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"But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice." -- Charles Darwin, Letter to Asa Gray
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2009
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February
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- Feasting with Panthers
- Bob Wieder: Still Funny After All These Years
- Put That on the Blog E. Says
- Pissed: Day Four
- Pissed
- An Arts Reviewing Class Exercise Promotes Concisio...
- Beauty and the Beast
- The Capo di Tutti Deani Makes Me an Offer I Can't ...
- Here's a Class Project That's Coming Along
- If the Daily Kos Didn't Want Me to Steal from Him,...
- Now He Belongs to the Ages: Socks the Cat, Whose L...
- Laughing at Our House
- Preview! Preview! All My Arts Reviewing Kids Will ...
- I Think They Call This a Teaching Moment
- No, It's Not Us
- Shame of the Soft Hands
- My Arts Reporting and Reviewing Class is Reviewing...
- In the Lair of the White Elephant
- Zadie Smiths 'Speaking in Tongues'
- Al Franken, Norm Coleman and the Beautiful Internet
- Night Thoughts
- William Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Thing...
- I Like to Think Had the Anti-Prop 8 Campaign Done ...
- Friendship is Weird. Sometimes It's Also Delicious.
- And There Was a Disturbance in the Force
- More Oliver Memories. He's the One Cracking on McC...
- Darwin Darwin He's Our Man
- Dems Get Fed Up With Republican Senators, Kick The...
- Insight Insight: Pencils Ready?
- Hello Kitty, CSI. That's the Show I'm Waiting For
- I Am Having Fun. Is That in the Job Description?
- Oliver in December, Two Weeks Before He Died (Just...
- As I Said to Peter: The Menu Was More Memorable Th...
- It's a Man's Life at the Super Bowl
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February
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5 comments:
nice! i like the shock and awe on some of the people's faces when they discover their presents.
Am I talking through my hat or do some of your guests look awfully bored?
Their faces are tense with anticipation.
More like 'anticipatory tension', no? And will someone look up where "talking through one's hat" comes from. Always wondered.
Best I can do with a quick Google:
"To talk through one's hat" was apparently a widespread idiom by the late 1880s meaning "to talk nonsense," although it initially seems to have carried the added connotation of "to lie." The precise logic and origins of the phrase are unclear. One theory, perhaps reflecting the earlier "to lie" meaning, maintains that the phrase refers to men in church who hold their hats over their faces while feigning prayer. Another possibility is that the phrase refers to the emptiness of the hat atop one's head, as if one were thinking and speaking with an empty head. It's also possible that "talk through one's hat" is an oblique reference to another phrase, "to talk off the top of one's head," meaning to speak speculatively, without thorough consideration."
: -----http://www.word-detective.com/
- possibly a euphemism for "talk through one's arse"? (sorry if that's too rude a word to use in this respectable forum)
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