"Someone should write a book about all the different complex flavors of patronizing behavior toward patrons."
—Jonathan Caws-Elwitt

Did you know that Santa, back when he was svelte, used to deliver presents on New Year's Eve and not Christmas Eve?  This illustration is from The Family Magazine, 1840.

"A rose is a rose is a rose because innately there is a mechanism whereby the mind understands that a unit, in spite of its individual characteristics, belongs to a composite."
—Ilan Stavans, Return to Centro Historico (2011)

"Monsieur Oiselle."

(That's a Googlewhack, as of this posting.)

(Thanks, Mike!)

An illustration from a 1900 issue of The Windsor magazine.

Marguerite Duras, when asked if death frightened her, said, "I don't know know anything anymore since I've reached the sea." Enrique Vila-Matas said, "What terrifies me about the idea of eternal death is to never be able to see the sea again, the waves breaking in winter on deserted beaches."

An illustration from a 1904 issue of The Windsor magazine.  The caption reads: "Was it you that spoke?"

"This might surprise you a little bit, but I would look for someone who had a quality that I call winsomeness."
—Bill Hybels, New Identity

An illustration from an 1899 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "Of course tears followed."

One hundred and eighteen years before Twitter, the immature gathered out of doors to exchange "five minutes' stories."  (The illustration is from Five Minutes' Stories by Mrs. Molesworth, 1888.)

An illustration from a 1904 issue of The Windsor magazine.  The caption reads: "On and on they sailed."

"This may surprise you and you may not even know this, but when you leave your power and influence leaves with you."
—Davidson L. Haworth, The Wizard of Prali (2011)

Eighty-two years before Coldplay proclaimed, "It was all yellow," everything was turning yellow in The Panama Plot by Arthur Benjamin Reeve (1918).

Statistics [and we realize that with good cause we've lost most of you after using that horrible, horrible word] tell us that "The weather today clearly depends on yesterday's weather.  It might also depend on the weather two days ago but as a first approximation we might assume that the dependence is only one day back" (Larry Wasserman, All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference, 2003).

An illustration from a 1905 issue of The Windsor magazine.  The caption reads: "It was the crux ansata, the Symbol of Life itself."

Did you know that Santa's nightmare word is "unfilled"?  We find proof in Life, 1918.

An illustration from an 1895 issue of The Canadian magazine.  The caption reads: "And thus he passed into the night again for evermore."

"The truest answer is simply: 'If you go, then I'll miss you . . . terribly.'”

—Julia Hoban, Willow (2010)

An illustration from a 1901 issue of Life magazine.  The caption reads: "Christmas Night.  Ancestral Greetings."

Santa is haunted by children of the poor in this illustration from Life, 1918.

We guess he might be dreaming of something like this:

"No more laps, just some weightless floating." —Bronwyn Jameson, Beyond Control (2004)

Time-traveling through old magazines, one truly does experience Einsteinian relativity.  Take, for example, this illustration of "a modern home" from 1893 (Cosmopolitan Magazine).  We also love how old magazines regularly long for the return of traditional holiday celebrations.  Even though the holiday trappings of the 1800s meet our current ideal of olde worlde authenticity, there was a time when all that was newfangled.  We can just hear the older generation back then, granting that the yule logs, holly wreaths, mistletoe, and snow effigies seem pagan enough, but if the kids only knew how things were really done back in the day!  Every olden time had its own olden time, and we're left with nostalgia for nostalgia.

Staring into the depths: an illustration from an 1890 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "Looking intently into the heart of the fire."

There are people who genuinely prefer My Fair Lady to The Sound of Music.

"Lady North Wind" by Albert Hughes (1857).

"It bears repeating that letting 'things be' should not be confused with indifference."
—Claude Cernuschi, Barnett Newman and Heideggerian Philosophy

An illustration from an 1884 issue of Belgravia magazine.  The caption reads: "When you see her next, give her my curse."

"It's really happening!  You knew it and they're proving it!  Congratulations!"
—Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur (2012)

Did the children make the snow Buddha, or was he self-realized?  From Parley's Magazine, 1842.

"The answer is simply: 'To have fun.'”

—The Laughing Jesus (2005)

"The only certainty ... is that you'll never know if you could be one of them unless you try."
—Sherryl Woods, The Summer Garden (2012)

A doll possesses a "dim, vague, blurred, vicarious, secondary consciousness of a soul embodied in an intensely loved but inanimate companion" and looks forward to encountering "the legendary doll of dolls" (John Cowper Poyws, Porius).

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Intriguingly, freshly fallen snow can actually store sounds as well as project them with clarity.  A carefully gathered snowball is like a library of sounds stored on crystalline shelves.  When held to the ear like a seashell, it may whisper the secrets it has absorbed.  Ergo, composer and music theorist John Rahn describes "a little snowball of sounds” (Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, 1995).  Snow expert Nancy Armstrong explains that "When snow is newly fallen, sound waves are absorbed into its soft surface.  Later, when the surface has hardened, sounds may travel further and sound clearer, because the snow reflects sound waves, sending them more quickly through the air” (Snowman in a Box, 2002).  Barbara Blair concurs: "snow is a wonderful substance to enhance awareness” (Communing with the Infinite, 2006).  [The preceding is an excerpt from our Field Guide to Identifying Unicorns by Sound.]

"In truth, everything is already healed right now."
—Doreen Virtue, Daily Guidance from Your Angels (2008)

"The answer is simple but takes much work. Are you ready for the answer? Can you handle the truth? Sit down relax and let me give it to you straight. You must learn that it is not about you.”

—Lynette Edwards, Take Off the Mask (2012)

"'Call it a hunch, if you want,' I said, 'but—'  'I don't want to call it anything,' he said."
—Raymond Chandler, The Thin Man


A still from the perennially delirious Young Frankenstein.

Let's begin with our favorite acclamation point — complete with a demonstrative waving flag. Type a regular exclamation point, then a triangular dingbat next to it. Superscript the dingbat to raise it up the flagpole. The dingbat we use is Lucida Grande #8227.

---

Another acclamation point represents a martini glass raised in a toast (the Y portion is like the cross-section of a glass). It's Lucida Grande #7924.

---

A third acclamation point communicates vocal approval. A big circular mouth engulfs the dot. It's Lucida Grande #0664.

The first acclimation point signifies Dorothy's concept of "getting the hang of something." It features a dot at both the top and bottom, as if the mark were hanging from itself. It's Lucida Grande #7883.

---

The second acclimation point represents acclimatization as symbolized by an umbrella. It's Ludica Grande #7788.

!^‣   Ỵ   ʘ   ị   Ṭ

"Always remember that there is a photo in every situation, it's just a matter of how closely you look to find it."
—PHOTOVIDEOi (Feb. 2007)

photo by Cobalt 123

"[A]propos of nothing.  'It always happens in threes.'"
—Catherine McKenzie, Spin (2012)

Geof Huth contends that "There is no opposite of potato."  He may be correct, and we'll be open to agreement once we're finished peeling all these "negative potatoes" (a.k.a. "antipotatoes).

An illustration from an 1873 issue of Peterson's magazine.

"Get the snowball rolling, and it may surprise you how fast it grows."
—Michael Ellsberg, The Education of Millionaires (2011)

"The Haunted House":  an illustration from an 1879 issue of Peterson's magazine.

An illustration from an 1887 issue of Life magazine.

I dreamed again about a coordinating conjunction.  It said the clauses in our sentence were long and contained internal punctuation used to separate long items in a series.  This was what I wanted to hear: it meant that I belonged in the sentence.  But for some reason I felt certain that the conjunction was lying.

I also dreamed that I had dinner and drinks with Michael Tomasky, who said: "If I were linguistic emperor, not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we’d all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I’m on some sort of drug.  What writing today does that?  Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas.”

[And this may surprise you:]  "Your mood today is often a response to yesterday's weather." —Weekly World News, May 4, 1999.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

An illustration from an 1879 issue of Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly magazine.  The caption reads: "He grew into a fashion of dropping his pen, or holding it idly in his fingers, and picturing dreamily sketches not written out for mortal ken, but only for his heart's comfort."

Here's a precursor to the self-referential prose fictions of postmodernism: "The Story of a Story" by Helen W. Pierson, from Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine, 1884.

"'Someone should write a book about the dedicatees of the great poets."
—James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (2012)

Above: An illustration from an 1894 issue of Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly magazine whose caption indicates that the faces of the subject's companions were transformed.
Below: An illustration from Niels Klim's Journey Under the Ground (1767) by Baron Ludvig Holberg.

We so often assume that our waking life influences our dreams, but Jeff Hawkins knows it's the other way around.  He notes: "Funny that my dreams can so powerfully influence my waking life, while my waking life has so little influence over my dreams."  We couldn't resist a diagram.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Bleeding ink and Google's scanning machine combine to form an aptly titled "Pairing."  The illustration is from Peterson's magazine, 1877.

An illustration from an 1895 issue of Life magazine.

We've been keeping one of our latest publications under the radar, lest it fall into the wrong hands.  But we felt safe sharing it with Clint Marsh (of Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop fame).  From his review in The Pamphleteer:

A master of practical esoterica, Prof. Oddfellow (a.k.a. the inimitable Craig Conley) follows in the footsteps of magicians throughout history in tracing his lineage to a potent fabulous ancestor, in this case Elizabeth of York, the mother of Henry VIII and the woman immortalized as the Queen of Hearts in the familiar deck of playing cards we've all seen.  Instead of climbing the family tree back toward Elizabeth, though, Conley begins with her and comes down through history toward himself.  This approach makes perfect sense to anyone bent on establishing a blood connection to a particular figure from the past, and it seems to involve less risk of falling down the wrong genealogical rabbit hole.  ... [Heirs to the Queen of Hearts: Tracing Magical Genealogy is] a wonderful new addition to his teeming brood of bibliomantic offspring.

"Write a novel in which a cryptozoophile kills himself at the end, unable to physically consummate his relationship to his objects of desire." —Stefan, of The Kelayah Objective

"Somebody should write a book someday about the silences in Scripture."
—Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark (2007)

"The Genealogical Ghost":  an illustration from an 1886 issue of Life magazine.

An illustration from a 1916 issue of Green Book magazine.  The caption reads: "His fingers ran about the keyboard and seemed to meet her fingers there as before.  She was at his side, her hands crossing his, his fingers lingering on hers.  He turned to clasp her . . . but his arms found only emptiness."

An illustration from an 1894 issue of Century Illustrated magazine.  The caption reads: "There was a whir, whir, whir."

An illustration from an 1898 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

An illustration from an 1870 issue of Peterson's magazine.

An illustration from an 1894 issue of Century Illustrated magazine.

"Often the answer is simply: It is not for you to know. This is a hard answer, but sometimes it is the only answer.”

—Tony Woodlief, Somewhere More Holy (2010)

An illustration from a 1908 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "The puzzling black marks on the white pages spoke to us."

Eighty-four years before Tim Burton introduced Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas, L. Frank Baum's The Road to Oz featured another pumpkin-head named Jack.

We're devastated to report that the piece on "Forecasting Yesterday's Weather" in NewScientist (Sept. 20, 1979) doesn't live up to its fascinating title.  We had so hoped that predicting past atmospheric conditions would be more accurate than predicting future ones, but it would seem that meteorologists can't even correctly describe current conditions.

An illustration from an 1876 issue of Peterson's magazine.  The caption reads: "Oh! Pitiless! Pitiless Moon!"

Children's staring contests with animals were apparently all the rage in the late 1800s, if these illustrations from Peterson's magazine are any indication.