""Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!""

The subtitle is "Adventures of a Curious Character", but I didn't quite expect sexual adventures as well. The chapter 'You just ASK them?' is a bit uncomfortable to read, though I can't hit upon the precise reason for my queasiness. (It's almost as if I'm worried about some putative boys and girls of impressionable age reading this and getting the wrong message or something. Wow.)

His other adventures continue to amuse and amaze:

• .. in the middle of nowhere we went into a museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols, pictures, and bars and dots. ...I bought (a copy of the Dresden codex.) On each page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and partial translation in Spanish. <> I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought, "I'm gonna have some fun!" I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow paper and began playing this game of deciphering the Maya bars and dots, sitting in the hotel room, while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids all day.
• I didn't want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said, If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it's not so much that he does it well, as that he does it at all.
• I was served a round, hard thing, about the size of an egg yolk, in a cup with some yellow liquid. So far I had eaten everything in Japan, but this thing frightened me: it was all convoluted, like a brain looks. ... I ate it, with some trepidation. The next day I asked ... "What the hell was "kuri?" <> "It means 'chestnut,'" he replied.
• The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.
• I glanced at (my father's book with the old Greek play The Frogs in it) one time and I saw in there that a frog talks. It was written as "brek, kek, kek. "... I tried it, and after practicing it awhile, I realized that it's very accurately what a frog says. <> So my chance glance into a book by Aristophanes turned out to be useful, later on: I could make a good frog noise at the students' ceremony for the Nobel-Prize winners!

---

笃，笃，笃，卖糖粥

mefi quote, no. 11

"They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears: They pretend 'twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it."
<"Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" is late by a month this time>
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All words are needful and should be cuddled regularly. Omission is a sin.
posted by TimothyMason at 1:54 AM PST on June 1
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Abstinence?
posted by tfmm at 6:37 AM PST on June 17