Word Wednesday: "Mungo"

Here's a weird tidbit for you:

The word mungo can mean "low quality wool" or "mongoose" and is the first person singular present indicative of the Italian word "to milk." (Put that phrase in your pipe and smoke it!) It has another slang meaning though; it means "dumpster diver." While this seems of little significance, it has shed light on one of the great questions in my life. I always wondered why the roguish character Mungojerry in "Cats" was called Mungojerry. It seems like a meaningless name. Now I understand. He is a wandering cat, a slightly bad cat, and surely isn't too high and mighty to do a little dumpster diving of his own.

Whether or not Tim Rice actually intended this hidden meaning in Mungojerry's name I don't think I shall every know. That is beside the point. The mystery has been solved

Ciao!

The Lonely Alchemist

Steampunk Game Review: "Azada: In Libro"

It is one of the great travesties of the world that Steampunk themed games are few and far between (and it's hard to find the good ones).  So we at the Lonely Alchemist are committed to testing and reviewing every Steampunk-ish MMORPG and casual game we can find, just for you!

Today we review a fabulous casual game by the name of "Azada: In Libro."  Another beautiful and fun-to-play creation from ERS Game Studios, this is a sequel to the other Azada games but, at least in our opinion, it is more worth the price than the others.

The game begins in an industrialized Edwardian Europe where you, the player, are informed that a distant relative in Prague has left you an inheritance.  After traveling there, you are cast into an enchanted world from which you cannot escape until you defeat the evil magician who wishes to destroy the magical world and then your own.

A Selection from "The Shunned House" by H. P. Lovecraft

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street—the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette—and his favorite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighboring hillside churchyard of St. John's, whose hidden expanse of Eighteenth Century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest fantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

A Quote for Thought

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
-- Albert Einstein

A selection from the Gothic romance "The Monk" by M. G. Lewis

CHAPTER I

——Lord Angelo is precise;
Stands at a guard with envy; Scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone.
Measure for Measure.

Scarcely had the Abbey Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors. Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled either from motives of piety or thirst of information. But very few were influenced by those reasons; and in a city where superstition reigns with such despotic sway as in Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt. The Audience now assembled in the Capuchin Church was collected by various causes, but all of them were foreign to the ostensible motive. The Women came to show themselves, the Men to see the Women: Some were attracted by curiosity to hear an Orator so celebrated; Some came because they had no better means of employing their time till the play began; Some, from being assured that it would be impossible to find places in the Church; and one half of Madrid was brought thither by expecting to meet the other half. The only persons truly anxious to hear the Preacher were a few antiquated devotees, and half a dozen rival Orators, determined to find fault with and ridicule the discourse. As to the remainder of the Audience, the Sermon might have been omitted altogether, certainly without their being disappointed, and very probably without their perceiving the omission.

Poetry Tuesday: "Sonnet 54" by Shakespeare

Ciao!
The Lonely Alchemist