Tenser, said the Tensor

Moose and Jelly

"As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly."  (An actual sentence spoken aloud in the wild, as recounted in this post—thanks to Deanna Hoak for pointing it out to me.)

Either a Prediction or Free Advice

Joss Whedon's upcoming series Dollhouse is about people who can be temporarily programmed with any personality or skills.  The Actives, as they're called, spend time between missions at a facility called The Dollhouse, where they have only rudimentary personalities of their own, and their names reflect this; the characters announced so are called Echo, Sierra, Victor, and November.  Get it?  They're named according to the phonetic alphabet.

Green Smurf and Smurf Green

"In Schtroumpf vert et vert Schtroumpf, published in Belgium in 1972, it was revealed that the village was divided between North and South, and that the Smurfs on either side had different ideas as to whether the term smurf should be used as a verb or as a noun: for instance, the Northern Smurfs call a certain object a bottle smurfer, while the Southern Smurfs call it a smurf opener."  (from here)

Has anybody read this story?  I wonder if the two smurfalects also differed in other ways.  Did the position of nominal modifiers vary, as the title seems to imply?  And what's the structure of the title—is schtroumpf vert a variety of smurf and vert schtroumpf a shade of green?  Is either of the diasmurfs consistently smurf-initial or smurf-final, or do they have relatively free smurf-ordering?

Fact-checking Ray Bradbury

James Lileks dug up an amazing bit of pop-culture this week: a TV commercial in which none other than Ray Bradbury appears, hawking Sunsweet pitted prunes.  No kidding.  Check it out:

At the end of his post (it's the most recent one at the moment, the permalink isn't working) Lileks writes, citing Bradbury's own words, "It's true: he didn't mention prunes in any of his stories."  But is this true?  The answer may shock you!

Robot Identification

Having now seen the WeRobot shirt from ChopShop (via, via), I can't help but treat it as a quiz.  How many of these robots can you identify based on their silhouettes?  (My answers after the jump.)

Melting the Babbitt

"Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called 'babbitt') connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable."  (from here, and don't miss the related video)

Meat and Blood

"I miss meat and blood very much.  Not vegetables because they are food for a woman."  (from here) (BTW, I'm pretty skeptical of the authenticity of the article.  How often do the sports pages in the Grauniad invent stories out of whole cloth?)

Cross-stitch, said the Tensor

Somebody's been stitching about my favorite telepathic mind-shield earworm.  Excellent!  (via)

Weygand or de Gaulle?

Over at Byzantium's Shores, blogger Jaquandor recently brought to my attention an apparently long-running controversy  about a line in Casablanca.  In the film, Ugarte (Peter Lorre) tells Rick (Humphrey Bogart) that he has letters of transit signed by General...somebody.  Opinions differ about which general it is that Lorre mentions.  Some hear de Gaulle, which would be a mistake on the part of the filmmakers, since Charles de Gaulle was the leader of the Free French forces, and his signature would be less than worthless in Vichy France.  Others hear Weygand, which makes more sense—Maxime Weygand was an official in the Vichy government and for a time was in charge of the North African colonies.

This I Believe #30

If you're going to have the operation, you know, have the operation.