Markets in Everything: The Dagenham Smile

Kottke tells me that “plumber’s butt” is also known as the “Dagenham smile,” I assume due to the prevalence of building trades in the London East End.

The reference prompts me to remember a novelty shop—I think it was near Eighth Avenue and 36^th Street in Manhattan, but the NY Crank tells me I am wrong—where you could buy as it were a “prosthetic Dagenham smile,” to delight your friends at parties. Manufactured, I assume, by the same guys who produced those weird and wonderful fake abs for the fight scene at the end of Branagh’s Hamlet.

Now my friend Anon advises me that you can also buy this.

[Consider yourself lucky that I do not have a graphics-friendly broadband connection this morning.]

Too Wonderful for Words

I can't begin to embellish on the truth here (link). Go ahead, click through, you'll thank me. HT: Kottke, who is on a roll today.

Passable Cook, Opposable Thumbs…

…but not so sure about the dying part:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Source: Heinlein, via Kottke.

Or Perhaps You Knew...

Kottke is impressed that you have cell phone coverage atop Mount Everest (link).

26. Harvesting rhubarb in candlelight helps preserve its flavour.

29. The average duvet is home to 20,000 live dust mites.

34. Kryptonite exists.

55. Books used to be bound in human skin.

87. Relocating crocodiles doesn't work - they come back.

Re #55, my high school Civics teacher told me that the second edition of Rosseau's Confessions was bound in the skins of those who had not read the first.

I Bet This Works:

I bet this works: learn a foreign language by reading Harry Potter in translation (link).

Fact is, I'm almost certain it works. Or more precisely: I have a supremo edition of Herodotus’ Histories in classical Greek, with Italian on the facing pages. Pardon, that is Erodoto, Le Storie—it is the one with the splendid introduction by David Asheri, best general intro to Herodotus that I ever saw. I figure that even if I can’t read the Greek (often), at least I can make out the Italian (sometimes).

My only hesitancy is that I haven’t read Harry Potter (yet) in English.

Fn.: Years ago I met a guy who had taken a class in Gothic. Apparently the only significant Gothic text is the (incomplete) New Testament, so the students had worked with a facing-pages text: Greek on one side, Gothic on the other. When they got stumped on the Gothic, the professor would say “Read the Greek! Read the Greek!”

Hat Tip: Kottke.