A combination form of the truncated noun Pantaloon, orig. from French c. 1600 CE Panteleon (see Fericunde’s apocryphal apocalyptical text “La Mort des Jours”) previously witnessed in non-distinct Old French and Latin forms (see Divius’ “Song of Seasons”), referring to a garment bound tightly at the hips and buttocks, then leading to two distinct tunnels of cloth provided for each leg – hence the typical plural form pants instead of pant – thereby separating the legs and allowing them to operate dividually, the fabric then proceeding directly to form cuffs at the top of the shoes, typically revealing aforementioned footwear; and the adjective Antsy, of or pertaining to the actions of nervous, fluttered, unflighted, rapid-fire – literally and figuratively, see second half of definition – yet highly social insects that sometimes operate in a spirited, annoyed manner when some gargantuan monster with a great magnifying lens stands over these creatures and proceeds to burn off either various portions or the entirety of their bodies, which are typically either found in the black or red variety and to the naked eye appear smooth, shellacked and shiny though upon closer examination – bearing in mind that one should not use the examining lens to magnify direct light upon them lest they should combust – seem to have tiny cilium around their body, which is composed of thorax, mandible, antennae, pincers, abdomen, spleen, exoskeleton, egg sack, and personality, the word Ant stemming from the Old Gaelic Ænth, its first known usage being c. 974 CE, register 478 of the War of Haelrthic Tapestry, which can be found in partial exhibition at a museum along the Jersey coast.

Def 1. – (adj.) THE WILL OR NERVOUS DESIRE TO PUT ON OR REMOVE A PAIR OF PANTS FROM ONESELF, a condition oftentimes situationally exacerbated by drunkenness or lethargy.

Def 2. – (adj.) THE UNEXPRESSED WISH TO PUT ON OR REMOVE ANOTHER PERSON’S PAIR OF PANTS, a condition oftentimes situationally exacerbated by drunkenness or lethargy.

Def 3. – (adj.) A STATE OF BEING WITHOUT PANTS AND LONGING FOR A PAIR OF PANTS TO GARMENT ONESELF WITH; A STATE OF BEING WITH PANTS BUT WISHING FOR ANOTHER PAIR MORE SUITED TO IDIOSYNCRASIES OF PERSONAL TASTE AT A GIVEN MOMENT.

Because this word loosely forms its own antonym and synonym, usage should be avoided when not in direct visual contact with the person being addressed. Distinction should be made in the action of the narration in order to avoid misinterpretations. Not to be confused in given conversation with the similar sounding word PANSY (n., pron. pænz-EE), which, colloquially, may be considered an insult, though the latter word requires either a direct or indirect article in its nominal form (i.e., a pansy, the pansy), unless being used as an exclamatory (i.e., Pansy!).

WE HERE at the Fictionarium: South Florida Campus certainly do encounter quite a lot of wildlife’s finest – sharks, foxes, egrets, not to mention the most loathsome fauna of them all, the feral iguana. Unfortunately, seeing something and getting people to believe that you saw something are two different matters entirely. And so, yesterday, when I saw a telltale, slow-moving brown mass drifting near the shore, I called my father over to the window.

About five minutes more of this, and I was running down the beach, goggles and underwater camera in hand, as part of an attempt to capture the North Atlantic’s bovine on film. Some of the pictures aren’t fantastic, but the final image in the series will, I believe, confirm any future of my sightings of the aquatic kind – even when they’re simply just out the window.

ONCE AGAIN, WE FIND OURSELVES AMIDST the glamour and excitement that is New York Fashion Week—the shows! the clothes! the parties! the celebrities! the grinding out of four to six articles per day, for eight days running, after having dosed oneself with enough Venti Soy Cappuccinos to fell a bull elephant. Or, at least, so be the evidence as found on my work desk from last Fashion Week, pictured above. Aside from the image, other extended thoughts on the matter may be found here.

Wishing you and yours a very Merry Fashion Week,

GB, HR.

LATE LAST NIGHT, while wandering the aisles of CVS during one of my pre-bedtime candy constitutionals, I made what may prove to be this month’s best confectionary find. Riding fresh on the heels of late January’s Great Fresh Cola Mentos Discovery, I was extremely happy to stumble upon, and am now excited to report, that Cadbury Crème Eggs are back in stores. I repeat: Cadbury Crème Eggs are back in stores. (If I ever used multiple exclamation marks un-ironically, there’d be several here.)

Admittedly, upon first seeing these ovoid delectables, I was also somewhat troubled in that I wasn’t sure if Easter had already come and gone. So go our days here at the Fictionarium. But no matter. At least my unconditional friends (i.e., Cadbury Crème Eggs) have decided to return home! If anybody needs me, I shall be in my apartment, devouring these succulent Easter-time morsels whole. Next, I shall be constructing a green, blue, red and gold tinfoil helmet out of the wrappers, lest somebody should try to steal the crème egg-thoughts from my mind-grapes. You may need a well trained psychiatrist—if not a forklift—to come get me.

Edina Monsoon: Darling, every troop didn’t have to contain Yasmine Le Bon, the generals didn’t require big hugs after every maneuver, and the whole operation did not have to be co-ordinated to rap and Japanese avant-garde pipe music because, you know, Darling, I think if it had, the outcome might have been rather different, don’t you?

–Absolutely Fabulous.

Many have paid homage to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La belle et la bête—from Philip Glass’s “Cocteau Trilogy,” to Tony Kushner’s dream sequences in “Angels in America,” to Disney’s aptly titled cartoon musical version, Beauty and the Beast—while the film itself, starring Josette Day and Jean Morais, draws on many influences. Below is a gallery of some still images from Cocteau’s work, interspersed with engravings by Gustave Doré and paintings by Johannes Vermeer.

With coursework completed in Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Egyptology, Creative Writing, Ceramics, Behavioral Biology, and Archeology, it seems that I’ve created the perfect storm of over-education, thereby allowing me to figure out the ending to the show. This is not a joke. What Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry was to William Blake’s poetry, or John Irwin’s Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge was to William Faulkner’s oeuvre, I’m certain these posts will be to the popular television series Lost.

For instance, though some may be able to tell you that the clock from Lost (pictured above) resets to the Middle Egyptian verb “to cause death” by looking in the cloth-bolt section of Raymond Faulkner’s useful though rather basic Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, how many people would be able to tell you that this s-causative verb swd3, written with a stick-determinative at the end, adds the nuance, “to cause the death of one’s enemy/nemesis”, or would be able to provide a specific reference to this interpretation in the Wörterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache (of Doom!) (IV Band, p. 78-81, for those who wish to examine this information more closely)? Or that the i comes before the e in hieroglyphs? Or that hieroglyph is, in fact, the correct noun form, not hieroglyphics? Not many, I can tell you that.

And if I knew all that about one silly, little Middle Egyptian s-causative verb, just imagine how much I know about Anubis and temples and mysterious vapors, not to even mention what they have to do with 4 8 15 16 23 42!

This post quite naturally leads to a series of meta-questions : Is there a significance to the inclusion of Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry in the list of books I mentioned in the first paragraph? Why is it the only book that’s hyperlinked? Further, does this hyperlinked mention have something to do with William Blake? Northrop Frye? An entity that is fearful and/or symmetric? And why did I choose to publish this post (quite obviously written well in advance of this evening’s episode) at 9:03, as indicated in the little time stamp one sees when one looks up and to the left? Why not at 9:00 on the dot? Or 9:04? Or tomorrow morning? Or not at all?

Such questions and meta-questions (and meta-meta-questions, if you want to go there, which you don’t) could haunt a man till his dying day! If only somebody knew the answers to them!! Oh, right… me.

And so, in my own time and given the correct site-metric numbers, I’ll provide a speculative reading of the popular television show—the word speculative being academic-speak for, “I am undoubtedly correct.” (I always knew that the overabundance of esoteric degrees would come in handy one day!)

On Thursdays from 8 AM-12 PM, the five undergraduates studying Egyptology at Johns Hopkins would gather in the Near Eastern Studies room—nicknamed “the Fish Bowl”—of Gilman Library’s basement for four rollicking hours of uninterrupted Middle Egyptian text reading. Presented here, in a fairly regular manner, will be some of my favorites from that class.

Above are some pictures I took of the black siltstone obelisk of Nectanebo II, originally placed in the doorway at the Temple of Thoth at Hermopolis and now located in the Great Court of the British Museum. For the ancient Egyptians, obelisks were very heavy versions of the modern day political poster, their symbolism operating as a proclamation of the glory, power, and dedication of the pharaoh (truth be told, it didn’t really matter which pharaoh, because very few Egyptians knew how to read hieroglyphs); many obelisks contained inscriptions declaring that their permanence would ensure the might of their ruler. In Nectanebo’s case, this can be found in a passage that contains the s-causative verb/subject/object construction s‘h‘.n.f  thn (Detail 1), my very loose translation being:

• ‘h‘ = verb “to set up,” therefore:
• s + verb = “to cause to set up” or “to erect”
• + n = past tense
• + f = subject “he” ≈ ref. to Nectanebo II.
• + thn = the noun “obelisk,” operating as an object
•         ≈ … He erected the obelisk [beside his house of ...]

Unfortunately for Nectanebo—and, for that matter, most obelisk-erecting pharaohs—these tall and pointy political statements seemed to make nifty little souvenirs for the British and French armies (the far more portable snow-globe had yet to be invented). There are ancient Egyptian obelisks in Central Park, Turkey, Poland, eight in Rome, and four in London—one of these being Nectanebo’s at the British Museum. Thus, an inscription on the base of Nectanebo’s obelisk reveals how it arrived in England. And, for those of you unversed in hieroglyphic languages, the inscription luckily doesn’t require any reading knowledge of Middle Egyptian, as it dates from the latter half of the seventeenth century CE (Details 2 and 3):

Presented by King George & Captured in Egypt by the British Army.