Zoology

Reponse of a 10-year-old child invited to write an essay about a bird and a beast:

The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.

I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides — right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.

— Ernest Gowers and Sir Bruce Fraser, The Complete Plain Words, 1973

| Humor · Science & Math

A Smile More Brightened

In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing in the description of Adam and Eve retiring for the night” in Book IV of Paradise Lost. It challenged its readers to improve Milton’s text; polymath Edward Marsh inserted these lines:

[… and eas’d the putting off
These troublesome disguises which wee wear,]
Yet pretermitted not the strait Command,
Eternal, indispensable, to off-cleanse
From their white elephantin Teeth the stains
Left by those tastie Pulps that late they chewd
At supper. First from a salubrious Fount
Our general Mother, stooping, the pure Lymph
Insorb’d, which, mingl’d with tart juices prest
From pungent Herbs, on sprigs of Myrtle smeard,
(Then were not Brushes) scrub’d gumms more impearl’d
Than when young Telephus with Lydia strove
In mutual bite of Shoulder and ruddy Lip.
This done (by Adam too no less) the pair
[Straight side by side were laid …]

Marsh called this “the cleverest thing I ever did.” “The mordacious Telephus and Lydia are ‘of course,’ as the gossip-writers would say, from Horace, Odes, I, xiii. Martin Armstrong, who had set the competition, gave me the first prize, and was good enough to express the hope that future editors of Milton would put my lines in the appropriate place.”

(From Marsh’s 1939 memoir A Number of People.)

| Humor · Literature · Poems

The Other Half

Who’s Who invites its contributors to list their recreations. Some responses are unusual:

Charles Causley: “Playing the piano with expression.”

John Faulkner: “Intricacies and wildernesses.”

John Fowles: “Mainly Sabine.”

Bevis Hillier: “Awarding marks out of ten for suburban front gardens.”

James Kirkup: “Standing in shafts of sunlight.” (In old age he changed this to “Standing in shafts of moonlight.”)

Edward Lucie-Smith: “Walking the dog; malice.”

Frederic Raphael: “Painting things white.”

Constant Hendrick de Waal: “Remaining (so far as possible) unaware of current events.”

Keith Waterhouse: “Lunch.”

Roy Worskett: “Looking and listening in disbelief.”

In 1897 George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as “cycling and showing off.” In 1980 Sir Harold Hobson listed “Bridge; recollecting in regretful tranquillity the magical things and people I may never see again — the Grand Véfour, Lasserre, Beaumanière; Proust’s Grand Hotel at Balbec (Cabourg); Sunday afternoon teas at the Ritz; the theatrical bookshop in St Germain-des-Prés; the Prado; Edwige Feuillère, Madeleine Renauld, Jean-Louis Barrault, François Perier; collecting from ephemera of the Belle Epoque the cartoons of Steinlen; and always and inexhaustibly talking to my wife.”

(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)

02/05/2025 UPDATE: John Cleese lists his as “gluttony and sloth.” (Thanks, Bryan.)

| Humor · Society

Call of the Wild

I heard the story — but I cannot verify it — that Marshall Lyautey (1854-1934) owned a parrot which incorporated these words in its vocabulary: What a beautiful evening! What a beautiful evening! and often repeated them in earnest.

Now one day the renowned soldier, on returning home, was greeted by the same interjection which seemed so in keeping with the fine evening. But what was his astonishment when he found himself before the spectacle presented by his bird. The parrot, which had spent the evening alone with a monkey, had been entirely defeathered by his everyday household companion. ‘What a beautiful evening! What a beautiful evening!’, in that context, took on a droll and ironic meaning.

— Elian Finbert, Les Perroquets Vous Parlent, 1975, quoted in George Gardner Herrick, Winter Rules, 1997

| Humor

Lost in Translation

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carmen_1875_Act1_lithograph_Lamy_NGO1p736.jpg

Apocryphal but entertaining: Allegedly a Paris (or Genoese?) opera company provided this synopsis of Carmen to its English-speaking patrons:

Act 1. Carmen is a cigar-makeress from a tabago factory who loves with Don José of the mounting guard. Carmen takes a flower from her corsets and lances it to Don José (Duet: ‘Talk me of my mother’). There is a noise inside the tabago factory and the revolting cigar-makeresses burst into the stage. Carmen is arrested and Don José is ordered to mounting guard her but Carmen subduces him and he lets her escape.

Act 2. The Tavern. Carmen, Frasquita, Mercedes, Zuniga, Morales. Carmen’s aria (‘The sistrums are tinkling’). Enter Escamillio, a balls-fighter. Enter two smuglers (Duet: ‘We have in mind a business’) but Carmen refuses to penetrate because Don José has liberated her from prison. He just now arrives (Aria: ‘Slop, here who comes!’) but hear are the bugles singing his retreat. Don José will leave and draws his sword. Called by Carmen shrieks the two smuglers interfere with her but Don José is bound to dessert, he will follow into them (final chorus: ‘Opening sky wandering life’).

Act 3. A roky landscape, the smuglers shelter. Carmen sees her death in cards and Don José makes a date with Carmen for the next balls fight.

Act 4, A place in Seville. Procession of balls-fighters, the roaring of the balls heard in the arena. Escamillio enters, (Aria and chorus: ‘Toreador, toreador, all hail the balls of a Toreador’). Enter Don José (Aria: ‘I do not threaten, I besooch you.’) but Carmen repels himwants to join with Escamillio now chaired by the crowd. Don José stabbs her (Aria: ‘Oh rupture, rupture, you may arrest me, I did kill der’) he sings ‘Oh my beautiful Carmen, my subductive Carmen …’

From what I can tell, the earliest date claimed for the opera performance is 1928, and this excerpt didn’t appear until 1966. No one anywhere makes any confident claim as to the writer.

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Pastiche

The Journal International de Médecine carried a startling article in 1987: “Mise en Évidence Expérimentale d’une Organisation Tomatotopique chez la Soprano,” or “Experimental Demonstration of the Tomatotopic Organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.).” In it, author Georges Perec notes that throwing tomatoes at sopranos seems to induce a “yelling reaction” and sets out to understand why:

Tomatoes (Tomato rungisia vulgaris) were thrown by an automatic tomatothrower (Wait & See, 1972) monitored by an all-purpose laboratory computer (DID/92/85/P/331) operated on-line. Repetitive throwing allowed up to 9 projections per sec, thus mimicking the physiological conditions encountered by Sopranoes and other Singers on stage (Tebaldi, 1953). … Control experiments were made with other projectiles, as apple cores, cabbage runts, hats, roses, pumpkins, bullets, and ketchup (Heinz, 1952).

The paper concludes:

It has been shown above that tomato throwing provokes, along with a few other motor, visual, vegetative and behavioral reactions, neuronal responses in 3 distinctive brain areas: the nucleus anterior reticular thalami, pars lateralis (NARTpl), the anterior portion of the tractus leguminosus (apTL) and the dorsal part of the so-called musical sulcus (scMS).

It ends with an incomprehensible diagram modeling the anatomical organization of the yelling reaction. No practical advice is offered the sopranos.

10/18/2024 UPDATE: It appears that Perec wrote the piece originally in 1974 while working as a scientific archivist in the laboratory of neuroscientist André Hugelin. It was Perec’s contribution to a special volume presented to neurophysiologist Marthe Bonvallet on her retirement. (Thanks, Frederic and Bruce.)

| Humor · Science & Math

Hard of Hearing

In 1979 Auberon Waugh was working as a columnist at Private Eye when his editor offered him a trip to Senegal to help celebrate the anniversary of the magazine’s sister publication. “All I would have to give in exchange was a short discourse in the French language on the subject of breast feeding.”

The assignment struck Waugh as strange but not unaccountable — he’d been writing a regular column in a medical magazine that had touched on that topic.

“So I composed a speech on this subject in French, with considerable labour, only to find when I landed in Dakar that the subject chosen was not breast-feeding but press freedom.” He’d misheard the editor.

“There was no way even to describe the misunderstanding, since la liberté de la Presse bears no resemblance to le nourrisson naturel des bébés.”

(From Waugh’s 1991 autobiography Will This Do?)

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