Get your thinking caps on -it's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you have any idea what this contraption is? Can you come up with an interesting guess?
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop!
Update:ladybuggs was the first of many with the correct answer. This is a National Cash Register Stamping Phone, used in bigger department stores. It was for clerks to get approval from "credit specialists" in the back room for customers to charge their purchases. Read more about them here. The funniest answer came from next2exits, who declared that this is a Wisconsin voter polling station. The handset allows the governor to call you and tell you who to vote for.
How well do you keep up with political television? Anna Merlan of mental_floss looked through the public records of FCC complaints and found plenty that concerned Glenn Beck and The Daily Show. In today's Lunchtime Quiz, you are challenged to figure out which TV show each of ten complaints is about. I got 70% right, which is about average. Link
By Corky White Professor of Anthropology Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
As a very young caterer in the late 1970s, I learned lessons the hard way every day. I catered for people who knew their food, and so I tried to make things I hoped they’d not yet had, to avoid comparison. Cooking off their grid and mine often meant making dishes for the first time. I took on every challenge knowing I would inevitably curdle or burn or undercook. But taking on a Roman orgy was a whole different kettle of fermented anchovy sauce.
A Harvard University professor, who will remain nameless, asked me to cater a Roman dinner, hereafter known as the Orgy. Considering the money (and not, in my innocence, the potential for blackmail), I took the job. I went to the lowest level—of Harvard’s Widener Library—and found Apicius and other texts giving clues to the foods of the Roman Empire.
Translations to 1970s Cambridge weren’t always easy. Stuffed larks? No problem: frozen quail, stuffed with a parmesan herb stuffing. Anchovies in oil with herbs came straight from Boston’s Little Italy. Nightingales’ tongues? Nowhere in our most exotic butchery were there packets of these. The smallest tongues I could find were from calves. I thought, what would a nightingale’s tongue resemble… little, slippery, wormy…snails! Periwinkles from Chinatown! With a hatpin, I plucked each of the little buggers out of their chambers and stir-fried them with garlic and green herbs. A nightingale sang in Harvard Square, or might have, except I had its tongue.
An 1817 edition of the source of the recipes.
With no orgy cookbook in front of me, I had to use my imagination. Honey cakes seemed to epitomize the evening, and I made them in buttocky shapes drenched in a nut-honey mixture.
I had thought about what to wear as costume, and summoning up dignity, decided to dress as a caterer in my long black apron. I carried the boxes of delicacies through the Doric columns of the host’s Victorian Cambridge home. The neighborhood brings together quite different styles: Olde Englande Colonial and New England clapboard, both decorous to a fault, making the fantasy of an orgy all the more titillating. The house had been swept free of furniture, the floors laid with oriental carpets and strewn with pillows. Incense wafted from standing brass braziers in which little electric bulbs were hidden. I took the food into the kitchen. Our host said, “Oh, just leave directions for the servers,” and I swore inwardly: surely you’ll let me just watch? At that point, the doorbell rang, and I opened the door on a pair of perfectly matched and fetchingly attired male undergraduates, wearing tiny chitons that barely covered their toned bodies in draped cloth. They even sported Demetrius and the Gladiator sandals, trussed up the legs.
There was a guest list near the door and I caught a peek: they were all male faculty whose names I recognized from the Classics and English departments. I left soon afterwards with instructions to return by noon the next day to pick up my dishes. (Noon? What low expectations he had! Surely orgies go on for days!)
I came back at about 11 the following day, a tad early, expecting (or hoping) to find the floor littered with sated or expired bodies, spilled wine and pieces of clothing. It was disappointingly empty and clean, and our host, clad in monastic old-school pajamas and robe, had a bowl of Cheerios breakfast cereal in his hand.
Was the orgy a bust? Perhaps Cambridge was not ready for deeply researched classical debauchery. Perhaps I neglected to add some crucial ingredient to the nightingales’ tongues. Come on, are Cheerios the tail of the dog in the Playboy Penthouse? Well, there’s no meal you can’t learn something from. Next time I’ll leave out the saltpeter.
A Note About Apicius De re Coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking) is a Roman cookbook from the late 4th or early 5th century C.E. The author is unknown, though the word “Apicius” which appears to be a made-up name, is associated with the text. The word “Apicius” has come to be associated with a decadent passion for food.
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This article is republished with permission from the May-June 2010 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Connecticut artist Ted Mikulski has a project in which he takes Tweets from various people and posts them in appropriate real-world settings. The result is often a clash between the idealism of our plans and the reality of the places they might take place. Link-Thanks, Liz!
If you stand at the South Pole and walk in any direction, you'd be walking north, wouldn't you? So how do people in Antarctica read a map or give directions? Minnesotastan looked it up, and the answer is: they throw out the directions from the globe and make up a system. The continent is labeled with "East Antarctica" and "West Antarctica" in this map, but of course you must go south to get to either. There are actually two conventions for mapping the continent, as you'll read in this post at TYWKIWDBI. Link
Artist Dan Berglund illustrated the song "What a Wonderful World" performed by Louis Armstrong, frame by frame, using ink on glass. The result is a pleasant three-minute break in your workday. -via Arbroath
Do we ever get tired of looking a the nocturnal primates we know as tarsiers? Ugly Overload has a collection of tarsier pictures, facts, and links for your enjoyment. Link
A couple of months ago we saw Wayne Dorrington's retelling of Star Wars Episode IV using only icons. Now he has completed the the plot of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in the same manner, which he calls "Iconoscope." If the images aren't showing up for you, click where they should be. Link -via Laughing Squid
To promote the new Internet Explorer 9, Soap Creative developed a Pac-Man game that involves thousands of user-submitted screens, and could take years to play. Link to story. Link to game. -via Simply Left Behind
See a series of classic Gil Elvgren paintings of women in various cheesecake poses, alongside the original photograph he worked from. Slightly NSFW. Link -via Nag on the Lake
A creation called Chilean CoPeepapo Mine Rescue won the grand prize at the annual Peeps diorama competition from The Washington Post. A video at the site looks at the details of the winning entry. You can see all the entries in this year's contest in a slide show. Link to video. Link to slide show.
Enjoy some music by cellist Kevin Olusola. He is an accomplished musician, but the senior at Yale University is majoring in pre-med and East Asian studies. Olusola spent a fellowship year in China to study the language, but also managed to perform a few concerts while there. Read more at his website. http://kolusolamusic.art.officelive.com/bio.aspx -via reddit
Here you see a skeleton knitting a scarf with yarn that is coming from her own bones! She is a knit-covered skeleton. Twilight Kallisti of Crafting Chaos made this artwork called Just One More Row using an educational skeleton model. See more pictures at the website. http://craftingchaos.com/2011/04/17/just-one-more-row/
Here's something that might keep you busy for a while. Robin Words pits your language skills against a computer.
Change one letter in the four-letter word the computer gives you. The computer will then change one letter in the word you used and so on. You may not use proper nouns or reuse words that have already been used. The first person to use up all possible words wins!
Some people brag of beating the computer fairly quickly, but it depends on the word you're dealt. Others complain that the computer arbitrarily rules your words ineligible. How are you doing? Link -via mental_floss
