Rolex doesn’t sound like a watch

It sounds like a prescription medication.

Ask your doctor if Rolex is right for you.

I think I found a book formerly owned by Donald Trump!

Found these during some random flipping-through at a used bookstore. These are the best marginal annotations, probably, ever. Everyone says so.

The only thing that makes me skeptical is that they're all in lowercase.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor ate the meat

Of rocs, and rocs destroyed his fleet.

Tinbad the Tailor killed some flies

Which in the telling grew in size.

Jinbad the Jailer's job had glamour:

He kept the inmates in the slammer.

Whinbad the Whaler was delish

And not unlike Filet-O-Fish.

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood

And did the only thing he could.

Finbad the Failer's ship was small,

And thus it failed, and that is all.

Binbad the Bailer helped to bail

The ships that were too big to fail.

Pinbad the Pailer was the bloke

Who had a crown, but then it broke.

Minbad the Mailer was a Jew

And wrote a lot of novels, too.

Hinbad the Hailer traveled far

By riding in a yellow car.

Rinbad the Railer, in a sleeper,

Traveled just as far, and cheaper.

Dinbad the Kailer was the man

Who wrote the script for Peter Pan.

Vinbad the Quailer brought delights

For manna-weary Israelites.

Linbad the Yailer, in the Crypt,

Did something, but his lips are zipped.

Xinbad the Phthailer maketh oft

Our polyvinyl chloride soft.

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

These few are named in verses few:

Name, title, and the thing they do.

May every "ailer" thus be prized

And "in bad" verse immortalized.

AI art still has a long way to go

I was trying to generate some line-drawing illustrations for Aesop's fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. Stable Diffusion had other ideas:

Actually, that looks like a much more interesting story.

No brakes on the clerihew train

Since Bruce started this, here's one more for him, followed by some other random offerings:

Dr. Bruce

Holds strong views:

Big on Mormons,

Not on Normans.

William James,

Briefly, claims:

"It will do"

Means "It's true."

Publius Vergilius Maro

Would have reacted with sorrow

To learn the price of fame:

A persistently misspelt name.

E. O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler

Both are noble, but who the nobler?

It was the one who got the grants

To fund the research for The Ants.

Francis E. Dec,

What in the heck

Were you smoking?

Were you joking?

Failed clerihew attempt: I can’t get this one to rhyme!

Francis Berger

Eats a sandwich

When he gets hungry

Over in Europe.

Dr. Bruce Charlton: a clerihew

Dr. Bruce Charlton

Isn’t as gnarled and

Rough as some readers infer —

But only suppose that he were!

No other blue tint version compares

All those other blue tint versions are second-rate and derivative. You're still the OG.

Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!

Thomas B. Marsh, the relatively obscure Mormon historical figure is in the air. Leo has posted on him extensively at his blog ("The Curious Case of Thomas B. Marsh" and "Thomas B. Marsh: Alternate Ending #1" so far, and I assume that "#1" means there's more where that came from), and William Wright picked up the theme with "Swampy Key Holders: Pokelogan and Thomas B. Marsh." My own sync-stream has featured such marsh-adjacent content as pokelogan (a kind of marsh) and a novel called Swamplandia!, but I haven't posted anything about Thomas B. himself -- until now.

Ever since I watched that Don Bradley Liahona thing, YouTube has decided that Ward Radio (a loud and goofy Mormon podcast, not that there's anything wrong with that) is my kind of thing, so today at the top of my suggested videos was something called "Thomas B. Marsh is Getting OUT OF CONTROL!" (shouting in the original) -- about how suddenly everyone's hearing about him. The whole video is basically a response to this comment:

I just have to say, I NEVER heard the Thomas B Marsh bucket of cream story until I started listening to this podcast. Now I've heard it about 5,000 times.

Here it is. It's worth listening to at least part of it just to hear Cardon Ellis pulling one Biden after another. First it's "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of story" (a smaller-scale version of Haroun and the Sea of Stories?), and then he actually calls him Thomas B. Bucket, which I think was one of the hero's relatives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Thomas B. Marsh -- who supposedly left the Church over a dispute about a bucket of milk -- is one of the go-to examples of people leaving the Church for stupid reasons. I heard the story countless times growing up Mormon. The other overused story with this moral is that of Symonds (Simonds?) Ryder (Rider?), who is supposed to have left the Church because Joseph Smith misspelled (or did he?) his name. As I was listening to Cardon holding forth on Thomas B. Bucket and his bucket of story, my mind melded the two stories together and created something new.

First, though, I know my readers are a pretty cultured lot, but if you have somehow never seen the classic Sesame Street sketch "The Wonderful World of T-Shirts," you should watch that right now before proceeding.

Anyway, the scene that spontaneously emerged in my mind went something like this:

"No, no, I'm sorry. That says Thomas B. Shawarma. You see, Marsh is M-A-R-S-H. I think you made some kind of mistake."

"Heh-heh-heh. I never make mistakes."

"No, but you see there's no such person as Thomas B. --"

Enter the Fat Blue Anything Muppet. "Hi. I'm Thomas B. Shawarma. Is my T-shirt ready?"

Yes, I know shawarma isn't an anagram of Marsh, but that's just what appeared, okay? -- fully-formed, as it were, like Athena from the headwaters of the Suez. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note.

Google Photos is trying to implant false memories

Why would Paul Bunyan cut down a volcano?

On February 3, someone started an /x/ thread with this picture of various rock formations that look like giant tree stumps, asking, "Did the Nephilim cut down the mother trees? Was that the last straw which caused God to flood the world and give humanity a fresh start?"

This made me think of some things William Wright has posted about sacred trees being destroyed by bad guys in Tolkien, and sure enough, I wasn't the only one to make the connection. One of the first replies implied that these "stumps" prove the works of Tolkien are actually non-fiction:

Then another totally non-fictional explanation was proposed, which got a bit more traction:

Someone, presumably a fed, was so unhip as to suggest that they're not actually tree stumps at all, but his ludicrous alternative explanation was immediately destroyed with facts and logic:

I'm not sure what the point of this post is other than to say "Never change, /x/."

Filth Room

Spotted in a hospital in Yuanlin, Taiwan:

It's actually the room where medical waste is temporarily stored. Searching for the Chinese phrase online led me to an even stranger translation from Mainland China, using an alternate Chinese word for "room" which also happens to mean "between":

A helmet for Tolkien

Today I carelessly set a key down on top of a stack of books. Later I noticed that I had just happened to put it in the perfect position:

To think that I saw it on Mulberry Street!

On the road, I just saw a motorcyclist, a young man with what looked like gang tattoos on his neck, dressed in baby-blue pajamas covered with pictures of Bugs Bunny and a pair of two-tooth wooden sandals like a geisha would wear. Never in my 19 years in Taiwan had I ever seen a Chinese person wearing such footwear. Nor, for that matter, had I ever seen a grown man, let alone a tatted-up gangster, wearing Bugs Bunny pajamas in public.

Not a dream. Really happened. I note it here because it seems too bizarre for the sync fairies not to have had a hand in it. Perhaps something to do with my recent references to "bugs"?

Note added: I usually try to keep AI "art" out of my posts, but I just had to document this epic fail:

How I imagined "cimeters" as a child

I had a healthy interest in weaponry as a child, and I certainly knew what a scimitar was, but I didn't make the connection that the cimeters in the Book of Mormon were a variant spelling of the same thing. I figured it was an untranslated word, like curelom, and referred to some distinctive Lamanite weapon for which there was no English name. When I was about seven or eight, I was pretty sure that a curelom was a Triceratops and that a cimiter looked like this:

I was never very good at explaining this to people. "I think it was like a Frisbee with spikes on it, on the end of stick" -- and they would always imagine something like a mushroom! 

I think this childhood image may have contributed to my later appreciation of the Man Who Knows How to Rick.

I think his ricking-stick probably has a spherical head, though, in which case it would not be a true cimeter. And if it does have a disk-shaped head, he's using it wrong. Obviously, you're not supposed to swing a cimiter like a tennis racket!

Ukraine is everything, Russia is just Russia

It occurred to me today that I hadn't checked The Babylon Bee in a good long time, so I opened it up in a new tab. Then I realized that I hadn't checked the last generation's Bee, the original Onion, in even longer -- because it hasn't been funny in ages, but who knows, maybe today -- so I opened that up, too. And then I thought it might be funny to see how the left-wing news-and-views site Daily Kos is spinning whatever is supposedly going on in the world these days, so I opened that up, too.

Having got all my tabs up, I started with the Bee, found nothing particularly chuckleworthy, turned to the Onion, and saw this was the featured story:

Huh, I thought. That's actually kind of funny. The picture is pitch-perfect, too. (Well, almost. Why would they show him wearing a shirt with a collar?) Maybe the Onion's still got it after all?

Then I saw the byline and did a double take. This wasn't The Onion; it was Daily Kos!

People always joke about not being able to tell truth from satire anymore, but in this case I quite literally couldn't tell.

This is a man who knows how to RICK.

The title of my recent post "I don't care what people say, Rick and roll are here to stay" uses "Rick and roll" instead of "rock and roll," implying that rick could be used as a verb, as in, "Let's rick and roll!"

This made me think of the classic Wug Test developed by psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason in 1958, which measures children's acquisition of morphological rules (e.g. ability to form regular plural and past-tense forms of unfamiliar words) through the use of nonsense words and illustrations. The test takes its name from one of its least interesting pseudowords -- wug for a bird-like creature -- but my personal favorite has always been the man who knows how to RICK.

How badass is that? Even if he weren't ricking in the picture, you just have to look at his face to see that this is a man who knows how to rick. He ruck yesterday, too. He probably ricks all the time and doesn't even think twice about it. This guy is cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

Now take a look at these losers who only know how to loodge and spow. Who would you rather hang out with? It's an easy choice, if you ask me.

Look at him. He loodges every day. People don't think anyone will know, but over time it starts to show in your physiognomy. And check out how full of himself that other guy is. He's spown a time or two without spilling his coffee everywhere, and suddenly he thinks he's Salvador frickin Dalí! Don't be these schlubs. Be the man who knows how to rick.

⁂

For those who never took Intro to Linguistics, a quick overview of the Wug Test in all its glory -- with plenty of Jean Berko Gleason's inimitable illustrations! -- can be found in this TEDx talk by Dr. Simon West, with the delightful title "He Is Ricking. He Did The Same Thing Yesterday."

The Jerusalem Post asteroid phenomenon

AC has been posting these headlines as they appear, but I think you have to have them all together in one place to get the full effect:

What's going on, and what happened in June 2022? Is it comms? Did their asteroid editor have a psychotic break? Has their asteroid editor been replaced by an AI? I don't have any theories, but it's certainly strange.

Are the Irish better at math?

Studies have shown that Irish people are significantly better than non-Irish at solving this math problem. Remarkably, many of them are able to do so in a matter of seconds, without using a calculator or even a pencil and paper. The problem is as follows:

Suppose there is a population of hares which, though every bit as prolific as lagomorphs generally are, are heavily hunted and thus increase in numbers very, very slowly. In fact, from one year to the next, the hare population only increases by an average of 0.005615%. To the casual observer, the hares' numbers appear to be static, but in fact the population is slowly but surely growing and, given enough time, will eventually double. It's a long road, but in the end they will arrive there. Assuming the rate of increase does not change, precisely how many years will it take the hare population to traverse this rocky road to doubling?

Hannah Gifford, Hare and the Blackthorn Blossom

Note: I just bought a new pair of wingtip shoes, which is what brought this problem to mind. No, really, that’s what prompted this post.

"That was silly!" Yes, Bulletman, just a bit.

Green Lantern and his pterodactyls led me to a defunct blog called "Comics Make No Sense" -- sort of like the old "Comics Curmudgeon" blog, but for old superhero comics rather than newspaper funnies. The blogger, Adam Barnett, is pretty solid on pterodactyls -- recognizing that "ALL pterodactyls were" yellow -- and he's introduced me to a superhero I'd never heard of: Bulletman the Flying Detective.

"A Bulletman Story with Which Adam Just Can't Deal" is an absolute must-read. I keep reading it again and again, and so far it hasn't gotten any less perfect. The things I've missed out on, never reading superhero comics!

It's a recurring theme, apparently.