Me too. And researching that on Wikipedia, I just found out I want a pet fossa.
Mad scientists need to resurrect the extinct Giant Fossa, a leopard-size mustelid that local legends say would crawl into peoples’ huts at night and attack them.
Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Frith of the Harvard Lampoon wrote a James Bond parody called Alligator in 1962, seven years before the far more famous Bored of the Rings. It was bound into copies of the Harvard Lampoon magazine, and then published as a separate paperback.
Cerf’s father, who happened to be Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House, thought it was so good it deserved to be published in hardback. He asked Ian Fleming for permission. Fleming was outraged to some young punks were parodying his masterpiece and said no in the firmest possible language. He had clout because Random House was just about to publish Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang.
No more printings were ever made, and Cerf and Frith didn’t do a follow-up parody. “We had movie offers, somebody wanted us to do a Broadway musical,” Frith said. They couldn’t. Here’s the jaw-dropping bit.
Fleming’s ire extended beyond the grave. After he died, the people who had obtained the rights to continue the series approached Frith and C. Cerf and asked them to write the further adventures of James Bond. The collaborators accepted, but a routine check revealed a codicil in the late author’s will that prohibited in perpetuity Frith and Cerf specifically from writing any Bond books after Fleming’s death. Not even over his dead body would the author let his hero fall into the parodists’ clutches a second time.
I’ve got a copy of this. It was missing the four center pages (the one sheet held in by the staple), but I borrowed a copy from a collector, photocopied the missing pages, and bound them into my copy.
Never heard the “retribution from beyond the grave” story before, though.
It’s available on Kindle for 99 cents!
I may have to get it.
Really hammers home the point that even though parody is legally protected free speech in America, it makes sense to get permissions the way Weird Al does.
I assume your copy is marked “second printing”. I’ve been searching for years for a first printing and never even seen one for sale, so I decided to track down why. Never occurred to me that a separate first never existed.
Don’t recall. I’ll have to check.
Facebook just served me up a video on the workings of the Brennan torpedo. Louis Brennan invented a torpedo that contained two spools of wire with the free ends sticking out of the back of the torpedo; when the wires were pulled quickly backwards, it would spin a pair of contra-rotating propellers that would move the torpedo forwards. In fact, by pulling the wires at different rates, the torpedo could be guided. Pretty fancy for the late 1800s.
I just remembered that when I was young golf suddenly became popular in Spain (remember Severiano Ballesteros? That was the reason.) Not that people suddenly started playing golf, far from it. It remains an elitist sport to this day in a country graping with chronical moderate to severe drought. But they started showing it on TV, which had never happened before.
And it soon became interesting, at least linguistically. Because when you reach the green and you hit the ball, you putt the ball. Putt for birdie, or putt for par, right? It is just that Spanish did not have a verb for that, so the commentator made it up as he went along. What should he have done otherwise? The result was the player was “putteando para birdie” or “putteando para el par”. The problem was that the verb putear did already exist, and there was no way to tell that this putear was written with a double “t” (which is not used in Spanish anyway – that would be Italian). Here is the definition for putear (in Spanish). Suffice to say that it is not to be used in polite company.
The solution? Pronounce the “u” as a Spanish “a”: patear. Keep a straight face. It’s completely normal. Wikipedia still advices the Spanish speakers on how to pronounce putter and putt in the description of the shots in golf:
El putt (castellanizado pat) es el golpe que se le da a la bola con el palo llamado putter (pronúnciese ‘pater’) en una sección de la cancha denominada verde o green.
The putt (Spanish pat) is the stroke given to the ball with the putter (pronounced ‘pater’) in a section of the course called the green.
Interesting? I don’t know. But I still find it funny after almost half a century.
Don’t worry, it’s interesting and funny. What’s also funny is that the first half of your story could have been told from my German perspective if you just replace Severiano Ballesteros with Bernhard Langer and the Spanish neologism “puttear” with the German neologism “putten”. Unfortunately, the already existing cognate in German is not as funny as the Spanish one, “Putten” only existed as a noun and means the cute baby angels with wings in baroque paintings and sculptures. Like this:
Bronny James 2025 Lakers salary: $1,157,000
Bronny James total 2025 points: 62
Dollars per point: $18,662
The term ‘putti’ is used for these figures in English, too, although mostly in art history circles.
Those two figures are part of a painting by Raphael of the Virgin Mary, orignially commisioned by Pope Julius II, it was bought by a German king and displayed in Dresden. During World War 2 it was stored in a cave and thus survived the war, but was taken by the Soviets. They eventually gave it back in 1955.
An animation of the mechanics:
Later surpassed by the brass steam-charged flywheel torpedo
Assyrians and Syrians are pretty different. Assyrians are not Arabs, usually Christian, and speak Syriac, which is an Aramaic dialect. Syrians are generally Arabs, Islamic, and, suprisingly, typically speak Arabic as their first language..
I know it’s easy and fun to pick on Bronny because of his family heritage, but he’s not the most overpaid NBA player.
Bronny’s salary was the NBA minimum for a full season of $1,157,153. He was one of 8 players to earn that this year. Another was Cam Christie of the LA Clippers. He scored a whopping total of 18 points this season.
You’re thinking like a normal person. The Lakers’ bean counters are thinking “Did LBJr sell enough tickets, bring in enough TV eyeballs to make the $1.5M worth it?”
LOL, good point.
And if failed at his job, but in a way that caused more people to watch the games and spend more money, the owners would want him to keep on failing in the same way.
Would “cherubs” be the equivalent or is there some hyper-technical distinction?
I’m not sure what meaning(s) “cherub” entail in English, but I’m thinking of rather frightening, warrior like angels of Biblical and apocryphal myths, just the opposite of the cutified fat baby angels in 16/17th century European art.