“On The Bear-Fac’d Lady”

In Search of the World’s Worst Writers is, well, self-explanatory. Excerpts:

  • “Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!” (Amanda McKittrick Ros)
  • “Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of the sky.” (Shepherd M. Dugger)
  • “We’rt thou suspended from balloon,/You’d cast a shade even at noon,/Folks would think it was the moon/About to fall and crush them soon.” (James McIntyre)

“There are those who think that John Wesley only founded Methodism as a way of saying ‘sorry’ for his father’s poetry.”

| Literature

“A Volley of Turnips”

From press reviews of the Cherry Sisters, “the world’s worst act,” a vaudeville quintet who toured the U.S. and Canada in the 1890s:

  • “Four Freaks From Iowa”
  • “It was awful.”
  • “It is sincerely hoped that nothing like them will ever be seen again.”
  • “Such unlimited gall as was exhibited last night at Greene’s Opera House is past the understanding of ordinary mortals.”
  • “Their long skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically, and anon waved frantically at the suffering audience. The mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns, and sounds like the wailing of damned souls issued therefrom.”
  • “If some indefinable act of modesty could not have warned them that they were acting the parts of monkeys, it does seem like the overshoes thrown at them would have conveyed the idea in a more substantial manner.”
  • “A locksmith with a strong, rasping file could earn ready wages taking the kinks out of Lizzie’s voice.”
  • “Unutterably rank.”
  • “Probably respected at home and ought to have stayed there.”
  • “It was the most insipid, stale, weary, tiresome, contemptible two hours work we have ever seen on the stage. Every man who laughed or jeered or hooted or howled at them reviled himself.”

The sisters toured for seven years, though, and probably saved their impresario from bankruptcy, so perhaps they had the last laugh.

| Entertainment

Five Times Fast

Dutch tongue twisters:

De koetsier poetst de postkoets met postkoetspoets.
The coachman cleans the stagecoach with stagecoach cleaner.

De kat krabt de krullen van de trap met drie droge doeken.
The cat scratches the woodcurls of the stairs with three dry cloths.

De knappe kapper kapt knap, maar de knappe knecht van de knappe kapper kapt knapper dan de knappe kapper kappen kan.
The clever barber cuts hair well, but the clever helper of the clever barber cuts hair more cleverly than the clever barber can cut it.

De meid snijdt recht, en de knecht snijdt scheef.
The maid cuts straight, and the servant cuts crooked.

Liesje leerde lotje lopen langs de lange lindenlaan.
Liesje taught Lotje how to walk along the long tree lane.

| Language

Brooklyn Bridge East

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tour_eiffel_at_sunrise_from_the_trocadero.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Eiffel Tower has been getting some alarming press lately: Its nighttime image has been copyrighted, and Islamists admitted they’d planned an attack on the Paris landmark in 2002. But these still can’t compete with the most outrageous episode in the tower’s history, when a Bohemian con man sold the whole thing for scrap — twice.

The tower was built for the Paris Exhibition of 1889, and by 1925 its upkeep was becoming a burden. So Victor Lustig posed as a government official and summoned six scrap dealers to a secret meeting, where he told them the city wanted to dismantle it. He led a convincing tour of the site, and even induced one eager dealer to “bribe” him for the job.

Lustig fled to Vienna with the cash, and the embarrassed scrap dealer never called the cops. So the con man came back six months later and ran the same scam again, with six new dealers. This time the suspicious mark went to the police, but Lustig still escaped.

An even more successful salesman was at work elsewhere in the early 1920s: Arthur Ferguson sold Nelson’s Column, Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace, then sailed to America and marketed the White House and the Statue of Liberty. Sometimes the best salesmen are the most audacious ones.

| Crime · Hoaxes

Let There Be Light

Obscure light-bulb jokes:

Q: How many existentialists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two: One to screw it in and one to observe how the light bulb itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin cosmos of nothingness.

Q: How many Welsh mothers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: “Don’t worry dearie, I’ll just sit here in the dark, alone.”

Q: How many Marxists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None: The light bulb contains the seeds of its own revolution.

Q: How many Greek Orthodox priests does it take to change a light bulb?
A: What do you mean, “change”!?

Q: How many Spaniards does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Juan.

Q: How many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb?
A: A tree in a golden forest.

Q: How many postmodernists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: In a Derridaist reading, wherein light is a social construct, there is a dialectic between Darkness as a reality and reality as a mode.

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Fish.

| Humor