Foreign Food

“Ingliz menuyu” presented to writer William Dalrymple at a family restaurant in Turkey in 1986:

SOAP
Ayas soap
Turkish tripte soap
Sheeps foot
Macaront
Water pies

EATS FROM MEAT
Deuner kepab with pi
Kebap with green pe
Kebap in paper
Meat pide
Kebap with mas patato
Samall bits of meat grilled
Almb chops

VEGETABLES
Meat in earthenware stev pot
Stfue goreen pepper
Stuffed squash
Stuffed tomatoes z
Stuffed cabbages lea
Leek with finced meat
Clery

SALAD
Brain salad
Cacik — a drink made ay ay
And cucumber

FRYING PANS
Fried aggs
Scram fried aggs
Scrum fried omlat
Omlat with brain

SWEETS AND RFUITS
Stewed atrawberry
Nightingales nests
Virgin lips
A sweet dish of thinsh of batter with butter
Banane
Meon
Leeches

“It was a difficult choice,” he writes. From In Xanadu, 1989.

| Language

Words and Music

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Music_cross-rhythm,_cold_cup_of_tea.PNG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia user Tarquin points out that the natural rhythm of spoken language can be used to teach polyrhythms.

Above: The phrase “cold cup of tea,” spoken naturally, approximates a rhythm of 2 against 3.

Below: The phrase “what atrocious weather” approximates 4 against 3.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Music_cross-rhythm,_what_atrocious_weather.PNG

| Art · Language

“Almost Too Ceremonious”

A gentleman walked up to another gentleman, who was standing before the fire in a Coffee Room, and immediately said, ‘I beg your pardon, Sir, but may I ask your name?’ ‘I am not in the habit, Sir,’ said the other man, ‘of giving my name to strangers, but, as you are so pertinacious, Sir, my name is Thompson, Sir.’ ‘Then, Mr. Thompson, Sir,’ said the first speaker, ‘now I know your name, I beg, Sir, to inform you that your coat tails are on fire.’

— Frederick Locker-Lampson, Patchwork, 1879

| Humor

Roll Call

Remarkable names of real people, collected in the 1980s by John Train:

  • Mac Aroni
  • Cigar Stubbs
  • Legitimate Jones
  • Halibut Justa Fish
  • Daphne Reader’s Digest Taione
  • Halloween Buggage
  • Eucalyptus Yoho
  • Solomon Gemorah
  • Asa Miner
  • Carlos Restrepo Restrepo Restrepo de Restrepo
  • Cranberry Turkey Breckenridge Jr.
  • Demetrius Plick
  • F.G. Vereneseneckockkrockoff
  • Rev. Fountain Wetmore Rainwater
  • Grecian T. Snooze
  • July August September
  • Lobelia Rugtwit Hildebiddle
  • Tarantula Turner
  • Theanderblast Mischgedeigle Sump
  • Theodolphus J. Poontang
  • Vile Albert
  • Welcome Baby Darling

Buggage had a daughter named Easter.

| Language

Auteur

When James Cameron was serving as second unit director on Galaxy of Terror (1981), he was asked to film an insert of a severed arm that’s being eaten by maggots. The team made a fake arm, covered it with mealworms, lit the shot, and rolled the camera, but the mealworms didn’t move. “They looked completely inert,” Cameron said. “So I thought, well, what would happen if we put a little electrical current through these worms? Maybe they’d jump around a little more.

“So we get all ready to do the shot and two guys I knew who were producers had come up behind me to watch me work because they had heard I was doing some directing. I rolled the camera and when I said ‘Action,’ what they saw was two hundred mealworms all come to life. When I said ‘Cut,’ they stopped moving.

“This must have been tremendously impressive to two low-budget horror-movie producers. I’m sure they ratcheted up in their mind that if I could get a performance out of worms, I probably could work very well with actors.” They hired him that day to direct Piranha II.

(Robert J. Emery, The Directors: Take One, 2002.)

| Entertainment

Reflection

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_%C5%BDmitek_-_Po%C4%8Ditek.jpg

If your nose is close to the grindstone
And you hold it there long enough
In time you’ll say there’s no such thing
As brooks that babble and birds that sing
These three will all your world compose
Just you, the stone and your poor old nose.

— “From a two hundred-year-old stone in a country cemetery,” quoted in Christina Foyle, So Much Wisdom, 1984

| Society

Late Progress

Back in 2017 I wrote about the Feynman ciphers, three coded messages that had been presented as challenges to Richard Feynman in the 1950s.

Feynman couldn’t crack them, and even at the time of my post only the first of the three had been decoded — it turned out to be a transposition of the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English. But in May 2023 David Vierra solved the other two — one turns out to be an excerpt from A.E. Housman’s 1896 poem “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” and the other is the start of Feynman’s 1953 paper “Atomic Theory of the λ Transition in Helium,” from The Physical Review.

Who was the “fellow scientist” who had devised these challenges? Nick Pelling thinks the most likely candidate is Paul Olum, who had been Feynman’s officemate at Los Alamos in the 1940s, but hard evidence is lacking. More at Cipher Mysteries.

(Thanks to reader Peter Dawyndt for the tip.)

| Puzzles