Ickiest Shakespeare Simile?

'I'll warrant him for drowning; though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell, and as leaky as an unstanch'd wench': The Tempest, I i 45–47: leaking as much as a girl that, during menstruation, wears no sanitary pad (or towel or clout), stanch being 'to check the flow of (particularly, blood)'; or, perhaps, rather, it = as much as a girl whose menstrual flow has not ceased.

ERIC PARTRIDGE (2007-04-16). Shakespeare's Bawdy (Routledge Classics) (p. 171). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

Let me know if you have found worse

Quote of the day

After I'd come to understand evolution and know a little about history and farming, I saw that the thick white animals I laughed at for following each other around and getting caught in bushes were the product of generations of farmers as much as generations of sheep; we made them, we moulded them from the wild, smart survivors that were their ancestors so that they would become docile, frightened, stupid, tasty wool producers. We didn't want them to be smart, and to some extent their aggressiveness and their intelligence went together. Of course, the rams are brighter, but even they are demeaned by the idiotic females they have to associate with and inseminate.

The same principle applies to chickens and cows and almost anything we've been able to get our greedy, hungry hands on for long enough. It occasionally occurs to me that something the same might have happened to women but, attractive though the theory might be, I suspect I'm wrong.

Iain Banks, "The Wasp Factory"

Quote of the day

"I told my husband that "lying" was an unfairly strong word to use about Obama's discussion of Buffett and his secretary's tax rates. That was back when we thought she was making $200K+. But since it turns out she makes $60K, I think "lying" is putting it mildly. (See the end of this post by +Megan McArdle )."

- Virginia Postrel

While the figures are almost guaranteed to be bogus (to be fair, unless his secretary convinced WB to do his taxes for him, WB seems unlikely to have exact figures), the fact remains that WB probably had a lower effective tax rate (but much higher tax PAYMENTS) than his secretary. Whether that is a bad thing or not is not obvious though. The very wealthy still have the option to leave a country, and in a sense countries are competing for them. I believe there was a time when a lot of the English rock stars found it pointless to live in England.

Quote of the day

And all the while the ugly smoke went upwards, the smoke that has stifled Romance and blackened the birds. This, I thought, they can neither praise nor bless. And when they saw it they raised their hands towards it, towards the thousand chimneys, saying, "Behold the smoke. The old coal-forests that have lain so long in the dark, and so long still, are dancing now and going back to the sun. Forget not Earth, O our brother, and we wish thee joy of the sun."

Dunsany, Lord (2004-07-02). The First Lord Dunsany Omnibus: 5 Complete Books (Kindle Locations 2084-2087). Renaissance E Books. Kindle Edition.

Quote of the day

"It's good when you still find a nice old British tradition, then: a warm and flavourful ale, a black cab with a brilliant driver, or a newspaper article shot through with unconscious language prejudice."

- Johnson, explaining that you can't LOSE an accent, you can only train yourself in another one ("Only the mute have no accent.")

Quote of the day

If Moses showed up as a Republican candidate you'd get headlines like:

"How many drowned during that Red Sea crossing? Cover up?"
or
"Mana from Heaven laced with deadly preservatives"

- Chucklepants

Quote of the day

Yeah, from "God, No!" again.

"The Eskimos—or as I think they’re called, the Inuits, or maybe the correct term is now “Frozen-Ass Aboriginal North Americans,” I don’t know—do not have twenty-something words for snow. That’s not true. But the Brits do have more than a hundred and fifty terms for male masturbation. If you’re in England and someone uses a verb and you don’t know what it means, it probably means jacking off. For jilling off, female masturbation, our brothers and sisters across the pond stick to “auditioning the finger puppets.” In the good old US of A, if you have a plural noun and you don’t know what it means, it probably means breasts.

Jillette, Penn (2011-08-16). God, No! (pp. 48-49). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Quote of the day

"He calls me once in a while and there's that special bond you have with a guy who's played guitar while you've floated around naked in zero G."

- Penn Jillette, "God, No!"

Quote of the day

"One important detail is that actions that have not yet been tried in a state s are always assumed to lead immediately to the goal with the least possible cost, namely h(s). This optimism under uncertainty encourages the agent to explore new, possibly promising paths.

- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Russell&Norwig)

Amusing how theory can guide one's life as well as explain the inevitable disappointments. Of course, Mae West anticipated theory with "Whenever I have to choose between two evils, I always like to try the one I haven't tried before"

Quote of the day

"Damn has the syntax of an attributive adjective but the semantics of a scowl. "

- Geoffrey Pullum, Language Log

Quote of the day

"The more often you swear in everyday life, the less it reduces pain when you're hurting"

Yes, you've got to be an economics fan to make sense of the title of the piece where I found the original: Toward a theory of optimal swearing seigniorage

And yes, that not only sounds clever but refers to an actual study.

Quote of the day

"We found it populated mostly by innocent and well-intentioned, if confused, young people. Then again, that's how "Lord of the Flies" began."

- James Taranto regarding OWS

Quote of the day

Cribbed from The Economist:

Inspiration for the € symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon (Є) – a reference to the cradle of European civilisation – and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to ‘certify’ the stability of the euro.

Leonard Cohen of the Day

"Well the last time that I saw him he was trying hard to get
a woman's education, but he's not a woman yet
and the last time that I saw her she was living with a boy
who gives her soul an empty room and gives her body joy"
(Death of a Ladies Man)

Quote of the day

"...the famed Russian hospitality is mostly just the Russian love for seeing a foreigner drunk."

- Bruce Chatwin?

Quote of the day

I know you need your sleep now, I know your life's been hard,
But many men are falling where you promised to stand guard.....
-LC

A few REAMDE excerpts, to get across the flavor of his writing...

A few of my favorites, lets me use the "copy" feature of my Kindle software (glad they added that to the PC version):

The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 15). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Video games were a more addictive drug than any chemical, as he had just proven by spending ten years playing them. Now he had come to discover that they were also a sort of currency exchange scheme. These two things—drugs and money—he knew about. The third leg of the tripod, then, was his exilic passion for real estate. In the real world, this would always be limited by the physical constraints of the planet he was stuck on. But in the virtual world, it need be limited only by Moore’s law, which kept hurtling into the exponential distance.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 34). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

But each had a kind of confidence about him that was not often found in young men who had followed the recommended path through high school to college and postgraduate training. If she had wanted to be cruel or catty about it, Zula might have likened those meticulously groomed boys to overgrown fetuses, waiting endlessly to be born. Which was absolutely fine given that the universities were well stocked with fetal women.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 160). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Zula asked Yuxia what a Hakka was and learned that they were the only Chinese who had refused to take up the practice of foot binding. So “Big-Footed Woman” was not just a throwaway line. Not only that, but they would buy the unwanted female children of their Cantonese-speaking neighbors and raise them. Yuxia was not the type to deploy terminology like “feminist” or “matriarchal,” but the picture was clear enough to Zula.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 242). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

...Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist’s movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr’s heaven.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 340). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. You simply couldn’t go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who wanted to talk to you for hours about the ballistics of the .308 round or the relative merits of side-by-side versus over-and-under shotguns.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 603). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (pp. 893-894). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 893). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Quote of the day

At this point, I should repeat my long-standing conviction that speech errors, by politicians and others, are rarely if ever worth the fuss that they sometimes generate
- Mark Liberman

Quote of the Day

"You can get rid of a surprising number of kittens on Craigslist.  In fact, the capacity seems unlimited."
  - Bob Armstrong

Quote of the day

"Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever."
- Anonymous student