A few entries from the Limerick Dictionary

This dictionary's written in rhyme,

and the results are quite sublime.

For a limerick form,

in this work is the norm,

Just don't turn to it every time!

Some gem entries:

"A deadeye's a marvelous shot;
Deadeye Dick has a Vonnegut plot;
Plus, a deadeye, you'll note,
Is a block on a boat,
And a line can be run through its slot."

"The abacus, pearl without price:
An ancient computing device.
Sliding beads strung on rods,
One can figure the odds.
You ask: "Why's it still used?" It's precise."

"Coney Island had sideshows and rides
On its boardwalk, and plenty besides:
Boats that rode in the dark,
And, in Steeplechase Park,
An ingenious assortment of slides."

"I'm efficient—I'm sure you'll agree:
I can juggle and dance on a ski,
Blow my nose, pen a rhyme...
At the very same time!
I'm so talented. Jealous of me?"

OK, maybe it's not such a hot idea. But regardless, are they going to finish this thing or what? It's only up the the E's.

A few quotes from the lexicon of Francis E. Dec, crank

Francis E. Dec was a New Yorker who had a relatively normal life as an Air Force radio operator, Bachelor of Arts graduate, and lawyer, until he was overtaken by paranoid schizophrenia and drew out the remainder of his years as a harmless crank who wrote a series of documents detailing a vast conspiracy-theory worldview which he mailed out and otherwise shared. We're talking racism, sexism, homophobia, religious conspiracies, mind-control rays, the works.

That bein' said so, his ravings make for a fun little theme park of kooky whimsy.

He's since achieved underground cult status, with tributes popping up everywhere from the Church of the Subgenius to Discordianism to popular music, including fictionalized versions of his works and a whole fan site, seen here.

So, a few terms to know if you want to study Francis' worldview:

The Brain-Bank Cities:

Cities existing on the far side of the moon we never see and which house your moon-brain (your real brain) of the Computer God. Primarily based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, your moon-brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold Brainwash Radio inculcating conformist propaganda. As such, these cities and the moon-brains housed in them are a vital part of the Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy.

The Computer Brain Machines:

These secret machines are used by the Gangster Government for the purpose of filling out all of its paperwork, such as taxes, forms, bills, etc.  The speed of these machines is 2000 words a minute and they actually do the work which is supposedly done by Government Employees.

Infrared Crusader Priests:

These troops, created by the Computer God, were several hundred years ago responsible for the conquering and degeneration of the Slovene People, as well as for the savage butchery and experimentation upon thousands of innocents in order to perfect the process of implanting Frankenstein Controls inside the human skull. The Crusader Priests wore black robes and armor, with night-vision plastic lenses built into their helmets. They also used weapons smeared with Poison Nerve Jelly and conducted mass-exterminations by burning vast fields dusted with inflammable poison nerve gas powder Prussic Acid. Their headquarters were specially designated, fortified monasteries. Their modern-day successors include both black-robed judges and black-robed priests.

Frankenstein Slavery:

The process during which one’s own body is remote-controlled by the Worldwide Mad Deadly Gangster Computer God. Frankenstein slavery is usually most prevalent at night, when you are unwittingly operated upon by the Computer God Sealed Robot-arm Operating Cabinet. Sodomy and rape, performed upon you by your tormentors, is an added bonus.

Rumors abound of archival on Ubuweb, but I'll be hanged in Tarnation if I can find them.

Social Studies Textbook - or Satanism Manual???

Retrospace found this mind--blowing textbook called "Understanding Human Behavior", which contains some... shall we say... controversial views and subject matter. Couldn't see this thing being used in today's schools!

An awesome archive of vintage educational comics

A special media-geek treat just in time for Christmas: Head on over to the Educational Comics archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The archive is chock-full of charming, fun titles such as "Crack Busters" (an anti-drugs comic that is like Reefer Madness but in comic-book form for crack), "Mickey Mouse and Goofy Explore Energy", "Stop and Go, the Safety Twins", and "The Amazing Spiderman vs. the Prodigy" (a Very Special Episode of Spider-Man presented by 'Planet Parenthood', about sex education).

Credit to WFMU for tweeting the link.

Every issue I've looked at so far is an entertaining read combining the best rasas of corny, kitchy, informative, naive, hilarious, and progressive. It's tough to pick just one issue to show, so below I have a random one to share.

BTW, I did this using ImageMagick; a simple convert command (convert $FILE.pdf $FILE.png) does the trick.

And now, sit back and enjoy one underdog classic, "Dracons Visit Earth To Study Food and the Land", (which is mis-titled as "Dragons". They're Dracons, from planet Draco).

Just from the title page, you know I had to go for this awesomeness from 1984 first. Especially since it was produced in my home state.

We meet our principles, Generic White Geek and a guy who dresses like young Bill Cosby on his way to an interview. I can understand the typical trope of having aliens speak Earthling English for reading convenience (including labeling the hull of your spaceship with your mission's purpose in a font taller than you are), but having an alien who makes English puns on his own name is just an extra helping of cheese on top of that.

Well, Cosbyman and Plucky Sidekick waste no time recycling a Star Trek trope (only it's the Dollar General store version of a transporter, using flashlights and hope) to beam down in front of a restaurant which the proprietors have sensibly named "Good Food Restaurant". Wait, it gets better!

"Well, I'm kinda busy taking orders here, in case you can't see that, so I'll push you off on my Hispanic flunky." Meanwhile, Scoop has shape-shifted into a cat, to blend in. But he (she? Can you ever tell with shape-shifters?) still carries his telltale medallion communicator, because that's a lot less obvious than just walking around as a white college student.

Scoop's plan backfires on him just two panels later. Why does a shapeshifting alien need to be afraid of a dog? Anyway, we get on with our educational exposition, with our adorable Flintstone family just stone cold chowin' down on some bugs. What a relief agriculture was!

Maria cheerfully explains the elementary concept of bread to our alien investigator, completely nonplussed that he wouldn't know this. Meanwhile, Scoop, who has so far proved himself utterly useless on this mission, rejoins us on his Community College Sophomore setting.

Yeah, this was 1984 (remember "We Are The World"?), when Americans went through a naive period where they didn't take into account the role that African politics plays in African famine. They just tried to cure world hunger by raising awareness, so that third world people could sit down to bowls of steaming awareness every morning.

Maria takes that Libertarian hard-line stance: "Poor people are poor because they just won't work, the lazy bums!" Scoop doubles his uselessness by peppering the dialog with tangent questions just when it was getting interesting.

Anthropomorphic veggies! Will the wonder never cease? Memo to Scoop: That's the third pun on your name, IT IS TIME TO STOP. No sooner do the dynamic duo flashlight over to the farm - because fuck walking - than Scoop mysteriously bows out again, possibly to morph into a skunk so he can get run over.

"Ed Itor"??? Forget fact-gathering missions, these aliens need their own sitcom. Meanwhile, Scoop, during corn harvest time, decides that this is the perfect time to morph into an ear of corn so he can talk to the other corn and find out... something. Because I guess corn talks. Never, in any scenario of substance abuse, have I ever had a hallucination this bizarre.

Alright, show of hands, who do we elect as the obvious Gilligan of this mission? That's right, Scoop, who has managed to get himself into trouble again with his shape-shifting shenanigans. Meanwhile farm-dude continues the pro-Capitalist theme by practically cackling over all the money, money, MONEY he's going to make off his corn.

Oh, God, my sides! We get a glorious chain of production as Scoop volunteers himself to become food, and part of him even gets the honor of passing through an animal's digestive tract. I sure hope there's a scene coming up where Scoops gets deposited as cow shit before he just pops up and walks away in his human form, firing off yet another groaner like "I'd better get up before somebody pooper-scoooops me, hyuk hyuk hyuk!"

We finally get the explanation for that huge jagged line across Farmer Jim's crop. And what the heck, this is informative content after all, and a mercifully Scoop-free page.

Jim and Ellen need to get back to the office, so he can show her his windbreak, if you know what I mean. And Scoop is back in the truck as yelling corn, just when we were about to forget about him. Mod Squad  deliberates but decides to take Scoop with him back into space, saving all Earth life from being doomed to recycle Scoop through our digestive tracks forever.

Ye Gods, Scoop has a superiority complex! For being a bumbling shnook who mostly got in the way when he didn't need to be saved, he expects the Dracontis Prize??? Say it for us Chief: "No, I did all the work and carried the whole story, Scoop! Me, not you! I should get the Dracontis Prize, and then I should return you to Earth to fulfill your destiny of being poop!"

And that's our story, as our hero and his Load swoop away in their marvelous Captain-Planet-like spacecraft for further educational exploration. Which, come to think of it, you never really saw Star Trek do this sort of thing, did you? I mean for the Enterprise to have "explore strange new worlds" as part of its mission statement, you never saw Kirk go interview the natives about how they lived as much as he tried to either fight them, meddle in their affairs, or slip his tubesnake into the sexiest one.

Now, wasn't that a treat? Go to that link, there's tons more where this came from!

Beyond Mein Kampf: Three books by dictators

1. Quotations from Chairman Mao

Published from 1964 through 1976, and still a popular read in much of the People's Republic of China, this is a collection of parts of speeches, letters, and general utterances of Chairman Mao Zedong. It was commonly known as the "Little Red Book" and also featured many images from the life of the Chairman. At one point, it was more prominently displayed than even images of the Chairman himself. While it was not required reading for the population, it was commonly printed in small pocket editions, so it could be with one always, and issued to soldiers and other grunts, even, presumably, throughout the Great Chinese Famine.

2. The Green Book

Published in 1975 until right around the Libyan Civil War in 2011, this was a small collection of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's thoughts on all matters political. It was said to be directly inspired by Mao's "Little Red Book". Unlike that book, The Green Book was published with the intent of making it required reading for all Libyan citizens. Libyan children during Gaddafi's reign had to study the book for two hours per week as part of official school curriculum. Quotes from the book were also broadcast daily over the official radio stations. Billboards were everywhere with quotes from the book. Can you say "citizen brainwashing"? Revolutionaries burned the book at protests and its since become quite a rare publication since the overthrow of Gaddafi.

3. The Ruhnama

We have now reached the epitome of batshit egomania. This book, roughly translated as "The Book of the Soul", was the work of Saparmurat Niyazov, "President for Life" of Turkmenistan until his death in 2006. This was just a little bit more than a run-of-the-mill political rant. Example:

That's a real giant statue of the book, elevated on a rotunda surrounded by bubbling fountains. Here's some people around it for scale:

No, wait, we're not done. Every evening, the giant damned thing opens and displays text and plays video! Here's a video showing the construction of this behemoth, and showing it in action:

Yeah, eat your heart out, Stephen King.

The Ruhnama is not just a political tract, but spiritual scripture and autobiography of Niyazov himself. Required reading in school? That's small potatoes! Reading from the book took you from kindergarten to college in Turkmenistan. You couldn't publicly criticize the book without being thrown in prison and tortured. To make more room in the schedule for studying the Ruhnama, algebra, physics, and phy-ed were removed from the curriculum. You'd have to pass a test on the Ruhnama to get a driver's license. Quotes from the thing are inscribed in half the hard surfaces in Turkmenistan. Posters of the Ruhnama flank the streets. By law, it has to receive equal treatment with the Qur'an, even in Muslim mosques.

Shortly before his death, Niyazov claimed that he had arranged it with no less than GOD HIMSELF that anybody who read the Ruhnama three times was guaranteed a place in Heaven.

We could go on all day, all night, and all day tomorrow about the blood-curdling insanity and megalomania of Saparmurat Niyazov and the utter hell-on-Earth of a nightmarish, dystopian, totalitarian dictatorship this human piece of shit imposed on his imprisoned citizens (who were restricted from legally exiting the country), but this page on traveling Turkmenistan gives you a very good taste of it.

It is fitting that the Internet-fabled "Door to Hell" (a natural gas fire that has raged for 40 years) is in Turkmenistan. How come we've heard all about Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein, but never Niyazov?

6 Examples of literature produced under a writing constraint

In 1939, novelist Ernest Vincent Wright produced the novel Gadsby without using the letter 'e'. This is an example of a lipogram.

In 2004, French author Michel Dansel, using the pen name of "Michel Thaler", wrote Le Train de Nulle Part ("The Train From Nowhere"), a novel written without using a single verb.

In 1996, mathematician Mike Keith wrote a short story, Cadaeic Cadenza, where each word corresponded by letter length to a consecutive digit of Pi. This is an example of Pilish.

The final chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses contains no punctuation.

In 1974, author Walter Abish wrote Alphabetical Africa, a novel written with the condition that the first letter of each word in each chapter start with a successive letter of the alphabet; chapter 1 had words starting with 'a', chapter 2 with 'b', and so on.

Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham using a vocabulary of only 50 words, reportedly written to win a bet. In alphabetical order, the word list is "a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you."