Spice Prom

The Kings and Queens of the Hot Ones, according to the Domestic Goblin

John Boyega
David Blaine

Jimmy Fallon

Bill Murray

Adam Brody

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Conan O'Brien

Louis Theroux

Zayn Malik
David Beckham

Macaulay Culkin

Kristen Bell
Courtney Cox

Jenna Ortega

Florence Pugh

Padma Lakshmi

Charlize Theron
Ali Wong

Lady Gaga

Emily Blunt

Victorian Poetry

First Fig by Edna St Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends

It gives a lovely light!

A Man's Requirements by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I

Love me Sweet, with all thou art,

   Feeling, thinking, seeing;

Love me in the lightest part,

   Love me in full being.

II

Love me with thine open youth

   In its frank surrender;

With the vowing of thy mouth,

   With its silence tender.

III

Love me with thine azure eyes,

   Made for earnest granting;

Taking colour from the skies,

   Can Heaven’s truth be wanting?

IV

Love me with their lids, that fall

   Snow-like at first meeting;

Love me with thine heart, that all

   Neighbours then see beating.

V

Love me with thine hand stretched out

   Freely—open-minded:

Love me with thy loitering foot,—

   Hearing one behind it.

VI

Love me with thy voice, that turns

   Sudden faint above me;

Love me with thy blush that burns

   When I murmur Love me!

VII

Love me with thy thinking soul,

   Break it to love-sighing;

Love me with thy thoughts that roll

   On through living—dying.

VIII

Love me when in thy gorgeous airs,

   When the world has crowned thee;

Love me, kneeling at thy prayers,

   With the angels round thee.

IX

Love me pure, as musers do,

   Up the woodlands shady:

Love me gaily, fast and true

   As a winsome lady.

X

Through all hopes that keep us brave,

   Farther off or nigher,

Love me for the house and grave,

   And for something higher.

XI

Thus, if thou wilt prove me, Dear,

   Woman’s love no fable.

I will love thee—half a year—

   As a man is able.

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast, the light
Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true 

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Sonnet On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters by Oscar Wilde

These are the letters which Endymion wrote

     To one he loved in secret and apart,

     And now the brawlers of the auction-mart

Bargain and bid for each tear-blotted note,

Aye! for each separate pulse of passion quote

     The merchant’s price! I think they love not art

     Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart,

That small and sickly eyes may glare or gloat.

Is it not said, that many years ago,

     In a far Eastern town some soldiers ran

     With torches through the midnight, and began

To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw

     Dice for the garments of a wretched Man,

Not knowing the God’s wonder, or His woe?

Crossing the Bar by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

 When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell, 

 And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark; 

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face  

When I have cross’d the bar.

Love and Sorrow by Lord Alfred Tennyson

O MAIDEN, fresher than the first green leaf
With which the fearful springtide flecks the lea,
Weep not, Almeida, that I said to thee
That thou hast half my heart, for bitter grief
Doth hold the other half in sovranty.

Thou art my heart’s sun in love’s crystalline:
Yet on both sides at once thou canst not shine:
Thine is the bright side of my heart, and thine
My heart’s day, but the shadow of my heart,
Issue of its own substance, my heart’s night
Thou canst not lighten even with thy light,
All powerful in beauty as thou art.

Almeida, if my heart were substanceless,
Then might thy rays pass thro’ to the other side,
So swiftly, that they nowhere would abide,
But lose themselves in utter emptiness.
Half-light, half-shadow, let my spirit sleep
They never learnt to love who never knew to weep.

===

* This post was inspired by My Oxford Year *

What About the Goose Legs?

Season 8

Amsterdam

A joke for Max by Andy Kindler:

There's this Jewish lady, her husband died, so she wants to put an announcement in the paper.

So she calls up the paper and she says "How much does it cost to put an announcement in?"

And the guy says "Five dollars a word."

She goes " Oh very, very expensive. That's crazy. Okay put this in: Saul died.

And the person goes "I'm sorry ma'am there's a five word minimum."

"Okay put this in: Saul died. Volvo for sale.

Basque Country

A joke for Max by Will Forte:

I love Dolly Parton. So if I ever got to meet Dolly Parton, I'd have so many questions for her. But after really thinking about it I think I know how I would start the conversation.  "Hello Dolly!"

I love Dublin. But there's one place that I like just slightly more...Triplin.

I love Tucson but there's a place I like slightly more...Threescon.

No matter how fast you are going in an airport, you're always going this speed...terminal velocity.

Boston

A joke for Max by Jane Fonda:

A lady's husband died. They've been married about 30 years and the pallbearers are brining out his casket to the church and they accidentally bump the casket into the back row of pews and there's a noise inside the casket. And sure enough the husband is alive. It's a miracle. So he and his wife love together another ten years. Finally he passes away and the pallbearers are brining the casket back into the church. And the wife says "Be careful this time."

My wife yelled upstairs yesterday and asked me "Do you ever get a shooting pain across your body? You know, like somebody's got a voodoo doll and they're stabbing it?". And I said "No". And she responds "How about now?"

Tbilisi

A joke for Max by Bonnie Hunt:

In Dubai, they love American television. But the only show they don't like is The Flintstones.Why? 

I don't know. But the people in Abu-Dhabi-do!

When I worked in a  psychiatric office for a while, we had a lady walk in one day, no appointment, which they couldn't stand. They didn't like to have walk-ins, they didn't want people coming without an appointment. I go to the psychiatrist, "Theres a woman here with no appointment." He said, "What's the issue?" I said, "She thinks she's invisible." He said, "Tell her I can't see her now."

Sydney and Adelaide 

A joke for Max by Mel Brooks:

A guy walks into a grocery store and says "Give me half a pound of lox, half a pound of cream cheese, half a dozen bagels..." He stops and says "I'm sorry I don't mean to pry but I'm looking at your shelves and all I see are red boxes of salt. You must have a hundred boxes of salt. And every shelf is cluttered with boxes of salt. Maybe a hundred boxes. Do you sell aot of salt?"

And the guy says "Me? If I sell a box a week, it will be a miracle. I don't sell a lot of salt. No, I don't sell a lot of salt. But the guy who sold me salt, boy can he sell salt!

Las Vegas

A joke for Max by Ray Romano and Brad Garrett:

A man walked into a bookstore. He says to the woman behind the counter, "I'm looking for a new book. It's about small genitalia but I forgot the name of it."

She goes, "Let me look" and she opens up the laptop. She goes, "I don't think it's in yet."

He goes, "That's it!"

Manila

A joke for Max by Ike Barinholtz:

My rabbi is a great rabbi but is very strictly strictly to the letter of the law kosher. But his deep dark secret was that he dreamed of eating pork. But he never had the chance to have it his whole life.

It was all day haunting him. "What does it taste like. I need to know."

One day he just kind of broke down and he said, "I'm gonna go have some pork."

He went to Chinatown and goes inside a restaurant and he walks in with a hat and glasses.

He sits down and orders a suckling pig.Then he takes the hat and glasses off and a little bit later they bring the pig out. It's got a big apple in its mouth, it's sitting there on the spit.

He's holding his knife and fork and licking his lips.

He goes in and takes a slice of it and as he looks out the window he sees three other members of his congregation walking by and they stop and they freeze and they see him. And he looks at them and he goes, "This restaurant's horrible. I ordered an apple and this is how they served it!"

Guatemala 

A joke for Max by Jimmy O. Yang:

An Asian guy and a Jewish guy are eating at a restaurant. The Asian guy orders a miso soup and the Jewish guy is like, "Oh, that's great. Is this what you ate growing up?"

The Asian guys says, "No, I'm Chinese. Miso soup is actually Japanese. And the Jewish guy is like, "Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, you're all the same!" And the Chinese guy didn't say anything.

Then the Jewish guy orders a wedge salad. And the Chinese guy is like, "Oh, is that what you ate growing up?" The Jewish guy was like, "No, this is just iceberg lettuce."

The Chinese guy was like, "Yeah, iceberg, Goldberg, Rosenberg. You guys are all the same!"