Wednesday 1 April 2020

Insom(a)niac musings during a corona(ry) attack

My insomnia was the result of drinking a flask of organic Darleeing Kalimpong tea (see pic) late at night. The tea I was drinking has the brand name Mighty Leaf, which is a pun (on My Tea Leaf?) and was part of the inspiration for the multilingual punning rant below.

When your ToDo list becomes longer than its creator, it's clearly because of procrastination. Deal with it by subjecting the lista toda (the whole list, in Portuguese) to a Procrustean transformation. For those who are wondering, Procrustes was the Greek dude who, when asked to make a sentence with the word fiddlestick, came up with "If you sleep in a bed that's too small for you, your fiddlestick out!" (To give credit, where it's due, this wonderful line came from The Little Book of Outrageous Puns, a mainstay of my father's comfort books, which began thus: Two old ladies went for a tramp in the wood, but, in the end, he got away ).

Was John Bunyan aware that the Slough of Despond was even worse than he thought (Slough of [Mr.] De's পোঁদ )?

Def: ভাজপাওয়ালা, ভক্ত = যারা খা মোষ  ( অর্থাৎ মোষ খাওয়ার আদেশ  ) কে খামোশ করতে চায় ।

Golshifteh Farahani (گلشیفته فراهانی-- a great Iranian actress who played Elly in About Elly (Darbariye Elly, an Asghar Farhad film). Her name can be parsed as follows: 
From Persian گل (gol) meaning "flower" combined with شیفته (šifte) "loving, amorous, infatuated". A known bearer is Golshifteh Farahani (1983-), an Iranian actress and musician. 
 But in English the name reminds one of shifting goalposts?

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