Mailbag, when the Czar can take it a smidge easier and see what others have to say.

First up, we have The Big Guy himself, Uncle Jay, who has an interesting observation about why alpacas spit when threatened:

O most Dread, Awful, etc:

Re: Your recent educational missive on the Lives of the Saints—

I was a-hopin’ for a little inside information on that NFL team from New Orleans to assist me with either the Castle G All-Minion football pool or perhaps my dead pool, but alas, received neither…

What did occur was free-association recognition of one of your treatise subjects (Toaster the Onion Red) and some odd occurrences in Oklahoma recently in the news.

To wit:

Oklahoman restaurant has a monument to the dark god Azathoth

The restaurant discovered a three-foot tall, concrete block on their front lawn last Friday. The roughly cut block bears a bronze plaque with the inscription “In the Year of Our Lord 2012 Creer Pipi claimed this land for Azathoth.
—-
Clearly, I have no need to remind you, of all people, about Azathoth, first mentioned Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”:

…outside the ordered universe that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.

So, between this monolithic monument and the two churches dedicated to Toaster the Onion Red.

Obvious to even the most unimaginative and thick-headed minion such as Yours Truly, Oklahoma has Gormogonian fingerprints (or perhaps tentacle-prints?) all over the place… Odd that it wound up in the news like here, here and here…

A minion (not Y.T. of course) might begin to think someone is a) getting careless, or b) losing their touch.

Well, gotta go- my turn to take Phideaux (our resident Hound of Tindalos) for a walk.

Trembling in fear and reverence…

TBG

PS – Toaster the Onion Red?
Horniest Toad or Teen?
Thirteen Oared Snoot?
Antihero Ends Toe Rot?
Hmmm…

Hmm. Minions seem to have been skipping days at work, as indeed our influence in this matter is well and truly documented.

The Czar also received two letters, that shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons, that confirmed what a soft target the Navy Yard cafeteria was. Flash a military ID and you were in; expect that to change. Secondly, the target was well chosen: the cafeteria was good, centrally located with a lot of concealed overhangs above, and most of that building is a cube farm that made thorough searching extremely difficult for first responders. And, one theorized, Monday mornings are especially busy at WNY.

Finally, Mark Spahn of West Seneca, NY, knows what a goofy bunch of whacky polyglots we are, and how much we love language. He submits that there are not one but two websites that will help Americans analyze their dialect of origin.

The first version consists of 140 simple questions, but the Czar warns you that they seem to be running this on an old Macintosh SE/30 or something.

The second version consists of 25 questions that isn’t as accurate, but certainly Mr. Spahn reports he completed it in 11 minutes. And told him that he speaks exactly like someone who lives in his general area of the country. Did the Mandarin design this?

The Czar took the longer test, and it revealed, quiet accurately, that the Czar speaks with a Midwestern post-Slavic dialect with a heavy influence of Korean-Germanic Britishisms. Sadly, the Czar knows and uses so many different expressions that regionalisms are tricky. The Czar says both “firefly” and “lightning bug” often, but there are was no option for both. Many regionalisms are obvious—bag or sack, pail or bucket—and have been part of these tests for over a century. The long test could use some cleaning up and editing, alphabetizing the entries and weeding out some made-up words that college students submitted because they are ignorant and did not know the correct names of some words. And some questions are just typos: citizen: s or z? Which? The c or the z?

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.