Relatively trivial.

I love discovering unusual pairings in the family tree. (Getting a bit Chaucerian here, try a different tack.) Odd relationships, I mean. People with unexpected kin.

Just found out today -- Anna Leonowens, the real-life governess whose writings inspired the movie Anna and the King and then, of course, the Rogers and Hammerstein musical (and film) The King and I, was the great-aunt of . . .

 . . . Boris Karloff.

My very favorite composer on the planet, Ralph Vaughan Williams, was the great-nephew of personal hero Charles Darwin and the great-great-grandson of Josiah Wedgwood, of pottery fame, for whom I entertain no particular affection beyond general admiration.

Some fathers just wear egg on their faces.

This morning, I'm haranguing the boys so that they'll get to camp on time -- Primus and Tertius doing gymnastics, Secundus a week-long film and TV course at a different location, two Rye miles (i.e., the equivalent of thirty kilometers in non-Westchester) from his brothers. Same drop-off time, hence the impatience of taxi-driver Daddy.*

Despite the ticking clock, they move with all the slow deliberation of moon-walkers, blissfully unsullied by the merest touch of urgency. (Why can't a nine-year-old make tart and irrelevant comments without pausing in the middle of tying his shoelaces?)

Primus belatedly reminds Tertius that socks and sneakers are required for an activity today, Tertius refuses to believe it, clings to flip-flops, unable to grasp the concept of wearing sneakers anyway as insurance, in case of the dim possibility that his older brother may actually be right. Daddy now quite exasperated, spinning car keys like worry beads, snapping orders.

I might have had more authority if it hadn't come out as "put on your snocks and seekers." Twice.

Last sacerdotal appearance, about five years ago.

It reminds me of an occasion a few Halloweens ago. (This will sound like a publicist's fantasy piece, but it's completely true.) Real life having, sadly, shifted my innocuous old priest costume into the scary category -- especially when chaperoning three small boys around the neighborhood -- I switch to dressing as the Grim Reaper** for trick-or-treating, face completely hidden behind a black fabric screen. But after the first year of this, the mem-sahib complains that it creeps her out (although it's turned out that it was me, not the outfit). So for the Reaper's next appearance, I try to soften it a little. Long, blue clown shoes poking out from underneath the black robe and a big red nose attached to a rubber skull half-mask. Somehow, though, it has the opposite effect.

That evening, Primus commits one of those childhood sins, long forgotten and no doubt fueled by high-fructose corn syrup, that requires a serious parental scolding. (When did every overhyped American tradition become a kids' candy-fest?) Having removed my Halloween costume, I sit him down on the living room sofa and lecture him for ten minutes on his behavior. And it's only as I draw to the end of my brilliant fatherly peroration that I realize I'm still wearing the clown nose.

I now go trick-or-treating dressed as a monk. You don't need to wear pants, and neighbors offer you beer.

*Are you talkin' to me? (I love footnotes. They're like P.S.'s)

**My former Citibank colleagues and I decided years ago that a "Grim Reaper" should be the name of a cocktail, although we were unable to come up with anything sufficiently lethal. We did agree, from frequent caipirinha-oiled business lunches (it was the 80s) at the nearby "Brazilian Pavilion" in midtown (it was the 80s), that it should have a cachaça base. But the next ingredient foundered on the current legal status of absinthe. (Not to mention the abandonment of New Coke.)

Poet's day.*

I'm telling the boys about "Mockingbird," a new game I just thought of. (It's a bit obvious, so I doubt I'm the first person to come up with this idea.) You begin with the lullaby "Hush Little Baby," and take turns to make up a couplet, giving the next player the challenge of completing the rhyme. Extra points for fiendishness and ingenuity.

So I start with the real lyrics:

Hush, little baby, don't say a word;
Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird don't sing,
Papa's gonna buy you a diamond ring . . .

And here, I change it up:

And if that diamond ring don't sparkle . . .

Take it, Primus. (Admittedly, all that comes to my mind is "Papa's gonna buy you a horse called 'Arkle.'"**)

Primus is made of better stuff. In a flash: "Papa's gonna buy you a pile of charcoal." Bloody brilliant.***

*"Poet's Day" as a hallowed acrostic for Friday: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday. Is that just an English thing?

**Not Urkel. Arkle. Notoriously successful Irish racehorse in the 1960s.**** And six punctuation marks in a row, beating my previous record. Although does the double asterisk count as just one?

***Totally worthy of Ogden Nash (1902-1971), who was born here in Rye but is insufficiently celebrated around these parts.*****

****Coulda had "patriarchal."

*****Like me.

Talking of orange cows . . .

What's orange and sounds like a parrot? 
A carrot.

School of hard knock-knocks.

This happened a couple of years ago, before I had this blog, but I was reminded of it today for some reason.

I'm telling Tertius (then about four or five years old) some knock-knock jokes, but he's not getting the idea of the pun. Instead he insists on starting the joke himself, giving me a first name, and then when I say, say "John Who?" he just adds the family name of a friend at his nursery school.*

Trying to be encouraging at all times, I explain that it's awfully nice to remember your friends, but just repeating their names lacks a tad on the laughing-my-ass-off front.

"Look," I say, "what's funny is when something surprises you, when it's silly. For example, if I say I just saw a brown cow, you might be interested, but you wouldn't giggle much." (Tertius could giggle for Britain.) "But if I say I saw an orange cow, you'd laugh because it's such a silly idea."

And he duly does. "I get it," he claims. "Okay, let me try again. Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Apple," he answers. Apple? Where did that come from?

"Apple. . . who?" I ask, with trepidation.

"Orange cow!" he explodes gleefully.

*Alice, the dim verger on The Vicar of Dibley, played to perfection by the magnificent Emma Chambers, did the same thing once, during the regular post-credits joke-telling spot with the equally redoubtable Dawn French.

Life of Brian.

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum -- he of the "axis of evil" coinage -- now has a conservative website called "FrumForum." Frum appeared this morning (via telephone) on Brian Lehrer's show on New York's public radio station, WNYC.

Lehrer (the best political and current affairs radio host ever) heralded the segment by giving himself this inadvertent tongue twister: " . . . and we'll be hearing from David Frum from FrumForum."

Nailed it. But he's buggered off on vacation for two weeks to recover.

In all humility.

The average two-year-old has a vocabulary of a few hundred words. At five or six years old, it's expanded to 2,500 to 5,000 words, and the child goes on adding words at a rate of 3,000 a year -- that's eight new words a day! -- until the end of formal education, when acquisition tails off drastically. Final tally: anything from 20,000 words to 75,000, depending on which expert you consult. (The range is all to do with whether you count inflections and variant meanings of the same word.)

There are more than a quarter of a million definitions in the latest edition of Chambers Dictionary, the crossword enthusiast's tome of choice. But unless this is your bedtime reading, or you're studying for a Scrabble competition or a spelling bee, the chances are that, by the time you're an adult, new words come along so rarely that you can remember the first time you heard each one.

Yeah, from time to time we jump back into the flood, with a new job or field of study, say, or a flurry of so-called advances that give us "twitter" and "blog" and "meme" and "iPad." I had some swift learning when I moved to New York. Sure, I already knew all those common British/American differences that irritating schoolboys like to trot out -- mainly the parts of cars -- but what was "taupe"? (The English would call it "beige.") And I'd never heard the word "faucet" in my life. ("Tap.")*

Today, I had one of those learning experiences. An NPR correspondent from Florida, floundering to end a sentence about the effects of the oil spill, used a catch-all ". . . and elsewise." And I'm about to leap on this hideous formation -- for the British, the addition of the suffix "-wise" to any word is seen as the worst excesses of the American advertising industry -- and compose a smug little post, no doubt bringing in a reference to La Palin's recent "refudiate" (God, it's like fish in a barrel with her). Only something made me check first.

And there it is. "Elsewise." In several dictionaries. Meaning just what you'd expect it to mean. Used by my second-favorite author Charles Dickens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, no less. (Which means I must have come across it before and failed to store it away.)

It's true: you do live and learn. Still.

*Big problem. When you have an English accent, nobody likes to correct your Briticisms, so you continue to use the wrong word for years.

Finite jest.

There's been a lot of buzz about a website called "I Write Like", which analyzes samples of your writing and gives you the name of an author that you . . . er . . . write like. (If you're interested, Google "I Write Like" for a swift sampling of the many newspaper and online articles that have covered this.)

The general consensus is that it needs more work. Gawker put in a transcript of the recent Mel Gibson rant and the suggested author was Margaret Atwood. But when Margaret Atwood put her own prose in, she came up with Stephen King. As did Herman Melville, vicariously, when the New York Times plugged in Moby-Dick.

But of course, it's irresistible. And remarkably fast. So I tried three extracts from This Private Plot.

The opening paragraphs scored me David Foster Wallace (DFW pictured right).  A clear endorsement.

Then I tried the climactic chase scene, and got Stephen King, presumably not writing as Margaret Atwood. Under the circumstances, another palpable hit, especially when you think  it could have been Dan Brown.

And finally, I entered a chapter that's meant to be a parody of a quality broadsheet newspaper's theater review. That earned respected horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. (If it was going that way, I'd have preferred M.R. James, but at least the program recognized the different style.)

By the way, this blog entry -- up to the preceding paragraph -- came out as cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson. Which is puzzling, but better than Mel Gibson.*

*See what I did there? Brought it full circle.

Tired British meme but possibly unfamiliar to visitors from other parts of the globe, and rather useful advice for me at the moment.

The Daily Insult: non-age-related edition.

The inspection sticker has expired on the mem-sahib's station car, so getting her to her morning train means a brief family road trip. Climbing into the car, Secundus finds my cell phone -- missing for three days -- which had fallen under the seat. Daddy duly delighted, despite thwarted plans for iPhone replacement.

On the way home, we spot a Jeep with an unusual color, a striking metallic khaki (the color of Leila barf, according to Primus). I recall wistfully that my last car before I moved from England, a Renault 14TS hatchback nicknamed "Rochester," was a similar color, a goldish green. Or greenish gold. (Since it was a company car, issued to my first wife as a perk, it doesn't make the meager list of "cars I've owned," even though I did more of the driving.)

"Where is it now?" Secundus asks. I calculate that it's been thirty years since it was manufactured, so I suggest that it was probably scrapped a long time ago.

"I hope you didn't leave your cell phone in it," he murmurs.