It’s Better Down Where It’s Wetter

A strange trend for you to consider.

The Abyss

Released: August 9, 1989

Plot summary: A civilian diving team are enlisted to search for a lost nuclear submarine and face danger while encountering an alien aquatic species.

Leviathan

Released: March 17, 1989

Plot summary: Underwater deep-sea miners encounter a Soviet wreck and bring back a dangerous cargo to their base on the ocean floor with horrifying results.

DeepStar Six

Released: January 13, 1989

Plot summary: At the bottom of the ocean, the DeepStar Six has just discovered a new and deadly alien menace.

The Evil Below

Released: July 1, 1989

Plot summary: A down-on-his-luck sea captain goes treasure hunting for a wrecked Spanish galleon that is rumored to be cursed by God and protected by supernatural forces.

Lords of the Deep

Released: April 21, 1989

Plot summary: Man has finally conquered the ocean. America's first self-contained undersea laboratory is the pride of the nation, and expectations are high for an elaborate undersea mining operation. What wasn’t expected was the inhabitants of an undiscovered world.

The Rift / Endless Descent

Released: March 9, 1990

Plot summary: An experimental submarine, the Siren II, with a very experienced crew is sent to find out what happened to the Siren I, mysteriously disappeared in a submarine rift. Things go awry when they begin to find things that shouldn't be there...

My takeaway: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED IN 1989? What made people — and Hollywood especially — so terrified of the ocean? What about the ocean are we no longer so terrified of? Are we foolish for ignoring the brackish menace at our shores that Hollywood tried to warn us about back in 1989? Is it weird if The Little Mermaid painted a far rosier picture of the ocean back in 1989? What was Disney trying to cover up?

But no, seriously, my takeaway: What so affected the human psyche during this time period that we all turned our attention to the depths of the sea, if only for this brief period?

Elsie and the Looking Club

An old book held and celebrated for its cover but not flipped through and then pondered after the fact:

Wait, so is it about a weirdly sexy cow and her friends that spend all day looking at a mirror?

Or is it about a club that just likes looking at Elsie, the weirdly sexy cow, who may not be the most appropriate friend for these children to have?

What, exactly, are they watching Elsie do? Cow stuff? Lady stuff?

Does Elsie know they are watching? (I mean, she looks like she is into it.)

Or do they just all go around looking at things, Sexy Elsie and her human child-friends that maybe she had kidnapped for all I know, because they live in a strange world where a slender-shouldered, elegant cow-woman is somehow not the most interesting thing to look at?

But she is unusually sexy for a cow, no?

Did the children make the daisy chain for her? Is that hinting at something awful? Though literally speaking, they would have had to, because elegant forehoof notwithstanding, she doesn’t have the fingers necessary to weave daisies together.

Is it weird if I can only imagine the worst possible uses for the bucket at the bottom of the illustration?

Are they milking her?

Are they “milking” her?

God, I hope they are milking her and not “milking” her.

Is it a “looking but not touching” club?

In Which Drew Searches for Frozen Fruit

Since I moved out of Brentwood and away from the one-block radius of a Whole Foods, I rarely have any good grocery store stories nowadays. But oh hey, look: here’s one that happened today.

Me: “Where can I find frozen fruit?”

Grocery store employee: “We don’t have that.”

Me: “You don’t have fruit that's frozen in bags?”

Grocery store employee: “Oh, you mean toppings.”

And though I didn’t think I did, sure enough this kid was right: The frozen fruit case at the Los Feliz Albertson’s is labeled “toppings.” I’d imagine other ones are too.

Now, a few notes:

• The frozen fruit wasn’t located near the frozen vegetables but with the other desserts.
• He didn’t say it cheerfully, in the context of “Oh, you silly goose. We actually put those in the ‘toppings’ section here!” He said it like “You fucking dumbfuck. Why would you ask about this product in such a ridiculous, roundabout manner when any sane person would have just asked for the toppings case. Fuck.” He said it as if I had asked him, in a the voice of a bespectacled time-traveller from Victorian England, “Good sir, can you please direct me toward the whereabouts of some bottles of fermented grape juice. We’re dining with the Sultan and his concubines tonight, and they do so love the fermented juice of the Vitis berries.”
• Wait, people know that you can eat frozen fruit out of the context of sundaes, right? Like, we haven’t come to the point that we as a nation don’t think of it just as the cold version of the stuff that grows on trees but actually supplementary material for ice cream, right? But seriously — right?
• They only had berries, peaches and cherries. Is that normal? Why the hell don’t we freeze apples?
• This is why you’re fat. 
• If they change the name of the juice section to “mixers,” I’m moving to the forest.

JP 4

Yes, you are welcome to interpret this as being fraught with symbolism.

Personally, I have no idea who or what JB is, nor why there might be four of them. Happy Easter.

Where Are All the Evil Princesses?

Being mostly an indoors kid, I saw a good number of princesses get rescued. Books, movies and video games feature a lot of captive princesses, to the point that you’d think princesses would stop wearing those tiaras and pointy tassel hats, just as a safety precaution. The royal damsel in distress is such a popular trope that by now it seems like it should have become popular to subvert it: Hero sets out to rescue princess but finds that she’s actually not the embodiment of goodness he thought she was. It seems like such an obvious twist to have the princess turn out to be the big bad, hiding malice and ambition beneath a ball gown and courtly manners, but when I actually tried to think of examples, I couldn’t come up a single one. In fact, I struggled to think of more than a few “bad” princesses in all of popular culture.

via

It seems weird, this scarcity of devious princesses, given how many stories have evil kings and queens or even scheming, power-hungry princes — just off the top of my head, Loki in Thor, Humperdink in Princess Bride, Viserys in Game of Thrones. But the notion of the pure-hearted maiden is such a fundamental one, I’m thinking, that it generally precludes evil twists on the character, even despite historical accounts of princesses who weren’t above getting blood on their hands. (In particular, China’s Princess Pingyang could give many warlords a lesson or two in raising a ruckus.) So even if I’ve never seen the Pretty, Pretty Princess character so subverted that she turns out to be the big bad, some pop cultural princesses or princess-like characters have come close. Here’s what I have.

• Medea is the daughter of the king of Colchis, but she’s rarely referred to as a princess. She is one, technically, and she’s an icon of vengeance. Not only does she betray her family to help Jason get the golden fleece, even dismembering her younger brother to prevent her father from tailing her, but she also goes to town on Jason once their relationship goes all kinds of sour. In fact, she burns Jason’s new wife to death, kills Jason’s kids and peaces out on a dragon-drawn chariot. No, really. But she does all this in reaction to Jason’s cruelty, not, say, evil for the sake of evil.
• In King Lear, the older daughters, Regan and Goneril, are pretty heinous, and their scheming ends up annihilating the entire family, and they stand in contrast to the youngest sister, Princess Cordelia. (I can forgive Goneril because what else do you do with your life when you have name that sounds like a venereal disease?)
• Electra is the daughter of Agamemnon, a king, and she goads her brother to kill their mother, Clytemnestra, but she only does this because ol’ mom killed dad. So if anyone’s the big bad, it’s Clytemnestra. Electra is the Christina to Clytemnestra’s Joan Crawford, and if anyone wants to co-write a Joan Crawford-inspired retelling of the Oresteia — a good idea, now that I think about it — I’m all for it. Then again, having your legacy be the Electra complex seems ignominy enough.
• But then again, there’s Elektra King. The Sophie Marceau character in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough fits the storyline I’m thinking of pretty closely, but she’s not a princess, even if her name is Elektra King — which, you know, subtle — and she’s the heiress to an oil empire. In the end, Bond discovers that Elektra has contracted a nasty case of Stockholm syndrome and become the lover and co-conspirator of the film’s big bad.
• It was pointed out to me that the king’s daughter from “The Lady or the Tiger?” might work, depending on how you interpret the story’s ending. She allegedly inherited her father’s “semi-barbaric” qualities, and when she motions for her lover to pick one door over the other, there’s a fifty percent chance that she’s sending the guy to the hungry tiger and instant death. She loses him either way, you see, because should he pick the door hiding the lady, he has to marry her on the spot, so there is also a fifty percent chance that she is acting in a very un-Disney-like manner.
• In the movie Return to Oz, the big bad is Princess Mombi, but it was pointed out to me that she’s not actually a princess; she’s an impostor. And the books don’t call her a princess. Instead, she is just a witch. Why not get technical about it?
• In the DC Universe, one of the central Teen Titans, Starfire, inherits the title of princess of the planet Tamaran over her older sister, Blackfire, on account of the latter being lame and unpleasant. Blackfire holds a grudge, over throws the Tamaranean royal family, enslaves Starfire for a period and eventually becomes a major antagonist for the Titans.
• There’s the obscure Capcom character Princess Devilotte de DeathSatan IX, who is to evil what drag queens are to feminine sexuality. She actually might be an exaggerated reaction to relative lack of characters like her, and that’s about as literary as anyone has ever gotten about someone with the name Princess Devilotte de DeathSatan IX.
• The Batman villain Talia al Ghul sort of works, if you consider her pops to be a sort of king. It’s a stretch.

And that’s all I got. I’m sure I’ve overlooked some, but I think the takeaway is that princesses generally fall into the sunny, bright-eyed, singing-in-the-forest category. In fact, there’s not even an “evil princess” page on TV Tropes, and there’s a TV Tropes page for everything. Blame Disney if you want, but do tell me if you can think of any more.

In closing, please gaze upon this 1868 Frederick Sandys painting of Medea.

via

If that expression doesn’t read as “Do not fuck with me because I have ISSUES,” then I don’t know what does. Moo hoo ha, indeed.

EDIT: Bonus Mombi. Worst bonus, I know, but still.

via

When Saints Are Both Things

Once again, let’s talk saints and the horrible ends they met.

via wikipaintings

Not long after I posted about ol Captain Flaps — and considerably longer after I posted about St. Agatha’s boob plate, St Lucy’s disarming stares and the cephalophore — I received a letter from a reader who brought up a good point. Why are saints depicted as both things? Here, read:

so, I know I'm the art historian whatever, but you're the recovering large-c Catholic (you never recover from being a small-c catholic, it's too all-permeating) so maybe you know:

why are saints depicted as both things?

like, why does st bart hold his skin but also, mostly, has skin? and why does st lucy have eyes, and also hold her own eyes? it's not like cephalophores (you know, those fish they thought were extinct)(ahem. head-bearers.) have a head...and also a head to carry. There's clearly no leaning away from gore in Catholic iconography, so what gives? why the hesitation?

I hadn’t thought about it, and I lack the background in art history to give a definitive answer. But I could take some guesses. My response:

You bring up a good point that I had considered but which I have no good reason for. It doesn't really lend itself to Googling -- believe me, I tried -- so I can only offer you this.

On one hand, Catholics believe that losing, like, a limb in life doesn't mean you'll be an amputee in heaven, so it's possible that this artistic meme results from the belief that the martyr, having ascended into heaven, gets back the things the lost on earth -- eyes, skin, boobs, nose (probably there's one this happened to) -- but they're proud of their martyrdom and so they're showing off their lost body part like it's a kind of trophy.

My other guess, which seems less likely to be true, is that some people just weren't good at depicting the insides of bodies and therefore just didn't. But this wouldn't account for, say, a lack of breasts, which doesn't seem that hard. And let's face it: Most of the people living in these eras probably did see bodies torn apart, since that was reality TV back then, to say nothing from the constant farm accidents that I imagine claimed ranch hands of yore left and right.

Surprise third guess that I just thought of: Perhaps certain depictions were not meant to be gory, or would be posted in a location where gore would have been unacceptable -- like a children's room??? -- and they therefore did a sanitized version of the dead saint, so as not to offend. The cephalophore, conversely, would have been shown in a place where a decapitated person would have been, like, fun and edgy.

Do any of these seem reasonable?

Now what do you think? I’m genuinely curious if there’s consensus about this. I mean, I suppose it makes about as much sense to show St. Bartholomew simultaneously with and without his skin as it does to pose St. Sebastian (pictured above) like he’s a gay pin-up despite being punctured by arrows. (That takes quite a bit of composure, really.) But clearly the artists made some aesthetic decisions, and they must have had reasons for making them.

Drunk Agriculture

This weekend, I was afforded the opportunity to see my hometown from the sky, and among the observations I made — “People look like ants! Ants look like nothings!” and “I have become airsick!” and “Okay, now I feel better but I am so, so sorry” — was the following sight, captured through the magic of Instagram:

No, it’s not the solitary landing strip in the middle of San Benito County ag country, though that itself was a surprise. It’s the field that looks like it was manicured in a hilariously irregular fashion. Well, that’s being kind: It looks like someone trusted an intern with the task of crafting a festive harvest-time maze. It looks like a certain know-how skipped a generation. It looks like Farmer Joe maybe is brewing moonshine in addition to more traditional agricultural products. Whatever the story, is it not strange that this would happen on the farm of someone who owns a private landing strip and would therefore have the means to see how screwy it looked?

No one has been able to offer a reasonable explanation as to why someone would plow their field in this way, so I put the question to you, creative-ish people: Why do you think this happened?

Foreign Heat (Not a Pornographic Film Title)

I was at the liquor store, “Eetz hot,” the man behind the counter proclaimed. It was hot, in fact. Last Monday afternoon had been sweltering, and it didn’t diminish the moist, chaffing ick of it to recall that the end of the week was forecasted to be ten degrees cooler.

“Yeah, it’s awful. I don’t even want to think about how hot it is in my apartment.”

Him, again: “Yesterday, I go home, and there are ninety degrees!”

Now, this actually stopped me. Even knowing he hadn’t yet mastered English idioms, I was not immediately sure what he meant. Then, I realized: It was ninety degrees inside his house when he got home. I’d just never heard anyone phrase it that way. I thought he was talking about, like, right angles — and godammit, homes need corners, as far as I’m concerned.

Then, the overthinking as I walked home: Isn’t it strange, grammatically, that the temperature is uncountable but nonetheless treated like a singular? Even when it’s almost always given a value of more than one? We say “It is ninety degrees” and not “They are ninety degrees.” If you had learned basic from-the-book English without understanding how it’s actually used, however, I think you might actually be inclined to say, “They are ninety degrees.” It makes logical sense — plural thing is plural thing, rather than singular thing is plural thing. That's how the guy in the liquor store put it together in his head, I'm betting.

Looking at the sentence “It is ninety degrees,” I’d say it looks like a predicate nominative construction — or what we use when we express the idea “X is equal to Y.” If I say “The boy is a murderer,” I’m saying that in this case, the boy is the same as a murderer — boy is the subject and murderer is essentially another subject, because you could flip the sentence around and it would basically mean the same thing. On either end of that is is a noun that being treated equally and assigned the same case. English-speakers would never say “The boy is murderers,” because that doesn’t make sense, yet that would seem to be what we’re doing with “The temperature is 90 degrees.”

Is it just that “The temperature is 90 degrees” is elliptical? We’re really expressing that “The temperature is valued at 90 degrees,” or something to that effect. But no one really says that either; we just say “It’s 90 degrees.” So at what point does a construction like this cease to be elliptical and just become standard grammar? If it’s not elliptical, how do you explain what’s going on here, grammatically speaking?

Encyclopedia Drew and the Dubious Diorama

When I visited the Natural History Museum, I escaped the fate that befell poor Sally Draper and did not, thankfully, begin my period immediately after viewing the animal dioramas.

Yes, in true Don Draper fashion, Mad Men fibbed and passed off Los Angeles Natural History Museum as its New York counterpart. This is not news, and this post isn’t about Sally’s diorama-prompted womanhood. No, I’m actually more concerned with the oryxes.

The Arabian oxyx, according to the Natural History Museum’s website, is notable for a horse-like gait and the fact that it, when moving in profile, appears to only have a single horn and therefore may have been responsible for belief in unicorns. But even that’s not enough to warrant this post. No, here’s what did. Not the oryx family but way in the back corner…

Do you see it?

Okay, you have to see it now — a cat whose shitty expression is masked by the cat-colored grass around it. The diorama placards made no mention of Grassy Grumplepuss, leaving me to consider several possible explanations:

• The diorama curator placed the cat, but a higher-up exercised an anti-cat agenda and saw to it that the cat was not mentioned at all.
• The diorama curator’s cat died while he was making this particular exhibit, and so he taxidermied the cat and slipped it into the background as a way of letting future generations appreciate the severity of his cat’s scowl.
• It’s actually a live cat that snuck into the museum, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler-style, and it’s posing as if it were taxidermied so as to avoid detection.
• It’s the mouse-deterring version of a scarecrow, and the museum would rather not publicize its rodent problem.
• The museum placed the cat in the exhibit, unannounced, and they’re giving out prizes to whoever spots it first. (Me! I did! Give me the gift certificate.)
• Ghost cat.
• Something something illuminati symbolism.
• Oryxes naturally have guardian angels that take the form of cats, but the museum — being a scientific institution — is reluctant to endorse such spiritualist notions, and so the resourceful museum-goer is left to research on his own and come to his own conclusion.
• “Oh, shit. We have this extra cat. Will anyone care if I just stick it in the oryx diorama? I need to take lunch, like, now.”

Your input is valued and appreciated.

Previous Encyclopedia Drew mysteries:

• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Rabbit-Eared Woman
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Haunted Clock
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Look-Alike Cats
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Unclaimed Canvases
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Missing Maori Fuck
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mysterious Table of Mystery

If You’re Happy and You’re Handless, Clap Your Nubs

Because Friday is the day I blog without trying very hard, here are two photos of handless boy mannequins that I spotted at an airshow. They — along with this posting — were easily the most interesting parts of the airshow.

Why were they handless, you ask? I can only imagine that it stemmed from the presence of antique airplanes and a desire to teach children about propeller safety.

(Via my Instagram account, which I'm apparently plug on my regular blog because 2012 of course.)

The Office Desk Mystery

Two clues. I’ve not yet determined what the crime was, who the victim was, if there was a crime, if there was a victim, if I could have been the criminal or the victim, if suspicious deskmate was an accomplice, and (I repeat) if there was a crime.

But I’m pretty sure there totally was a crime.

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mysterious Table of Mystery

Perhaps you might remember when I wrote about buying a coffee table. I did so here on this blog, in the post wherein I discussed the set dressing from a cancelled Raven-Symone sitcom, the monsters from Tremors, severed mannequin legs and the estate sale of Not Joni Mitchell. Yes, that post. At the very end, after the detailed listing of all the things I did not purchase, I mentioned that I bought coffee table.

That, I suppose, was a lie.

I bought a piece of furniture that I have chosen to use as a coffee table even though it’s most likely intended for some other purpose. I’m just not sure what.

Here is the table in its oval form:

What makes this table strange, however, are its leaves. They don’t especially increase the overall surface area, and they also don’t fold under the table, as extend-o-leaves usually do. Instead, they fold up. Here, with the edges vertical, the shape takes on its second, rectangular form:

So why would a table do this? The leaves, when folded up, make it difficult to put things on and get things off the table, so I’d guess seems like you’re supposed to use it with the leaves down. But why would you ever want the leaves up? Did this table go on a ship or something else that had reason to be less stable that a normal, tacked-to-the-ground house? Or did someone once arrange items on this table and then move it somewhere else, arranged objects and all? With the sides folded up, the handles make it easier to carry, I suppose, but overall the table is not especially light. I can’t imagine why a whole table — legs and all — would be simpler to move around than, say, a tray that you could place anywhere.

Anyone? Really at a loss for what this thing is. And please, no jokes about it being a sex table, because I’ve already eaten off it.

Circle Cubes

Apparently in the last word in the name Bed Bath & Beyond refers to the sections of the store in which geometry is bent into shapes impossible anywhere else on Earth.

Question: Would it not be dangerous to bring such an anomaly into the house?

Myra / Myron

I found a note jotted down on the back page of a copy of Myra Breckenridge.

In case you can’t read it, it says, “How does a child’s irrational fear of everything and its irrational confidence that things will be taken care of live side by side?” I did buy the copy of the book, and I’m eager to find out if reading it will explain what it means.

Amazombies

Remember that street sign from not-my-street deposited on my street? Back, like, almost a month ago? Guess how far it has moved.

From flat on the grass to propped up next to the palm tree on the grass. Seriously, what level of city government does one notify about this kind of thing?

My Rude Hat (A Question in Need of an Answer)

Except for the part where you’re not supposed to say anything unless it’s nice (because my humor is mean-spirited and without mean jokes I worry I’d just be etymology trivia, anecdotes about old video games and some combination of these two), I do try to follow rules. The kinds that go in various governmental books prevent us from devolving into hooting monkeys, and the kinds that remain in our grandmother’s heads (and hearts and souls) make us at least monkeys who hoot politely and wear pants. I won’t argue with this, and you shouldn’t either.

I do, however, find fault with the rules that don’t make any sense, because when you obey the spirit of law that has no, like, physical body attached to it, you verge on superstition. Chewing with your mouth open? A no-brainer. It’s gross. Someone else’s mostly masticated, saliva-soaked food looks quite a bit like vomit, and it’s unappetizing to see someone else’s vomit any time much less at mealtime. (I wager that no one would ever break this rule if the human eye were able to swivel around and somehow watch its neighbor mouth as it chews food, for it would appear no less disgusting than it would in someone else’s mouth.) Other rules confuse me. For example, why is it considered rude to place your elbows on a dining table during a meal? What is it about a goddamn raised surface that happens to be supporting food that makes it so special? Clearly nothing. No one has ever been explained to me why this act is considered rude, and I think there is in fact no reason, which is why more and more members of polite society eat with their elbows resting comfortably at the same level as their dinner plate. Similarly but on the opposite end of the scale of meaningfulness: the prohibition against gay marriage. Obviously, people are gradually realizing they have no reason to refuse this small (but important) group of people this basic human right, and so they say, “Feh. Do whatever you want, you crazy kids,” especially because other places have condoned it without having been swallowed by The Void or plagued by ghosts or hit with natural disasters any harder than any other part of the world.

So that brings me to my question: What the hell is the problem with wearing a hat indoors? Fewer and fewer people consider this rude, and so we see people (mostly men) strutting about be-capped in homes and casinos and museums and other places. Yet the admonitions of my mother and grandmother ring in my ears whenever I do, particularly during meals. (What is our deal with eating. Is this a Last Supper thing? I’ll bet it is.) So please, someone, explain to me why this rule of etiquette ever existed, so I can realize that its origins are silly and I can put it out of my head once and for all.

I swear I’m not, like, hiding a sword under my hat, or whatever other medieval times-originated worry is responsible for the hat hatred.

Mistpouffers: Creepier Than Their Name Might Indicate

Sometimes a word’s definition simply does not match its form or pronunciation. For example, my word of the week. I’m fairly certain it can’t mean what it does, and it should rather refer one of the following:

• a thing that exists in the Harry Potter universe
• a euphemism for a rude noise made by the female anatomy
• something your grandmother might call a male homosexual
• a sort of cookie
• a crop duster
• a crotch duster (if that’s a thing maybe)
• a synonym for whatchamacallit or cajigger

But it’s actually none of these. No, it’s actually a bit more sinister.

mistpouffers (MIST-poof-ers) — noun: unexplained noises that sound like cannon fire or sonic booms.

Chances are that if you’re hearing mistpouffers, you’re near a body of water. Picture yourself standing there, enjoying nature in all its wetness, when a clap of thunder disturbs the tranquility of the scene. But then you notice: no clouds. What the hell? That’s what scientists have been wondering since the first report of mistpouffers back in 1824. Ever since, prominent noiseologists have attributed the mystert sounds to everything from meteors to geothermal gas to the collapse of underwater caves. (Or, you know, aliens. Personally, I think it’s Cloverfields.)

And depending on what cursed part of the world you’re in when you hear these mystery noises, these above-water bloops, you might call them something else: brontidi in Italy, retumbos in the Philippines, Seneca Guns in the American Southeast, Moodus noises specifically in Connecticut, uminari in Japan, and Barisal Guns in Bangladesh.

But why mistpouffers? That is equally baffling, because no article that I can find lists an origin for the term. (I blame Cloverfields for this as well.) But I can at least guess were it came from. It seems possible that the term shares some connection with the French pouffer, “to burst out (as with laughter),” even if the closest relative this word in English would seem to be puff, which names an eruption of a different sort. The fact that another apparent term for this phenomenon is fog guns could possibly explain the mist in mistpouffers, and while it seems like the word could have also described some kind of smoke-belching gun or cannon, I can’t seem to find an instance of this word being used to name anything other than the noise. Oh well.

I suppose that if anyone’s looking into mistpouffers, it’s for the best that they’d be looking into not into the term but the sounds themselves, especially given the long list of other unexplained noises sounding off throughout the world, doubtlessly heralding the death of us all. By Cloverfields, of course.

Previous words of the week after the jump.

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, beeturia, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, cephalophore, cherpumple, chilver, cockernonnie, coprolalia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
• fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• lagniappe, leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, maroon, milt, mongo, mooncalf, morepork, muzjiks
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, petrichor, pettifogger, pettitoes, phlegmagogue, pismire, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc, quiff
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, sharrow, shebang, sinople, slampatado, slubberdegullion, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• tappen, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Word nerd? Subscribe to Back of the Cereal Box’s word-related posts by clicking here.

Nowhere Near the Land of Goshen

So I found this on the lawn in front of my apartment building.

It should be noted that I don’t live on the 11800 block of Goshen Avenue. I live near enough Goshen that I could walk to it but no so close that I, for example, would want to carry an extricated street sign from there to where I live. Clearly, not everyone agrees. As it stands now, all that stop sign is doing is stopping the grass — and it’s doing that quite well, at least in one specific octagonal region, and will continue to do so until someone realizes this sign isn’t where it’s supposed to be.

The “TIXE” Sign

Does an upside-down exit sign mean it’s actually an entrance sign?

Or is it telling you that you have to take the exit by walking on your hands?

Surely, it must mean something more than a construction worker who installed it, saw his error and said “Fuck it. Close enough.”

Right?

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Communicative Thais

I don’t speak Thai, so I’m really curious to know what has gotten this motley crew so excited.

My guess? Hemorrhoid balm.