Mondegreen is one of about 100 new words added to Merriam Webster's Collegiate dictionary this year. Here's the Wiki explanation:
The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen in an essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," which was published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the final line from the 17th century ballad "The Bonnie Earl O' Murray." She wrote:
When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic] And Lady Mondegreen.
The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green." As Wright explained the need for a new term, "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original."
The most common mondegreen (and one which I was guilty of for many years) is Creedence Clearwater Revival's "There's a bad moon on the rise" misheard as "There's a bathroom on the right." In retrospect the item I blogged entitled "Joe Cocker with subtitles" is an assembly of (intentional) mondegreens.
Other well-known examples of mondegreens include Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear and Round John Virgin; for more, see the Wiki link, or just Google the term.
Other words and terms incorporated into the new dictionary include infinity pool (one whose edge appears to go to the horizon), pescatarian (vegetarian who eats fish), wingnut (political extremist), subprime, and dirty bombs. I haven't encountered a complete list, even at the Merriam Webster website.
No one does it better than Ron Paul. Listen to the 6-minute video above in which he explains in no uncertain terms the immorality and frank lunacy of attacking Iran. Or read the text below (boldface mine, for the benefit of those who want to skim the high points).
Statement on House Congressional Resolution 362 before the US House of Representatives, June 28, 2008
“Today the Dow Jones Average was down 350-some points, gold was up $32, and oil was up another $5. There is a lot of chaos out there and everyone is worried about $4 gasoline. But I don't think there is a clear understanding [of] exactly why that has occurred.
We do know that there is a supply and demand issue, but there are other reasons for the high cost of energy. One is inflation. In order to pay for the war that has been going on, and the domestic spending, we've been spending a lot more money than we have. So what do we do? We send the bills over to the Federal Reserve and they create new money, and in the last three years, our government, through the Federal Reserve and the banking system, has created $4 trillion of new money. That is one of the main reasons why we have this high cost of energy and $4 per gallon gasoline.
But there is another factor that I want to talk about tonight, and that is not only the fear of inflation and future inflation, but the fear factor dealing with our foreign policy. In the last several weeks, if not for months, we have heard a lot of talk about the potential of Israel and/or the United States bombing Iran. And it is in the marketplace. Energy prices are being bid up because of this fear. It has been predicted that if bombs start dropping, that we will see energy prices double or triple. It is just the thought of it right now that is helping to push these energy prices up. And that is a very real thing going on right now.
But to me it is almost like déjà vu all over again. We listened to the rhetoric for years and years before we went into Iraq. We did not go in the correct manner, we did not declare war, we are there and it is an endless struggle. And I cannot believe it, that we may well be on the verge of initiating the bombing of Iran!
Leaders on both sides of the aisle, and in the administration, have all said so often, "No options should be taken off the table – including a nuclear first strike on Iran." The fear is, they say, maybe someday [Iran is] going to get a nuclear weapon, even though our own CIA's National Intelligence Estimate has said that the Iranians have not been working on a nuclear weapon since 2003. They say they're enriching uranium, but they have no evidence whatsoever that they're enriching uranium for weapons purposes. They may well be enriching uranium for peaceful purposes, and that is perfectly legal. They have been a member of the non-proliferation treaties, and they are under the investigation of the IAEA, and ElBaradei has verified that in the last year there have been nine unannounced investigations and examinations of the Iranian nuclear structure and they have never been found to be in violation. And yet, this country and Israel are talking about a preventive war – starting bombing for this reason, without negotiations, without talks.
Now the one issue that I do want to mention tonight is a resolution that is about to come to this floor if our suspicions are correct, after the July 4th holiday. And this bill will probably be brought up under suspension. It is expected to pass easily. It probably will be. And it is just more war propaganda, just more preparation to go to war against Iran. This resolution, H.J. Res 362 [listed as H. Con. Res 362 online] is a virtual war resolution. It is the declaration of tremendous sanctions, and boycotts and embargoes on the Iranians. It is very, very severe. Let me just read what is involved if this bill passes and what we're telling the President what he must do:
This demands that the President impose stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains and cargo entering or departing Iran, and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials.
This is unbelievable! This is closing down Iran. Where do we have this authority? Where do we get the moral authority? Where do we get the international legality for this? Where do we get the Constitutional authority for this? This is what we did for ten years before we went into Iraq. We starved children – 500,000 individuals it was admitted probably died because of the sanctions on the Iraqis. They were incapable at the time of attacking us. And all the propaganda that was given for our need to go into Iraq was not true.
And it is not true today about the severity [of the need to attack Iran]. But they say, "Yeah, but Ahmadinejad – he's a bad guy. He's threatened violence." But you know what? Us threatening violence is very, very similar. We must – we must look at this carefully. We just can't go to war again under these careless, frivolous conditions.”
"The body's made of carbon fiber to minimize weight (the entire car weighs just 660 pounds)… made extensive use of magnesium, titanium and aluminum to bring it in at less than one-third the weight of a Toyota Echo…
…aerodynamics plays a big role… long and low, coming in at 11.4 feet long, 4.1 feet wide and 3.3 feet tall. It features an aircraft-like canopy, flat wheel covers and a belly pan to smooth the airflow under the car. The engine cooling vents open only when needed, and video cameras take the place of mirrors. The passenger sits behind the driver to keep the car narrow…
The engine turns off at stop lights to save fuel, then automatically restarts when the driver depresses the accelerator pedal…
The car reportedly has anti-lock brakes, stability control and airbags…
… a sticker price of anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 Euros (about $31,750 to $47,622)…
I'm not all that excited. It's more like a motorcycle than a car, doesn't even have room for a couple bags of groceries, would be laughably ineffective on snow and ice, and is priced as a toy for the wealthy.
The quote in the paragraph below this was published in the New York Times on October 14, 2001 - one month after the attack on the World Trade Center, when it was feared that "sympathizers of Osama bin Laden" would sink oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz or that Arab countries would cut off oil production, or that the pro-American Saud family would be toppled:
''If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he'd turn off the tap,'' said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. ''He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel'' -- about six times what it sells for now.
The price of oil reached $144/barrel this week. That's without any attacks on oil tankers or Saudi production. It was achieved by the United States, first by invading Iraq in 2003 (at which point oil was about $30/barrel), then by spending trillions of dollars we don't have to finance the war, which resulted in the dollar falling to its current near-worthless level, and finally by the actions of the U.S. and Israel threatening to attack Iran, which propelled the oil price from $80-100/barrel to the current $140+.
Don't believe it? Embedded above is a graph showing the price of oil from the beginning of 2001, through the WTC attacks and the start of the war up through the start of this year. The blue line shows the cost of oil in USD, the red line shows it in Euros, and the purple line shows the price in ounces of gold.
We accomplished bin Laden's goal for him. You're doing a heckuva job, guys.
I found this item posted at J-Walk; it is equally ironic, and is well explained by the original author in his post "Look What My Kid Got at Wall•E" -
I took my son to see Wall•E this weekend…
Wall•E paints a picture of a planet destroyed by a thoughtless humanity in the thrall of a consumer culture that eventually overwhelms the earth with… junk. Humans are forced to abandon the planet and blast off into space… Meanwhile on earth… dust-and-garbage storms blow scour the surface of the earth.
Depressing—all that garbage, all that thoughtless over-consumption, all that environmental devastation. But look what we got on the way into the theater…
That’s a watch. A cheap plastic watch. According to the instruction card that comes with it, my son’s Wall•E watch was made in China, it’s not water resistant, and its batteries are not replaceable. So basically it’s a disposable watch brought to us by a movie about the dire consequences of thoughtless over-consumption, a watch that is just one of many—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—that will be coming soon to landfills near you.
I started TYWKIWDBI about six months ago, sending the url to a handful of friends, family, and neighbors. The webhost for this blog (blogger.com) is owned by Google, which provides me with data regarding traffic to TYWKIWDBI, some of which I've embedded above.
The top graph shows that for the first three months there were just a few visitors a day; one spike occurred when I blogged about a reflection in Dick Cheney's glasses. Then in late April the number of daily visitors began to climb, to the point that now there are about 100 visits a day. The middle map shows that visitors have come from all 50 U.S. states, and the bottom table indicates visits from 78 countries.
At TYWKIWDBI's 4-month anniversary I reported that this blog's Technorati ranking was 3,366,655, (out of 112,000,000 blogs that Technorati monitors). I checked again today, and the ranking has now moved up to 660,369 !!
The metrics show that most people come to the main page, but some arrive at sublinks (each individual post has its own url), and for reasons that totally escape me, the most popular sublinks have been the ones on body painting, the 200-mpg Volkswagen, Joe Cocker with subtitles, and striped icebergs.
I've done nothing to promote this website, so I presume the increasing traffic reflects people sharing the url with their own friends and family. What's interesting to ponder is that the people who come here on a regular basis probably share a wide range of common interests with one another. So, to the "TYWKIWDBI family" - happy half-year-birthday!
As a young woman, Betty Jenkins received a gift from her mother that was meant to attract the attention of young men... The gift was an inflatable bra that was designed to enhance its wearer's figure. A straw-like tube was used to inflate pads in the cups.
"I was real excited, so I blew and blew to about [size] 32," Jenkins said.
But things didn't go smoothly during a plane trip in South America. The plane was flying near the Andes Mountains when Jenkins began to feel pressure and sensed there was a problem...
Only one of the cups burst, Jenkins said. But the noise was loud enough to seize the attention of everyone on the plane.
"The co-pilot came into the cabin with a gun, wondering what had happened. The men all pointed to me."
Jenkins then tried to explain in Spanish what she could hardly explain in English, "that part of your anatomy just blew up."
The plane made an emergency landing, and Jenkins was handed over to the police. She was ordered to strip, as the officers looked for what they assumed could only be a bomb...
You can read the rest of the story at NPR's website. Interestingly, Snopes claims that exploding inflatable bras are urban legends. The lady at NPR says it happened to her.
Ayshela was correct that the Pippi-Longstockinged creature in round 7 was a Zedonk (image credit to EricaLucci). A zedonk is the offspring of a zebra stallion and a donkey mare; apparently other neologisms include zebrass, zebronkey, and zonkey. Mental Floss has a page showing other hybrids, including a very impressive zorse.
For round 8 I've inserted two photos above - a frog and a snail. That's the easy part. Now tell what they have in common (or if you can name them then that will show you know what characteristic they share).
The banking company J.P. Morgan Chase hires a firm to drill out the locks and empty the contents of a "foreclosed" house. However.... all the contents in the house belonged to the new owners who had completed the paperwork and purchased the house. None of the house contents have been recovered.
"Two guys, early 20's, supposedly have papers from Countrywide to clean out the house. What they actually did was punch holes in the walls, tear up carpets, removed half my pool table, drained the pool which cracked, took the stove, cook top, dishwasher, plugged up the toilets with shit and newspaper, broke windows, cracked tiles, etc... etc...
The investigation revealed that Countrywide would hire local gangs to trash houses they knew were going into default so they could re-purchase them at public auction much cheaper. Countrywide would then finance the renovation and re-market the houses with the local thug getting a big chunk of cash and anything they could sell from the pilferage..."
There must be hundreds of such assemblages on the internet, but this one seems particularly good. 99 images, over half of which are excellent. CLICK HERE.
...and remember, when you screw up the world, you're screwing it up for them.
