Bubbling Vat

As if the name PEA CREAM SOUP wasn’t bad enough, the sloppy handwriting — as opposed to the other soups’ professional-looking typed labels — makes this lunch selection completely unappetizing.

Also, I don’t even know was Pea Cream Soup is. Cream of pea soup? Spilt pea soup with half and half poured into it? Something a crazy person made in his garbage can bathtub and then snuck into the restaurant?

No Milk Today

Doorstep check.

This, I suppose, would give new meaning to the sentence, “There’s a package for you at the front door.” If I were the management at diapers.com — and I’m not, I just saying if I was — I might rethink their branding technique. In effect, boxes marked with the company name advertise the fact that someone in the house doesn’t know how to use a toilet. And, for example, if your neighbors knew that you had no infants living at the house, that would get really awkward.

Storke Tower Was Broken

NOTE: The file I linked to no longer works, so I reposted the clip as a YouTube video. You can hear it here.

Picture it: May 18, 2009. The UCSB campus. The Storke Tower carillon goes off-key or breaks a cog or gets possessed or something and fills what I imagine to be especially foggy air with creepy, atonal lullaby music. Spencer wisely thought to record it with his phone.

Seeing as how Spencer has now graduated and no longer has reason to hear any of the music played at Storke Tower — cacophonic or not — I felt I should put this up. May it be a lingering memory of UCSB for all of us graduates.

Mrs. Weinberg’s Bungalow Colony

Three iPhone photos, unrelated save for the fact that they’re now being posted together here.

Expect period dumps of such photos in the future.

Mister Xyster

One day I’ll find a useful word of the week that begins with “X.” One day.

xyster (ZIS-ter) — noun: a medical tool used for scraping bones.

Then again, you could well be a med student or a murderer, and this post could free you from the daily shame of having to ask colleagues for the “scrapey-scrape thing” as you go about your daily work. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, The word comes from the Greek xyein, “to scrape” and from there goes back to the Proto Indo-European base *kes-, also meaning “to scrape.” Xyster also happens to be a metal band, which shouldn’t be surprising, and part of the scientific name of the Southern banned guitarfish, also known as Zapteryx xyster. I’d guess some kind of scraping, if not outright bone-scraping, figures into this animal’s existence, not unlike the aforementioned med student or murderer. In fact, images of Zapteryx xyster are a lot easier to find online than those of the actual xyster instrument, so I’ll just give you the fish, which you should be nice to.

a scraper, not a strummer

Yes, there’s not a whole lot online about xyster, and what’s there isn’t all that interesting. Perhaps the most notable thing would be what I found on Wordnik, which helpfully noted that it was an anagram for sextry, which I didn’t know existed and which, in fact, is just a more salacious-sounding variant of sacristy. So there’s that.

Previous words of the week:

• adulterine, ambeer
• barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
  
• catholicon, cecaelia, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate
  
• epeolatry, espalier
  
• fabiform, fissilingual
• gallinipper, grandgore
• honorificabilitudinitatibus
• itaiitai, ignivomous
  
• jehu, jumentous
  
• kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
  
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, milt, mongo
• nihilartikel, nobiliary particle
• ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pareidolia, petrichor, pismire, pong
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa
  
• scrutator, shebang, sinople
  
• tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby, tyro
  
• ucalegon, ultramontane
  
• veneficial, verdigris
  
• williwaw, witzelsucht
• xenodocheionology
• ypsiliform
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic

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Rich Man’s Hockey

I attended a match at the Santa Barbara Polo Club on Sunday — my first ever, in fact. And despite preconceived notions of the stands being populated solely by upper-crusties, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it all. Horses, yelling, the regular thwack of mallets striking hard surfaces — and, because I did it in Santa Barbara, the strangeness of being able to see mountains, grass, the 101, and the Pacific Ocean all in one quick turn of the head.

I did my best to capture the thrill of horseback sport with my phone camera, but the results were somewhat lacking.

I had better luck photographing things just a few feet away.

Because those photos were mostly unsatisfying, I’ll interpret the event the best way I know how.

The word polo arrives in English from Balti, a language that, while spoken in India, is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and not the Indo-European one that includes, for example, Hindi and English and about all the languages spoken in the lands between. In its original form, pulu, the word just meant “ball.” I can’t help noticing similarities between pulu and words like pellet and pelota and others that descend from the Latin pila, also meaning “ball.” Unless I’m mistaken, there’s not too much reason that the pulu and pila would be related, given their divergent histories. (It’s usually at this point that I’d check this on the American Heritage Dictionary, but I’ve found that its online hideout, Bartleby, no longer seems to feature it or anything dictionaries.)

By sitting through Sunday’s match, I also learned that polo’s six seven-minute periods of play are called chukkers or chukkas. (The same pair of terms can also refer to the boots polo players wear, however.) Unlike polo itself, chukker does descend from Hindi, going back to the Sanskrit cakra meaning “circle” or “wheel.” The same Sanskrit word also gives us chakra, which should be familiar to even the most yogically challenged and which are explained and often even represented as round, wheel-like things. Again, I’ve got nothing to back this up, but I wonder if chukker’s etymological connection to wheels could work along the same lines as the English round in the sense of a bout of play or even a setting of drinks. You know, wheels being round and all.

Further links (per recommendation by Zemanta, which I am not quite sure about)

• Jai Ho! English lexicon hits million-word milestone (ctv.ca)
• It literally still has meaning (mendicantbug.com)
• Enamored With Words? You'll Love Wordnik (readwriteweb.com)

Behind Her Jalapeno

An office Post-It warning of dangerously spicy Bagel Day cream cheese was repurposed in a way that probably violates some policy somewhere.

Wherever that girl’s going, the other people in the painting will surely be laughing at her behind her back — or, apparently, behind her jalapeno.