William Keckler marvels: "I tried to find a picture of a lime in lime light.  And I couldn't find a single photograph of this.  I felt like asking Google for a divorce.  All I wanted was to see a lime in a perfectly matching lime light, a lime camouflaged in lime light."

Ladies and gentlemen, we present an Internet first: an actual lime in limelight.

Gordon spotted our Skeleton Key of Solomon: Unlocking the Secret Reflections of Sigils and Vévés (the yellow book on the middle shelf) at Chicago's Quimby's Bookstore, sitting next to The Key to Solomon's Key: Is This the Lost Symbol of Masonry? (the red book) and Aleister Crowley's Diary of a Drug Fiend (in purple).  Now that's some heady reading!

Imagine a game of "What's My Line," in which either a cherub or an imp whispers into a blindfolded panelist's ear.

Are the whispered words pictured on the right of an angelic or a diabolical nature?

Answer: Angelic. "Turn—yet turn and live!" —Andrew Cleaves, "Chapters on Churchyards," in The Living Age, Vol. VII, Dec. 1845, p. 362. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)

"As unlikely as it sounds there's strong evidence that some sections of the audience relish tedium."
—The Independent

"The answer is simple: He will undoubtedly get it.”

—Kiplinger’s Personal Finance (Dec. 1956)

All kidding aside, there's a book entitled What Shall I Read Next?  We can just see this title scrawled (without irony) on someone's list of to-be-read books.  (Even more deliciously, as we type this post, the book has not yet been released but is pre-orderable.)  It's like something out of a procrastinator's Calvinoesque dream.

"Believe it or not, there are some [TV] producers out there who are not very nice people."
—Lee Goldberg, Successful Television Writing

We understand this is the first and last time Hollywood extras were acknowledged in a film's opening credit sequence.  The film is the stunning noir masterpiece The Shanghai Gesture:

Two birds fly past.  They are needed somewhere.
—Robert Bly

via A Murder of Crows, An Unkindness of Ravens

Here's one of Nabokov's methods for a secret code.  Note the charming detail that "one-letter words remain undisguised":


Via Gretel und Hänsel

From our former outpost at Twitter:


Gary Barwin wittily answers:

June adds:

"There are two kinds of truth:  trivialities, where the opposite is obviously impossible, and deep truths, which are characterized by their opposite also being a deep truth." —Niels Bohr

Imagine a game of "What's My Line," in which either a cherub or an imp whispers into a blindfolded panelist's ear.

Are the whispered words pictured on the right of an angelic or a diabolical nature?

Answer: Diabolical. "Some Demon whispered, 'Visto! have a taste.'" —Alexander Pope, "Epistle IV," The Works of Alexander Pope Vol. III, 1881, p. 173. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)

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Gordon writes:

"Are you sitting down?  Good.  Now for a dose of reality.  You are not super-leader."
—Blaine Allen, When People Throw Stones (2005)

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

This piece was inspired by Andy Paik and Arcana Chaos.  The red letter C is from the award-winning typeface created for our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary (HarperCollins) by Mucca Design.

We were chatting with a Hollywood screenwriter the other day about the great dramatic pitfall of the wizard genre — problems can be solved with the wave of a hand.  We're reminded of thrillers in which logician savants battle wits (it's fun when the two masterminds form a Yin/Yang connection, each respecting his rival's intellect).  It's a stalemate ... until one of them fails to predict a tiny repercussion that tips the balance.  Every wave of the magic wand initiates an action, but the ripple effects are for the machinations of Chaos to sort out.  Consider the murderer who, with a wave of the hand, throws the incriminating evidence in the river, unable to predict where the material might wash up.  (Or consider the classic Bewitched series, in which a vexing and hexing mother-in-law's action invariably triggers a chain of unforeseen consequences.)  Perhaps a magician's foremost powers need to be of logic and of foresight.

"Too Much Candy for a Dime" by Eddy Raven

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

You're just too much candy for a dime, ain't no way
I can look into those eyes of yours and walk away
You think I would know better, but I fall every time
You're just too much candy for a dime

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION

You're just too much candy for a tenner, ain't no way
I can look into those eyes of yours and eat my dinner
You think I would know better, but I ain't no thinner
You're just too much candy for a tenner

In the British comedy series "Absolutely Fabulous," a life coach gives this ridiculous "daily aim": "Have a great idea and write a pop song."  We couldn't help but think back on that line when we saw this advice:

"The Heaven of the Time Machine" from Louis Untermeyer's Heavens, 1922.

Imagine a game of "What's My Line," in which either a cherub or an imp whispers into a blindfolded panelist's ear.

Are the whispered words pictured on the right of an angelic or a diabolical nature?

Answer: Angelic. "An angel whispered in her ear, 'Stretch out thy hand.'" —Emanuel Geibel, "As It Often Happens,” The Ridpath Library of Universal Literature by John Clark Ridpath, 1898. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)

Is it true, as Momus suggests, that there are "few tales which would not be improved by the addition of the phrase 'suddenly, a shot rang out'"?  Decide for yourself as we alter the opening lines of . . .

THE SHADOW LINE by Joseph Conrad

Only the young have such moments.  I don't mean the very young.  No.  They very young have, properly speaking, no moments.  It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.
     One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness—and enters an enchanted garden.  Its very shades glow with promise.  Suddenly, a shot rings out.

Prof. Oddfellow goes into the field (in this case, an icy lake freezing around his precarious canoe) to listen for unicorns.  Join the adventure on YouTube or the superior Vimeo.

The next morning, only the canoe's wake remains unfrozen (see bottom photo).

Nabokov suggests that the "ultimate vision is the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow.  This is, I believe, it:  not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another."  (Transparent Things)

"What most people don’t understand is that typography is the use of language that in itself is its own language – one that can take a lifetime to learn and perfect, and that few ever do."
—Chip Kidd, The Learners, 2008, via DJMisc

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June adds:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"Did they have a sale on twinkling antlers?"
—Rosemary Laurey & Karen Kelley & Dianne Castell, The Morgue the Merrier

"My Girl is a Dime" by Charlie Wilson

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

My girl is a dime
Dime dime dime
My girl is a dime
Dime dime dime
Man I got a dime
dime dime dime

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

My girl is a dollar
Holler, holler, holler
My girl is a dollar
Call her, call her, call her
Man I got a dollar
Ain't no Montrealer*

*No disrespect to the Canadian dollar is intended.

Q:  What is the difference between a crevice and a question?

A:  A crevice contracts and expands and holds little bits of darkness like water, shadow and air.  A question is something used to plumb the depths of a crevice.

—Geof Huth, personal correspondence

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June writes:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

This one is for our friend Jeff;  we immediately noticed that the name of his mysterious pen pal "Redacted the Jackal" is an anagram of "Jacketed Cathedral."

Since my ancestors fall on both sides of the Wars of the Roses, I could say I'm fiscally Yorkist but socially Lancastrian.

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Jeff quips:

"Writing is just the process of reading backwards, of unpacking from the skull what watching has filled the head with."
—Geof Huth

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Daryl Griffiths writes:

Here's a literal New Yorker cartoon caption involving a unicorn.

Poet Bob Grumman [in a suddenly missing blog post] uses the subject of one-letter words as an example of a "knowleplex," defined as a "reasonably coherent unified knowledge, practice, use and understanding of some subject."  There are five kinds of knowleplexes; which would you guess describes our own dictionary of one-letter words?

1. Academically-Approved Knowleplexes (by 90% of academics)

2. Academically-Tolerated Knowleplexes (insufficient data to approve or disapprove)

3. Academically-Unexamined Knowleplexes (too trivial)

4. Academically-Disapproved Knowleplexes (by 90% of academics)

5. Academically-Denounced Knowleplexes (considered a significant danger to right thinking)

Prof. Oddfellow ventures out, armed with a viewing crystal and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.  Yes — the door knocker is from Warwick Castle; Prof. Oddfellow is related to the first fifteen Earls of Warwick.

Imagine a game of "What's My Line," in which either a cherub or an imp whispers into a blindfolded panelist's ear.

Are the whispered words pictured on the right of an angelic or a diabolical nature?

Answer: Diabolic. "And then my familiar demon whispered: 'Why not? Think of the fun.'" —Patience Croswell, "The Confessions of a Vicarious Person,” The Bookman, Vol. XVI, 1903, p. 72. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)

Is it true, as Momus suggests, that there are "few tales which would not be improved by the addition of the phrase 'suddenly, a shot rang out'"?  Decide for yourself as we alter the opening lines of . . .

FORBIDDEN TO MARRY by Isabella Banks

It has been intimated that Muriel's homecoming had not been the unmixed joy she had anticipated.  Suddenly, a shot had rung out.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

This piece is in honor of Gary Barwin's new volume of poetry, The Porcupinity of the Stars.

From our Magic Words outpost:

Our intriguing magician friend Chris Philpott posed an interesting question about the preponderance of the two most popular magic words:


Chris, there are actually two very different answers to your question about abracadabra's surge in the 1920s.

Here's our first answer:  What we see when presented with a chart comparing word density over time from the Google Books scanspace is both something and nothing at all.  It's certainly something because we can perceive it, i.e. the charts dazzle us with their jagged edges and numerous nodes, suggesting the compilation of many data.  However, the trends that they argue are circular, based as they are only upon the tiny subset of books which Google has scanned from the periods under consideration.  If we had it on reliable word that Google had scanned, say, 95% of all extant publications, we should still consider word density measurements statistically insignificant considering that the missing 5% might contain 95% of the contemporary appearances of "abracadabra" in print.  Moreover, Google cannot estimate the readership of its catalog, which would be necessary to make any evaluative claims about the familiarity of a word or phrase in common culture or parlance, which is really what the word density charts are attempting to demonstrate.  Words used by authors in printed publications which survived until 2010 are not, by themselves, particularly significant.  The field of statistics is famous for its bold sleights of hand.  Most any contention can be illustrated by a sufficiently culled data set and evaluative methodology.  Google's scanned word data are of course too fun not to keep playing with, but we must always bear in mind their inherent balderdash.

Here's our second answer:  The rise of "abracadabra" in 1920s is the exhalation of a meme's biorhythm.  Decades later, the "wizard" meme began its exhalation, and J.K. Rowling rode the wave.  We can't even say that Rowling buoyed the wave -- she is merely part and parcel of a grand expansion cycle.

Chris responds:


Indeed, Chris, one definition of "meme" is an expression that can be copycatted.  (The Greek root is mimema:  that which can be mimicked or imitated).  Without discounting Rowling's achievements, let's remember that she didn't coin the word "wizard"; it was already a charming Briticism for "excellent."  Just as the common cold spreads one handshake at a time (Richard Dawkins has unsavorily called memes "viruses of the mind"), human culture spawns.  Rowling, bless her heart, is simply one node of the complex informational network that enables the "wizard" meme to spread and thrive.

Happy new year!  (This drawing is from Louis Untermeyer's Heavens, 1922.)

"It would be bitterly cold, the only certainty of the days ahead."
—Scott Ridley, Morning of Fire (2010)