“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: A young woman did not fart in her husband’s embrace.”
As quoted in Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton, 2025), by Moudhy Al-Rashid. This is an excellent introduction to how much we can learn about ancient Mesopotamia from the thousands of cuneiform stamped tablets often just tossed away as building fill.
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[This is a guest post by Diana Shuheng Zhang]
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Lois Beckett, "Perky Maxwell House viral ad takes on housing crisis as ‘Maxwell Apartment’", The Guardian 10/1/2025:
Housing in the US has become so unaffordable that a coffee company has based a viral marketing campaign on the idea that almost nobody can afford to buy a house.
Maxwell House coffee, a 133-year-old brand, recently launched a marketing campaign rebranding themselves as “Maxwell Apartment coffee”.
“Maxwell House? In this economy?” a narrator asks in a video ad, promising that Maxwell Apartment is “the same affordable coffee you love, now with an even more affordable name”.
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People who don't know any Chinese characters will think the four glyphs pictured above are just typical Chinese characters, but won't be able to make any sense of them at all.
People who are minimally / partially literate in Chinese characters will recognize components of the four glyphs, but not one of the glyphs as a whole.
People who are moderately literate in Chinese characters will "sort of" recognize parts of the four glyphs, but will not be able to extract meaning from the sentence as a whole.
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From Astral Codex Ten:
Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women.
“I’ve never seen a gender balance like this in the Bay Area,” you tell your host Chris. “Is this one of those fabled ratio parties?”
“No – have you heard of curtfishing? It’s the new male dating trend. You say in your Bumble profile that you’re a member of the Dissident Right who often attends parties with Curtis Yarvin. Then female journos ask you out in the hopes that you’ll bring them along and they can turn it into an article.”
“What happens when they realize Curtis Yarvin isn’t at the party?”
“Oh, everyone pools their money and hires someone to pretend to be Curtis. You can just do things. Today it’s Ramchandra.”
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The most famous example, of course, is the 1945 "Who's on first?" dialogue:
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A skit by Singaporean voice actress Caitanya Tan.
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From J.M.:
Much amusement online this morning about a tropical storm that is named Gabrielle Spaghetti and is apparently doing some modeling work.
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A learned friend recently sent me a draft composition on medieval Chinese history in which he referred to "*" as an "asterix". This reminded me that ten years ago I wrote a post, "The many pronunciations of '*'" (12/17/15), on this subject and we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about it.
Given that lately we've been talking a lot about Celts, Galatians, and so on, I think it is appropriate to write another post on Asterix the Gaul, that famous French comic book character, and how he got his name. Also inspired / prompted by Chris Button's latest comment.
I often hear "*" pronounced "asterix" or "asterick", and so on (e.g., "astrisk" [two syllables], esp. in rapid speech). It's hard even for me to pronounce "*" or type the symbol those ways, so ingrained is the pronunciation "as-ter-isk".
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