Bringing home the bacon

Fou lard.

In other news, I have a slight cold - perhaps 3 out of 10 on Davidsonian ailment scale. It is making me feel as though I would benefit from a full head transplant!

Punslingers

Ted Trautman on the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships:

“The inveterate punster,” Leacock wrote, “follows conversation as a shark follows a ship.” What is missing from the Pun-Off, then, is this conversation; onstage, we inveterate punsters are forced to play only with the words we can find inside ourselves, rather than lying in wait for a punworthy moment in the course of normal dialogue. Hence the excess of gimmes like “philosophers Kant hold their liquor,” as opposed to a more organic, transcendent play on words, as when I misremembered the color of a friend’s car years ago and he told me that “it must have been a pigment of my imagination.” Or when a friend interning for a congressman confessed that he snuck a glance at John Boehner’s crotch in a Capitol restroom and I declared him the Peeker of the House. Such turns of phrase are unlikely to appear in any serious writing I attempt down the road, and yet the elation they produce is among my favorite feelings: a credit to their author and a gift to anyone with the wit and good sense to enjoy them.

B. is a mighty punster whose lines are often delivered with a deceptive blandness that means the non-language-attuned may miss them altogether. One I remember particularly fondly, as we traveled by boat in Costa Rica and an enormous flock of seabirds came into view: "One good tern deserves another!"

Mid-morning update

9:45am (Cayman doesn't observe daylight savings).  Just typed in final edits for first half (parts one and two); it will only now need printing out and a final proof against the marked-up edit where new typing may have introduced new errors.

Second half (part three) still needs a few 'bits'; I will write them on my computer at Cafe del Sol (I have spent many happy hours here working on something or other!), then go back to the condo and print the whole thing out.  Determined to be done by 5pm.  If I finished by 2:30, I could go to yoga at 3, but that seems a bit of a stretch (!)....

Two thoughts in the meantime:

• I overuse the words "as" and "that"
• Though I think that sometimes the effect of elegant variation should be deliberately embraced, it is probably just as well that I have only used the word "confiture" once (there are seven instances of jam)

Stuck up!

This post title is a homage to Wendy, who liked punny blog titles and who would have used it to solve the puzzle of what kind of a doctor I saw on Thursday and Monday, stomach-ache notwithstanding: the allergist!

The initial round of testing on Thursday sent me into something of a mental tailspin.  It was not to my surprise but certainly to my chagrin that I proved violently allergic to nearly every major environmental trigger.  On my way home, I was so immersed in the leaflet the doctor gave me that I actually missed my subway stop; of course, partly the distress is physical, the histamines were raging in the bloodstream and the amazingly named "wheal and flare" response to skin pricks is unpleasant, but I think the major emotional stress factor here concerns the question of living with a cat.  To me that seems non-negotiable!  I have obtained new bedding and will start allergy shots tomorrow or the next day: the doctor chooses five high-priority allergens to desensitize the patient to, and I think she said that we will do spring pollen/trees, fall pollen/trees, dust mites, cockroaches (NYC living!) and cat dander.  I'll go a couple times a week just for next week or two to get a head start, and then fall back to once a week.  I also have nasal spray and instructions to wipe down the cat with a wet cloth a couple times a week: little does he know what is in store....

Light reading around the edges: an advance copy of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, which truly exists at the sweet spot between Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Crais (I wasn't crazy about the final twist at the very end, but it is grippingly readable); and Kameron Hurley's fascinating and engaging God's War, which has a misleading and odd opening that I think detracts from the effectiveness of the book as a whole but which I really loved otherwise.  Kind of like Steph Swainston, with worldbuilding reminiscent in certain respects of but to my taste superior to The Windup Girl.

Procrastinatory tidbits

At the NYRB blog, James Gleick ponders the OED's new and novella-length entry for the word "information."

At the LRB, Michael Wood reflects on linguistic similarities and differences between Lewis Carroll and James Joyce (the piece also quotes, appealingly, a pun from Walter Redfern's book, which I now covet but do not think I will be able to get electronically: "A person who has been given bits of greenery for her birthday instead of the colourful flowers she was hoping for decides to make the best of things. She says: ‘With fronds like these, who needs anemones?’").