Baby Swan

Given the word's meaning, I honestly believe that "cygnet" sounds far too technical.

Dina Says I Don't Take Good Notes in Class

So do you agree with Dina?









In my defense, my grades are as good if not better than hers.

Zombie Cucumbers

Then, for no reason at all, I suddenly feel sorry for pickles. These vegetables — and I mean vegetables in the sense that a body pumped with chemicals for a funeral is a person — would envy cucumbers, I'd think. Pickles look like cucumbers: same shape and color and all that, but they're not cucumbers. They're more dead than cucumbers. They're like zombie cucumbers. So while cucumbers are crisp and healthy, pickles are salty and mushy. And though pickles have seeds, they're not viable. And even if those seeds were viable, they wouldn't produce baby pickles — they'd make baby cucumbers. So even then, the parent and the baby wouldn't even speak the same language: The parent would speak pickle, while the baby would naturally speak cucumber.

Oh, and please note the slightly updated blog design. Lime green is in. Dark, cucumber green is out.

Don't Cock This One Up

In an effort to resist studying for my midterm tomorrow morning — and taking a cue from Vitamin Q — I composed a short list of human body parts that double as verbs.

• head
• face
• eye
• mouth
• teeth (as in, "Babies cry when they are teething.")
• lash
• ear ("to form ears," in the corn sense)
• chin
• tongue
• gum
• nose
• neck (synonym for "make out")
• cheek (British for "speak rudely to," like how we use it with "being cheeky")
• brain (a good one: "to kill by smashing the skull")
• arm
• shoulder
• palm
• finger (as in, "I fingered your girlfriend," but also in the sense of identifying a culprit)
• thumb
• hand
• nail
• knuckle (though, more usually as "knuckle down")
• elbow
• breast (according to Webster, a synonym for "contend")
• rib
• back
• knee
• leg ("to walk," according to Webster)
• foot
• toe
• heel
• butt
• stomach
• blister (does this count?)
• throat (as in, "to sing in a throaty voice")
• skin
• hip (a synonym for "tell" or "inform")
• heart (according to me, as in the recently fashionable expression "I heart New York" to mean "I love New York" or the film "I (Heart) Huckabees")

So what did I miss?

Because "Martina" Was Taken?

I let my mind wander and I ended up in Super Mario World, more or less. I was thinking about the more obscure characters to populate Mario games and I recalled one of the first few female characters to show up: Valentina. Most wouldn’t know her, and for good reason — this lady bad guy appeared in one game and never schemed again, most because a company other than Nintendo owns the rights to not just Valentina but all the characters created specifically for a 1996 Super Nintendo game called Super Mario RPG.

One-timer or not, Valentina is notable because she was one of the first few lady bad guys ever too rain in Mario’s parade and, for someone that had reason to interact with kid-friendly notables like the Super Mario Bros., she’s also a little racy.

Check her out.


Aside from the rather prominent chest and the odd, football-shaped Betty Boop head, Valentina is constantly clutching what would appear to be a cocktail — a martini, to be exact. In Japan, she is called “Margarita,” which seems like a misnomer but, in my book, further underscores her predilection for booze. In fact, I’d bet that the translators switched her name so the association wasn’t so obvious. Also, If I remember correctly, the eventual showdown that Mario had with her in the game was made all the more notable by the fact that whenever Mario struck her, her whole body shuddered and set her breasts to a noticeable quivering motion.

Very odd.

I’m surprised Nintendo let this fly in a Mario game, much less one that kids in America got to play. They’re normally a bit more prudish than that. Perhaps it was okay that Valentina was such a bad girl because she was, in fact, a bad girl — a villain. In any case, she’s also an anti-Princess Peach who perhaps never got her fair shake at long-time do-baddery.

As to why she’s wearing a dead parrot on her head, your guess is as a good as mine.