Southwest Airlines was envisaged not with a paper airplane (as Hollywood might lead you to believe) but rather on the back of a napkin.  (See this BusinessWeek article for a picture of the doodle.)  It could be said (though it won't be) that the napkin's flexibility has "rubbed off" on the company, not to mention elegance, durability, absorbability, and stain resistance.  Speaking of napkins in Hollywood, it appears that an uncanny look-alike of former Senator John Edwards has written a book about napkin doodling.  (Surprisingly, and some might say disappointingly, the book is printed on regular paper.)

by : Damien

"The Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh might be the oldest piece of literature we have; it has lost nothing of its original freshness.  Gilgamesh for Apes is an attempt to translate it into the pictorial language used by American and Japanese  primate centres teaching language to great apes."

Which is funnier: “whiskers” or “mutton chops”?

Clue:  This is according to Jonathan Caws-Elwitt and Laurence Sterne.

Answer:  mutton chops. Mr. Caws Elwitt explains: “In a room full of ordinary words, I feel that ‘whiskers’ would most likely be the life of the party. But the triumph of ‘mutton chops’ is, I think, overdetermined, given the inherent silliness of both of the two individual words; the synergistic effect of their combination; and the conceptual silliness of describing facial hair with reference to a food.” (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)

Though we'll soon be sharing more pages of our new book Annotated Ellipses here at Abecedarian, we can't resist quoting the early reviews:

From Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]:

Here's a delightful new book by Craig Conley: Annotated Ellipses.  In it, he takes a page from The Wind Bloweth, a ellipse-filled novel by Donn Byrne, and he explains the hidden story behind all those daffy dots. It's so creative, so funny, and so completely Craig, who also wrote a dictionary of one-letter words and a field guide to identifying unicorns by sound (really!).  We love it!

From Gordon Meyer, author of Smart Home Hacks:

Very charming. ... It's visual theatre.

From Gary Barwin, author of Seeing Stars:

Fantastic.  Really lovely use and fragmentation/elaboration of the source text, something very allusively numinous and resonant.  The idea of what lies behind the ellipses ... what has been left out, the ellipse as a hole/portal into another world, as .... a 'mark of three,' as three places in an alphabet of symbols/signs/sigils, is fantastic, and very evocative.

I dreamed I participated in a cakewalk with a spastic colon.  (My dream was no doubt inspired by Jeff at Omegaword.)

G. B. Stern, in her delightful book Monogram ... tells of her rage, about three years ago, at learning that there were no such animals as unicorns.

All her life she had simply taken it for granted that there were unicorns. "That there should not be is plainly silly," she says. "Who can deny that there are zebras? And zebras are even striped, which is absurd. Well, then, there must be unicorns or how are we to manage?"

I think that possibly Miss Stern is a little too upset right now to look at the lack of unicorns in its right perspective. Her desperate cry of "or how are we to manage?" is born of the suddenness of the whole thing's breaking on her like this. In a year or two Time, the Great Kidder, will have fooled her into thinking that we are managing all right without unicorns, and only occasionally will she wince when looking at the "By Royal Appointment" signs.

My dream began at a pet store that resembled a big warehouse.  I was in search of a pet octopus.  I was assisted by a young man who placed a maroon-colored octopus in my arms.  I walked around with it in my arms for a while and decided to set it down for a while.  It started running around, and I chased after it.  Not long into the chase I became frightened and ran from it; here the octopus started chasing me.  The young man who had given me the octopus caught it and again placed it in my arms.  I began walking again and decided to buy the octopus some food, so I asked the octopus what it liked to eat.  The octopus couldn't talk, but we could communicate.  I stopped suddenly in front of a row or clear refrigirators and asked the octopus if it could shock me.  The octopus responded by placing one of his tentacles in my mouth.  I fell to the floor where I lay for a minute; when I arose, the octopus was again placed in my arms.  We headed to the reptile section.  I stopped in front of an aquarium where snakes had tried to escape through the bottom but had suddenly died.  Half of their bodies had managed to taste freedom.  I blinked and suddenly I was in a stranger's driveway.  His garage was open so I walked inside.  His pets were dying, among them a dog, already covered in maggots.  I walked inside and was greated by a young male.  I asked him if I could use his bathroom he said yes and showed me the way.  The inside was covered in blue carpet and there were three steps that led down to the toilet.  I closed my eyes for a second and when I opened them I found myself in a classroom.  The classroom resembled the classrooms in the movie Matilda.  There were only girls inside the classroom, all no older than 13.  They were all waiting in line holding AM/PM cups.  I too was holding one and was told to urinate in it.  There was a table on the right side of the classroom where all the cups were being placed.  I did what I was told and I gave it to my instructor.  She looked inside and said that it was the right color; I didn't understand.  At the end of my dream I realized that the world was ending and the color of my urine was the only way to save the world.  (I am not sure why this was the solution.)  I also realized that the only reason why my urine was the right color was because the octopus had shocked me.