Present Imperfect

Lock and load.

He Totally Kochalkaed My Ass

My browser's home page is set to James Kochalka's Sketchbook Diaries so I can see a new comic every day. Today, the site's accompanying message board featured a couple of stories James wrote when he was a kid. They are way better than the short story I'm working on now.

I'm afraid I suck.

Imposing trollmaid seeks foolish mortal for wild night of debauchery. No fatties.

Okay, I admit it. I sometimes Google my name. But I defy any of you to tell me you have not done the same!

My site still doesn't display in a search of my full name, but Bronwyn Jones is a very popular name. It also happens to be the name of some Australian actress who appears naked on many Web sites. These sites seem to have cornered the market on a Google search of my name. However, a few years ago, those crafty pornographers did drop the ball and let the registration lapse on bronwynjones.com, hence the site you see here today. Yay for laziness!

Anyway, today I found some interesting Bronwyn sites on the Web. (Besides the porn, that is.) And as a tribute to Bronwyns throughout our cyber-universe, I am proud to present the first (and possibly last) installment of...

The Bronwyn Files
A random selection of Bronwyn-related search results

Did you know Margaret Cho's dog is named Bronwyn? Now you do. Read all about her in Margaret Cho's Weblog.

This is excellent. It's a Dark Shades World of Darkness campaign (RPG, don't ask me) profile of Dame Bronwyn, "a tall, imposing knight of the Seelie court, but not one of haughty mien. She has the blue skin and tiny horns that mark her as a trollmaid, but her armor and the blade at her side suggest she is not one to be trifled with." Damn straight.

Holy crap! I'm a Portland-based indie band! I wonder if I know The Decemberists.

Stay tuned, kiddies, for more strange-but-true tales...if I remember to do this again. Otherwise, I don't know, go outside and take a walk or something. You look pale.

Which One Brought Potato Salad?

My new Page-a-Day calendar (a Christmas gift from my mother) has just informed me that today marks the Feast of the Epiphany, the day the three wise guys finally found the baby G. and gifted him up good and proper.

So happy Twelfth Night, everybody, and remember: When in doubt, ask for directions.

Whiskey. Neat. OED Back.

Today's New York Times features an article about the runaway British bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. I have not read this book, but I already think it is great for two reasons: I have a serious aversion to what Jasper Fforde calls "grocer's apostrophes," and the joke the title is based on is my all-time favorite joke. Here's how the NYT breaks it down:

The book is dedicated to "the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg," who, Ms. Truss writes, "in 1905 demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution." As for its title, it comes from a joke that begins, "A panda walks into a cafe."

The panda orders a sandwich, eats it and then fires a gun into the air. On his way out, he tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual at the confused bartender and directs him to the entry marked "Panda."

Whereupon the bartender reads: "Panda. Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

The version I always tell, however, involves a panda walking into a western-style saloon, throwing back a bowl of peanuts, shooting a gun into the air and walking back out. The bewildered bartender follows him out and asks him what the performance was all about. The panda replies "look me up in the dictionary." (To me, that's actually the funniest part of the joke.)

The bartender walks back into the bar and retrieves a dictionary where the entry for "Panda" reads "...eats shoots and leaves." Now, my version works fine without the punctuation angle because I tell it aloud. However, my version strains credibility not because it features a panda walking into a bar, but because there is really no reason for a bartender to keep a dictionary handy.

Germans Pass Along the Darndest Folklore!

Just browsing the Internet this morning, I found this article on fairy tales by A.S. Byatt. Now, we all know the Grimm brothers' Cinderella where the stepsisters fill the glass slipper with blood by trying to jam it onto their feet after hacking off their toes and heels (don't we?), but this one is way more frightening:

The most terrifying tale I have ever read in the Grimms is a one-paragraph tale about the obstinate child, in German "das eigensinnige Kind", which means literally the child with its own mind. In German a child is neuter in gender. All we are told about this one is that it would not do what its mother wanted, that God had therefore no goodwill towards it, and it died. When it was buried, it kept pushing its arm up through the earth. Until its mother came and knocked its arm down with a stick. After that it was for the first time peaceful under the earth. The real terror of that is implicit in its bleak little form and the complete absence of character (we do not know if the child was a boy or a girl). It doesn't feel like a warning to naughty infants. It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.

I found a translation of this whimsical little tale, too:

The Willful Child
Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed.

He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn't help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and as soon as she had done that, it withdrew, and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth.

Then I learned that this is just one of many "Hand from the Grave" tales so popular in the German folk tradition. Check 'em out! Some highlights include "The Withered Hand in the Church at Bergen," "A Mother Disciplines Her Deceased Child" and the time-honored favorite, "The Parent Murderer of Salzwedel."

Good times.