Inventory

New posts coming soon! For now, please enjoy some obsessively specific pop-culture lists.

10 Things The Ramones Wanna or Don't Wanna Do:

**Walk around with you ("I Don't Want to Walk Around With You")**

**Go down in the basement ("I Don't Wanna...To The Basement")**

**Be your boyfriend ("I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend")**

**Be a good boy ("Now I Wanna Be A Good Boy")**

**Be sedated ("I Wanna Be Sedated")**

**Be well ("I Wanna Be Well")**

**Sniff some glue ("Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue")**

**Grow up ("I Don't Wanna Grow Up")**

**Have something to do ("I Just Want To Have Something To Do")**

**Live ("I Wanna Live")**

10 Things We'll Forever Associate with The Simpsons

**Planet of the Apes, particularly Dr. Zaius**

"I hate every ape I see/from chimpan-A to chimpanzee/no, you'll never make a monkey out of me!"

**Pablo Neruda**

Lisa: "Pablo Neruda said, 'Laughter is the language of the soul."

Bart: "I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda."

**Theme Restaurants**

Marge: "An alligator wearing sunglasses?...Street signs? Indoors? Ha ha! Whatever!

**Eudora Welty**

Krusty: "Let's get going. I've got a date with Eudora Welty. [Loud offscreen belch.] Coming, Eudora!"

**Arnold Schwarzenegger**

Rainier Wolfcastle: "My new movie is me, standing in front of a brick wall for 90 minutes. It cost  $80 million to make.

**Meaningless Awards Shows**

Joe Frazier: "Webster's Dictionary defines excellence as 'the state or condition of being excellent.' And now, the winner of the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence..."

**Secret Societies Like The Masons**

Lenny: "You put that sticker on your car so you won't get any tickets. And this other one keeps paramedics from stealing your wallet while they're working on you."

Carl: "Oh, and don't bother calling 911 any more...Here's the real number."

**"Baby On Board" Signs**

Marge: "Look what I got! Now people will stop intentionally ramming our car!"

**A Streetcar Named Desire**

Marge: "I just don't see why Blanche should shove a broken bottle in Stanley's face. Couldn't she just take his abuse with gentle good humor?"

**purple. monkey. dishwasher.**

"may it not be tricksy"

you shall above all things be glad and young For if you're young,whatever life you wear it will become you;and if you are glad whatever's living will yourself become. Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need: i can entirely her only love whose any mystery makes every man's flesh put space on;and his mind take off time that you should ever think,may god forbid and (in his mercy) your true lover spare: for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave called progress,and negation's dead undoom. I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance ~E.E. Cummings

Doppelgänger, Darwin and ... Crayolas

This week is Doppelgänger Week on The Book of Faces, and it's raised a few important questions: 

1. Does Christopher Walken have a Facebook account?
2. Does Christopher Walken know that he bears an uncanny resemblance to that Second Viennese School hunk, Alban Berg?
   

I'm pretty sure that the answer to Question #1 is a resounding 'no' (Though my preliminary research did lead me to some amazing things, including a Facebook page for an event planning service called "Asians doing Christopher Walken Impressions."). As for Question #2, I'd wager that CW remains blissfully unaware of the fact that he is the doppelgänger of a dead Austrian composer. Nevertheless, I submit these photos for your evaluation:

 

And now it's time for one of my favorite games: Caption This Profile Pic! (though I doubt the subjects of these pictures actually have profile pics, so this round should probably just be called Caption this Pic!, but that just sounds ridiculous.) Anyway, The Picture Show recently featured a new book called Darwin's Camera, by Phillip Prodger. Apparently, Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was "the first photographically illustrated science book ever published." However, the pictures weren't taken by Darwin, they were done by Oscar Rejlander, a pioneer in Victorian photography/notorious for his erotic photographs of children/real-life chums with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as writer/mathematician/fellow nudey-photo enthusiast Lewis Carroll). And some of them are hilarious.

There are some really ridiculous hair styles in some renderings that I didn't include, because Darwin had those drawn from the photos of Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who used electrical currents to study and photograph the facial expressions of his patients, and they're just absolutely terrifying and heartwrenching. Like this one: 

But all the other pictures are fair game, so start captioning! These pictures also reminded me that I really want to see this movie.

And now for something a little more bright and cheery:

Did you know that at the current rate of Crayola color expansion (an increase of 2.56% per year), by the year 2050, there could very well be 330 crayons in an average box of crayons? Well, that's not good enough for Christian Faur, who has assembled these amazing pieces using more than 100,000 hand cast crayons of varying colors and shades!

Here's what a close-up of his work looks like:

little, 'pleasure-full' things

Ok, so I'm not afraid to say that I love these commercials - just thinking

about them makes me smile - it's unreal. And, I mean, it's Suite No. 1 

in G - let's be serious. I'm pretty sure that I was a cellist in a past life. 

Or maybe even a cello.

This one I am a little ashamed of, but this song makes me happy, and I 

love those cats. Just ignore his hair - it's fine, don't even worry about it.

My friends are funny, and once upon a time, they would commandeer 

random U Choir rehearsal recordings to make ridiculous videos that  

would keep us entertained on the choir tour bus.

While I was at Millikin, I really wasn't considered a choir nerd (though the

Choir Nerd bar was admittedly set pretty high in the Land of Soy), but

alumni and current U Choir members have been chronicling Winter Tour

on the Book of Faces, so I've been especially homesick for U Choir this

week. The quality of this recording is pretty poor, but it brings back so 

many memories of senior devotionals, choir angels, eating pasta and 

chicken in church basements for 2 weeks, home stays, super-secret 

section cheers (get low!), and making amazing music with 59 other people 

who genuinely cared for the choir and for each other (most of the time).

a vanity of blogs, part 2

 So...coming up with updated terms of venery (TOV's) was much more challenging than I expected, but after some brilliant reader suggestions, much experimentation/editing, and some really terrible first attempts (e.g. a schmaltz of waltzes, a clove of vampires), I've compiled a preliminary collection of some modern day terms of venery for your reading and collecting pleasure, as well as some TOV composition guidelines (for the DIY'er):

1. Alliteration is good. Innuendo is better.
2. Adjectives tend to work more effectively than nouns.
3. Terms of venery are derogatory creatures by nature. They do not lend themselves to positive connotations easily, and when they do, the end result seems a little trite. (There are definitely some exceptions to this rule, and I've tried to include a number of neutral and positive TOV's in my collection.)
4. Successful TOV formulas include: IdR + N = TOV and eg + N = TOV [IdR=indirect reference; N= noun; eg= exempli gratia]. Results of these formulas include: mytacism + Hanson fans = "a mytacism of Hanson fans" and flutterby + spoonerism = "a flutterby of spoonerisms."

Hopefully these will inspire you to come up with your own terms of venery. If they do, please post them in the Comments section!                                                                                                                              

Terms of Venery 101:

 

**a promiscuity of Cougars**

**a stool of barflies (when seated)**

**a hover of barflies (when congregated outside a drinking establishment)**

**a suction of octopuses**

**a desuetude of dodo birds**

**a whimpering of pundits**

**a sanctity of side-hugs**

**a twittering of tweens**

**a despondency of uSingers**

**a mundanity of status updates**

**a glittering of vampires (when in the sun)**

**a flutterby of spoonerisms**

**a progeny of pogonotrophers**

**a sloth/slueth of baldheads** (Bears love baldheads, so I thought they should share a TOV.)

**a penetration of analrapists** (Bless you, Arrested Development.)

**a maladroitness of mockumentaries**

**a mytacism of Hanson fans**

**a cliche of platitudes (or should it be a "platitude of cliches"?)**

**a belig (soft 'g') of abbrevs** (if u dont know this obvi abbrev for 'belligerence,' u make me want 2 vom)

**a fingerstache of  tatts** (the use of 'fingerstache' implies that the tatts are of an "ironic" nature)

 

Reader's Terms of Venery:

**a treachery of potholes**

**a desperation of blind dates**

**a proliferation of blogs**

Terms of Venery I'd Like to Take Credit for:

**a shudder of clowns**

**a charm of lullabies**

**a vanity of blogs**

**an enterprise of Trekkies**

**an eclipse of socialism** (one of many inadvertent terms of venery penned by Amanda McKittrick Ros)

the next big thing in colon musicals

There are some truly great colon musicals out there, and now there's this.

There's interactive audience drumming, multilingualism, Sarah Palin, and so much more.     

(Not to neglect Silence! or Prop 8 -, but those are exclamation and hyphen musicals, respectively.)                          

Personally, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for an entirely new "punctuation musical" genre someday: the interrobang (?!) musical. 

Appreciate a Dragon Day

Appreciate a Dragon Day was Saturday. I hope that you all found time to remember and appreciate the important dragons in your lives.

My belated appreciation for some of history's best-known dragons:

**Norbert/Norberta: Norwegian Ridgeback of HP fame. Favorite food: a bucket of brandy mixed with chicken blood (every half hour). 

**Smaug: Derived from Beowulf. Loves riddles. Hates hobbits.

**Glaurung: No one writes dragons like Tolkien. And Glaurung was father of them all.

**Mushu: Possibly my favorite movie dragon of all time. Partially because his name reminds me of Moo shu pork, but mostly because he makes puns about Huns and makes Mulan's eggs and bacon look like my perplexed breakfast bag. Also, Eddie Murphy is much more believable as an animated dragon than as an animated donkey. (It's irrelevant, but true.)

**Elliot: Obvious winner of Best Dragon 'Do. His movie may have lost its Oscar to A Little Night Music, but you have to love a film in which one of the main villains is named after a sandwich.

**the Magic, Puff: Favorite things include: strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff (coincidentally(?) shares similar/the same enthusiasms as Carroll's walrus). Covered by Dolly Parton, Marlene Dietrich and, unfortunately, Paul Shanklin.

**Quetzalcoatl: Ongoing feud with Stephen Colbert (2005-20**). 

As you can see, the next important Holiday You Should Be Celebrating is coming up quickly: Answer Your Cat's Questions Day on January 22nd. Maybe the campus cats will give me some questions to share?

Updated terms of venery are coming soon!

a vanity of blogs: Venereal Terms (of Endearment)

Tens of readers: "So, Allison: you've told us all about your predisposition for distraction and admitted your enthusiasm for the reverse mullet and erratic capitalization, and that's really cool and whatnot, but why 'a superfluity of nuns'?"

Good question, tens of readers! Unfortunately, it's a question without a concrete answer, so I'll just wave vaguely in the direction of my general affection for venereal terms and nuns. (Yes, you read that correctly. Reason #3 to read this blog: sentences in which words like 'venereal' and 'nuns' shack up in a legitimate way.) 

Tens of readers: "What is a venereal term, anyway? Is that what Glenn Beck was referring to when he said that "the Ganges" sounds like a disease?" (No, but they are related to my opinion that Glenn Beck is a whimpering of pundits.)

Collective noun: A word used to define a group of objects, where "objects" can be people, animals, emotions, inanimate things, concepts or other things (e.g. a pack of cards, a range of mountains, a round of drinks).

Terms of venery: Collective nouns that are specific to certain groups of animals/people.

Terms of venery were first used by medieval English sportsmen, who invented hundreds of collective nouns and used them as a sort of secret code that distinguished them from the yeomen and general riffraff. Learning these terms eventually became part of a gentleman's formal education, because the rules for using these terms can be extremely complicated: for example, a group of geese on the ground are referred to as a "gaggle," but in flight, they are known as a "skein."

Even in medieval times, the coinage of venereal terms was an invitation for social commentary and cleverness. Within the category of terms for groups of animals, if you skip over the more conventional "school of fish" and "flock of sheep," you'll find a murder of crows, a kindle of kittens, a lounge of lizards, a murmuration of storks, a shrewdness of apes, an ostentation of peacocks, a charm of hummingbirds, an ascension/exaltation of larks, a gam of whales, and a piteousness of doves.

Even less well known are the terms the medieval sportsmen invented for people, which include a skulk of thieves, an observance of hermits, a multiplying of husbands, an incredibility of cuckolds, a safeguard of porters, a stalk of foresters, a drunkenship of cobblers, a malapertness of peddlers, a blush of boys, a nonpatience of wives, a superfluity of nuns and a herd of harlots.

Some of the most famous literary terms of venery include a "comedy of errors" and a "sea of troubles" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I), but contemporary writers continue to play the Venery Game (George Plimpton: An om of Buddhists. Neil Simon: A mews of cathouses. Kurt Vonnegut: A phalanx of flashers.).

(This is the part where audience participation comes in.) My question is this: How can we update the list? What are some modern day groupings that need a term of venery? MILF's? Blogs? uSingers? Gingers? Vampires? Apps? Mockumentaries? Analrapists?

My next post will (hopefully) be a compilation of some of my ideas and lots of your (yes, that means YOU!) suggestions!

"I don't want my body to be a distraction from my talent or my brain." - Shania Twain, on "distraction"

“Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” 

— Robert Benchley, American humorist and pencil moustache/bow tie enthusiast                                            

I can (and will) do any amount of work, provided it is sufficiently irrelevant/unrelated to my Master's recital and slash or THE FUTURE.  

—Allison Lingren, American woman and reverse mullet/headband enthusiast  

 

Even though I've only recently come across this tender nugget of wisdom, I'm pretty sure that I was at least the twinkle in Robert Benchley's eye as he penned this witticism (or maybe even the pensive stroke of his pencil moustache). a superfluity of nuns is merely the latest in a long line of projects and whims that have served as my trusty - yet proverbial - Trojan horse in the face of countless anxiety-inducing deadlines and life events. Facebook? Knitting? Silly Grünschnäbel! Here are some photos of me the night before my first performance as a principal in an opera scene: 

As you can see, I don't mess around when it comes to distractions. Unfortunately, mosquito-zapping, bird-catching photo-documentary adventures can't come around every day. But when they do (and I'm of the firm opinion that they should), I'd like to have a place to document them, as well as a home for the day-to-day minutiae - the obscure trivia, the latest punditry scandal, the deliciously inappropriate YouTube clip o'the hour - that can sometimes be fodder for bigger adventures and always (hopefully/maybe/superficially) amuse. 

 

Here's a list of things that you can expect from a superfluity of nuns: split infinitives. randomness. lists. NPR articles. obscure words and their definitions. audience participation. erratic capitalization. clips from TV shows and the interwebs. irony (unintentional, intentional and 'misdefined'). guest posts from funny people. 

 

Here's a list of things that won't be addressed on a superfluity of nuns: miley cyrus. negative references to specific people and events in my life. gluten-based products. twilight. 

                                                                                                                                                         

Hopefully you're cool with that.                                                                                                                    

"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with, and then the different branches of Arithmetic-- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."

—the Mock Turtle