fearfully ominous in nature. Today, the phenomenon is known as a "Brocken Bow," named after a mountain in Germany. Like a small, circular rainbow, a foggy Brocken Bow tends to last from several seconds to fifteen minutes. Bands of color surround the gigantic shadow at a distance of several feet. The outermost band is red, and the others follow the order of the typical rainbow. In some cases, a Brocken Bow is surrounded by a second bow, whose color order is reversed. A similar phenomenon, known as a Glory, is distinguished by the fact that the bands of color touch the head of the shadow. Glories typically sport seven bands of color and can last for hours at a time. Sometimes Glories are surrounded by glowing white fog bows.

by bob the lomond

In ideal conditions, the sun shines behind the observer and a cloud of fog rises from a lower elevation in front. The ideal temperature for Brocken Bows and Glories varies between 19 and 56 degrees Fahrenheit. Though the bands of colors are no illusion, the size of the shadow is actually a trick of the eye. Apparently, the shadow appears gigantic due to a distortion of depth caused by moving fog particles at varying distances.

For a detailed description of Brocken Bows and Glories from a scientific point of view, see Henry Sharpe's piece for Scottish mountaineers. Also don't miss The Nonist's study on the phenomenon, illustrated with vintage woodcuts and color photographs.

by bob the lomond

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

"When the tidewater in the canal started to ebb, the head floated out to the sea."
—Kamala Tiyavanich, Sons of the Buddha

There are two types of comedian . . . both deriving from the circus, which I shall call the White Face and the Red Nose. Almost all comedians fall into one or the other of these two simple archetypes. In the circus, the White Face is the controlling clown with the deathly pale masklike face who never takes a pie; the Red Nose is the subversive clown with the yellow and red makeup who takes all the pies and the pratfalls and the buckets of water and the banana skins. The White Face represents the mind, reminding humanity of the constant mocking presence of death; the Red Nose represents the body, reminding mankind of its constant embarrassing vulgarities. . . . The emblem of the White Face is the skull, that of the Red Nose is the phallus. One stems from the plague, the other from the carnival. The bleakness of the funeral, the wildness of the orgy. The graveyard and the fiesta. The brain and the penis. Hamlet and Falstaff. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Laurel and Hardy.
—Eric Idle, The Road To Mars, 1999.

Which is funnier: An attempt by Lucy to stomp grapes or a “shot to the moon” by Jackie Gleason?

Clue:  This is according to a book on how to construct sketch comedy

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

Citation:  Cherie Kerr, Build to Laugh: How to Construct Sketch Comedy With the Fast and Funny Formula (1998), p. 13

"The more gray and ordinary and undistinguished and commonplace the beginning of this novel is, the more you and the author feel a hint of danger looking over that fraction of 'I' that you have heedlessly invested in the 'I' of a character whose inner history you know nothing about." —Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler

Sometimes Yakov lost sight of the words. They were black birds with white wings, white birds with black wings. He was falling in thoughtless thought, a stupefying white- ness.
—Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, 1966.

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Jeff writes:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

I spilled red curry and Thai-dyed my shirt.

Q: In his song "Humanized," Jon Ryman sings, "I'm half alive, just like a Chinese figurine."  Are Chinese figurines indeed sentient?

A: Yes—but only the jade statues are sentient.  "Living Jade" (Jadeite, as opposed to Nephrite) displays mild intelligence.

Certainty #29:

"The sole certainty of life is found in the love that destroys all else."
—Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry, 2001

The man had on a brown suit, white shirt, and red tie, all of the same degree of cheapness, and all worn out to the same degree. The color of the suit was reminiscent of an amateur paint job on an old jalopy. The deep wrinkles in the pants and jacket looked as permanent as valleys in an aerial photograph. The white shirt had taken on a yellow tinge, and one button on the chest was ready to fall off. It also looked one or two sizes too small, with its top button open and the collar crooked. The tie, with its strange pattern of ill- formed ectoplasm, looked as if it had been left in place since the days of the Osmond Brothers. Anyone looking at him would have seen immediately that this was a man who paid absolutely no attention to the phenomenon of clothing.
—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

"'Questionable' is a splendid word; I have always attached a great philological value to it.  It calls up a desire both to pursue and to avoid, or at any rate a very cautious pursuit, and stands in the twofold light shed by what is noteworthy and notorious in a thing—or a person."
—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

When we're asked to weave stories out of the whimsical dictionaries we compile, we're left scratching our heads [oops—the Majestic Plural gets tricky!].  The lexicographer gathers the words for the writer to combine.  The satirist Dr. Boli knows what we're talking about.

True of False: Soup is as funny today as it was a few years back.

Clue:  This is according to the book The Sense of Humor.

Answer:  False.  “Soup is still funny, but not as funny as it was a few years back.”  (The answer is in black text on the black background.  Highlight it to view.)

Citation:  Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor (1921), p. 150.

I had a nightmare about a ghost shark.

Certainty #28:

"The only certainty is that of journeying towards a non-verifiable arrival."
—Paolo Bartoloni, Interstitial Writing, 2003

Saint Robert
Patron of Post Rock.

I dreamed I came down with stigmata.

Claggart deliberately advanced within short range of Billy, and mesmerically looking him in the eye, briefly recapitulated the accusation. Not at first did Billy take it in. When he did the rose- tan of his cheek looked struck as by white leprosy. He stood like one impaled and gagged. Meanwhile the accuser’s eyes, removing not as yet from the blue, dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet colour blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence losing human expression, gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep.
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd, 1924.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

by Derpunk

All the Colors of the Wind

The air. A thing too intangible for color you think? ... The truth is all air is colored.
—John C. Van Dyke, The Desert

Anyone who thinks that air is invisible is impaired by a sort of color blindness. Indeed, the air is so alive with color that it could be likened to a rainbow that encircles the entire earth with pink, red, violet, gray, blue, and yellow. Ask a naturalist or a painter, and you'll hear descriptions of an airy spectrum that escapes the unobservant viewer. Carried by swirling dust particles and refracted by the prisms of water vapor, the colors of the air are best observed in a mass. Mountaintop vantages, canyons, desert expanses, or deep valley views are recommended. The warmer the temperature and the stronger the wind, the more color will be detectable. Rising heat carries finer dust particles deepening the air's hues, while high winds carry larger particles, brightening the coloration.¹

Here's how naturalist Richard Jefferies poetically recorded seeing the colors of the wind at sunrise one morning:

by James Jordan.

Color comes up in the wind; the thin mist disappears, drunk up in the grass and trees, and the air is full of blue behind the vapor. Blue sky at the far horizon — rich deep blue overhead — a dark-brown blue deep yonder in the gorge among the trees. I feel a sense of blue color as I face the strong breeze; the vibration and blow of its force answer to that hue, the sound of the swinging branches and the rush — rush in the grass is azure in its note ; it is wind-blue, not the night-blue, or heaven-blue, a color of air. To see the color of the air, it needs great space like this — a vastness of concavity and hollow — an equal cauldron of valley and plain under, to the dome of the sky over, for no vessel of earth and sky is too large for the air-color to fill. Thirty, forty, and more miles of eye-sweep, and beyond that the limitless expanse over the sea — the thought of the eye knows no butt, shooting on with stellar penetration into the unknown. In a small space there seems a vacuum, and nothing between you and the hedge opposite, or even across the valley; in a great space the void is filled, and the wind touches the sight like a thing tangible. The air becomes itself a cloud, and is colored — recognized as a thing suspended; something real exists between you and the horizon. Now, full of sun and now of shade, the air-cloud rests in the expanse.²

The COLOURlovers library is full of airy inspiration. There are colors of "thin" to "heavy" atmospheres as well as airless colors of suffocation.

NOTES:
[1] John C. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances, 1903.
[2] Richard Jefferies, "Winds of Heaven," The Eclectic Magazine, 1886.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

We found this quotation for fans of This Is Spinal Tap:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Here's a fun observation from the folks at Strange Maps:


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NH writes:

Often confused with "anamorphic," the anthropomorphic format is a photographic projection in which an animal mask is required to view the original aspect ratio.  In this example, an anthropomorphic kangaroo (Prof. Oddfellow) and his silver tabby watch David Lynch's "Rabbits" series.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

I felt the eye of the forest staring at me from among cedars, pines, and several species of cypress, all of a green so murky that one perceived it almost as black.
—Kenzaburo Oé, The Silent Cry, translated by John Bester, 1974.

From our outpost at Blogger, here's an excerpt from Janet Boyer's review of our Magic Words: A Dictionary:

The first 48-pages of Magic Words are utterly fascinating, with Conley an engaging tour guide through literary, philosophical, cultural and spiritual landscapes—realms dotted with landmarks that pay homage to the power of magical utterances (and, sometimes, even to silence and mysterious glyphs).

Not only does Conley offer examples of poetic incantations and the mysterious power of words in his introduction, but he also provides fascinating insight into the vocabulary of ritual (and why we get the giggles during solemn occasions!), the four archetypes of the Magician, and our ability to imbue “ordinary” moments with the magic of both cadence and connation.

The rest of Magic Words is dedicated to, well, magic words!

With word origins, facts, variations, meanings, mystique and appearances in literature, this A to Z guide offers a mind-boggling array of information to be mined by would-be magicians, entertainers, writers and artists. . . .

Magic Words is, indeed, a meticulously researched, heavily footnoted, and absorbing read, especially for lovers of trivia and words.  Performers seeking to spruce up their magic routine would do well to consult this book, as would all manner of artists who seek to infuse their work with meaning, mystery, flair or sacredness.

See the full review here.  Janet is author of The Back in Time Tarot Book.

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Gary Barwin writes:

What is “more humorous than passionate attempts to invent artificial languages, Volapük, Esperanto and what not, to do the work that the English language is already doing all over the sea, and will, apparently, soon be doing all over the land”?

Clue:  This is according to essayist Theodore Watts-Dunton

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

Citation:  Ernest Rhys, Modern English Essays (1922), p. 120.

Certainty #27:

"Hold on fast to the only certainty in this world, which is the certainty of Love and Care."
—Willa Cather, in a letter to Sarah Wyman Whitman, 1898

There were Saturday mornings when a muddy brown pool was joyous to the test of squatting kids . . . as dewy and mornlike as brown mud water can get, — with its reflected brown taffy clouds —
—Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax, 1959.

Did you hear that Dante's epic journey through Hell to Purgatory to Heaven was merely Alighieri-cal?

Saint Morass
Patron of the Bog.