True spirit of the season

I’ll take this Gershon Kingsley/Nurse With Wound mash-up over a Tim Burton film score any day:

 

Gorilla my dreams

Hidden Los Angeles posted this Betty Boop cartoon this morning and asked its readers to guess why it had been banned. My favorite guess was “bobbing for apples in the midst of a polio epidemic.”

Beware of witches carrying squirtguns

I may be remembering this wrong, but I seem to recall one Halloween long ago when my brother’s best friend got ambushed by some older kids who sprayed him with a squirtgun that had been filled with Nair. This can’t be right, can it? I mean, that’s way beyond “trick” territory. Wouldn’t the police have been called in on something like that? I wonder what really happened.

Useless

I already knew 10 out of 25 of these “useless words” Buzzfeed put together, so perhaps this means I am a magpie. But who doesn’t know what a peen is?

The comments section for the list are predictably terrible, as most comments sections are, but there is one new and lovely word that someone volunteered:

Squatcho! Squatcho is the brave Patuxet guide cloth-covered button on the top of a baseball cap. SQUATCHO!

Belated bologna

Yeah, yeah; I missed National Bologna Day yesterday. Big whoop. It might not even be real holiday. I did learn something important in my research on the topic, however: if you ask for a bowlful of cheerios when you’re in New Zealand, you might get oversized hotdogs in purple casings instead of breakfast cereal. Let’s just forget about this National Bologna Day for now.

Via The Hairpin; photo by ojimbo via Flickr

Nothing up my sleeve

I wonder if a magician has been hanging around my neighborhood, just practicing tricks on the sidewalk or something. It seems like we have an inordinate amount of found rabbits around here.

F/K/A The Friendly Boy

Some thoughts:

• Daniel Johnston got it wrong. People didn’t automatically love Casper as soon as he was dead. Pay attention to the story, Daniel.
• It must be the worst feeling ever to realize that you can’t kill yourself because you’re already dead.
• The YouTube Insult Generator still needs a little work. It gave some pretty lame results for “Casper The Friendly Ghost”, even though I had very little trouble finding “whiny little candy ass” associated with our famous boy spectre.
• This cartoon has a lot of, uh, similarities to Spook Sport from 1940, no?
• That being said, it’s still a lot better than the 1948 version.

Hobby peacock

The other day I was just minding my own business, reading this article about how people in olden times used to think they were so great for not using the word schadenfreude because oh no they would never get joy from another’s pain that’s just horrible, when suddenly I was introduced to the amazing world of The Neologist. And now I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, as we say.

This person The Neologist just sits around thinking of new compound German words for specific situations. People write in to him/her asking “what’s the word for this?,” and he/she thinks about it for a while and then pops out a new word. What a life. I am learning so many helpful new fremdwort; the only downside is that they are so long that there is no way I’m ever going to remember them.

I can’t pick a favorite, so let’s just go with:

You know, Höflichkeitsgehemmter Vorzorn. Direct translation is “anticipatory wrath held in check by manners.” Basically, it’s that feeling when you know you are about to be incredibly irritated by someone or something but will have to be gracious and kind in response.

Yes, I know it’s two words, not just one. Höflichkeitsschmerzlächeln to you.

The most wonderful time of the year

Oh people, I hope you are having a wonderful Hagfish Day. I love all the traditions associated with this holiday; I’ve already tied a bunch of knots and suffocated some prey and am well on my way to filling a two pound bucket with slime. How about you?

I can’t really make a long post today, what with all the preparations for tonight’s Eating A Carcass From The Inside Out Feast, so I’ll just leave you with a haiku written by Houston haiku writer Sunnye:

Slime makes me stunning
All beauty is relative
I am the Hagfish

 

Manual labor

I know I don’t seem like much of a blue collar worker, but I do think I would fit in at this factory.

No, I have no what the fancy lady miner has to do with any of this.

via Eat Your Feelings