@ Peter Shalen: That’s a rather charming little story.

Louise Hay, who was chair of the UIC math department when I first came here in the 1980’s, had fled Europe with her family when she was a child to escape from the Nazis, and moved in with relatives in New York. Her hosts had a child of the same age as Louise. Neither of the two spoke a word of the other’s language, but they quickly discovered that they both knew the name “Pinocchio,” and that was enough for them to get along fine.

If Republicans do well tomorrow, expect the 3 volcanos to erupt. Michelle, Valerie and Mister Peanut will be mighty pissed.

What I see there is a kind of simmering rage, an entitled attitude which says, ‘we know because we just know and nobody better cross us.’

@ J.E. Dyer:

I’ll always have an imperishable soft spot for the carrier navy. After I passed a verbal board before him and the department heads the captain of the Big E said to me, “Congratulations, Mr. A, you’re now qualified as underway OOD of the largest warship in the history of the world.” Reflecting on it later I realized that the CNO probably gave him his orders to take command with the same words.

Let me try this one:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

A fellow officer with whom I served on the USS John F Kennedy was an Egyptian-American who grew up in Egypt and Iraq (he was a teenager in Iraq’s naval cadet school in Basrah when Saddam mounted his coup in 1979, and had to escape Iraq on a fishing boat in the weeks after the Iran-Iraq war started).

We learned for some reason one day that he had never heard the nonsense word replicated above. Of course — he didn’t grow up watching Mary Poppins, or even reading Mary Poppins, and had probably never heard anyone sing “Hum-diddle-iddle-iddle-umm-dee-lie!”

We tested him frequently on American cultural minutiae after that, which he took in good part. Of course he knew about Star Trek (and Star Wars); but imagine being an American of his age and not recognizing Lassie, The Sound of Music, or Laugh-In.

@ Sully:
Who’s Pinocchio?

Nice art!. Just the other day my brother suggested over coffee that a longish nosed friend of ours could easily prep for the Halloween dance. Put on a floppy green hat and go as a puppet, he suggested. Then followed a several minute question and answer period. Who knew there were people our age who never heard of Pinocchio?