Rambles at starchamber.com

Via Lynn‘s twittering last night, I came across Spamusement, a site with cartoons drawn to correspond to actual spam email subject lines. This reminds me of the old Surrealist parlor games like Exquisite Corpse. By God, we should be doing more to amuse ourselves with the discovered poetry of spam. It’s the moral equivalent of [...]

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See this fish? He’s bad news. This is not just any fish. This fish nearly punched the lights out of the Enlightenment. Oh, he seems likable enough for a red gurnard. But at parties, after he gets into the brandy, he parades around and insists on being called Aspitrigla cuculus of the Scorpaeniformes (I understand [...]

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Salem, Massachusetts is in love with witches. It took three hundred years or so for them to come around, but they’ve fallen in a big way. I spent some time in Salem this weekend, and I can attest that, in addition to the various museums and tours, the “witch on a broom” motif is everywhere, [...]

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English teacher (and Star Chamber Correspondent) Alan Kennedy writes to tell us about a new book recommendation site his brother-in-law is building called Flashlight Worthy. With lots of hand-picked book lists and reviews, it’s a sort of annex and way station to Amazon. For our purposes here, one of the fun things about it is [...]

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Many years ago, while doing the college Europe thing, I found myself on an underground train in Munich. I had just come from London, where they mostly speak English, by way of Amsterdam, where they all do. I speak no German. So Munich was the first place where I was completely unable to communicate with [...]

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Fargo North Decoder, of Electric Company fame, once helped a character played by Rita Moreno with her dangerously loose interpretation of a No Fishing sign. Her version went like this: “Private Property? No! Fishing Allowed.” She was wrong; trouble ensued. In a similar vein, here is a good one from Steve Crandall’s blog. It appears [...]

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Some animals live up to their cool names. Animals like the toothy velociraptor and the mysterious leafy sea dragon. Others, despite their nifty cognomens, fall short. For example, the Northern beardless-tyrannulet (not to be confused with the Ruby-crowned Kinglet) is a comparatively plain little flycatcher. But I imagine any animal might have a hard time [...]

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Here’s a fun image: the most complex Chinese character in common use. You have to arrange 57 little lines just so to make that character. What it means (besides “Chinese is hard”) is a kind of noodle, the biang biang noodle. Now let’s imagine you work at a noodle shop in China’s Shaanxi province where [...]

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