Once when I needed to entertain my daughter while we were driving somewhere, I said, "Let's pretend that, rolling along outside the window, there was a little ball that would pick up trash and boxes and trash cans, and that as it collected items it got bigger and bigger, until it was picking up houses and buildings, and that there was happy music playing that sounded like this (I hummed a bit), while hundreds of citizens called out for help that would never come."

Her little eyes got really wide.  

She was very quiet for the rest of the ride.

(Thanks for the e-card, Karissa.)

McSweeney's:

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. (Twitter would probably catch the back-and-forth spirit of a drama a little better.)

Via Psychemethadelica! (Metafilter)

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there'll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons. I'm learning valuable skills. --Marco Kay

A great introduction to some of the reasons why I love studying the English language. From John McIntyre's You Don't Say.

The malapropism: This venerable category of errors derives from the delicious and eponymous Mrs. Malaprop from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals of 1775. Mrs. Malaprop (from the French mal a propos) pretentiously and unknowingly substitutes the wrong word for a similar-sounding correct one in her pronouncements, such as an allegory on the banks of the Nile. Or, more comprehensively: If I reprehend any thing in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs! (apprehend, vernacular, arrangement, epithets).

The Spoonerism: The Rev. Archibald Spooner, warden of New College, Oxford, has given his name to a tongue-twisted error in which portions of words are transposed in phrases to give new and incongruous meanings. May I sew you to a sheet? for show you to a seat and the toast To our queer old dean for dear old queen are representative examples. Though the Rev. Mr. Spooner was said to be given to this sort of thing, it appears that many Spoonerisms attributed to him are entirely apocryphal.

The mondegreen: In an 1954 essay Sylvia Wright gave this word its impetus by desribing how as a child she had understood a line in the ballad "The Bonnie Earl O'Murray," laid him on the green, as Lady Mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misunderstood rendering of the text of a songf or poem. The child's hearing the hymn "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear" as "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear" is a famous mondegreen. Rock music, given the roaring instrumentation and slack articulation of the singers, is fertile soil for mondegreens.

The eggcorn: The linguist Geoffrey Pullum has given us this term for an erroneous transformation of a stock expression into a new one that only appears to make sense. Free reign, hone in and baited breath* are typical examples. They appear to rise typically from misunderstandings of spoken English as it is translated into the written version.

The Cupertino: Technology has given us a new class of error identified at Language Log as the Cupertino: an error induced by careless use of electronic spell-checking -- a form of cooperation transmuted into Cupertino. The Sun once presented a notable example in an article referring to Kunta Kinte, the protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots, as Chunter Knit. It should be superfluous to point out that only a fool sets a spell-check program to run automatically.

One of my favorite things -- a photograph of a mistake on a sign. From Language Log.

If the following line doesn't get you reading The Steampunk Home, nothing will:

I can think of two steampunk references to octopodes.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I'm not usually interested in sports, but this sounds fantastic: chess boxing.

Berlin is home to the world's biggest chess boxing club with some 40 members and it is in an old freight station here that the two men settled the matter early yesterday.

The match began over a chess board set up on a low table in the middle of a boxing ring.

Stripped to the waist, wearing towels around their shoulders and headphones playing the lulling sound of a moving train to drown out the baying crowd, the men played for four minutes.

Then off came their reading glasses and on went the gloves and the mouthguards.

For three minutes they beat each other and then, when the bell went, the chess board was back in the ring and they picked up the gentlemanly game where they had left off.

Inside Higher Ed goes to hell.

Job Listing #666. University of Hell at Seventh Circle. Visiting Assistant Professor, two years (with possibility of converting to tenure-track position at culmination of two-year appointment). Beginning September 2009. Teaching load of forty-three courses per semester, with no more than thirty-nine preparations (i.e. instructor will teach more than one section of some courses). No official committee duties, but will be expected to contribute occasionally to departmental administrative work. Competitive salary, given local economy. Candidate must exhibit evidence of strong potential for both research and teaching, and significant flexibility in his/her expectations. For further information, repeat the name "Mizrakreth, Chair of Hiring Committee" three times.

Raymond stroked his chin thoughtfully. After a minute he began chanting "Mizrakreth..." After all, it couldn't hurt just to get a bit more information.

My six-year-old daughter is a very visual thinker, who absolutely adores her brother. About a year ago, I stumbled across a notebook of sketches I made in 1980, when I was 12, and I remember how much I enjoyed drawing gadgets and cityscapes.

So I bought a notebook and some mechanical pencils, thinking I'd encourage my daughter to express herself through art, and maybe in the process reawaken the visual part of my brain.

So, in my spare moments around the house, I started sketching web page layouts, or characters and props from the bedtime stories I've been telling my daughter. (Recently, I had a burning need to know what an engine room looked like in our ether-powered blimpship.)

Carolyn has picked up the habit from me -- we supply her with little notebooks which she happily fills up.  She drew this picture during church this weekend. There's Carolyn on the left (note the "C" floating above her head) snuggled up against her brother Peter.  Note also the little hearts inside the letters.

At the time she drew the above picture, I was sitting between Carolyn and Peter, and I wouldn't let her squirm across me to show this picture to her brother.  Blinking back tears, Carolyn sat down in the pew and drew another, very different picture:

That's Carolyn on the left again, with a heart hovering over head as before -- only now the heart is broken, and each broken half contains the letter "P". One finger points to herself, the other points pleadingly towards her brother (whose shoulders droop in sorrow, and whose own floating broken heart contains little "C"s).

I have been reduced to a vertical barrier -- an impersonal force separating the two siblings.

The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV:

You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car -- or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up -- and see if you're tempted.

But not just tempted. Not just amused or excited by the possibility of becoming a dark hero of the criminal underworld. You need to determine if you're actually willing and able to act on those temptations. You need to determine whether it's possible for you to change from whoever you were into someone completely different, someone who no longer recognizes the conditions and regulations of a society that, until you played the video game, were all you knew and believed in. That is, you need to find out just how stupid you really are.

An amusing bit of neo-folklore.

Well, Paul Bunyan was always a sucker for a bet, and anyhow lumber futures were down, all the rivers he knew of had been tamed, there was no room for new Great Lakes, and frankly, life had been boring of late. So with a gigantic laugh that was heard as far away as San Francisco, Caracas, and Berlin, he took Sam up on that bet.

Naturally, just getting Paul Bunyan online was already no mean feat. There was no broadband available in the remote areas of the woods where they'd been working, so the first thing he had to do was string optical cable from the nearest T1 line, which was clear down in St. Paul. For anybody but Paul Bunyan, that would have been near impossible, but ol' Paul just ordered a couple flatbeds of the finest glass windows Minnesota had to offer, chewed'em all up in a single mouthful, and drew'em out between his teeth to spin three hundred miles of perfect fiber optics. Then he just coiled it all up in a loop, and walked all the way into town, stringing that cable all the way. So getting online wasn't a real problem.

An amusing post from Language Log, about the ill wind that blows for people who trust their spell checkers too much.

As you might have guessed, what Edwards actually said in the debate was "Highfalutin language is not enough." The word highfalutin should be in any decent spellchecker's wordlist, but if it is written as two words, high falutin, then the second element of the compound can go unrecognized.

Thanks for the suggestion, Matt.

"Celebrities in rehab, political punditry and a mauling at the zoo - this is what we're calling news these days" at JibJab.

Great little tool from bookrags. Use a drop-down list to construct your own sonnet, using lines from Shakespeare's corpus. This might be a good tool to ease students into constructing their own sonnets.

Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-Up

(start a new sonnet)

Who would think of working a casual reference to Aliens into a blog entry about a trip to Disneyland. Nobody but James Lileks, that is.

Usually I hate turbulence, but I was too tired to care, and I slept through it like Hicks on the drop down to LV-426.

Thank you, Rosemary, for sending me this interesting visual essay on the persistence of digital memory, from Instructables.com:

Want to make a flash drive that nobody in a modern office would even think about taking? Hide it in a pink eraser and it's secure in this digital age.

A few years old but, worth a few yuks, from McSweeney's.

In his nine years with the department, Dr. Jones has failed to complete even one uninterrupted semester of instruction. In fact, he hasn't been in attendance for more than four consecutive weeks since he was hired. Departmental records indicate Dr. Jones has taken more sabbaticals, sick time, personal days, conference allotments, and temporary leaves than all the other members of the department combined.

The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body during and after the transition to a coeducational system at the college. However, his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.

If your father is an English professor, how do you respond to poorly written signs in a kiddie park?

Everywhere I go, I like taking pictures of signs with mistakes that make good classroom proofreading examples.

Shortly after I moved to Western Pennsylvania, I learned that Idlewild Park is the regional version of Disneyland.  Every year we get season passes, and a regular stop for us is Storybook Forest -- which my wife remembers visiting when she was a little girl. 

Who knows how many generations of children have seen this sign and wondered about the anonymous dwarven sign-maker who claims ownership over the familiar seven?

More cruel jokes to play on literal-minded people.

Not the best spoof I've ever seen, but if you really want to see a spoof of a trailer of a documentary about text adventure games, you might be somewhat amused. (Here's the original.)

I'm mocked in this, if that's any incentive to anyone...

Nerdvana: ROFLCon (From Leeeeroy Jeninks to Bert is Evil to LOLTrek to  Tron guy, old friends come back from the abyss; good thing too, because I've got more than 15 minutes of love for our favorite memes of yesteryear.)

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you've got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It's a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We'll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it's going.

Then, there'll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

Back when the box art had little to do with the way computer games looked, you got used to the cognitive disconnect between the two media.

My brain still hasn't fully processed Infocom Diskgate, when I come across a trove of Atari 2600 cartridges that resemble games I played, but the boxes seem... different.  Here's my favorite.

Check out the others at Mightygodking.

For a second, I really wanted this to be true. Great satire from The Onion.

According to Mead's website, the ruling lines in the grad-school-ruled notebooks will be placed 3.55 millimeters apart, making them "infinitely more practical" for postgraduate work than the 7.1 millimeter college-ruled notebooks. In addition, the standard 1.5-inch top margin normally provided for dates and headers will be halved, and the left-hand margin will be eliminated entirely.

"Just think: If you are writing a dissertation on elements of thanatopsis and necromimesis as they relate to cacaesthesian themes of mid-20th-century Irish literature, do you really want your notebook lines to be more than seven millimeters apart?" Luke said. "Of course not."

"When you're in grad school, every millimeter counts," he added.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It's the kind of place where someone can say, "That reminds me of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric... inventio, dispositio, elocutio, actio, and... uh.. .what's the other one?"  and it's likely that the others will get the joke.

While walking around the city after the conference was over, I had a vision of a future 4Cs conference that made me giddy. I'll tell you about it in a little bit. First, let me talk about the conference.

Just watch it. You'll get it.

Language Log offers a great post about the comics convention of using typographical symbols to represent swear words.

In any case, ! ? * @ # $ % & seem to be the characters most commonly used in the U.S. (I suppose £ and € get some play outside the U.S.) At the moment I have no idea about why = is out of the game.]

I've been playing Rogue, so I want to translate that as "potion, scroll, gold, Rogue, corridor, stairway..."

BoingBoing links to an interesting story about time travel and a self-policing community of time-travelers (modeled on a Wiki community).

11/21/2104
At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:
Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler's admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?

At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:
All right; that's it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I'm looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?

At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:
PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren't worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint's still fresh. Freaking n00b.

At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.

Of course I don't know what kind of back story there might be between these two, but keep it off camera, okay, boys? Comically unprofessional.(I'd never heard of this site before... at first I thought it had something to do with journalism, but it seems to be a random assortment of clips.)