Bouncing tits: the wacky world of palindromes

No, no, no, I swear this gif relates! And I didn't write these, though I wish I had. I don't know how anybody could sit there and figure even one of these out. They sort of make sense, in a weird, almost surreal way. It's hard to find anything to illustrate these, so I tried to dig up a few palindromic images of my own.

Some of them are, I'm warning you, pretty weak, but the palindromes are magnificent.

A dog, a plan, a canal: pagoda. 

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. 

A new order began, a more Roman age bred Rowena. 

A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita. 

A Toyota. Race fast, safe car. A Toyota. 

Able was I ere I saw Elba. 

Animal loots foliated detail of stool lamina. 

Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna. 

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era? 

Are we not pure? "No sir!" Panama's moody Noriega brags. "It is garbage!" Irony dooms a man; a prisoner up to new era. 

As I pee, sir, I see Pisa!

Barge in! Relate mere war of 1991 for a were-metal Ernie grab! 

Bombard a drab mob. 

Bush saw Sununu swash sub. 

Cain: a maniac. 

Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic. 

Daedalus: nine. Peninsula: dead. 

Dammit, I'm mad! 

Delia saw I was ailed. 

Denim axes examined. 

Dennis and Edna sinned. 

Depardieu, go razz a rogue I draped. 

Desserts, I stressed! 

Did I draw Della too tall, Edward? I did? 

Do good? I? No! Evil anon I deliver. I maim nine more hero-men in Saginaw, sanitary sword a-tuck, Carol, I -- lo! -- rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero-men in Miami. Reviled, I (Nona) live on. I do, O God! 

Doc, note I dissent: a fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod. 

Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard. 

Drat Saddam, a mad dastard! 

Draw, O coward! 

Draw pupil's lip upward.

Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside. 

Eva, can I stab bats in a cave? 

Evil did I dwell; lewd I did live. 

Gateman sees name, garageman sees name tag. 

Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog. 

Goldenrod-adorned log. 

Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog. 

Harass sensuousness, Sarah. 

I roamed under it as a tired, nude Maori. 

Laminated E.T. animal. 

Lay a wallaby baby ball away, Al. 

Lepers repel. 

Let O'Hara gain an inn in a Niagara hotel. 

Live not on evil. 

Lived on Decaf; faced no Devil. 

Lonely Tylenol. 

Ma is a nun, as I am. 

Ma is as selfless as I am. 

Madam, I'm Adam. 

Madam in Eden, I'm Adam. 

Marge lets Norah see Sharon's telegram. 

May a moody baby doom a yam. 

Meet animals; laminate 'em. 

Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.

Murder for a jar of red rum. 

Never odd or even. 

No, Mel Gibson is a casino's big lemon. 

No cab, no tuna nut on bacon. 

No lemon, no melon. 

No sir -- away! A papaya war is on. 

On a clover, if alive, erupts a vast, pure evil; a fire volcano. 

Party boobytrap. 

Poor Dan is in a droop. 

Reviled did I live, said I, as evil I did deliver. 

Rise to vote, sir. 

Saw tide rose? So red it was. 

Senile felines. 

So many dynamos! 

Some men interpret nine memos. 

Stab nail at ill Italian bats.

Stack cats.

Stella won no wallets.

Step on no pets.

Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!

Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts.

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot-toilet.

Tarzan raised Desi Arnaz' rat.

Ten animals I slam in a net.

Too bad I hid a boot.

Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Wonder if Sununu's fired now.

Won't I panic in a pit now?

Won't lovers revolt now?

Yo, banana boy!

Yo, Bob! Mug o' gumbo, boy!

Yo, bottoms up! (U.S. motto, boy.)

POST-SCRIPT. Like the success of my book, this doesn't want to happen, so head-bashing is useless indeed, unless I wish to become a rampant alcoholic who lives for the advent of Happy Hour. And I've had enough of that. But I have tried to piece it back together after a large chunk of it just disappeared, along with the last gif which I retrieved from the garbage, i. e. the recycle bin.

Wondering about the last gif, the palindrome? Oh OK, this is OTTO Klemperer. Father of Werner Klemperer, who played Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes. We were sitting in a symphony concert back in the '60s, and my Dad said, "Look, there he is."  "Who?" "There's Klink." He was right, but we didn't speak with him, too cowed by his greatness.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

FUN WITH WORDS!

And now it’s time to play. . .

FUN WITH WORDS!

Ye-e-es, it’s that goofy game in which we discover words that no one uses any more. Words that are retired. And a few once-popular phrases, which means they’re more than one word that isn't used any more!

I was going to put these in alphabetical order, but to hell with that. I sort of grouped them into categories.

Ready? 

Sociological terms:

Problem child (today called ADD, PTSD, QRST, evolving queer, or whatever the combination du jour is. Back then, they were just plain bad and had to go out behind the woodshed to be taught a lesson.)

Broken home: “He comes from a broken home.”  (Knowing looks, nodding heads. Ahhhh, that explains it.)

“Put him away” (as in “have him committed”, but it sounds more like closet clutter).

Sexual terms:

Nymphomaniac: I always thought this sounded like a long-winged insect, a dragonfly or something. Anyway, there aren’t any left, though people do go to Sex Anonymous and talk about how awful they are.

Frigid: Like a frigidaire. No hope of sex here.

Impotent: Always purely psychological. Now, purely physiological. Ain’t science grand?

Hymen: Does anyone have one of these any more?

Disease terms:

Grippe: Sort of like a flu, I think.

Lumbago: I love this word! It’s some sort of arthritic condition in your back.

Chilblains: An inflammation followed by itchy irritation on the hands, feet, or ears, resulting  from exposure to moist cold. Usually treated by rubbing snow on the afffected area. Ow.

Consumption: No, this has nothing to do with eating.

Ague: Jesus, I don’t know.

Psychiatric terms

Oedipus complex: Loves Mommy, kills Daddy, etc. Only in the Ozarks.

Penis envy: This was supposed to be universal among women, until science realized it afflicts mainly men.

Nerves: Nerves could mean anything, but it generally worked to get you out of gym class.

High-strung: We didn’t say bipolar then.

Candy terms:

Humbug: Hard boiled sweet, normally peppermint-flavoured, cushion-shaped. (And awful.)

Horehound: 1. an Old World bitter perennial mint (Marrubium vulgare) with downy leaves 2: an extract or confection made from the dried leaves and flowering tops of this plant 3: any of several mints resembling the horehound

Awful.

Pepsin:   a digestive enzyme in the gastric juice of stomach secretions that catalyzes the splitting of proteins into smaller, more absorptive peptides; an extract of pepsin from the stomachs of calves, pigs, etc., formerly used as a digestive aid.  A popular flavoring used in chewing gum, Lifesavers, etc. (Yum!)

These must be holdovers from the days of patent medicines.

Drunk words:

Sot

Crapulous

Bibulous

Not very flattering.

Miscellaneous:

Gay: this meant festive, flamboyant, even gaudy, and definitely happy. No one knows when the other meaning came into play.

Dandy: Not as in “just dandy,” but referring to a young man who was always just ahead of fashion and a bit of a poppinjay. Now mostly replaced by "metrosexual".

Hoary: Snowy or beardy or otherwise old and obsolete.

Self-pollution: This had nothing to do with going green, believe me!

Hankie (a related term): A piece of linen cloth that you blew your nose into (or worse), then stuck back into your pocket. You can see how Typhoid Mary got her start.

 http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Let's Play With Shapes!: or, the concrete poetry of Dylan Thomas

Who

Are you

Who is born

In the next room

So loud to my own

That I can hear the womb

Opening and the dark run

Over the ghost and the dropped son

Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?

In the birth bloody room unknown

To the burn and turn of time

And the heart print of man

Bows no baptism

But dark alone

Blessing on

The wild

Child.

Now

Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
Dry lover mine
The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

Now
Say nay,
Sir no say,
Death to the yes,
the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
Should he who split his children with a cure
Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

Now
Say nay,
No say sir
Yea the dead stir,
And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
He lying low with ruin in his ear,
The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire.

Now
Say nay,
So star fall,
So the ball fail,
So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,
The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,
The come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

Now
Say nay
A fig for
The seal of fire,
Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,
We make me mystic as the arm of air,
The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

Ceremony After a Fire Raid

I
Myselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the street burned to tireless death
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth
Charred on the black breast of the grave
The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

Begin
With singing
Sing
Darkness kindled back into beginning
When the caught tongue nodded blind,
A star was broken
Into the centuries of the child
Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

Forgive
Us forgive
Us your death that myselves the believers
May hold it in a great flood
Till the blood shall spurt,
And the dust shall sing like a bird
As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

Crying
Your dying
Cry,
Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed
Street we chant the flying sea
In the body bereft.
Love is the last light spoken. Oh
Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.

   If I were                tickled by

  the rub of love      a rooking girl

    who stole me for her side why then

    I might be able to write them shapes

     just the way Mr. Dylan Thomas could

       do, that is when he was not too sou

       sed by Divine Inspiration which has

      soused many a good writer into

     an early grave. If I were tick

      led by the rub of love, I

       might now have ear

        ned a little mon

        ey from all

          this non

           sens

            e

Let's play. . . GUESS THE WORDS!

And now it's time for. . . GUESS THE WORDS!


The other night in bed, as I was trying to get through a book called - what WAS it called anyway? - The Sealed Letter or something like that, I began to realize how many weirdo words there were in it: words, in fact, that made me run to the dictionary or whatever-it-is I use now when I don't know a word.

These included: 

rodomontade

calenture

spiantati

Ask me, and I'd say these aren't even English, nor do I remember what they mean. I have this theory - if you look up a word that is really unfamiliar, particularly from another language, the definition won't "stick". Whenever you see that word again, you won't remember what it means. It doesn't matter how many times you look it up.

Same with names, particularly names you can't pronounce.

I won't tell you what these 20 words mean because I have forgotten. PLEASE NOTE: they are all REAL words! Just wacked, cuz no one would ever really use them unless they were Dr. Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory.  I will attempt to invent meanings that you might buy, or not. They aren't mixed in with real definitions because that's too much freaking work. Just tell me if my definitions sound at all convincing.


1. Erinaceous

You know that actress Erin Moran, from Happy Days? The one that played Tze-Tze or whatever, Richie's little sister? I saw a horrifyihng story on Inside Edition about how she is now living in a trailer park, or maybe her car. She looks a mess, like she's been out on the street for several decades. So I'd say erinacous describes someone who used to be on Happy Days but is no longer happy.


2. Lamprophony

Some lamprey are totally affected. I mean, they pretend they aren't eels at all! They'll never get away with it, so this term was invented to socially unmask them. Either that, or it means you go into the lighting section of Ikea and pick up the wrong box: Gardo rather than Blonkfiss.

3. Depone

Couple of variations on this. Say you've been watching Turner Classics for too long, and this movie comes on called Scarface. You just can't get this movie out of your head - Jimmy Cagney pushing that grapefruit into  Mae Clarke's face, etc. After a disturbing movie such as this, you may need to "depone". Taking a shower helps.

This might also be the answer if someone asks somebody with no teeth, "I hear ringing. What could it be?"

4. Finnimbrun

OK, this is a Star Trek question. There's this episode called Shore Leave, one of my favorites in fact, in which everyone goes down to this planet for shore leave, but every thought they have turns real. So there's a Bengal tiger and a Don Juan and a Samurai sword and etc., etc., but then all of a sudden Kirk is thinking about his days at the Academy, and voila - Finnegan appears! Finnegan is this asshole who used to hassle Kirk big-time, and Kirk has always had a revenge fantasy which he now can carry out. Once he has thrashed the living daylights out of Finnegan, he sort of changes color from all that rolling on the ground. Spock, who has a mouthful of Vulcan pomegranate pate that he has dreamed about for years, comes upon the scene and observes, "Finnimbrun."


5. floccinaucinihilipilification

A very long sneeze after breathing up the entire contents of a feather pillow.


6. Inaniloquent

A description of someone who does NOT give birth to quintuplets through their anus.



7. Limerance

What happens when you're trying to get the juice to come out of one of those plastic limes, and you keep squeezing and squeezing, and then all of a sudden the juice spurts out and squirts you in the eye.


8. Mesonoxian

You know mesomorphs? What are they, anyway - nobody ever uses that term any more. Plus wouldn't an ox already be a mesomorph, rendering this term redundent? Or is this an Oxonian - you know, from one of those men's clubs, only he's so old he was born in the Mesozoic era. Or else somebody who used to go to Oxford, but kept a very messy room. Or a Mason - using the early spelling Meson that predominated during the Jeffersonian era - who is really obnoxious. Or is it a contraction, such as Tarzan might make, informing us, "Me son Oxian"? (And who is Oxian anyway? Tarzan's son, or his father?) Is this the man who invented Oxyclean? One can only conjecture.


9. Mungo

A fungo.


10. Nihilarian

Oh too easy!


11. Nudiustertian

A variety of nasturtium (again, spelling was fluid in the days when words were first invented) which somewhat resembles the form of those nude women in Roman statuary. Much prized by a man named Nudius Maximus, later hanged for being a Stertian.


12. Phenakism

Phenakism you, too!


13. Pronk

A bottle-opener made from the antlers of a pronghorn antelope.


14. Pulveratricious

Ensign Pulver in that movie, you know that one with Jack Lemmon - The Wackiest Ship in the Army or whatever - got into a lot of trouble and was sometimes described as meretricious. Or else atrocious, depending on the movie critic.

15. Rastaquouere

One of those rasta guys, with the hair that looks like something you'd find in a kitty litter box, standing in a queue, but nobody knows how to spell queue anyway.


16. Scopperloit

"What's the name of that metal, you know, the metal they make the bottoms of pots with?"

"I'm not sure, Loit. Let me think. Wait, I think I have it. . . "


17. Selcouth

Uh, I'm really tired of this but there are twenty and I'm almost at the end of it, so. . .  

18. Tyrotoxism

A guy in a Tyrolean hat who's just toxic.

19. Widdiful

I used to know this girl named Janet Widdifield. Theoretically, everything she 

did was widdiful.

20. Zabernism

The precepts of a demented Hungarian Omo-endoblianostic named Yusef 

Paprikash ("Uncle Adolf") Zabern. Later jailed for being a distant cousin of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.

Backward child

Today I found two books I had given up for dead. You know how you just can't find a book? It must be somewhere. I felt as if I was going out of my mind.

This all started a few months ago, I think. I was in the bird room (my bird's bedroom, downstairs, also a catch-all for my husband's TEN YEARS' WORTH of receipts for such important purchases as foam insoles at Walmart and two loaves of bread from the Safeway). No, back up a little. I couldn't find my music books! Caitlin, now 7, got a guitar for Xmas and wanted me to help her and I could not find ANY of my 25 or so music books!!

I don't know, I didn't even think to look in the bird room, nor did I remember moving a whole bookcase down there with lots of "tall" books in it, books that just didn't fit anywhere else. Anyways.

The 2 books I found today, in the tall book case in the bird room, are called (firstly) Panati's Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody. Most of it is boring, the rest of it gruesome. It talks about how a man, after being beheaded, retains consciousness (presumably in his head) for several seconds after "severance". Once a researcher asked a poor beheaded guy to blink three times after they removed his melon. He blinked twice.

I won't tell you about Thomas Edison's early failed experiments (on humans) in electrocution, or the death of William the Conqueror whose body exploded like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python, because it is simply too disgusting (and when I visited England, a tour guide at the Tower of London told a horrible fable about a drunken executioner, Jack Ketch, who mis-chopped about fourteen times before successfully offing the poor guy's head).

But I will say, during one of the worst bouts of the Black Plague, 10,000 people were dying per day. Unable to accommodate the bodies even in burning pits, they had to remove the roofs from massive guard towers, throw the bodies in, cover the whole thing with quicklime and nail the roof back on.

I think my day just got a whole lot brighter.

Enough of this Panati stuff: and who is he, anyway? Some ghoul? On to the other one, equally boring except in spots, called An Almanac of Words at Play by Willard R. Espy.

A lot of this is bad poetry and tricky little word-things, and the anagrams are atrocious, but I do like the palindromes, words or names or phrases that read the same forwards as backwards ("Otto"; "Anna"; "Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron"; "'Naomi, sex at noon taxes,' I moan").

I want to share with you, dear readers, before I nod off into another bout of foggy depression, what I've come to think of as the Ultimate Palindrome. For some reason it's called The Faded Bloomers' Rhapsody. I will have to transcribe it, damn it, and it's long!

Flee to me, remote elf - Sal a dewan desired;
Now is a Late-Petal Era.
We fade: lucid Iris, red Rose of Sharon;
Goldenrod a silly ram ate.
Wan olives teem (ah, Satan lives!);
A star eyes pale Roses.

Revel, big elf on a mayonnaise man -
A tinsel baton-dragging nice elf too.
Lisp, oh sibyl, dragging Nola along;
Niggardly bishops I loot.
Fleecing niggard notables Nita names,
I annoy a Man of Legible Verse.

So relapse, ye rats,
As evil Natasha meets Evil
On a wet, amaryllis-adorned log.
Norah's foes' orders (I ridiculed a few) are late, Pet.
Alas, I wonder! Is Edna wed?
Alas - flee to me, remote elf.

This is simply gorgeous, and you just gotta start at the end and go backwards. It will at least distract you for a while.