Eunuch.
I'm shock'd, young chaps, I truly am --
To turn down jingon-berry lamb,
Imported from the Persian court,
With Medish sweet-balls for dessert!
Are you so bold as to propose
To scorn such gifts with upturn'd nose
And ask for river-wine and beans?
The King will wonder what it means!
Daniel.
It means the King is sitting pretty:
Two wonders in a single city!
"Come see the Hanging Gardens. Then --
The lunch of these four Hebrew men!"
-- Yes and No
Once he tried to feed all the animals in all the world in one day, but when the food was ready an Animal came out of the deep sea and ate it up in three mouthfuls. Suleiman-bin-Daoud was very surprised and said, 'O Animal, who are you?' And the Animal said, 'O King, live for ever! I am the smallest of thirty thousand brothers, and our home is at the bottom of the sea. We heard that you were going to feed all the animals in all the world, and my brothers sent me to ask when dinner would be ready.'
-- Rudyard Kipling, "The Butterfly that Stamped"
After getting 11,000 fake Swedish visitors from the devil knows where, followed up by a roughly equal number of authentic Swedish puns courtesy of Sean Fowler (plus a Kraken pun of my own), I've got Sweden on my mind -- so, while washing some dishes, I found myself humming, "Swing low, Swede chariot . . . ."
And then the good old associative machinery threw up this:
In this version of the classic swing song originally by Cab Calloway, Minnie the Moocher is described as "a low-down hoochie-coocher" and is given "a platinum car with diamond-studded wheels" by the King of Sweden in a dream. Swing, check. Low, check. Swede chariot, check.
Minnie's ridiculously luxurious auto reminds me of the They Might Be Giants song "Mink Car" -- from the album of the same name, which was released on September 11, 2001.
It's knocking off my diamond wigKnocking me down onto the platinum groundWoke up in a beautiful dreamAlone, aloneI got hit by a mink car . . .
Ever wonder where the word mink comes from? Turns out it's a loan-word from Swedish.
Hugh Laurie ends his version of "Minnie the Moocher" by repeating the line, "But Minnie had a heart as big as a whale!" What creature, I thought, would have a heart as big as a whale? Surely only the Leviathan -- or its Scandinavian equivalent, the Kraken. (Technically, I suppose the Kraken would have three such hearts.) And then I thought of Kipling's Animal that came out of the deep sea. Isn't a moocher someone who exploits the generosity of others, like the Animal in the story? And wouldn't Minnie -- or, more properly, Mini -- be a natural nickname for "the smallest of thirty-thousand brothers"?
