Esperanto to Egg Whites

Esperanto, for those who don't know, is what is known as a "constructed international auxiliary language". If you're staring at that phrase blankly, it basically means that someone --in this case L.L. Zamenhof (who missed a really good bet by not being a magician with a name like that. I mean, why invent a language when your name is L.L. Zamenhof? Slap a "The Magnificent" in front of that bad boy and start learning to manipulate lightening and levitate, because it is your destiny! Or invent Esperanto. Go ahead, DON'T be all your awesome name allows you to be. Just let L. L. stand for Language Lackey and not Lightening Levitator)-- made up a language that everybody could use to communicate with each other around the world. This is sort of awesome, although it is clearly not as awesome as becoming a magician.
Esperanto is supposed to be politically neutral, so that no one could possibly be offended by it. Nobody wants to be biased towards one language or another. That's decidedly not P.C. If a large political group were to choose one language to negotiate in, all the other languages would feel left out. It would also lead to secret hilarity, because inevitably some perfectly harmless word in the chosen language sounds hysterical to speakers of every other language. Or, worst case scenario, some slightly less than harmless word. For example, the German word for intercourse, "geschlechtsverkehr" sounds to an English speaker a bit like a spoon doused in pudding and lubricant caught in a garbage disposal. Only one (well, possibly two) of those things are even remotely related to the actual meaning of the word, which makes it sort of hard to decode if you speak very little German, and even if you DO happen to speak German but come from an English-speaking background, the mental image alone makes the meaning of the word faintly horrifying. Or at least, it fails to convey anything of the suggestive sensuality it would have, had it not, to your untrained ear, sounded like the dying cries of a goat in a distant swamp.
Point is, language barriers cause problems. Esperanto is meant to bridge these.
You know what else causes problems? Eggs.
You may think that this is a little hyperbolic, since generally the only things eggs cause are baby chickens, and baby chickens are adorable. However, eggs also occasionally carry Salmonella. This is not, as I thought as a child, the name of a fish princess. It is also not at all adorable. Don't get Salmonella.
Eggs also carry egg whites, which are also not adorable, and sort of taste like nothing. I'm pretty sure they're an essential component in breakfast sandwiches though, so they gain a small amount of my approval.

Speaking of German: Kangaroos to Kraftwerk.

Penguins to Parsnips

Penguins are birds that can't fly, like emus and cassowaries (don't google them, they're terrifically ugly). When I was, oh, eleven-ish years old I wrote a poem that featured this penguin handicap in a series of similes about the moon (excerpt - "the moon is like a penguin who can't fly back down to earth"). In this poem, I also compared the moon to a golf ball, a camel, and a new mother post-labor, but funnily enough I never mentioned anything about cheese. A popular myth about the moon is that it is made of cheese, which, to everyone's chagrin, has been proven wrong by those damn NASA scientists who claim that "moon rocks" are actually "real rocks" and not just the crusty stuff on the outside of a giant wheel of cheese (my theory is that they've just never dug deep enough into the moon to find the good stuff). Cheese is that yummy stuff that's made from cow milk. Cow milk makes a lot of other yummy things, like yogurt and frosting and cream cheese. They actually make cream cheese frosting, which is kinda gross but tastes delicious on carrot cake cupcakes. Carrots are root vegetables, just like parsnips. But carrots are better. Who ever heard of parsnip cake? No one. Because carrots rule.

Esperanto to Egg Whites.

Lollipops to Landmines

Lollipops are great. This is almost a universally accepted fact. They're so great that little kids will do anything for them. They'll undergo dentistry or become willing banking spectators if a lollipop is involved. They'll cry hysterically when they can't have one. Some of these children will grow up to have similar feelings about, say, heroin. Only "undergo dentistry" will get to be more along the lines of "cut a bitch" and "cry hysterically" will become "shriek and brandish a weapon".
As far as I'm concerned, the best kind of lollipops were and are Tootsie Pops. My inner (and at that time decidedly outer) fat kid loved these things conceptually. They were a lollipop on the outside, and a Tootise Roll on the inside. You didn't even have to expend the extra energy to eat another candy, because they were already both in the lollipop. Two candies at the same time. Concurrent candy. A magically delicious three-way between hard candy, Tootsie Roll and my mouth. At ten, I really could think of nothing better than that. Except a pet dragon with a magical world inside its abdomen full of awesome adventures. But Tootsie Pops were a lot more accessible.
The Tootsie Pop concept (one awesome thing inside another awesome thing) is also applied in the construction of land mines. Only instead of "awesome" think "really fucking dangerous." Since I really had no idea what the inside of a land mine was made of-apart from the fact that it was clearly not Tootsie Roll- I decided to do a bit of research. Since Wikipedia had featured rather prominently in the last post, I thought I should look a little farther afield. This was how I ended up on britannica.com, the website for Encyclopedia Britannica. For a glorious, golden moment I actually believed I had enough functioning braincells to use this website. Real people, I thought to myself, use Encyclopedia Britannica. People getting doctorates use this. It is legit, and by virtue of its legitimacy I am also legit. I reveled for a moment in the glory of my intellectual prowess.
Then I realized that Encyclopedia Britannica has a total of eleven words to share with me about land mines. They are as follows:
"... stationary explosive charge used against military troops or vehicles. See mine."
Really, Encyclopedia Britannica? Holy shit! I never would have guessed! They explode?! I thought people just buried large hunks of metal for kicks. Perhaps they hid them for the winter months when metal supplies would be scarce. I'm enlightened. I can hardly handle the world in the face of this overwhelming new knowledge. Excuse me while I go wash out my skull because my mind is BLOWN.
Apparently Encyclopedia Britannica could sense my intellectual inadequacy, and responded in kind. It was a bit harsh, but I'm sure that this was merely because it was offended. In spite of this minor setback, I was not to be daunted. I now needed to prove myself to the encyclopedia. Accordingly, I obediently followed its instructions and saw mine.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, a "mine" is:
"... a usually stationary explosive device that is designed to destroy personnel, ships or vehicles when the latter come in contact with it. Submarine mines have been used since the mid-19th century; land mines did not become a significant factor in warfare until a hundred years later."
This was, if anything, even less enlightening. The encyclopedia had given me more information, but not about anything particularly useful. I could imagine it gloating in its infernal internet layer, cackling to itself. It was just fucking with me now. I decided that Encyclopedia Britannica had won this round, and went back to Wikipedia. Rest on your laurels, Encyclopedia Britannica. I'll be back.
According to Wikipedia, your average landmine has five components. A firing mechanism, a detonator, a booster charge, a main charge and a casing. In terms of number of parts, this beats out the Tootsie Pop, which only has three (the stick, the casing and the Tootsie Roll center.) However, in terms of usage, I think the Tootsie Pop still wins. While the land mine is full of fiery death, the Tootsie Pop is full of joy. Wouldn't you rather have an explosion of joy?
On the downside of the Tootsie Pop, there's always the problem that the small, weirdly animated boy faced in the Tootsie Pop commercials: "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?" He never did find out, because whatever asshole animal he asked always ate his tootsie pop.
How many land mines does it take to get to the center of Mr. Owl?
One.

Oh, and by the way: Penguins to Parsnips.

Trousers to Triptychs

According to Wikipedia, the populous at large does not wear pants. Either that or the Wikipedians (as I assume the writers there are called...that is, if there is indeed a Wikipedia headquarters where all the greatest geniuses of our time come together once a year to get their annual lobotomy and subsequently write ten or a hundred pages of bullshit about random topics) assume that the average internet surfer has an IQ of about 7 and needs to have every minor thing about their life explained to them in excruciating detail so as to prevent them from going through life massively confused all the time. But in case you are, in fact, confused about what that oddly-shaped piece of cloth that covers your legs are all about, here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"Trousers, or pants, are an item of clothing worn on the lower part of the body from the waist to the ankles, covering both legs separately (rather than with cloth stretching across both as in skirts and dresses)."
Wait a minute...that's not entirely true. What about those silly Aladdin pants where it starts out as a skirt and goes all PSYCH! and turns itself into pants on the bottom? And what about those pants that don't go all the way down all the time because they have zippers in them so that they can turn into capris and shorts whenever you want? (Confession time - I once owned a pair of those pants. They were the BEST. I could wear them as pants and if it got a little hotter outside...boom! Capris. Don't judge me.)
Anyway, those zip-down pants were divided into three sections: pants, capris, and shorts. Lots of things in life are divided into three sections, like traffic lights and ants and triptychs. Triptychs, for those of you who don't know, are works of art that are divided into three sections that are attached by hinges. They were really popular in the middle ages, especially used as altar decorations in churche....sorry, I'm distracted. I got curious and clicked "Random Article" on the side of the trousers page and wound up on the page for the Kayapo People, an amazon tribe in Brazil. They like botony and wear awesome hats.

Lollipops to Landmines.

Alzheimers to Amphibians

I could use this as a moment to touchingly reveal that I have a soul and talk about my adorable and tragic bond with my recently deceased grandmother. Instead, I'm going to tell you about that one time my grandpa punched a nurse, and use that to illustrate the fact that Alzheimer's is some bad shit. Basically it eats your brain, then kills you. Notice that it eats your brain BEFORE it kills you. This means you'll forget everything and everyone you've ever known. You'll also panic a lot, because you have no idea what's going on around you. Oh, also it's incurable. As far as I know, Alzheimer's is one of the worst things that can possibly happen to you. It also happens to run in my family. On both sides. Metaphorically speaking, I'm tied to the railroad track of inevitability waiting to hear the rumble of a crazy train which tragically does not contain Ozzy Osbourne. Yeah. Anyway, on a happier note, gardening also runs in my family. Well, at least it does among the older family members (I have yet to meet a young person who legitimately enjoys gardening, but I do believe they're out there. Like Yetis.) My grandmother on my mother's side used to love to garden- back when she was living in a place where there was enough room to have a garden- and she always put statues in with the plants. All of these statues were frogs. Don't ask me why, but she loves frogs. Big frogs, little frogs, realistic frogs, cartoon frogs; if it was shaped like a frog it went in the garden. It was what you might call a frog fiesta. Oh, except for the one statue of Saint Francis. He was noticeably not a frog.

Trousers to Triptychs

Disco to The Danube

When I think of the word "disco," I think of one thing and one thing only: disco balls. Disco balls are, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant and most useless inventions of all time. I ask you, is there anybody who really needs to look at themselves in six billion teeny little mirrors arranged neatly around a globe? (Sam, don't answer that.) Unless you have six billion teeny little heads to look at, disco balls are unnecessary. Yes, they reflect light onto the ceiling and make it looks like there are stars moving around inside the room. But you know, here's a tip: GO OUTSIDE. There are stars EVERYWHERE. Real ones. Moving around on the ceiling of the EARTH. Why buy a thing that will simulate stars when you can just go outside and see them for free?! Hmm?? HMMM?!?? Okay, yes, I'm getting carried away. Where was I...oh, yes. Disco balls. They're round and pointless. Kind of like Christmas tree ornaments. I personally do not celebrate Christmas, therefore I have never owned a Christmas tree nor have I needed to decorate one with shiny hollow baubles. Trees are beautiful as they are, why the need to decorate them further? It's like putting makeup on babies...just let them be! Anyway, as a general rule Christian people believe in Jesus. Jesus was supposedly born in Bethlehem, which is in modern-day Palestine. Palestine is kind of near the Mediterranean sea, not unlike Italy. In WWII Italy was allied with Germany, and we all know how that turned out. But that's beside the point. The point is, Germany is where the Danube - the longest river in Europe - starts.

Alzheimers to Amphibians.

Leprechauns to Lord & Taylor

Leprechauns are tiny, magical Irishmen who horde gold and, when the gold supply runs out, shave off their bitchin' beards and sell breakfast cereal. According to legends, if you happen to catch one who hasn't sold out to the breakfast industry yet, he will show you the location of his gold. Or rather he will lie to you blatantly about the location, amount or reality of his gold, then laugh at you when you completely fail to steal it from him. Then he'll disappear in a puff of smoke and go down a six of Guinness while telling all his tiny, magical leprechaun friends what a useless asshole you are. Leprechauns are tricky bastards.
You'll notice I've used male pronouns throughout when referring to leprechauns, and also assumed that they all have beards, which is generally a male sort of thing to have. This is because I have never in my life heard of a female leprechaun, except in a made for T.V. movie that was so insane it may actually have been an unusually long and detailed hallucination. If you google leprechaun, you'll mostly find pictures of males. However, there is one picture of a woman in a leprechaun costume, which I really hope is intended for Halloween use only (but the included "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" panties suggest a terrible alternative.) Although they don't make this leprechaun costume (Honestly, who came up with "sexy leprechaun" as a costume idea? For that matter, who came up with "sexy leprechaun" as an idea that did not generate nightmares?), Lord & Taylor do make women's clothes. According to their website, the exact term for what they make is "women's apparel." One flavor of apparel purveyed by Lord & Taylor is the romper. The romper in itself is sort of fun, really, but Lord & Taylor has taken it a step too far by selling them in black, and thus suggesting that there could be such a thing as a formal romper. A cocktail romper, if you will. This leaps gracefully over fun and goes straight to disturbing. This suggests that, at some time in my life, I will be happily romping through cocktails and run across a person who has taken the romping a little too much to heart. I will have to network with someone wearing a onesie with a belt on it and really, honestly take that person seriously. This is a recipe for social seppuku, because after a few cocktails there is no way I could hold it together in the face of a formal romper. Just by making this garment, Lord & Taylor, much like leprechauns, are deviously tricking the universe at large. Only when they laugh at you, they drink appletinis.

Disco to The Danube

Pad Thai to Poltergeists

There are very few things I know about Thai food. All I know is that it involves a lot of noodles, spicy things, and that it is fucking DELICIOUS. To the best of my knowledge, Pad Thai is a delicious stir-fried Thai dish that has a lot of noodles in it. Noodles are also really popular in Japan. There's a Japanese movie I had to see this past year in my film class called Tampopo, which is about a cowboy (more like a Japanese man in a cowboy hat - he drives a delivery truck) who helps a widowed lady turn her noodle establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle soup making" (you just can't make this stuff up...but apparently someone did). In Tampopo, there are lots of little subplot stories that pop up out of nowhere and disrupt the main narrative. All of them are disturbing in one way or another, and they all have something to do with noodles. One of them, for instance, involves a woman's etiquette class where the teacher is teaching a bunch of young ladies how to eat noodles silently, not like those damn foreigners who make slurpy noises when they eat. The scene lasts for almost two whole minutes of shots of these ladies giving up trying to be polite and slurping their noodles loudly. Another one of these little scenes involves a woman who gets up from her deathbed in order to cook her husband and two young kids their supper (Geez Ma, noodles again?!??). Then she just goes and dies in the noodle bowl. Lots of people think that when you die, you go to heaven or hell. Some people think that once you fall in the noodle bowl, that's about it. And then there are others who believe that you become a ghost. Some ghosts are friendly, like Casper, and others aren't, like Peeves. Peeves is a character from the Harry Potter books, and he's not just any old ghost. He's one of them that goes and moves shit around to freak normal, non-ghost people out. He, my friends, is a poltergeist. And the Harry Potter books are some of the best things that have ever happened to the world of fiction writing. Facts of life.

Leprechauns to Lord & Taylor.

Marie Antoinette to the Macarena

Personally, I think that Marie Antoinette would be fundamentally opposed to the Macarena, based on the fact that it's the second most unsexy dance ever created (the first of course being so-called "hand jive." "Hand jive" is actually so impossibly unsexy it makes prospective romantic partners' genitals cringe.) But that is neither here nor there.

Marie Antoinette, when she wasn't busy being squeezed into or bursting out of various dresses, pretending she knew shit about gardening or generally queening, somehow found time to offend peasants. To be fair, most things about Marie Antoinette must have been sort of offensive to peasants without her making any real effort. It seems like it would be kind of annoying, when you're in the position of farm or die, if someone wearing more pearls then they have braincells and a wig the size of a third-world nation announced that they had taken up farming for fun. If they then proceeded to tell you that this helped them understand you as an individual and gave them qualification to be your queen, you'd probably want to punch them vigorously in the ovaries until you could hear the cries of their unborn children. If they then told you they were going to get back to their farming, then hopped on their cartoonishly fat white horse, ready to prance off through a field of verdant flowers to the next orgy of champagne and titties (I like to imagine that pre-revolutionary, aristocratic France was entirely composed of champagne, titties and gold. Also sometimes cherubs. Everyone owned a fat, white horse, and everyone had more chocolate than could ever possibly be consumed by a single human being. Don't crush my dreams by telling me that this is historically inaccurate) you'd probably kill them. Marie supposedly really inspired the urge to kill when she dropped the "Let them eat cake" bomb on the populous. Things did not go well for her after that. To be fair, her husband Louis was a bit more of the problem than she was... But the cake comment ties Marie in with birthdays, a popular location for cake. At every single birthday I ever went to during elementary school, they played the damned Macarenea. And every time they played it, we were all compelled to dance to it. And every time I danced to it, I felt a tiny piece of my post-pueberty sex appeal slipping away. And by "slipping away" I mean "fleeing screaming."

I hate the Macarena.

Anyway, apparently people at court called Marie Antoinette "ostrich bitch", which is perhaps the best insult I've discovered all week.

Pad Thai to Poltergeists.

Tigers to Tidal Waves

I could do this the easy way (tigers and tidal waves are among the many things in this world that could easily beat me in a fight), but who ever likes going the easy way? No one.

So.

In 1894, Rudyard Kipling wrote a collection of short stories called "The Jungle Book," in which a boy named Mowgli has all these adventures and ends up fighting with a tiger called Shere Khan. (You may remember this from the Disney movie or the way, WAY better live-action film from 1994 that stars Cary Elwes and John Cleese and the most adorable little boy that has ever been captured on film hugging a baby wolf while sliding down a jungle log flume...if you haven't seen it, you must. Right now. Go.) But anyway, Shere Khan is the most badass of all the animals in the jungle and all of the humans and the animals that live in/around/have ever heard of the jungle are scared of him. I know I'd be scared of him if I lived near there. I'm scared of many things, but really I have only three major fears: frostbite (if somebody can just break off a piece of your body like they can break apart a popsicle, that's just not okay), slugs (I don't care what you say, they WILL come after me and burrow and slither their way into whatever opening they can findewwwwthisisgrossIcan'tkeepwriting) and last but certainly not least, tsunamis. Tsunamis are those big, scary mega-waves that sneak-attack unsuspecting coastal towns and force all who come in contact with it to die painfully. I actually once had a dream that a tsunami came and attacked my middle school, which is weird because my middle school was built on top of an old corn field in the middle of farmlandnowhereville, Pennsylvania. But I digress. The point is, I'm scared of large pieces of ocean creeping up on me and making me die. Tidal waves are basically mini-tsunamis. They're like the tsunami's little, less-deadly but equally as scary brother.

Marie Antoinette to the Macarena.

Elmo to Elevator Music

Let me start by saying that Elmo, conceptually, kind of freaks me out. When I was little, I just sort of assumed that he was a four year-old child with werewolf syndrome and ADD. As I got older, I realized he was a muppet (like many people I thought I knew as a child) and that really should have been the end of it. But no, my mind had to go on to point out to me that Elmo is an old muppet. He is certainly not four, because he'd been around since like '73 when I was four and he's still the same age despite the fact that I'm 21. Elmo is not just a muppet, he's a vampire muppet. Even ignoring the fact that Elmo is apparently immortal, there's the ADD thing. He's not just ADD, he's just freaking the fuck out, running up to small children and pestering them with questions and then asking them to hug him. That's actually pretty creepy. And why is he doing this? Well, he lives in a back alley in a neighborhood which- in spite of being populated by large, cheery animal puppets- is a little skeevy. If you take a good look a Sesame Street it really looks like certain unfortunate parts of Holyoke. One is force to assume, then, that Elmo has gained this inordinate amount of energy and twitchiness from some sort of illicit substance. This also explains why the main toy in the likeness of Elmo screams and shakes when you touch it. Elmo's a tweaker. So I look at this and think to myself, well, Elmo's tweaking, Cookie Monster has some serious munchies, Oscar the Grouch is just one perpetual freakout and Big Bird is certainly hitting the ganja in this back alley of puppetry. Who exactly did I learn to spell from? And then there's the count who LIVES ON HUMAN BLOOD- and is, admittedly, the coolest Sesame Street Character-so none of my early education is safe!
Then of course we move on to the muppet show. We've both worked in the industry, we know what's going on behind the scenes at the muppet show!
Anyway, that's not the point. Point is, Elmo is one bouncy sumbitch. Like he's all over the place. Elmo probably needs some serious downers at this point. Morphine-grade downers. Downers make you calm, you see. Elevator music is meant to make you feel calm, but honestly nothing in the world will make me feel calm in a tiny steel box being hauled up and down through the metal digestive tract of a building, least of all The Girl from Ipanema.

Tigers to Tidal Waves.

Sushi to Salvador Dali

I hate sushi. A lot. I'm sorry if you like it, but really, when you take the time to think about it, it's disgusting. The idea of raw fish chopped up and wrapped in a jacket of rice and seaweed just does not make me happy, and I bet that the fish in question isn't so happy about it either. Fish are things that live in the sea, like whales and narwals and mermaids. At the 1920-something world's fair (I learned this in a class first semester of freshman year, so excuse me if my facts are a little bit off) Salvador Dali created an exhibition that was some kind of fucked up funhouse that was decorated on the outside with live women dressed as mermaids. This is not a joke, unfortunately. I would show you a picture, but it scares the shit out of me. I hate Salvador Dali. Much like I hate sushi.

Elmo to Elevator Music.

Beans to Beethoven

Beans, for reasons that remain unclear to me and most sane people, are the subject of several "songs". "Songs" here has developed quotes because they're more sort of rhyming mumbles, chanted by people between the ages of two and fourteen (and anyone who's drunk) who find them hilarious. You may be familiar with Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit (an especial favorite of my father's), but I'm thinking more along the lines of My Mother Said Not to Put Beans in My Ears (this one is referenced, as you know, in The Fantasticks.) Putting beans in your ears, one would assume, would make you deaf. I wouldn't know as I've never put beans in my ears because I take songs to heart. This has become dangerous in the era of rap (more than once have I regretted justifying my actions on the basis of it being "the freakin' weekend" or merely because "I'm on a boat, motherfucker, don't you ever forget", the second case being more regrettable when I have been noticeably NOT on a boat at the time.) but it is a fact of life. I DO however know what happens if you put peas in your nose, because my aunt did it when she was about three and my grandmother LOVES the story. This is the same aunt who got her tooth stuck in the faucet, but that's unrelated. I also know a story about a carrot that went where no carrot had gone before but where, lamentably, I'm pretty sure far too much produce (read:any) has gone since. Point is, putting foods where they don't belong is a practice that tends to end in the emergency room with many, MANY people laughing at you. Also, the food tends to clog up the orifice in ways that are problematic. So if you had beans in your ears, you'd end up deaf. I doubt that's why Beethoven went deaf-- who knows though, he was German, they're up to all kinds of crazy shit--but whatever happened, he couldn't hear anything by the time he died. Poor Beethoven. That sucks some major cock.

Sushi to Salvador Dali.