My younger brother has often told me that I love to be outré, a character trait that I, the third of four brothers, no doubt developed to try to get some attention. And it has only gotten worse as I am entering my dotage. Anyway, here is a little essay for all of us who are worried about all of the bad news we’re seeing these days.

Seminar: Art History and Archaeology

A few weeks ago I met Prof. Ana María Fernández Garcia, the Chair of the Art History Department at the University of Oviedo. She suggested that it might sometime be possible for me to give a seminar paper at the Uni on Art History and Archaeology. While it is by no means clear if she will be able arrange this, I got excited about the prospect and went ahead and wrote my paper, which I am now posting on this website. (As I will give this paper, if I do give it, in Spanish, I wrote it a paragraph at a time in English and then translated that into Spanish; after I finished doing that, I realized that I hadn’t kept an English version of the paper, so I retro-translated it back into English, which explains the somewhat awkward language!)

Here is a silly piece of satire.

After getting back to Spain from our recent three-week trip to the US, I have written up my reflections on the country. (As anyone who knows me might guess, these are pretty negative!)

Here is another example of my obsession with -nyms.

[Eponym:  noun (plural: eponyms)

1. a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named.
2. a name or noun formed after a person.]
   

Okay, this is not really a game.  Rather it is a (hopefully fun) exercise to see how many people you know who eponymously gave their names to the following list of eponyms.

[And, yes of course I had to look up some of these on the internet!]

Let me know of your favorite eponyms.  I have mostly avoided the many scientific/medical eponyms, like Haley’s Comet or Addison disease, and the myriads of biological eponyms, like Anelosimus biglebowski (a spider named after the film The Big Lebowski) or Anophthalmus hitleri (a cave beetle named after Adolf Hitler in 1933 that is currently threatened due to high demand from collectors of Nazi memorabilia).  In addition to Stigler’s Law of Eponyms, which states that eponyms of scientific discoveries are rarely named after the person who actually first made the discovery, or the problem of biological eponyms being predominately named after White European males, I just find scientific/medical and biological eponyms mundane and boring.]

So here is a list of eponyms:  (answers below)

America

Bowdlerize

Boycott

Cardigan

Chauvinism

Derby

Dunce

Gerrymander

Leotard

Mesmerize

Nicotine

Paparazzi

Shrapnel

Sideburns

Okay, yet another homophone game, this one in the original format where you are to create a homophone pair by matching the clues on the left with the clues on the right. This is the format that, as of now at least, the 4.0 Bing and Chat can’t master.

I am certainly not a talented poet, but I like giving it a try!

Okay, my brain seems to just keep whirling around! Here is another homophone game, where you are to match the clues on the left with the pairs of homophones on the right. (Interestingly, the 3.0 version of ChatGPT couldn’t do these homophone games, but the new Bing and the 4.0 version of ChatGPT both get them all right.)

Okay boys and girls (and non-binary others), here is a variation of the “Match the Homophone Pairs” game I posted a year ago (in the “Silly Riddles and Lists” folder on this website).  The rules here are to match the clues on the left with the homophones on the right.

And here is a bonus question:  The stupefied look of the impotent on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday?

[If you are stuck, message me for the answer sheet.]

Here’s one about white privilege: