I've been screwing up some of my favorite songs, "Weird Al" style. The Who's "Eminence Front," for example: "People forget/ Forget they're hiding/ Behind an elephant's butt/ It's an elephant's butt/ It's a big one."
And then there's "Family Affair" by Sly & the Family Stone. I've given it what I call the Goldilocks Treatment: "It's a family of bears / It's a family of bears/ It's a family of bears / It's a family of bears."
It has occurred to me that the Casio G-Shock Rangeman GW9400-1,
because of its size (large), shape (closer to spherical than most watches made since AD 1600), styling cues and startling range of technical capability (solar recharging, radio synching with an atomic clock, altimeter, barometer, ambient-air compass, a really nice backlight, etc, etc), could be nicknamed the Death Star. I am aware that Citizen has a watch called the Death Star, and I am unimpressed.
In my life I've only had one brand-new car, a 2003 Saturn Ion 1. I still have it. Lately I have begun to daydream that if I keep it long enough, like an original VW Beetle or a Pontiac Aztek, it will suddenly change from a cheap piece of junk into an expensive collector's item. I am aware that this is an unrealistic fantasy.
I've been looking at the footnotes in John Stoye's The Siege of Vienna, NY, Chi, SF, 1965, and almost all of the sources are in German, with a few in French. I found one in Italian. And I found one in Romanian, which impressed me for about a minute, the amount of time it took me to figure that Stoye could've had someone translate it for him. No Turkish, no Polish, no Hungarian, no Czech -- unless I overlooked something, which is possible. Even so, Stoye was certainly no Runciman.
There are those who think Runciman's linguistic prowess has been greatly exaggerated. I am not one of those.
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