Like haikus? Like maps? There's a website that blends them both.

The creators at Satellite Studio created OpenStreetMap Haiku, a site that whips up a brand new haiku for every single address, neighborhood, town, etc. you place your cursor over.*

As the creative team explains in a blog post:

"Looking at every aspect of the surroundings of a point, we can generate a poem about any place in the world. The result is sometimes fun, often weird, most of the time pretty terrible. Also probably horrifying for haiku purists (sorry)."

Inspired by artist Naho Matsuda's EVERY THING EVERY TIME project, which used data points of one city to create short poems, the Satellite Studio team followed suit--albeit on a massive global scale.

The myriad of nearby data points from a selected spot include grocery stores, schools, bus stop locations, etc., to generate the haiku. They even include current weather and time of day, which leads to a potentially new haiku again and again for a selected spot.

Some randomly selected locations checked just now:

Boston, MA @ 28 State Street:
A bird in the tree,
Meet at Court Street, 1
The blurs of lifetimes


Paris, France @ 3 Avenue de l'Opera:
White paint on concrete
Quite chilly
Dear You


Tokyo, Japan @ JP Tower:
Commuting back home
A vacant lot
Warm air from the subway entrance


Checking local places I personally know, OpenStreetMap Haiku generated a variety of poems suggesting again and again that it was "a sad day."

Either the haiku generator is feeling down in the dumps or I need to reevaluate where I live.


*It works well in populated nations. But some random sparse locations, like Micronesia, weren't worth a haiku according to the map. Let's have a moment of silence for Micronesia then.

Randomness Corner: Europe is running out of butter, panic to ensue.

Soon to be a mythical thing to tell your grandchildren about.

Grandmothers in the remote, bucolic countrysides and elitist chefs at fine dining establishments across Europe are sharing a similar panic this week.

A report from the Federation des Entrepreneurs de la Boulangerie (that's French for bakery somethingoranother) says global demand for butter has skyrocketed, while supply in Europe has dipped, creating a butter shortage crisis.

"Butter shortages appear to be a real threat by the end of the year," said the Baking Homeboys, noting that brioche buns, tarts, and croissants might see prices drastically increased. That's right. That sound you just heard was a grown Parisian man crying in the streets. The daily habit of smoking filterless cigarettes and having a croissant at the corner cafe will cease to exist possibly. The French economy will single-handedly be more crippled than during World War II.

Remember the good ol' days when butter was in abundance and on crystal trays.

The European Commission's Milk Observatory (a real thing, I promise) claims that butter stockpiles in Europe have dropped 98% in the past year, all while Europeans have increased their annual intake of butter by a half-pound in the past half-decade. Saturated fat in stick form has never been as alluring.

Meanwhile, Peder Tuborgh, the CEO of U.K dairy megapower Arla, recently told the BBC that there might not be enough milk and cream come Christmas.

First the French are taken out on croissants, and now the Brits won't have custards and puddings come Christmas. Thank God the Germans are alcoholics and only focus on beer. If they had a butter and milk fetish like the rest of Europe, the entire European continent might crumble soon.

The book translated into the most languages is...

...The Little Prince*, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, which was just translated into its 300th different language.

The title of the book should sound familiar, and there's a solid 50/50 shot you were forced to read it in high school or in a freshman college class, where you likely slacked off, so things are foggy, but you entirely recognize the title from somewhere. (No, it wasn't made into a Disney movie. Yet.)

The novella, written in 1943 by the Frenchman de Saint Exupéry, has found a worldwide following in the decades since its creation. The 300th translated language of the book was in Hassanya, a North African version of Arabic, popular with Moorish tribes in southern Morocco, which is where Antoine de Saint Exupéry once lived and worked at an aéropostale** for France.

That said, there are an estimated 6,500 spoken languages in the world, and 4,500 of those are spoken widely. So, yeah, The Little Prince has a ways to go.



*The Bible and other religious texts have more translations, but they're not really gripping page turners written on a whim for artistic merit, y'know?

**Before it was a retail store for preppy people with way too much discretionary income to burn, an aéropostale was a French airmail company. I assume they were fashionably dressed, though.

Mark Twain's unfinished children's "book" is now finished.

To say Mark Twain has an "unfinished" children's book soon to be published is a bit fast and loose with the facts.

Doubleday Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, plans to release the lighthearted Twain fare on September 26, 2017, after author Philip Stead and illustrator Erin Stead worked to complete the book.

According to Doubleday, the story--The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine--"follows a young boy who eats the flower sprouted by a magical seed and gains the ability to talk to animals. From there, the boy and his new animal friends go off on a wild adventure to rescue a kidnapped prince."

So, it's like Jack and the Beanstalk meets Doctor Doolittle.

In 1879, while the family was visiting Paris, Twain apparently told his daughters a bedtime story following the plot of Prince Oleomargarine. Afterward, Twain wrote 16-pages of notes on a potential full-length book, but left it at that. For over 130-years, the notes remained lost until scholar John Bird discovered them at the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California at Berkeley in 2011.

Somehow, 16-pages of Twain's notes evolved into a 152-page storybook with illustrations by two other people.

Notes = 152-page book.

A "Twain" book.

Notes.

Based on this metric, I have written tens of thousands of books. It's impressive, if I do say so.

Fashionable Words: Cahoots

[Sometimes words die out of fashion. But sometimes those words are good words, words with a certain appeal that can't be denied forever. Those words should be brought back into fashion, used frequently and used often. These are those words.]


Word:

Cahoots


Definition:  verb / noun

1.)  go cahoots:  To share equally; become partners

2.)  in cahoots:  In partnership; in conspiracy with one another


Origin:

America likes to take delightful European things and bastardize them somehow, like Wonder Bread and microwaveable cheese product. This is why America can't have nice things.

Le sigh.

In the case of cahoots, the word first appeared in 1829. While the exact origin is unknown, the word was born as an Americanism of one of two similar--although much more debonair--French words cahute or cohorte.

Cahute is a 12th century French word that means a cabin or hut. (Think: Two people sharing a hut, possibly eating French bread and some aged Roquefort. And wine. Always wine.)

America is still trying to figure out how to bastardize Roquefort.

Some believe cahoots evolved from cohorte, the French word that also created the English cohort, meaning "companions." Except the modern English cohort has shady undertones in nefarious behavior. Indeed, you might be in cahoots with your cohort.

In turn, the French cohorte evolved from Latin. A cohort was one of ten divisions of a legion in the Roman army, usually made of 300 to 600 men. You definitely could not fit that many men in a cahute.

What I'm really trying to say is that Americans made up a word and no one has an idea how it came about--but let's assume it's fancy and French.

'Mericuh!


Most obscure UrbanDictionary.com definition of 'cahoots':

6.)  The sound an owl makes when it sneezes.

I beg to differ with the upstanding people at UrbanDictionary. Here's video of an owl who clearly needs some Allergra.



Not going to lie--I'm a little disappointed an owl sneeze sounds so dainty.


Used in a sentence:

"Sven and his cohort, Bjorn, were in cahoots to eat all the Cheez Whiz while the other campers slept in the cahute."


Why you should use 'cahoots' in your everyday life:

It's the illegitimate lovechild of a Parisian brasserie and an American dumpster fire.


Word Awesomeness Scale (1-to-5):

Four.

It loses a point for being the name of a British boy band.

British teenage boys are sweaty, fashionable.

There's a 95% chance that wherever you are reading this in the world your body is slowly devolving into a gelatinous puddle from the summer of 2016. Teenage boys in Great Britain feel you. Or they would, that is, if they didn't feel like they were going to keel over from heatstroke first.

Uniforms are required at the Longhill High School in Rottingdean, East Sussex, which led to nearly twenty boys swapping out their long, heavy pants for their school gym shorts after a recent heat wave.

This is England though, where a love of elderly women wearing tiaras is only matched by a national sense of schadenfreude--so the shorts-adorned boys were told to wear pants, sent home, or kept in isolation all day at school.

According to the BBC, the boys were told that they needed to "wear any part of the agreed school uniform." In a genius move, four boys came to school the next day wearing the school approved skirts for girls, which flummoxed Kate Williams, the head teacher. She allowed it. As a result, ten additional boys joined in wearing the school approved skirt the following day in an act of solidarity and/or cooled gams.

The Argus, a local newspaper, quotes Williams' subtle displeasure. "Students have access to water in order to keep themselves hydrated," she said. "We have made reasonable steps to ensure that classrooms are as comfortable as possible."

Hydration = Least enthusiastic air conditioning method ever. Remember that, kids. Don't start asking for ice now or whatnot. This isn't France.

Rare Thomas Jefferson letter is historic, mildly sassy.

You've heard similar stories before. Someone's rummaging around in an attic, finds some old, forgotten boxes, and discovers a piece of history worth $325,000. This inspires you to immediately run to your attic or basement where hopes of wonderful riches are quickly dismissed upon learning you only have old musty sweaters, 8-track cassettes, and dashed dreams. Que sera, sera.

And so the story goes again. A family is Mississippi recently discovered a letter in their attic that was written by Thomas Jefferson shortly after the War of 1812. Jefferson wrote the letter to then-U.S. Ambassador to France William Crawford, a relative of the modern Mississippi family.

In the letter, up for sale by The Raab Collection, Jefferson remarks about the Treaty of Ghent, which effectively ended the war and which was written in his Monticello home. The letter also offers Jefferson's thoughts on Napoleon--who had just lost his own war with Britain occurring the same time in Europe as the War of 1812 was raging in North America. According to Jefferson, Napoleon's "downfall was illy timed for us. It gave to England an opportunity to turn full handed on us, when we were unprepared. No matter. We can beat her on our own soil…"

Oooh, sassy passive aggression! Jefferson doing a little chest puffing and dismissive hand waving at both the British and Napoleon in one sentence.

All of Jefferson's sass can be yours for the sale price of $325,000.

But double-check your basement first. Just in case.

Fashionable Words: Malinger

[Sometimes words die out of fashion. But sometimes those words are good words, words with a certain appeal that can't be denied forever. Those words should be brought back into fashion, used frequently and used often. These are those words.]


Word:

Malinger



Definition:    verb

Exaggerate or feign illness, especially to avoid work.



Origin:

There's little the English and French agree on except drinking, fancy hats, and an unwavering passion for Gérard Depardieu. You can't find sexy, morbidly obese, sixty-something character actors just anywhere after all. Right, Gérard?

Damn right!

The English also love borrowing the occasional French word to use in their own vocabulary, such as malinger(er) or malingering. If there's anything the world can unite behind it's being a deadbeat.

The English malinger comes from the very similar French malingre, which means to be sickly. In turn, malingre has just evolved from the prefix mal- (bad) and Old French word heingre, which roughly means haggard. "Bad haggard"? That's right--loosely translated Old French can also sound like the worst name for a country music band.

Any thoughts, Gérard?

We all are shocked, Gérard.

Malinger first gained traction in the early 19th century, and then was quickly adopted by both psychologists (as a disorder) and the American military (for soldiers feigning illness), creating potentially the only time those two institutions shall ever be spoken of in the same sentence.

Indeed, malingering can lead to a court martial in the American armed forces. No coincidence then that the word spiked in its everyday common American usage around 1918, right as World War One raged. The word makes a second spike in use post-World War Two thirty years later.

No, Gérard, not everyone has your spitfire when it comes to war.

Today the word is used either in upper crust society parties, said with a jaw jutted out, or at your shrink's office to explain why you always have an excuse for skipping work because of that [[wink]] chronic bad back of yours.



Most obscure UrbanDictionary.com definition of malingerer:

[verbatim]
1.  A person who fakes an illness or injury to get out of work. Who is commonly know for screwing over his or her brothers so they have to work more overtime.

Sounds like a sibling rift somewhere, Gérard!



Used in a sentence:

Gérard was never called a malingerer with his strong work ethic!



Why you should use malingerer in your everyday life:

We all know that one person in our life who's a deadbeat and has an excuse for everything.



Word Awesomeness Scale (1-to5):

Five!

Calling a deadbeat a malingerer is like using an insult wrapped in satin.

Right, Gérard?

Sounds about right.

Napoleonic war diary found in secondhand bookstore in Tasmania.

That's how humans used to write.

Royal Engineer John Squire was a noted soldier for the king's military, a learned man of good standing with a penchant for fine handwriting. This led to a diary detailing his stops in battle during the crown's fight with Napoleon's war across the continent. Any sort of diary two centuries old is valuable, never mind one of an officer from the Napoleonic War.

Fast forward 200-years, and Squire's diary was discovered in a cupboard--stacked amongst old, dusty books--in the back room of  bookstore in Tasmania of all places. And no one knows exactly how it ended up there.

According to the BBC, the bookstore owner believes "the journal could have been in the shop for 20 years, but no-one [know's] how it arrived. A working theory is that it arrived with the colonists who established Van Diemen's Land." Van Diemen's Land was the former name of Tasmania shortly after it became known to Europeans in 1642.

Squire was no slouch, with a military resume that saw him at British campaigns in Egypt, including being present when the Rosetta Stone was handed over to the crown. He later spent time in South America, Sweden, and Portugal, where he eventually died of a fever.

Yet, strangely enough, his long lost diary might have been a better traveler than he ever was--however it was that it traveled.



FUN FACT!: After being discovered in 1642, Tasmania was thought to be part of mainland Australia. Somehow, despite a settlement long established on the southeastern tip, it took until 1798 for an explorer to circumnavigate the island and realize, you know, duh.


Photo:  abc.net.au

Some Famous Writer Once Lived Here: Oxford, Mississippi

Some Famous Writer Once Lived Here is where we check out cities or towns that--you guessed it--a famous writer once lived. Picture the illegitimate lovechild between the US Census report and a tourist pamphlet from a local chamber of commerce. What's it like there today? Here's where we find out.



Today:  William Faulkner once lived in Oxford, Mississippi:

William Faulkner has been called the Shakespeare of America. This is startling because it's difficult to picture Shakespeare with a southern accent and brandishing a shotgun.

At some point in the last hundred years, Mississippi gave up the title to most frightening American state to Alabama after a lengthy struggle where multiple lives were lost in a muddin' fiasco involving pickup trucks and four-wheelers largely adorned in Confederate flags. No one knows what happened specifically, but rumors abound that it involved light beer, six brain cells, and Alabama coming out on top. Strangely, it was a high point in Mississippi's history.

Alabama celebrates victory and defeat at the same time.

While you can still hear the frightening pluck of banjos and subtle din of monster trucks in the distance, Mississippi does have some fairly polite, even classy areas largely infiltrated by a strange phenomenon called "education."

Although anyone who has ever seen a professor wear a paisley sweater vest knows education can be frightening, too.


The basics of Oxford, Mississippi:

Location:
Far north from the Gulf coast, Oxford is only 85-miles away via major highways, or 78-miles via the minor variety, from Memphis, TN, reminding people that while it might not be Xanadu or desirable, Memphis is nearby and sure as hell isn't Mississippi.

Do not confuse Oxford, MS, with Oxford, England. Common mistake. But Oxford, England, is 4,336 miles away and involves heavy amounts of dry humor and rejoicing in the rain.

2010 Census:

Population: 18,916 people make up Oxford, up 61% since 2000. Almost 1-in-3 residents resides in poverty though, proving that--oh, wow--oh, god. A third are in poverty? One of the best parts of Mississippi has that much poverty? Oh, Christ. I give up. Just continue on without me. I'm done.

Racial Makeup: In 2010, 13 people claimed to be of Hawaiian or Pacific Islander backgrounds. That's up from 2 people during the 2000 census. Those 2 people were horribly, horribly lost from rogue Google Maps coordinates, it appears.


What to see, what to do in Oxford, Mississippi:

The top thing to do in Oxford, according to TripAdvisor? Visit the University of Mississippi! Nothing says a sexy vacation quite like spending all day roaming a random college campus in 90-degree heat, sipping bourbon, and yelling something about rebel pride. That'll be the envy of everyone on your Instagram feed.

The University of Mississippi goes by the nickname Ole Miss, which they claim is from their old yearbook title, the Ole Miss Annual, and has nothhhhing to do with slaves calling the wife of a plantation owner "ole miss." As if Mississippi would ever do something subtly racist. It's practically the ACLU of the south after all.

No Rhett Butler here.

There's also William Faulkner's estate, Rowan Oak. It's like Gone with the Wind's Tara Plantation, except with less Scarlett O'Hara chest-thumping, and Rhett Butler actually doesn't give a damn and never wants to be seen at Rowan Oak. For $5 you can tour the house and remember all of those Faulkner books you made sure never to read in college.

Do you like feeling depressed? There's the Confederate Cemetery in town. Yes. That Confederacy. Says Regina from Memphis on TripAdvisor, it is "wonderful history." Oh, Regina, no matter how you approach cemeteries or slavery, no one ever pauses and thinks, "Well, you know, that's some little slice of wonderfulness right there."

Feeling like a little church revival? Swing on into College Hill Presbyterian Church, famous for its antebellum architecture and where Faulkner got married. Are you a Presbyterian? Do you want to be? No? You're making this difficult for all involved.

When in doubt, there's always Wal-Mart located about two minutes outside of the University of Mississippi's campus. Phew.


Where to eat in Oxford:

Are you tired of Colonel Sanders and Kentucky's claim to fried chicken? Visit Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken then. Do you know Gus? No. Neither do I. Is Gus lying about being world famous? Let's just agree Gus has overstepped his proclamation just a tad.

Ajax Diner sells fried food as well, but also has toothpicks in the ceiling. I'm not sure why, but if the food doesn't sell you, low expectations might do the trick.

Looking for awkward names for your restaurant of choice? There's Handy Andy. Admit it--you raised an eyebrow wondering what Andy's getting handsy over, too. Is he good with general contracting work? Sure, let's assume that.


Isn't Aubigny-sur-Nère, France, a sister city of Oxford?

Yes. And like most siblings, it really doesn't want to talk much.

Second guessing its parentage.

William Faulkner's thoughts on his hometown:

(In reference to Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional stand-in for Oxford in his books.)

"I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse."

Julia Child's home in Provence is now a vacation retreat and yoga studio.

Built in 1963, Julia Child's former home in Provence is now being turned into a cooking school and yoga studio. This is a natural progression from the French Chef ideal, as nothing channels your inner calming chakra like thoughts of a 6'2" chef wielding a meat mallet and cast iron frying pan.

For $2,650 per person, six guests will spend five days cooking and practicing yoga at La Pitchoune, the summer home of the famed chef. Child, author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, personally designed the kitchen which remains relatively untouched over fifty years after its creation. Peg board walls well-adorned with pots and pans of every style still remain properly placed for use.

The yoga angle is the confusing part though, but I assume all celebrity chefs have some sort of gimmick. Like Jacques Pépin doing a spin class or Anthony Bourdain operating krav maga courses. No one understood the brutality of krav maga until they saw Julia bludgeon a Cornish game hen on a cutting board though.

Amherst College no longer acknowledges its namesake.

Lord Jeff pondering who to kill next.

Lord Jeffery Amherst was a colonial-era military commander for Great Britain in North America and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces for the crown during the Seven Years' War. In case you're foggy on your numbered-year wars, the Seven Years' War was between those two quarrelsome jamokes, England and France. Lord Amherst was a key figure in the war, where he oversaw key victories in then-French territories like Montreal and Quebec City.

Lord Jeffery Amherst was also not a friendly and benevolent man. He wanted to eradicate the Native American population by dishing out smallpox-coated blankets and implored Great Britain to "try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." Swell guy.

But benevolence in warfare doesn't win you fame, and fame doesn't exist 250 years ago unless you have a variety of cities and towns in America named after you, especially in the northeast. Take Amherst, MA, named after Lord Jeffery and home to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst College, and Emily Dickinson's agoraphobic ghost.

Except now Amherst College is looking to distance themselves from any association to Lord Jeffery and his use as the school's unofficial mascot. As a number of students, school officials, and the New York Times are quick to point out, Amherst College wasn't named after Lord Jeffery. The college was named after the town! Not the same thing!

((.......................pause........................))

Try not to get a headache overthinking this one. There's a thousand arguments that could be made to kick Lord Jeffery to the curb, but your head will throb if you try to disassociate the town and college's naming origins.

Vending machine has complete lack of chips and soda, instead pumps out short stories for you to read.

The squat orange-and-black vending machines, located throughout the French city of Grenoble, are an attempt to encourage citizens and visitors alike to put down their electronic devices and spend a few minutes reading. (...writes the blogger on his electronic device to the individual reading this on on their own electronic device...)

The machines are user-friendly and straight-forward to use--with three buttons of 1, 3, 5 to choose from, which signify how many minutes an individual has available to read. After selecting a button/time, everything is left to chance. Printed out on a piece of paper that resembles a receipt, the short story might be joyful, sad, introspective, fantasy, romantic, or any other category a writer might conjure up.

The company behind the idea, Short Edition, has the backing of Grenoble city officials. Eight different machines are located throughout the area, including libraries and city hall, with stories created by members of the Short Edition company and community.

Alas, you and I don't live in Grenoble, so we're going to have to keep living off our electronic devices and using vending machines for what they're made for: giving us love handles.


photo: psfk.com

'Charlotte's Web' reimagined with Albert Camus instead of Charlotte.

American xenophobia means if you mention the name Albert Camus to 100 of your fellow citizens, 99 of them won't have a clue who you're talking about. The one person who does know is very likely related to Albert Camus, and even then they're probably probably going to hesitate before saying yes.

But good ol' Al is a stalwart standby here, mainly because of the way he died--yet he won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and made a name for his depressing view of the world and a fantastic ability to chain smoke.

So someone over at McSweeney's decided to reimagine Charlotte's Web, swapping out Charlotte the spider with Albert the philosopher.

And just like Camus, the story is short, to the point, and a little bit delightfully absurd.

Twenty academic books that changed the world--at least according to the U.K.

In advance of Academic Book Week next month, a panel of librarians, booksellers, and publishers in the U.K. have whittled down a list of two hundred academic books to twenty, creating a list they claim are the tomes that changed the world. Now, they want the general public to vote which book is the singularly most influential book that stands heads and shoulders above the rest.

Two works of the twenty are fiction: George Orwell's 1984, and the complete works of Shakespeare. (I gather they couldn't pick just one.)

The remaining eighteen books are all nonfiction, with a heavy leaning toward writers from Europe, and especially the United Kingdom. Indeed, only two writers are Americans by birth (Rachel Carson and Germaine Greer), and two were born elsewhere and moved to the United States at a later point in life (Albert Einstein and Thomas Paine).

Poor France only has one writer on the list: Simone de Beauvoir

I know I'm shocked--stunned, really--that a bunch of British experts find no use for anything French.

The complete list:

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Orientalism by Edward Said

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Complete Works by William Shakespeare

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson

The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

The Republic by Plato

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Ways of Seeing by John Berger



Don't kid yourself. No one from Asia, Africa, or South America ever wrote anything that changed the world. Everyone in the U.K. knows this.

Fashionable Words: Chicanery

[Sometimes words die out of fashion. But sometimes those words are good words, words with a certain appeal that can't be denied forever. Those words should be brought back into fashion, used frequently and used often. These are those words.]


Word:
Chicanery

Definition:  noun
The use of trickery to gain a political, financial, or legal purpose.


Origin:
Chicanery's most immediate connection is the nearly identical French word chicanerie--because if the English can't learn to steal French cuisine, they might as well steal French words.

Things didn't evolve too quickly it seems, because if we go back further it appears chicanerie just came from the 16th century word chicaner, which meant "to quibble." That's right, we've gone 300+ years and the word has barely changed. And you thought service at a Parisian restaurant was slow.

From here is where things get murky, with dictionary after dictionary tossing out the always classic "origin unknown." But one etymological blog states that chicaner first appeared in a poem by François Villon (born in 1431), who was a medieval poet. If you're a bit rusty on your medieval poets, you get a pass on this one--but Villon led a life of crime and intrigue until he disappeared sometime around 1463.

Let's go to the highlights!

On June 5, 1455, Villon had a scuffle while in the company of a variety of other gentlemen, including a priest by the name of Philippe Chermoye. As if out of a stereotypical Hollywood adaptation, daggers were drawn, and while people were casually being stabbed in a delightful brouhaha (Chermoye is claimed to have drawn blood first), Villon apparently went big-time, stabbed Chermoye, then grabbed a stone and clobbered the priest over the head, who later died from his injury. Villon fled. A medieval version of a hit-and-run, if you will.

Let's pretend it looked something like this.

Villon was banished, but King Charles VII (best known as the king of France during Joan of Arc's hay day) pardoned him after receiving two petitions that said Chermoye forgave Villon before he died. Rii-i-i-ight. That might have been the head wound talking, but, hey, you take what you can get. As a result, Villon went back home to Paris.

Being the little rapscallion he was, Villon was allegedly involved in the theft of five hundred gold crowns from the chapel of the Collège de Navarre with a group of other thieves sometime around Christmas of 1456. Clearly a very merry Christmas for Villon. Months passed before the theft was discovered, and after one thief was arrested, he claimed Villon was the mastermind behind the crime. Villon was banished again, and apparently wandered for four years--with some scholars believing he led a gang of thieves during this time.

By 1461, Villon popped up again, this time writing that he had been in prison for the summer--which was practically a vacation by Villon's standards. A year later, in 1462, he was arrested again for theft. Villon enjoyed a little five finger discount with everything in life it seems. He made bail though--but then promptly found himself involved in a street fight and was arrested again. With this arrest, the old Christmas theft of five hundred gold crowns was brought up--and Villon was found guilty and ordered to hang. Yet, lucky as he was, he was pardoned by parliament and banished again on January 5, 1463.

Hey, baby Jesus wasn't using it.

And that's where Villon's story ends. He disappears from history. No trace exists as to what happened to him after that. Because I'm sure he went on to live a pious life and didn't have any enemies that would do him harm.


Most obscure UrbanDictionary.com definition of chicanery:
(verbatim)

2. it's a place where Chicanos (mexican-americans) go to school to learn trades.

(Ed.:  As if that doesn't sound a bit racist.)


Used in a sentence:

That shady gentleman used legal chicanery to be found not guilty in court.


Why you should use chicanery in your everyday life:

It sounds like it should be the name of some sort of candy--most likely a brand of licorice.


Word Awesomeness Scale (1-to-5):

Four

It gets a one point deduction for the whole murderer angle.

Punk band using the poetry of a monk as their lyrics.

Because you never really respected a monk's poetry until you heard it warbled by a punk band.















What's a 'French style fur'? Are there Italian style furs? Slovenian? Cambodian? I'd imagine a French style fur smokes filterless cigarettes and enjoys a fine red wine.

Learning to speak English on a French commuter train.

Dubbed English on Track by French rail officials, the program teaches intimate, small groupings of students how to speak English in conversational style, all while commuting to Paris on high speed trains.

This program, notes NPR, comes after a recent report that France ranks 35th on a worldwide study of English proficiency, behind varied nations like Russia, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Spain, South Korea, Italy--and even right behind China. This places France in the "Low Proficiency" category.

Says passenger-student Giles Hallais to NPR, "Before the course, we were sleeping in the train in the morning. [...] So I prefer practicing English."

Admittedly, the French have never been known for their coffee.

Famous Writers Shirtless: Benjamin Péret

Writers are never known as the studliest or sexiest of people, but that doesn't stop them from showing some skin for the camera once in awhile.

So, occasionally we'll post some literary beefcake for your perusal.

Today: Benjamin Péret (w/Remedios Varo)

Here we see the famous French poet feverishly smoking a cigarette while pondering which muscle group to avoid working out next.

In the background, surrealist painter Remedios Varo is inspired to create a melting landscape for her next work of art.

Germans are heavily borrowing English words, and this has some German linguistics experts worried.

Germany has borrowed or adopted 10,000 English words into their own language since 1990. At least that's what NPR authoritatively says, as they apparently stood listening at the Berlin Wall as it fell and haven't stopped counting since.

Holger Klatte, the spokesman for the German Language Society, explains his concern to NPR.

"Languages do tend to affect one another, but the influence of English in Germany is so strong that Germans are having a hard time advancing their own vocabulary," he says.

Klatte says that can be a problem for Germans who may not know any English.

"The second world war and Nazi times have led Germans to downplay the importance of their language," he says. "Unlike the French, Finns and Poles — they promote their languages a lot more than we do."


If I'm Finnish, I'm suing whoever's promoting my language and demanding a refund. Even the Muppets chose the Swedish Chef over anything Finnish.

Anatol Stefanowitsch, an English linguistics professor at the Free University of Berlin, tells NPR that Germans are just overemphasizing the matter. As Stefanowitsch notes, roughly 25% of the German language comes from borrowed words. English, by comparison, borrows 40-80% of its words from other languages--and it's a healthy, robust language doing just fine.

"No language has ever disappeared because it borrowed words," Stefanowitsch says.

Quite true. It might become a hot mess like English, but it never disappeared.