Words to the Cosmos

First, alligators in Summit Lake, now Piranahs in Portage Lakes?

// August 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // House-of-Chaos, Ohio, china, life the universe and everything, personal

it’s a crazy, crazy world.  Twice in the past years, alligators have been found in NE Ohio’s Summit Lake.  Now, in our Portage Lakes a cousin to the piranha has been found:

Deadliest catch? Not really. But girl gets bragging rights

Exotic fish related to piranha caught in Portage Lakes by 9-year-old

By Jim Carney
Beacon Journal staff writer

Published on Tuesday, Aug 03, 2010

NEW FRANKLIN: This is one fish tale that has some real teeth.

Nine-year-old Mackenzie Dalton tossed a line with a bobber and a big fat worm into the muddy brown water in the Portage Lakes on Saturday and pulled out a frightening catch: a red bellied pacu, a fish that is a cousin to a piranha.

”I was like freaking out,” the little girl from Mayfield Village said Monday.

The catch happened on the dock at Baine’s Pier 619 Pontoon Rentals on Stutz Avenue.

The dock is on the Turkeyfoot Channel between West Reservoir and Turkeyfoot Lake in New Franklin.

The girl had been fishing with her grandparents and some cousins for a few hours and had caught nothing while out on a pontoon boat.

But when she threw her line in off the dock, she pulled in a foot-long, one-pound fish.

”The fish started jumping at me,” said the fourth-grader at Center Elementary in Mayfield Village.

The catch offers an interesting twist to a long-standing joke started by Roy Baine, 60, owner of the pontoon rental place.

A few years ago, he put up a sign and a dispenser to sell fish food for a quarter. The sign on the dispenser offers visitors the chance to ”Feed the Portage Lakes Piranha.”

Visitors toss the food into the lake and blue
gills typically pop up to feed.

Baine said he never guessed something more exotic was swimming below.

”I have never seen anything like it,” said Baine, who for many years ran an old-time photo studio called Magic Lantern at Quaker Square.

Matt Wolfe, fisheries biologist for the Portage Lakes office of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife, said the fish was probably tossed into one of the lakes by someone who no longer wanted to keep feeding it in a home aquarium as it got bigger and bigger.

”More often than not,” he said, fish like the one Mackenzie caught ”get so big in people’s aquariums and they eat so much they just dump them into the lake.”

One time, he said, during a routine survey of fish in the Portage Lakes, a 3-foot koi was discovered.

”Most of your aquarium trade fish die off in the wintertime,” he said.

Piranhas and pacus cannot survive cold Ohio winters, he said.

Pacus are vegetarians and even though they have sharp teeth and look intimidating, Wolfe said, ”all they do is shred vegetation.”

The fish reportedly can reach a maximum of 42 inches long and live up to 15 years.

Baine said he took a look at the mouthful of teeth on Mackenzie’s fish, which he is keeping in a plastic tub at his dock, and it looked like he was staring into a human’s mouth.

”It’s teeth look like perfect human dentures,” he said.

Baine is not sure what to do with the fish. He would like it to find a new home with a fish collector who has a big enough aquarium to keep it.

Mackenzie’s mother, Kerri Setlock, said she thought her daughter was ”pulling [her] leg” when she told her she caught the fish.

Mackenzie said she fishes a lot and this is the most impressive fish she has ever caught. And now she has the fish story of a lifetime to tell.

”When I grow up, I will tell my kids and my kids will tell their kids and it will go on for generations,” she said.

---

Jim Carney can be reached at 330-996-3576 or jcarney@thebeaconjournal.com.

Roy Baine holds a Red Belly Pacu caught outside his Boat Rentalplace Pier 619 on Turkeyfoot Lake on Monday, Aug. 2, 2010, of Akron, Ohio. (Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon Journal)

View larger version>>

NEW FRANKLIN: This is one fish tale that has some real teeth.

Nine-year-old Mackenzie Dalton tossed a line with a bobber and a big fat worm into the muddy brown water in the Portage Lakes on Saturday and pulled out a frightening catch: a red bellied pacu, a fish that is a cousin to a piranha.

”I was like freaking out,” the little girl from Mayfield Village said Monday.

The catch happened on the dock at Baine’s Pier 619 Pontoon Rentals on Stutz Avenue.

The dock is on the Turkeyfoot Channel between West Reservoir and Turkeyfoot Lake in New Franklin.

The girl had been fishing with her grandparents and some cousins for a few hours and had caught nothing while out on a pontoon boat.

But when she threw her line in off the dock, she pulled in a foot-long, one-pound fish.

”The fish started jumping at me,” said the fourth-grader at Center Elementary in Mayfield Village.

The catch offers an interesting twist to a long-standing joke started by Roy Baine, 60, owner of the pontoon rental place.

A few years ago, he put up a sign and a dispenser to sell fish food for a quarter. The sign on the dispenser offers visitors the chance to ”Feed the Portage Lakes Piranha.”

Visitors toss the food into the lake and blue
gills typically pop up to feed.

Baine said he never guessed something more exotic was swimming below.

”I have never seen anything like it,” said Baine, who for many years ran an old-time photo studio called Magic Lantern at Quaker Square.

Matt Wolfe, fisheries biologist for the Portage Lakes office of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife, said the fish was probably tossed into one of the lakes by someone who no longer wanted to keep feeding it in a home aquarium as it got bigger and bigger.

”More often than not,” he said, fish like the one Mackenzie caught ”get so big in people’s aquariums and they eat so much they just dump them into the lake.”

One time, he said, during a routine survey of fish in the Portage Lakes, a 3-foot koi was discovered.

”Most of your aquarium trade fish die off in the wintertime,” he said.

Piranhas and pacus cannot survive cold Ohio winters, he said.

Pacus are vegetarians and even though they have sharp teeth and look intimidating, Wolfe said, ”all they do is shred vegetation.”

The fish reportedly can reach a maximum of 42 inches long and live up to 15 years.

Baine said he took a look at the mouthful of teeth on Mackenzie’s fish, which he is keeping in a plastic tub at his dock, and it looked like he was staring into a human’s mouth.

”It’s teeth look like perfect human dentures,” he said.

Baine is not sure what to do with the fish. He would like it to find a new home with a fish collector who has a big enough aquarium to keep it.

Mackenzie’s mother, Kerri Setlock, said she thought her daughter was ”pulling [her] leg” when she told her she caught the fish.

Mackenzie said she fishes a lot and this is the most impressive fish she has ever caught. And now she has the fish story of a lifetime to tell.

”When I grow up, I will tell my kids and my kids will tell their kids and it will go on for generations,” she said.

---

Jim Carney can be reached at 330-996-3576 or jcarney@thebeaconjournal.com.

Weird Word: Pandiculation (“Pandiculate for Health! Grow Tall! Get Well! Be Young!”)

// September 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, life the universe and everything

Weird Words: Pandiculation/?pænd?kj??le??n/

You do this. You just don’t know that you do. When you’re tired to the extent of yawning in fatigue, you may stretch your arms and neck to ease them. That’s pandiculation. Writers have been known to use the word just for yawning, but properly that’s an associated action, not the thing itself. This example might be correct, or might not, it’s hard to say:

Nothing new, nothing fact, nothing different. Result: ennui, followed by pandiculation and into the arms of Morpheus.

Evening Independent (Massillon, Ohio), 14 Oct. 1931.

Man pandiculating. A self-portrait of Joseph Ducreux (1735-1802)

It comes, as you might guess, from Latin — from pandiculatus, the past participle of pandiculari, to stretch oneself. The ultimate origin is the verb pandere, to stretch. That verb has also given us expand, plus some other much rarer words.

Pandiculation isn’t encountered often. But variations on it were once used for a quack remedy:

“Pandiculate for Health! Grow Tall! Get Well! Be Young!” Exuberant ads like this, running in health-fad magazines since 1914, have proclaimed the virtues of a spine-stretching device called the “Pandiculator.” The Post Office last fortnight barred the promoter of this fraud from using the U.S. mail. A rectangular box about four feet long, worked on the principle of a medieval rack, the Pandiculator has T-shaped iron posts at each end, one fixed, the other movable on a cable pulley system. To pandiculate, all a gull had to do was lie down on the box, strap his head to the fixed post, his feet to the adjustable one; when he turned a wheel on the side, he could stretch his legs and hear the joints crack. The promotion copy claimed that this Procrustean bed would cure “every conceivable condition.”

Time, 20 Apr. 1942. Gull is in the sense of a person who is fooled or deceived, a slang term dating from the sixteenth century whose origin is unknown. If the device was really only four feet long, was it intended solely for persons of short stature? Perhaps they particularly needed stretching?

Kung-Fu Tape Dispenser

// August 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone

While I was searching the interwebs for a Kung-Fu Banana…I came across this Kids Kung Fu Tape Dispenser:

KUNG FU TAPE DISPENSER

nice…

Lost Astronaut Tool-Bag makes it’s re-entry

// August 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, life the universe and everything, news

Eight months ago NASA astronaut, Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper lost a $100,000 toolbag used for repair and cleaning at the  International Space Station during a spacewalk.

The tool-bag,  was spotted by telescope during it’s eight-month orbit around the Earth.

Yeah, by telescope…as it orbited the earth.  How wild is that?

Gizmodo reports that it has:

“…plunged toward Earth and burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center tracking it and more than 19,000 other pieces of space junk in orbit today from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

“Based on its size and composition, we expect the object to completely burn up before hitting the Earth,” center officials said in a statement.”

They also said:

“So, if you happened to be in Mexico on Monday and wished upon a shooting star—I regret to inform you that grease guns and trash bags probably won’t grant your request. [Space via Gearlog]“

Life is very, very silly sometimes…

Weird Words: Titivil

// July 29th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, life the universe and everything

Weird Words: Titivil/?t?t?v?l/

Back in 1938, Paul Harvey wrote in The Oxford Companion to English Literature that “Titivil was evidently in origin a creation of monastic wit.”

He was thinking of the earliest sense of the word. A titivil was a very specific kind of tale-bearer. He was a devil whose job was to collect up the fragments of words or phrases that monks skipped or mumbled while they were reciting divine service. He took them down to Hell, where they were logged against the offender. Might he have been invented as a way to scare the less conscientious members of monastic congregations into saying their prayers properly? It seems more than likely.

He wasn’t English to start with. He turns up in continental Europe in the fourteenth century under various names, including Titinillus and Titivillus. He’s mentioned in a sermon dated to the early 1300s by a Dominican monk named Petrus de Palude who later became Patriarch of Jerusalem: “Fragmina psalmorum Titiuillus colligit horum. Quaque die mille vicibus sarcinat ille” (Titivillus collects up fragments of these psalms. Every day he fills his bag a thousand times.) One guess is that his name was from the Latin word titivillitium used by the Roman comic dramatist Titus Maccius Plautus and which seems to have meant a mere trifle or a trivial bit of gossip.

Titivil escaped from the cloisters into the medieval mystery plays and from there into the colloquial language as a mischievous tale-bearer or more generally a ne’er-do-well or scoundrel. He vanished from common usage around the beginning of the seventeenth century and this is among his last appearances:

Coquette: A pratling, or proud gossip; a fisking or fliperous minx; a cocket, or a tatling housewife; a titifill, a flebergebit.

A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, by Randle Cotgrave, 1611. The definition is worse than the original word for modern readers because so many of the terms are unfamiliar: pratling is from prattle and meant gossiping; fisking meant flighty or frisky; the OED does not define fliperous and it appears nowhere else but here; cocket is just an early English spelling of coquette; tatling meant passing on tittle-tattle; flebergebit would now be spelled flibbertigibbet. And proud then meant haughty or arrogant.

Anteater Love

// July 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone

I luffs you.  I really luffs you…

Now kiss me you fool!

Weird Words: Cockshut

// July 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, life the universe and everything

Cockshut/?k?k??t/

Fear not, this isn’t a risqué word. Cockshut time is the twilight of evening. The word has a longish history, with this being the first use on record:

Thomas the Earl of Surrey and himself,
Much about cock-shut time, from troop to troop
Went through the army, cheering up the soldiers.

Richard III, by William Shakespeare, 1597.

There are two ideas about where it comes from. One suggests that it refers to the time of day when fowls are shut up in their coops for the night, though why it should be cock rather than chicken or some other word isn’t explained.

Other writers point to the variant form cock-shoot and to terms like cockshoot net. These are fowl hunting terms that are said to refer to the

The British woodcock.

woodcock, a large wading bird with short legs. It’s nocturnal, hiding during the day in dense cover but coming out at dusk, when it often flies low along paths and other openings in woodland. At one time, people used to trade on this habit to catch them in nets. This is the origin of several British place names, such as Cockshoot in Herefordshire, Cockshut Hill in Birmingham and Cockshoot Broad in Norfolk.

However, in his English Dialect Dictionary a century ago, Joseph Wright included the hunting and twilight senses separately, hinting there may once have been two distinct words that became confused because they are linked to the same time of day. But it seems more likely that the woodcock origin is the true one.

Weirdest Moment of Reality TV

// July 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone

Insane.

The Four Horsemen of the Peepcopolyse

// July 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone

The Four Horsement of the Peepcoplypse

from Cute Overload!

RUN…the Giant Tube Worms of the Sea are coming…

// July 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // life the universe and everything

from Walking on Fire:

Giant Tube Worms Of The Deep Sea

?”? ????? ?????
Faunus 13

After posting today’s earlier entries, I decided to take a break from my computer to watch a little television. I turned on the television, flipping the channel to PBS. The documentary was discussing deep ocean giant tube worms. In light of my dream last night (Wind Of The Willow), I watched the discussion about deep sea giant tube worms.

Giant deep sea tube worms live around hydrothermal vents called black smokers. Adult worms have no mouth or digestive tract, grow up to 8 feet in length, dwell within a hard chitin shell, have a bright red hemoglobin plume, and live in the absence of light at depths over 5000 feet. They live in symbiotic relationship with billions of bacteria taken inside into the worm via a temporary mouth each has before reaching adulthood. The worms also have no eyes and sense via vibrations and movement.

A creature who senses through vibration, with no eyes with which to see, it is interesting that my dream reports of a deep sea big worm-like creature who is responsible for the deaths of novice seers who are transitioning from seeing into seeing from within the context of a high vibrational state.

13-Story Building Tips over in Shanghai

// July 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, life the universe and everything

HAIL ERIS!!! (And very glad it was a new construction and that no one was inside…)

http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=13-Story-Building-Tips-Over-in-Shanghai

(update:  I was wrong…there was one fatality)

Ah....I die!

Tweaker Menage a Trois… (that *alone* should get you to click)

// July 2nd, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, life the universe and everything

I have RSS feeds.  They give me access to LOTS of information.  Some useful.  Some just weird.  The Dreamin’ Demon on my RSS feeds and is a repository of crime stories of people and their inhumanity to…other people.   I didn’t even *get* through this story before I knew I had to post this quote:

“Now, I’ve never seen tweakers having a menage a trois before, but, I imagine it is something like watching a freaky zombie porno on fast forward…”

Now I’m going to be playing that weird film in my head all evening…  Freaky Zombie Porno.  That’s like Clown Porn.  Gives me the willies!

Weird Words: Phantasmagoria

// May 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // life the universe and everything

2. Weird Words: Phantasmagoria  /,fantazm@’gO:rI@/

——————————————————————-

In October 1801, a German showman named Paul Philipsthal placed an advertisement to publicise an event at the Lyceum Theatre in the Strand, London:

  The public are respectfully acquainted, that the PHANTASMAGORIA, or, Grand Cabinet of Optical and Mechanical Curiosities, exhibiting Magical Illusions, and various other wonderful Pieces of Art, will Open in this Place THIS DAY, October 5, and continue every Evening. [The Times, London, 5 October 1801.]

 By moving a slide projector (then called a magic lantern) backwards and forwards on rails, figures were made to increase and decrease in size, advance and retreat, dissolve, vanish, and pass into each other. Images were projected on a translucent screen between the audience and the stage, so that they appeared to hang in the air.

 A month after his spectacle opened Mr Philipsthal elaborated on it by proclaiming that it would produce “the Phantoms or Apparitions of the dead or absent” and that objects would “freely originate in the air, and unfold themselves under various forms and sizes, such as imagination alone has hitherto painted them”. Much later, a fuller description of the performance appeared:

The head of Dr. Franklin was transformed into a scull; figures which retired with the freshness of life came  back in the form of skeletons, and the retiring skeletons  returned in the drapery of flesh and blood. The  exhibition of these transmutations was followed by  spectres, skeletons, and terrific figures; which, instead  of receding and vanishing as before, suddenly advanced  upon the spectators, becoming larger as they approached them, and finally vanished by appearing to sink into the ground.  [Letters on Natural Magic, by David Brewster, 1831.]

 Philipsthal’s title for his show, Phantasmagoria, was a word he borrowed from “fantasmagorie”, by then used for some 20 years in French-speaking Europe for similar exhibitions. This derived from “fantasme”, a phantasm, plus possibly the Greek “agora”, a place of assembly. But as the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary said, a little sniffily, promoters may have merely wanted “a mouth- filling and startling term” and strict etymology be damned.

 He was much bothered by imitators who quickly took advantage of his success, despite his being granted a patent in February 1802, and the popularity of the visual spectacle was so great that the term soon became a generic one for this type of exhibition. It also entered the language in the modern metaphorical sense of a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream.

[A sketch of Paul Philipsthal's phantasmagoric apparatus is to be seen in the online version of this issue, which you will find at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/pihq.htm.]

Peacock Spider (from Ugly Overload)

// May 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // news

Pint-sized Peacock

Prepare to be charmed, people. And if you’re a lady, prepared to be wooed. He may not look like much, especially when perched upon your fingertip, but what he lacks in size he makes up for in style.

Say hello to the peacock spider (Maratus volans), UgO’s latest inductee from Down Under. You’ll find him festooned with all sorts of colors–colors the ladies can’t get enough of. Here he is, courting one such lucky lady.

This is what he looks like in his full courtship posture. Note the third set of legs held high with pride. His abdomen is also looming, complete with twin, colorful flaps fully deployed.

But you haven’t seen the best of it. Not only does he flash his colors peacock-style, but he also does an irresistible dance, capering from side to side and shaking those extended legs. What lady could possibly say no?

Here’s what his wee spider bum looks like from below when the flaps are extended. You looked, didn’t you? You cheeky bum-looker.

I tell you what, if this spider were hamster-sized and good with children, it might be the most perfect pet ever.

Thanks for the peacock spider, Jade. My life just got a bit more colorful.

Funny Email invite I got at work today

// April 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // personal

I work at a place that is notoriously stoic and quiet.  It’s old-school corporate ethics at its best (and worst).  Today, I got an email that was rather outside the usual run-of-the-mill work info:

People:

 By high order of the chancellor, Happy Hour has been decreed for tomorrow.  Use whatever excuse you feel is best: a) pre-gaming for a Cav’s World Championship run, b) its only 148 shopping days until “Talk like a Pirate Day 2009”, c) O’Toole has maintained a zero carbon footprint for 10 consecutive days, whatever.  

 Forget about Puxatony Phil, winter is over, spring has begun and it’s going to take a run at 80 degrees tomorrow.  Done and Done.

 This list is intentionally diverse (I did not use the employee workgroup alignment chart) in an effort to build total organizational unity around this important occasion.  Please feel free to tell others; there will be no complex conspiracies to keep the list streamlined.  All are welcomed, my friends. 

 Please feel compelled to make the trip to the deck at 69 Taps when the quality of your work output drops below the outside temp (the place isn’t open for lunch, Steve).  Hope to see you all there! 

Now, back to work! 

How about that.  Three days after I make some internal changes to my perspective and get my energy body moving to resonate peace, love and unity…I get something like this from one of our Market Development leaders.

Don’t fret…I’ll be drinking Diet Coke or unsweetened iced tea.  And can only stay for 20 minutes because I have parenting responsibilities.  But it’s a nice change!

Beep Beep

// April 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, news

I have a Segway-type transportation device…they’re called FEET!!!

Segway and GM have partnered to develop the P.U.M.A., a self-balancing individual vehicle in which the two riders have some degree of weather protection.  The Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility (P.U.M.A.) Project can travel up to 35mph, run 35 miles from one charge, and uses vehicle-to-vehicle communications to avoid collisions.

(more…)

Blood-Themed Furniture & Interiors

// April 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // House-of-Chaos

Here’s a hoot!  Blood themed decor!: http://weburbanist.com/2009/03/24/bloody-brilliant-10-blood-themed-design-ideas/

Thowing Knife Coat Hooks

// April 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone

Thowing Knife Coat Hooks – $25 each or 5/$100 at http://www.tc-studio.com/tcweb/Web/coathooks.htm

Throwing Knife Coat Hooks

Awwwww….it’s baby Fahfur

// March 31st, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, magick

Drunk…Hotel..Bagel.Rape (what do these four words have in common?)

// March 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // funny-bone, news

Ok…I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this one and I’ve got a pretty good imagination.  The “Dreamin’ Demon” reports: 

St. George, UT–What do you get when you put four drunk men in a motel room with one television remote? A front-page story, of course. Now, drunk guys beating on each other is likely an every day occurrence…so how did they end up here? Two words–Bagel. Rape.

So…bagel rape, right?  Four drunk guys in a hotel room.  Let’s continue:

It all went down last Sunday evening at the Economy Inn. Four transients; Steven Adamescu, Carl Ellison, Blane Chesleigh, and another unnamed man, were all staying in a room together…drinking. There can only be one king of the motel room, so when the unnamed man tried to decide what they were going to watch on TV, King Adamescu got his panties in a bunch.

 

 

Adamescu dropped a television on the unnamed man’s head and raped him with a bagel and part of a pocket knife. Yes, you read that correctly. He raped him with a bagel. Details as to what kind of bagel it was are lacking; I mean, what kind of bagel was it? Poppy seed? Onion? Sourdough? Did it have cream cheese on it? Wouldn’t a bread stick have been more appropriate for the task at hand? So many question, so few answers…

And finally…what contributed to such brutish acts?:

Authorities say the four men were all acquaintances. The motive behind the beating is unknown, but they do believe alcohol was a factor. Noooo, ya think?

Really?  Alcohol?  Who would have thunk?  Read the whole thing here.

Weird Words: Anadiplosis

// March 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // life the universe and everything

Weird Words: Anadiplosis/?æn?d??pl??s?s/ 

The beginning of a sentence, line, or clause with the concluding word of the one preceding.

This is yet another term from that repository of extraordinary expressions, the field of rhetoric. An example will make the idea clearer and to give it I call upon that fortune-cookie philosopher, Yoda from Star Wars: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Understanding you are? A more sanctified appearance of the form is at the very beginning of Genesis, in the King James Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void.”

Anadiplosis derives from Greek diplous, double, from which also come diploid,diploma and diplomat (the last two from the idea of a doubled or folded paper, hence an official document). The prefix ana- is also Greek, meaning back or anew.

Do not confuse this figure of speech with epanadiplosis, in which a sentence begins and ends with the same word. A famous example is in a speech by Malcolm X: “You bleed when the white man says bleed. You bite when the white man says bite, and you bark when the white man says bark.” The extra prefix in epanadiplosis derives from the Greek preposition epi that means “upon, in addition”.

Likewise, don’t muddle anadiplosis with the better-known anaphora, in which successive clauses or sentences begin with the same word or words:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. Ait is another way to spell eyot, island.

Another rhetorical term for a similar trick is antistrophe (which is also known as epiphora or epistrophe — there’s disagreement over terms), which refers to repeating a word at the end of successive clauses or sentences (“government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”). Both antistrophe and epistrophe derive from Greek strephein, to turn.Weird Words: Anadiplosis/?æn?d??pl??s?s/ 

The beginning of a sentence, line, or clause with the concluding word of the one preceding.

This is yet another term from that repository of extraordinary expressions, the field of rhetoric. An example will make the idea clearer and to give it I call upon that fortune-cookie philosopher, Yoda from Star Wars: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Understanding you are? A more sanctified appearance of the form is at the very beginning of Genesis, in the King James Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void.”

Anadiplosis derives from Greek diplous, double, from which also come diploid,diploma and diplomat (the last two from the idea of a doubled or folded paper, hence an official document). The prefix ana- is also Greek, meaning back or anew.

Do not confuse this figure of speech with epanadiplosis, in which a sentence begins and ends with the same word. A famous example is in a speech by Malcolm X: “You bleed when the white man says bleed. You bite when the white man says bite, and you bark when the white man says bark.” The extra prefix in epanadiplosis derives from the Greek preposition epi that means “upon, in addition”.

Likewise, don’t muddle anadiplosis with the better-known anaphora, in which successive clauses or sentences begin with the same word or words:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. Ait is another way to spell eyot, island.

Another rhetorical term for a similar trick is antistrophe (which is also known as epiphora or epistrophe — there’s disagreement over terms), which refers to repeating a word at the end of successive clauses or sentences (“government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”). Both antistrophe and epistrophe derive from Greek strephein, to turn.

“Torture” Phalluses

// February 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // 9th circle, funny-bone, life the universe and everything, news

(made you click, didn't I? Well I took that title straight from National Geographic, so take it up with their editorial department...not mine!)

“As we have long suspected…the longest and spiniest male genitalia is the one who gets the “job done” most often…”

And thus I give you photos of the large, spiny beetle phalluses:

C. maculatus - "Has the longest and spiniest male genitalia, which resemble "medieval torture instruments,"

But they also get the job done: Sperm from male seed beetles with the longest and spiniest sexual organs beat out their shorter competition in a recent study, to be reported in the March 10, 2009, issue of the journal Current Biology.

The seed beetle species C. subinnotatus has a strange, jawlike structure on its genitalia (above, a close-up).

The genitalia of the C. analis beetle is covered in spines from base to tip.

As male seed beetles’ genitalia have evolved to be spinier, the bugs’ reproductive success has improved, experts say in a study to be released in March 2009.

At the same time, females’ genitalia have evolved in a sort of “arms race,” the study says.

Females have thick padding on their reproductive tract that’s reinforced with strong, elastic connective tissue. After each mating—about five to ten in a lifetime—the wounds heal and leave scar tissue.

Wounding females during mating is likely just an “unfortunate side effect” of the males’ reproductive strategy, the study authors said.

They “inflated” the genitalia???  A water-jet vacuum pump?  That I’d love to have seen video of!!!  Beetle penis-pump porn!!!

Macropinna microstoma – “Barreleye Fish” (with cool transparent head!)

// February 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // life the universe and everything

Macropinna microstoma is a transparent head-ed, barreleyed fish. What looks like his eyes is actually his nose! Wild!

Fabulously Weird Animals: The Indonesian Mimic octupus

// February 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // indonesia, life the universe and everything, news

The Indonesian Mimic octupus:

The Indonesian Mimic Octopus, Thaumoctopus mimicus. This fascinating creature was discovered in 1998 off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia, It does wicked cool things like pretending its a lion fish, sea snake and flounder.  It alters its body colour, movement and behaviour.

Horray for adaption to overcome obstacles!!!  Huzzah!

Owl Posturing…

// January 26th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // funny-bone