The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

Tonight I post in haste, not because of impending deadlines but because-- having just spend a cornea-frying couple of hours working -- I need to stop seeing the blinking cursor, and right soon.

Let's get to today's double-underwhelmer.

Part the First: Born in England with the given names George Bryan, his more well-known nickname was drawn from a term, widely used during his lifetime, applied to many men (though not insulting, it was not generally used to their faces). He is often credited with an innovation, but not precisely an invention. He was also famous for suggesting a novel use of champagne. He had a very short military career, which ended when his regiment was ordered to Manchester and he resigned his commission. He fled the country after his debts became overwhelming and an intemperate remark led to his falling-out with an influential friend. He died of syphilis in 1840. What was the still-famous name by which he was known?

Part the Second: In the introduction to a 1937 Lux Radio Theatre play based on the man above's life, the famed director Cecil B. DeMille took an aside from the broadcast to ask for the audience's prayers on a particular matter of concern. For what did DeMille ask the audience's prayers?

Pre-emptive clarification: There is no other connection between the two answers, that I know of. The answer to Part 1 is not a particularly good clue to Part 2, nor will 2 get you 1.

First correct answer to each part wins a single stick-on googly-eyeball. Get both, and you've got yourself a pair of googly eyes, the envy of hobos and socialites alike. No Googling, despite the homonymic relationship between Google and googly. For good measure, no googlies, bosies, or wrong'uns either. One guess at either part per comment, but comment with all of your great, big, googly heart.

Posted by BT at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

They were restricted to carpentry and rope-making. They came into church by a separate, low door set off to one side. They couldn't marry outside of their group without dire punishments, and their social and economic life was subject to severe restriction.

Reading Graham Robb's fascinating new book The Discovery of France, one comes across the strange case of the "cagots" a minority (ethnic? It's hard to say if the term is applicable) group who were essentially a pariah caste within pre-modern France, right on up into the 19th Century.

The British novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote about the "Accursed Race", as did other scholars and commentators but no one seems to have completely penetrated the central mystery about the cagots: what defined them? There were thousands of people labeled as cagots, living in their own often ghetto-like communities adjacent to other towns and villages throughout the Pyrenees and southwestern France. They spoke the same dialects as their neighbors, had the same religion, and did not seem to orchestrate their lives around a deliberately separate culture. Although in many cases writers describe cagots as having distinct physical features, these accounts are contradictory and there does not seem to be an obvious correlate to conceptions of "ethnicity" as we typically understand it. Cagots looked, spoke and worshipped as their neighbors. Yet cagots were both socially and legally forbidden from attempting to become "non-cagot" - - attempts at assimilation were seen as a threat.

Various theories connect the idea of the "cagot" to a mythical belief in a community of carriers of "white leprosy" or to a putative ethnic connection with Muslim invaders of Europe. Robb himself finds more productive the suggestions in the goose-foot emblem cagots were sometimes made to wear, which have apparent links to the symbols of traveling carpenters' guilds in the early medieval period.

Whatever the origin of the group's identity - - enforced largely from without, and not a source of pride from within - - the circumstances under which they lived say a lot about the power of collective prejudice and myth. Robb's book is vastly informative and worth the read for lots of reasons, but his thoughts on the meaning of the cagots in our shared history are among the most valuable parts of the book.

Posted by BT at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In haste, and as is customary, steeped in apologies:

In 1956 he penned the teleplay for a CBC television film called Flight into Danger, that was adapted first as a theatrical release from Paramount, then as a novel, under a different title (Runway Zero-Eight). Nine years later he had his first breakout into major bestseller-dom with a business-centric novel, set in New Orleans which he said he researched by reading 27 books on the industry in question. That book, in turn spawned a television series, although the setting was changed to San Francisco.

However, it was in 1968 that he published the biggest bestseller of the year. The film adaptation garnered one of its stars the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Who was the author? What was the title of the 1968 bestseller? Who was the actress?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a heaping plate of pasta. No Googling or...look, it's late, so just don't Google. Don't put a lot of guesses into one comment. The usual, y'know?

Posted by BT at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Enough with the silence here. The Wombat's unaccountable reluctance to share his inconsequential and tedious opinions, beliefs, misapprehensions, complaints, spastic enthusiasms, and last-to-notice-it observations will no longer be allowed to choke off the free and spontaneous flow of Wombattitude that should enliven this space.

Here's a sample of topics you can look forward to in the near future:

• How to Live in Denial While Your Apartment is Falling Apart
  
• The Shame of Listening Repeatedly to only 3% of the Artists Represented on Your 30GB iPod
  
• Tiny Variations on the Same Damn Pasta Dish
  
• Musings on Wake of the Flood from Someone Who Knows Next to Nothing about The Grateful Dead.
  
• Agonizing Over How to Answer a Four-Year-Old's Questions About Death
  
• Safely Vague Complaints about Work
  
• Narrative of an Evening Trapping Fruit-Flies in a Homemade Trap and then Shouting with Inappropriate Glee Every Time One of the Little Fuckers Meets with His Soap-and-Vinegar Doom
  
• Feeble Attempts at Something Resembling Literary Criticism, Sabotaged by a Presiding Fear That I've Missed the Point
  
• Desperate Attempts to Make Generic, Helpless, Predictable Rage about Dick Cheney's Continued Role in American Foreign Policy Seem Fresh and Compelling
  
• Getting Ink-Stains Out Using Hair Spray: A Retrospective
  
• An Impressionistic Recollection of those Really Delicious Roast Beef Sandwiches that Place in Chelsea Market Used to Have, with Pre-Emptive Apologies to a Largely Vegetarian Readership
  
• Dithering Over Which Democratic Candidate Seems Least Likely to Disappoint
  
• Why That Last Movie I Got to See Really Sucked
  
• Pessimism on a Subject to Be Determined Later
  
• Excuses
  

Don't miss out!

Posted by BT at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Shout 'em out!

1. What do the Sarplaninac, Hovawart, and Kuvasz all have in common?

2. One of his first published works of fiction is the story ""A Family Elopement." However, it was not included in his first collection of short works, The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents. He is also the creator of the 1913 "Little Wars", credited by some as the first recreational war game? What is his name?

3. Name the top three U.S. states having the highest Gross State Product per Capita.

4. The late-15th-century novel The Adventures of Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo mentions an island ruled by women. Explorers in the western hemisphere, hearing of an island rumored to be under female dominion, they gave it the name of this fictional island. As it turned out, the island was a peninsula, and the name later became adopted for an even wider territory. What is the name?

5. What were the French teams of surveyors who traveled between the cities of Barcelona and Dunkirk, between 1791 and 1799 trying to accomplish?

The contestant who gets the most correct answers first wins a half-price ride in the jump seat of the Caspian Sea Monster. No Googling or trying to pump up your state's Gross State Product by going to that pricey Thai restaurant for lunch, the one with the good squid with the spicy basil thing. One guess (at any question or part of question) per comment but comment as much as your spirit guides tell you to.

Posted by BT at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (48)

OK, it was actually five-forty when we were so rudely snatched from slumber by the earliest-rising Wombat. But I wanted to get a Squeeze reference in somehow, as the reason we are so particularly foggy this morning is that the unthinkable happened last night; our actual attendance at a bona fide live music performace, sans any rendition of "Polly Wolly Doodle." As a very belated birthday present for T., we saw Squeeze on their current reunion tour (Glen Tilbrook was in excellent voice and all seeming happy as hell to be playing a crowd-pleasing raft of familiar hits. Quite the sing-along fest. We're definitely advancing into fogeyhood if this is our big night out, but a good time was had by all).

So, the overhang looms a bit over the Quiz this morning, but as caffeine, H2O and NSAIDs do their work, here's a bit of a quizlet for you:

It's obtained from Boswellia sacra; in many ancient texts, it is called "olibanum," a name apparently derived from the Arabic for "milking." It was also known in another language as "levonah." Curiously, the name we best know the substance by is likely derived from the name of the ethnic group who were credited with re-introducing the substance to Europeans in the medieval era.

By what name do we know this substance? For a bonus point, what song did Squeeze open with -- and which made me think of this?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a reasonable percentage of a freezer-sized Ziploc bag full of mostly-broken crayons, once they've been picked up (again) off of the floor. Don't put them in your mouth. I said no. No Googling or deriding fogey-centric reunion concerts. One guess per comment, please, but comment with joy, ferocity, and frequency.

Posted by BT at 06:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (26)