So You Want to Write a Shipwreck Song

I'm back in The Awl today discussing the only good kind of song.

The Least Dangerous Game

A partial list of literary egg puns compiled by Aubrey Clayton and me, with contributions by Zac Lizer:

Eat, Pray, L'Oeuf
How to Hen Friends and Eggfluence People
Fear of Frying
The Yolk and Its Relation to the Unconscious
12 Albumen
Our Bodies, Our Shells
The Tragedy of Omelette, Prince of Henmark
Upton Sinclair's "Boil!"
The Huevo the Pilgrim
The Kreutzer Frittata
The Mayonnaise Waltz
Thus Spoke Shakshuka
The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzoufflé
The Poachman Always Meringues Twice
Live and Let Dye
The Scrambler
The Soufflé Also Rises
This Sunnyside of Paradise
All Quiet on the Western Omelette
Over-Easy of Eden
Scrambler's List
Croque Madame Bovary
Don Quicheote
The Deviled Dictionary

The Most Dangerous Game

One great game to play with children at the Natural History Museum is to point to one of the dioramas and ask, "What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?" The answers may surprise you.





What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
No, actually it's the cape buffalo.





What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
Yes, it's an elk, but not the one you'd think.





What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
It's lupine, a poisonous woodland flower.

What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
That lizard on top of the boulder.

What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
That fox's crippling depression.



What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
Your own unchallenged assumptions.

What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
Over-reliance on hydroelectric dams.

What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
Climate change.



What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
The lead used to paint the backdrop.

What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
Cosmic background radiation.

What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
The baby hippo, who is going to grow up to be a spree killer.

What's the most dangerous thing in this scene?
The baby chimpanzee, who is 10x more venomous than the adult.

How To Tell If You Are in a Dostoevsky Novel

"Every night Pontius Pilate berates you in a dream."

I forgot to post this earlier, but check out my recent piece in The Toast, How to Tell If You Are in a Dostoevsky Novel, and a special thanks to Nicole Chung for being the most helpful and patient editor ever.

Without a single apology to John Keats

"O Weazel Ball, tumble on! Bold weasel, never canst thou clasp thy prize!" is the best line I have ever written or ever will.

Check out Ode on an Abandoned Shopping Mall today on The Toast.  With hilarious illustrations by Shing Yin Khor.

Eating Kids, on The Awl

"Made you eat your kids" was the "your shoe's untied" of the ancient world.

I'm back on The Awl this week discussing the ancient Greek penchant for cooking and eating kids: "Episodes of Eating Children in Ancient Greece, Ranked in Order of Reasonableness."

Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster

Thank you, Amber Sparks, for my sharing my new favorite author meeting story:

"Thomas Hardy once took E.M. Forster to his personal cat cemetery, and made him walk around for like an hour while he named all of the cats buried there (and there were many) and told Forster how they lived and how they died."

The Best Places to Get Free Coffee in Los Angeles

"When the Great Old Ones are recalled to power someday, they will be summoned right here in the Valley, in a strip mall between an El Pollo Loco and an adult bookstore."

Check out The Best Places to Get Free Coffee in LA - my first time in The Awl; not my first time talking about free coffee, PTA raps, LSD-laced sugar cubes, Freemasons, or the Deep Valley.

---

 

"The truth is, I can’t imagine living without constant low-level embarrassment about my teeth, like the roar of silence in a room after someone turns off the TV."

Meanwhile, on Medium, I published The List. This will probably be the only time I discuss my butt on the internet, so get on it.

Also, while we're talking about Medium, You Have Plenty of Time to Love Them Later is at more than 213,000 views!

Take that, Radiolab!*

What has studying the infinite complexity of the indifferent universe taught you about yourself and your personal relationships?

Check me out on Medium skewering popular science journalism.

* Just kidding, guys.

You Have Plenty of Time to Love Them Later

Wow, what a week! I am very pleased - and more than a little surprised - by what a great response I've had from You Have Plenty of Time to Love Them Later.

I originally wrote this as an email to my friend Sommer Browning when she was pregnant with her daughter. I decided to post it on Medium on January 7 and since then it's been viewed almost 200,000 times and counting. And I've gotten so many nice notes and messages from people all over the country, too.  Thanks, everyone!

Magical Thinking

"For Christmas this year, my daughter wants Santa to bring her a magic wand that allows her to enter books and movies, interact with the characters, and change their outcomes . . . She also wants the wand to resurrect the dead, though she adds this bonus feature as something of an afterthought, like a stand mixer that also makes sausage."

I'm back on Medium talking about adult American Girl fans, ontological freakouts, and Lovecraftian horror.

Modeling on Medium and More from the Music Center

"In the nicest shot Beatrice is sitting on an overturned trash can with a giant pink plastic flower in her hair, but somehow she makes it look good, which is probably the definition of a born model."

I have my first piece up on Medium, discussing my complicated feelings about Beatrice's short stint as a clothing model.  So far I'm really enjoying the Medium interface, I think I'll stick around.

 

---

Also, there are more Music Center episodes up! Check out #7, 8, 9, and 10.

---

Lastly, I've started working with the home automation startup Cliqk, writing some of their web and social media content and generally helping out.

Los Angeles County Fair: Tablescaping Judges' Notes

Some excerpts from the judges' notes in this year's Los Angeles County Fair Tablescaping Competition:

1. "Tablecloth needs pressing and is slightly too long."
2. "Question soup spoon. Unsure if guests are spooning their own hollandaise sauce."
3. "Menu is lacking diversity. Fruit for salad and dessert course is repetitive.  Questioning the knife, as it does not go with the menu. Lobster pick is appropriate but nut pick is not."
4. "Cake server out of proportion with the cake.  Too much flatware, fork not needed for grapes."
5. "Menu does not match place setting.  Dinner plate is too large for appetizer or salad.  Knife is not needed." *
6. (For a Passover table) "Missing plate for gafita [sic] fish."

Related: I am definitely entering the Tablescaping contest next year.

* I believe this was the Halloween-themed table. As I was noting this down, a woman came by with her teenage daughter, saw the labeled glass drink containers, laughed out loud, and exclaimed, "Apple Spider?! Now that's creative!"

From the L.A. County Fair

This is only the beginning.

From Long Beach's Aquarium of the Pacific

Did you know an adult tiger cowry can grow as long as an Apple iPhone 6?

Did you know a typical octopus lives five years, the same as Dyson's rock-solid extended warranty plan?

 

Did you know an electric eel produces enough electricity to power ten GE Energy Smart Spiral compact fluorescent light bulbs with flicker-free technology?

Vacation

The Adventures of the Gimmel Gang

Found at the library today

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Scary Basement

This month's column in Trop

"In the last eighteen years, I have taken classes in skiing, snowboarding, SCUBA diving, pole dancing, fencing, ballroom dancing, burlesque, ballet, jazz dance, yoga, tap, spinning, kickboxing, Pilates (prenatal and post-), Bar Method, karate, and wu shu; CPR, the Bradley Method, breastfeeding, infant care, and early childhood education; German, French, Old English, Latin, and Chinese; taxidermy, knitting, crocheting, quilting, needlepoint, candle-making, spinning, and sewing; drawing, singing, and sketch comedy; French cooking, wine tasting, olive oil tasting, landscape design, driving, and, due to a regrettable misunderstanding of the course description, geriatric water aerobics."

This month's column is up at Trop.

"a private recitalist for the late Gore Vidal"