Door #11: Academic Hilarity

Today one of the research fellows at work regaled my boss and I with the following joke:

[A classicist] goes into a bar.

[At this point, both of us started laughing already since the jokester used the actual name of our resident classics fellow.]

He walks up to the counter and says “Give me a martinus.”

The bartender says, “Don’t you mean a martini?

The classicist bangs his fist on the bar, ” If I wanted a double I would have asked for it, dammit!”

How do you say ba-dum-chuck in Latin?

Door #10: Gone Dinin’

Yes, dear readers, I’ve taken the night off.

The fellowship program I work for at Fancypants University (F.U.) is having its annual holiday dinner. The food and drink are lavish and delicious: salmon mousse, lobster, two different champagnes, port, cheese, chocolate.

Two years ago, I learned that I prefer 1994 Dom Perignon to 1995. Who knows what lessons this year will bring?

Door #9: The Parasite Behind Crazy Cat Ladies?

Filled with reports of off-beat research (or off-beat implications of otherwise garden-variety research), the annual “Year in Ideas” issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine has become a highlight of my December.

This year’s most amusing item:  Rebecca Skloot’s piece on a possible biological explanation for why “some humans develop an unhealthful attraction to cats and apparently become immune to the smell of their urine.”

Just the first paragraph had me and my housemate in stitches:

Here’s a little-known and slightly terrifying fact: According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 60 million people in the United States are infected with a parasite that may migrate into their brains and alter their behavior in a way that — among other things — may leave them more likely to be eaten by cats. New research into this common parasite — Toxoplasma gondii — may offer clues to the phenomenon known to the unscientifically-minded as “crazy cat lady” syndrome.

Door #8: I’m Just a Nutcracker Nerd

I went to see the Pennsylvania Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker every year from the time I was four until I was in high school. And I spent hours with the Russian dance and the Waltz of the Flowers and the Sugar Plum Fairy playing on the phonograph in my bedroom while I improvised my own choreography to the entire Suite.

Nowadays, I’m more of a Hard Nut kinda gal, but I really am a sucker for all things Nutcracker. So it’s not surprising that I thrilled to this version of the Sugar Plum theme assembled entirely from samples of sounds produced by tweaking, banging and plucking various bicycle parts.

And yes, I know it’s an ad, but I still can’t resist. My only complaint: every Nutcracker nerd knows it’s a celesta, not a glockenspiel.

Door #7: Friday Fiddle Tune #5

This was the first fiddle tune I ever wrote. It started out life as “Busshållplatsvalsen” – “The Bus Stop Waltz” — because it popped into my head while I was waiting for the bus.  Later I dedicated it to my friend Betsy in honor of her fiftieth birthday.

Door #6: Uncommon Consent

Tonight’s session of my social science research methods class covered research ethics: Institutional Review Boards, vulnerable populations, confidentiality, risk/benefit ratios, etc. Although the lecture sparked some lively discussion, the most interesting part of the evening was my teacher’s use of consent as a transitive verb.

Midway through the discussion of informed consent, the professor started a sentence “Before you consent someone…,” meaning, I gather, before you get them to sign an informed consent form.

There was a time when I might have used this as an occasion to rail about the decline and fall of the English language. But now, after a couple of linguistics courses and a lot of time spent reading Language Log, I’m just thrilled that English can still grow and change and surprise me with new meanings and usages.

Door #5: Goatwatch 2007 — Looking for Love

When I got home tonight, I logged on to AIM for a few minutes and ended up talking to my friend Marilyn — another of the Gävlebock‘s fans. She wanted to know if I’d been checking the goat’s blog lately.

“No, not really. Has he been attacked yet?”

“He’s looking for a girlfriend.”

After the goat asked whether anyone knew any nice nanny goats, a helpful American, sent the him a link to Lucy, the Amazing Elephant Building in Margate, New Jersey.

I don’t want to stand in the way of true love, but after checking out Lucy, I really think she’d be a better match for Stoorn, the giant moose.

Door #4: Not Pining for the Fjords

I’ve been meaning to post about this ever since I first mentioned one of this year’s hot new scents (library-smell perfume), which appeared on Salon.com’s holiday gift guide (scroll down to find the reference).

A few pages further in their list of gifts, Salon’s Joy Press suggests buying Peter Bjorn and John’s album Writer’s Block for the “culture vulture” in your life. Press describes the Swedish trio’s breakout song “Young Folks” as “fresh as morning mist bouncing off the fjords.”

Now, far be it for me to step on anyone’s simile, but the requisite fjord allusions in reviews of Swedish movies, films, music, etc. are starting to approach snowclone levels of cliché.

For once and for all, Sweden doesn’t really have fjords — at least not in the sense that Norway or Greenland or even Alaska does.

Sometimes Swedes will use the word fjord to mean what is usually called a fjärd (pronounced, fyaird) in Swedish, that is an open ocean area in an archipelago. And when the islands are steep and rocky and sit close together as they sometimes do on Sweden’s west coast or on the Höga Kusten (The High Coast) along the Gulf of Bothnia, you can almost get the feeling that you’re in a fjord when you’re sailing between them.

I’ve seen some of these fjärds (see my vacation photo above), and although they’re beautiful in their own right, they don’t even come close to Norway’s fjords on the grandeur front.

So if you want to talk about about some ethereally beautiful Swedish ditty, compare it to the sunlight on new-fallen snow or the rush of an arctic stream, but forget the fjords already.

And don’t even think about making polar bear references.

Door #3: Poetry of the Seamounts

My sister Mars and I share an affinity for the crazy common names applied to creatures. Her Web site features a list of whimsical bird names from the bristle-thighed curlew to the rufous-breasted fruitpigeon.

Today I came across an equally wonderful list of fish species trawled from the underwater mountain ranges (some over a mile below the surface) in the Tasman Sea off Australia. The list links to pictures of some of the most fantastical fish I’ve ever seen.

Go ahead, read these aloud. The list is like a strange, gothic poem:

Australian Burrfish
Ballina Angelfish
Beaked Salmon
Blue Grenadier
A deepsea anglerfish (no common name)
Duckbilled Eel
Dwarf Dory
A fanfin anglerfish
Fangtooth
Fathead
Gelatinous Blindfish
Gilbert’s Halosaur
Gulper Eel
Hammerjaw
Humpback Blackdevil
King Gar
Largescale New Laternfish
Little Red Gurnard Perch
Longray Spiderfish
Orange Roughy
Plunket’s Dogfish
Portuguese Dogfish
Ribbon Barracudina
Sharpnose Sevengill Shark
Shortsnout Lancetfish
Short-tail Torpedo Ray
Silver Lighthouse Fish
A snaggletooth (no common name)
Snubnosed Eel
Soft Leafvent Angler
Southern Spineback
Spangled Tubeshoulder
Sparkling Slickhead
Spiky Oreo
Stoplight Loosejaw
Triplewart Seadevil
Viperfish

Who needs science fiction, when science fact is this amazing?

Door#2: Fusilli with Tuna and Herbed Bread Crumbs

I slept most of the day away today (woke up at 8:00 a.m. and then went back to sleep until noon), and and the cold and sleet kept me from grocery shopping, so I had to fashion a dinner out of the contents of my fridge and pantry.

What I came up with wasn’t half bad. I did a variation on toasted, herbed bread crumbs that I often use as a topping for cauliflower — a sort of Italianized  (or is that Italicized) version of Chou-Fleur à la Polonaise.

This is one of those dishes that should be tinkered with depending on your likes and dislikes, not to mention what’s sitting on your shelves, so consider this recipe a template.

• One portion of pasta
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 pinch dried chili flakes
• 1 large garlic clove, pressed (I was out of fresh garlic so I used some Vietnamese pre-fried garlic slices I had in the pantry.)
• 1 teaspoon – 1 tablespoon capers according to preference, drained
• 1/4 cup panko or other non-seasoned bread crumbs
• 3 ounce canned tuna, drained and flaked (I had a can of that Italian chunk light in olive oil. Yum!)
• 1 – 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh herbs (I used some parsley, sage and rosemary — one herb short of a song — I had leftover from thanksgiving.)

1. While pasta is cooking, heat some olive oil in a medium skillet. Add pinch of dried chili pepper flakes and one pressed garlic clove and sauté until garlic is golden and fragrant.
2. Add capers and stand back. They usually spatter. Sauté for about 30 seconds — until the sizzling dies down — and then add the bread crumbs. Stir to mix with capers, garlic an pepper flakes. Turn down heat to medium-low and cook crumbs until golden.
3. When crumbs lightly golden. Add tuna and fresh herbs. Stir to mix. Let cook for about 1 minute then serve over drained pasta.

Serves: 1