She stood out in the crowd like a bird of paradise among a flock of crows, her bright, elaborate feathers instantly catching Dave's eye like the ornamental flank plumes of the Paradisa apoda. Unlike this particular bird, however, she was not native to Indonesia and did not have a diet consisting mainly of fruit, seeds and small insects; rather, she dined on the finest culinary creations at exclusive restaurants and lived in her luxurious central London townhouse which, as Dave was about to discover, was not constructed from fern fronds and moss.
As soon as he saw her, Dave could tell that they were about to engage in a highly ritualised mating dance, as is common among the sexually dimorphic birds of the genus Paradisaeidae, although hopefully this would not involve him competing with other males in displays of plumage, gymnastic prowess and bill strength, in the manner of the Curl-crested Manucode (Manucodia comrii).
That's odd -- in my luxurious central London townhouse, fern fronds and moss abound.
ReplyDeleteRichard Brautigan once wrote "The sun was like a huge 50 cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and lit with a match and said 'Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper' and put the coin in my hand, but never came back."
ReplyDeleteI rather like your blog. I'm keeping one myself on almost the same subject at http://inkyfool.blogspot.com/ I'll link to you if you link to me.
Done and done. I enjoyed your post on the derivation of the word "bunkum".
ReplyDeleteThanks. I had forgotten all about syllepsis, but now I shall use it all the time and with abandon. (I know that's not quite right but use is a boring word)
ReplyDeleteIt's the latin that really sells it. :)
ReplyDeleteOMG! I did this recently!
ReplyDeleteAs POTUS bowed lower, he noticed a Lincoln penny on the floor, which, of course, tele-prompted him to recite the Gettysburg Address -- "Four score and 7 years ago ..." -- amazing and perplexing His Imperial Highness, who longed to return to his prized Chrysanthemum (often called mums, a genus of about 30 species of perennial flowering plants in the family Asteraceae, native to Asia and northeastern Europe) Throne ...
ReplyDeleteHey Joel! You were voted as the Best Reverse Psychologist in the First Novels Club first blogger superlatives!
ReplyDeletehttp://firstnovelsclub.blogspot.com/2009/11/publishers-weekly-karmic-linkage-and.html
I'm most gratified, Frankie. Many thanks. And in such illustrious company as well.
ReplyDeleteThat post really is amazing. I'm just reading my way through your posts and this one particularly caught my attention.
ReplyDeleteSince I'm not a native speaker of English it's sometimes hard to understand the oddness completely (amongst other things because bad good writing requires so much different adjectives). But especially the phenomenon of failed metaphors is one of my favourites in German as well.
So, thanks for an extremely entertaining blog, and keep up the good (bad) work! I'll keep checking back.
Greetings from Germany,
Chris
Hi Chris.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the encouragement. Slogging through all this nonsense in a second language must be tough – my German's so bad that I doubt I'd be able to follow even a well-written blog, let alone a badly-well-written one.
Geology & Astronomy & Chemistry: Oh My!
ReplyDeleteStudy Tunguska! Comet gone by:
Absolute, burlesque, catachretic, complex, conceptual, conventional, creative, dead, extended,
grammatical, mixed, primary, root, structural, submerged, therapeutic and Visual a type...
Mete-o-(pho)-r ... no-more.
I laughed like a young child on the swing set. Glancing aside, I quickly plummeted from the swing, landing a dirty wood-chip pile of homework. However, I pushed the assignments aside and climbed back onto the swing, returning to blog-world.
ReplyDelete