The Reading Room

Tsundoku

1:32 AM

@bobble I'm still planning to write an answer to that question.

bobble

ooh!

Tsundoku

1:45 AM

But it's a bit unfortunate that the most recent edition of the text is available in a volume that costs €260.

bobble

this is unfortunate

Tsundoku

(That's definitely more than 260 USD.)

When I was at school, I preferred French over chemistry. Between the chemistry teacher and me there was simply no ...
uhm ...
...

verbose

3:13 AM

@Tsundoku We really don't need to know whether or not you Frenched your chemistry teacher 😱

Sorry, couldn't resist 😈 Also, thanks for the link to the Literature in the Digital Age course. I signed up.

Tsundoku

@verbose No, there was simply no rapport.

(The joke fell flat; I was hoping someone would say there was no chemistry between the teacher and myself.)

verbose

@Tsundoku I got that joke, I just tried to extend it.

I suppose one could have gone G-rated and said "No chemistry with the Chem teacher, no frenching with the French teacher" but you know I love to shock your Victorian sensibilities

Tsundoku

Ah, yes, my Victorian sensibilities, which explain why I read only bowdlerised Shakespeare.

Anyway, I also had a physical education teacher who also taught geography.

verbose

You mentioned reading the Sparks Note version in a self-answered question from 2018 tha you just edited

bobble

*that

verbose

3:27 AM

@Tsundoku Fascinating

Tsundoku

@verbose He made us do a lot of geogging.

verbose

lol

bobble

is there a pun/day limit?

verbose

@Tsundoku is going for the Pundit badge

Tsundoku

@bobble If you want to look like a nerd, you write s/tha/that/

bobble

3:31 AM

s/I/If/

Tsundoku

Quick learner.

@verbose I didn't ask the question; I merely edited it.

verbose

Speaking of badges, I went to see if there really was such a thing as a Pundit badge. Apparently there isn't. However, I discovered I qualify for the william-shakespeare badge on rep, but I don't have nearly enough answers to get it. That seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? Like, I'd've expected that the general case is the other way around

@Tsundoku oh k

bobble

That's to avoid people with one popular answer from getting the badge

verbose

oh I guess the asker must be on suspension or something, I don't see how someone with four upvotes on the question has a rep of 1

@bobble ah

Tsundoku

@verbose There is a pundit badge.

verbose

3:37 AM

@Tsundoku oh so there is.

Tsundoku

@verbose Looks like you need to answer 6 more Shakespeare questions to get the bronze tag badge. I assume that won't take very long.

verbose

who knows, I thought it would take me till April to break five figures but here we are and 'tisn't even March

well, Germany is a different time zone so maybe it's March there already, who knows. I have a strange relationship to time

i guess what i'm saying is, my sense of achievement timelines is discombobulated

Tsundoku

@verbose We can already buy chocolate Easter Bunnies, so it's getting close.

verbose

Is discombobulated short for discomrobertulated? In stuffier contexts, is the phrase classicalmrobertulated preferred?

Tsundoku

Or it means they have recycled the unsold chocolate Santaclauses.

LPombulated?

verbose

3:46 AM

I thought the plural of santa claus was either santae claus or santa clai

Tsundoku

It's actually Sanktnikoläuse.

verbose

ah

Tsundoku

That was literally a lousy joke.

verbose

oh k

sorry, it went over my head

(get it? lice? over my head?)

Tsundoku

So you don't need to shake them off.

verbose

3:51 AM

The one Easter candy that I actually look forward to is white chocolate M&Ms. I would buy them year round if they were sold year round, but for some reason they show up only during Paschal

s/during/around

oh did we literally let two bounties expire unawarded? That's sad

there were three bountified questions yesterday now it's down to Bobble's bunny one

bobble

rabbits

not bunnies

verbose

Is there an actual difference? I know in theory bunnies are baby rabbits but most people I know say "bunny" pretty indiscriminately. Like, you're on a hike and you see a jackrabbit (which isn't even a rabbit!) and everyone goes, "Look! Bunny!"

bobble

my sister insists there is a difference

Tsundoku

Rabbits Clover and Lily have a tug of war over some fresh cabbage leaves!

►

bobble

according to her, the order of cuteness is bunny > rabbit > hare

verbose

3:56 AM

Okay

But where do jackelopes fall in that hierarchy

(I think the word is properly spelled jackelopes. I don't see how you get jackalope out of jackrabbit + antelope)

bobble

I'm not sure she has an opinion about jackalopes

verbose

they're great, I love 'em

I saw a Pixar movie about a jackelope once

I think it was called "Bounding"

oh yes

Boundin Pixar HD Short Film

►

Tsundoku

@bobble Where do tortoises fit in? They are faster than hares.

bobble

tortoises are my mom's thing

Tsundoku

Tortoise outraces a hare, like in a fable

►

^ At least this has literary relevance, so @Randal'Thor won't keep me out of this room tomorrow.

Anyway, I should get some sleep.

bobble

4:08 AM

you should

verbose

4:34 AM

@bobble good catch adding historical-context to my question about the spells in Macbeth, thanks!

bobble

welcome!

Napoleon Wilson

7:51 AM

@Tsundoku That...wasn't why the joke fell flat I'm afraid. It simply wasn't worth spelling out. ;-)

Rand al'Thor

9:16 AM

@verbose No, at least one of them was awarded (mine to b4rtr's answer). I don't remember what the other one was.

verbose

ah good

Rand al'Thor

9:56 AM

The topic challenge suggestions thread currently has a tie between Gargantua & Pantagruel (French, suggested by Tsundoku) and the Mahabharata & adaptations (Sanskrit, suggested by verbose).

verbose

I'd be inclined to go with Gargantua. We just had Tagore last quarter and I think we can hold off before having another South Asian topic so soon.

Hey @mods, should someone grab this deleted answer and turn it into a comment? I don't think the answerer is coming back to fill it out after 10 months. If they do, we could restore it, I suppose?

@NapoleonWilson ooh burn 🔥

When I was eighteen and we were studying the General Prologue, I was the only guy in class alongside six women students. The prof was a woman as well. She got to the line about "stiff burden" and said, "well, girls, you all know what happens to boys when they get excited." Then she caught sight of me and said, "Oh look! He's blushing!" And every eye in the class turned to look at me. Like, lady, you're NOT helping me deal with my sexuality...

Teachers, don't do this to your students, k?

Rand al'Thor

10:34 AM

If @PrinceNorthLæraðr becomes a teacher, he should take the chemis-tree class. Hopefully he'll get on well with his pupils.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor I'm sure he'll be very poplar.

@verbose Isn't that answer a few centuries off?

verbose

It is, yes.

Tsundoku

@verbose Reminds me of a five-week summer course in Bath in the 90s. I was the only male student in the group. It was the best summer course ever.

verbose

Should we add william-stanley-braithwaite to this question? I wanna say yes. He is an important figure and the anthology's really idiosyncratic organization is quite unique.

(It will need to be wm stanley because there's also wm garnett, though the latter isn't literary afaik)

@Tsundoku oh cool. What were you studying?

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku You took a whole course in the bath? Was it online education with a waterproof tablet?

Tsundoku

10:46 AM

@Randal'Thor Online education in 1994? You're a few decades off there.

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku Ah, so it was a practical course for actors performing Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Got it.

verbose

@Randal'Thor They didn't read the original, though. Just a watered-down version.

Tsundoku

@verbose We studied text ranging from Chaucer to Liverpool Poets: some excerpts from the Canterbury Tales, some Renaissance sonnets, The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, some Romantic poetry some Victorian/Georgian poetry, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ...

verbose

Or maybe they read Swift's A Tale of a Tub? 🛁

@Tsundoku Oh okay. Interesting

Tsundoku

@verbose Close. We read Tennyson's Ulysses.

Bigger tub.

verbose

10:49 AM

yup

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Seen on a bus shelter in East Anglia: "How do you get an Essex man out of the bath? Add water."

verbose

@Randal'Thor ha

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor How do the Dutch take a bubble bath? They eat lots of peas in advance...

verbose

@Tsundoku I rather like Tennyson's "The Lotos Eaters". Spenserian stanzas ftw. Not quite as fond of "Ulysses." Nice enough, just doesn't linger in my memory and imagination quite as vividly

Tsundoku

I can't remember "The Lotos Eaters". Ate too much Lotos.

verbose

10:59 AM

"There is sweet music here that gentlier upon the spirit lies / than tired eyelids upon tired eyes." Those are simply beautiful lines. I'm conflating three lines

the lines are simply "Music, that gentlier upon the spirit lies / than tired eyelids upon tired eyes"

the "there is sweet music" is a few lines earlier

oh well

here you go

I wrote a paper once comparing "The Lotos Eaters" to "The Shield of Achilles"

Tsundoku

I bought the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry for that course. And Romantic Poetry and Prose, edited by Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling.

verbose

No opinions on the Braithwaite tag?

Tsundoku

The nice thing about being a Belgian is that you're always the only Dutch-speaking person at those courses. So you don't just speak but also think in English for the duration of the entire course. Whereas the Germans speak German among each other, thereby diluting the language-immersion effect.

verbose

@Tsundoku that's actually a really interesting observation.

Tsundoku

When I travelled back to Belgium, I had to make a conscious switch to Dutch again.

Rand al'Thor

11:13 AM

@verbose Indeed, very beautiful!

And there must be a pun in there about some gent being a liar.

Tsundoku

@verbose I think we could do that, even though it's unusual to create tag for editors.

AFK. Pizza got delivered.

verbose

@Tsundoku well he wasn't just an editor. He was a poet and essayist. He just happens to have edited quite a few anthologies and is best known as an anthologist.

Rand al'Thor

2

Q: Why is the Reeve's hair cut like a priest's?

In the general prologue of The Canterbury Tales, we're introduced to the character of the Reeve. The Reeve is described as having his hair cut like a priest's: His berd was shave as ny as ever he kan; His heer was by his erys ful round yshorn; His top was dokked lyk a preest bifor...

^ @verbose another question there, if you want to cement your status as the site's expert on 14th-century hairstyles :-P

verbose

@Randal'Thor you think it wasn't already in my queue?

Rand al'Thor

I guessed it might've been, but wanted to relish the idea of someone being an expert in 14th-century literary hairstyles.

Should we have a tag for that?

verbose

11:22 AM

Who's user111? Was that Hamlet? I don't think it's breaching confidentiality to say, because very often comments to a question from a deleted user will actually @ the prior username

Rand al'Thor

Yep.

verbose

Some such incident actually was needed before I linked @Tsundoku to @ChristopheStrobbe because he switched during my long absence from the site

Rand al'Thor

Aug 3 '17 at 17:40, by Hamlet

@Randal'Thor I have to say, the-canterbury-tales is the one tag on this site where I'm consistently getting really good answers.

verbose

Like, I was reading an answer or question by @Tsundoku and one of the comments, clearly directed at him, used @ChristopheStrobbe and I'm like "so that's who that is!"

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Or Napoleon to Cahir.

I suspect Tsundoku would've got more votes in the mod election if he hadn't changed his username twice in the months preceding it.

Not that it made a difference in the end.

verbose

11:27 AM

@Randal'Thor well, I'm a bit more specialized than that. I deal only with 14th C hairstyles as they reflect character

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Thanks; I just posted a question for you.

Might come up with a few more from that poem too - it seems to have a lot of depth and rich language.

verbose

11:43 AM

@Randal'Thor ask why it begins in Spenserian stanzas and then goes into irregular verse forms

well, I mean, you could, I'm not saying you have to

Bookworm

0

Q: Why are the lotos-eaters "mild-eyed" and "melancholy"?

In Tennyson's famous poem "The Lotos-eaters", a group of mariners find themselves on an island inhabited by "Lotos-eaters", and themselves decide to stay after eating lotos has had its effect on them. One passage is: And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy fla...

poetry wording-choice alfred-tennyson

verbose

(sigh) the Poetry Foundation site has really reliable texts, but I WISH they'd have line numbers. Quoting a long poem like "The Lotos Eaters" from that site makes it very difficult to guide the reader to the exact lines because there are no line numbers. So I just use it to quote brief lyrics and look elsewhere if I have to quote, e.g., the General Prologue

Rand al'Thor

@verbose If you quote the lines, someone can just Ctrl+F if they want to find where it is in the poem.

@verbose First I need to find out what that means :-)

verbose

Preview of answer, which I'll give tomorrow unless someone beats me to it: Melancholy as in the theory of humors, i.e., melancholy, choleric, phlegmatic, and sanguine

@Randal'Thor Nine lines rhymed ababbcbcc, iambic pentameter except for the last line which is an alexandrine. Spenser's Fairie Queene is in Spenserian (duh) stanzas

Should I have prefaced those comments with "Spoiler alert!"?

Tsundoku

12:24 PM

@verbose People who are used to reading scholarly literature are also used to reading spoilers. Only they are called "abstracts".

Bookworm

2:37 PM

0

Q: A better parody of "traitors, Rattlesnakes and alligators"

The song "Union Dixie" sings: "Away down South in the land of traitors, rattlesnakes and alligators. Right away! Come away! Right away! Come away!" I'm designing a video game and I need to make a parody of the sentence. The alternative words to "traitors, rattlesnakes and alligators" are: Initia...

song-lyrics wordplay

Prince North Læraðr

3:09 PM

@Randal'Thor Haha

Tsundoku

@PrinceNorthLæraðr How are you, prince of Sherwood?

Or would that be the wrong wood?

Prince North Læraðr

I am prince of all woods, so it wouldn't be wrong :P

Tsundoku

Who'd have thought that?

Prince North Læraðr

Aye

:P

Tsundoku

I had to correct that before @bobble throws a s/though/thought/ at me.

Prince North Læraðr

3:17 PM

Hahaha

bobble

s/throws/threw

also s/a/an

Tsundoku

Welll, at least I got only two instead of three. Not bad after basically skipping an entire night.

bobble

the tsundoku should get proper sleep

Prince North Læraðr

I agree

Tsundoku

One ~~day~~ night...

bobble

3:20 PM

more...

Tsundoku

I was preparing oral exams...

We still have a few empty tag wiki excerpts. (I don't know why I brought that up, really.)

Prince North Læraðr

They will be filled... soon :P

bobble

I took 2 :D

Prince North Læraðr

You can take them all :)

Tsundoku

Thomas Middleton allegedly wrote The Witch after finishing The Lion and before The Wardrobe, two play manuscripts that were eaten by a couple of beavers.

Prince North Læraðr

3:34 PM

snort

bobble

I've written four easy ones. I shall leave the dear Prince to write the three non-standard excerpts

Prince North Læraðr

okay :P

Tsundoku

Man walks into an ancient Greek tailors with a pair of ripped trousers.
Tailor says, "Euripides?"
Man says, "Yeah. Eumenides?"

^ Is that a classic?

Prince North Læraðr

This seems too big brain for me

You might need to explain this :P

Oh I see

Tsundoku

"You ripped these?" "Yeah, you mend these?". But with the names of the tragedian Euripides and the title of the play Eumenides.

I also have an epidemiology joke but it hasn't yet gone viral.

A colleague told me a Charles Manson joke and it's really killing me.

I used to tell a joke about Orpheus and Eurydice, but looking back, it was not a great idea.

Who was the coldest Ancient Greek?

A-Chill-es.

bobble

3:56 PM

Do Delete votes expire over time?

Mithical

no

Tsundoku

@bobble Do you want to cast delete votes on my jokes?

bobble

Fear not, kind Tsundoku, for I find your jokes pleasing to my ear

I VTD a main-site question soon after getting the ability and it's just sitting with 2 delete votes - was wondering if I had to worry about those going away

Mithical

poof

Tsundoku

Apparently also an ancient Greek joke:
Garrulous barber: 'How would sir like his hair cut?'
Customer:'In silence!'

Prince North Læraðr

4:00 PM

Hahaha

Tsundoku

Apparently, the world's oldest surviving joke book / comedy book dates from the 4th Century AD and is in ancient Greek: twitter.com/ThatMasakaOtaku/status/1285892605805502467

I also have a joke about communism but it only works if everyone gets it.

I have a joke about dyslexia and what not to do with a ladder, but no one will under stand.

It's all about timing. I have a time travel joke.

I have an unemployment joke but it needs work.

I have a plagiarism joke, but I stole it from someone else.

I have a joke about time travel but you didn't like it.

bobble

missing an I

Tsundoku

So you still don't like it.

bobble

s/"/'