Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor (1971) by Isaac Asimov.

I don't think I've done any bookblogging this year, so I thought I would ease back into it with this pretty slight item.

My late father taught Sunday School, and he used this as a resource for many of his opening jokes before he started on the lessons. I used it as bathroom reading, though I had read it before back in my early teens and remembered very little of it. Not surprising, since it's not very memorable; and not very funny, either, full of chestnuts that were stale at the time of publication forty years ago (and thus perfect for a Senior Men's Sunday School class). I only chuckled a couple of times, at best, and usually was left completely stone-faced. It's also very sexist, which Asimov's repeated assertions that he is a feminist don't do much to remedy.

A few points of interest among the general drabness:

• He misattributes "I wonder how one augur can pass another on the street without laughing" to Cato the Elder, when it was actually Cicero. And thus he misses getting to point out that Cicero was himself actually an augur. (IIRC, Cicero makes the infamous comment in a private letter when he was actually running for the office.)
  
• Asimov includes the 'teeth in Hell' joke ("In Hell there will be gnashing of teeth!" "But Reverend, what if the damned are toothless?" "In Hell teeth will be supplied!") IIRC - maybe I read it in Bart Ehrman somewhere - some twentieth-century theologian prankster made a pseudepigraph where that is a bit of dialogue between Jesus and his disciples. (Still not funny.)
  
• There's a joke about building a supercomputer, asking it if there's a God, and getting the response from the computer that, "There is now!" Asimov then mock-petulantly complains that it's a de facto rip-off of his story "The Last Question." He generously allows, though, that maybe the joke is older than his story. Well, yeah, since it's basically a paraphrase[1] of Fredric Brown's "Answer." That was published in 1954. Asimov's "The Last Question" came out in '56. Wow, at least the possibility of two plagiarism lawsuits there! I assume nothing ever happened on that front -- Brown died the year after this book was published, which may have something to do with it.
  

I was reading a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the other day, and I was reminded of the curious canonical fact that Holmes is the great-nephew of the real-life French painter Vernet.

I started thinking about other examples. There's C.S. Forester, who eventually marries his Horatio Hornblower off to a fictional sister of the Duke of Wellington. In Mario Puzo's The Fourth K (which I have not read, but have read about), "President Francis Xavier Kennedy" is a fictional nephew of John, Bobby and Teddy (presumably by a fictional Kennedy brother, since he has the surname; or maybe he's Joe, Jr.'s bastard). In Gore Vidal's Creation, the narrator, Cyrus Spitama, is a fictional grandson of Zoroaster and his great-nephew is Democritus. (In addition, Cyrus is for a while the son-in-law of King Ajatashatru.) And Howard Waldrop's "The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On)" is narrated by Manny, a fictional Marx Brother. (I've read somewhere that he was actually a real-life stillborn, which would technically disqualify him from this list, having actually existed, if only briefly; but this list is short enough I'll include him anyway. Gray area.)

I'm sure there are huge numbers of examples I'm missing. (N.B: I could have included another Gore Vidal novel above, but left it off since it would be a major spoiler.)

For some reason, Gmail is putting my Google Alerts in its spam folder.

According to an amazon.com consumer review, Iris Murdoch "one" a Booker Prize.

The morons march on . . .

Should have started this at the start of February, but better late than never.

( January's acquisitions: )

From Dorothy Sayers' dedication to Nine Little Tailors (1934): "From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. It seems strange that a generation which tolerates the uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band should be so sensitive to the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God."

And in the movie Goldfinger (1964) James Bond says, "My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!"

This is why I never say anything about rap.

I haven't seen much point to Twitter. When a friend started tweeting (or twittering, or whatever it's called) I got an account to follow him, and subscribed to some of the popular figures (Cory Doctorow, Stephen Fry, Will Wheaton, Neil Gaiman, etc.). I've been looking at it off and on for several weeks now, and it's just not impressing me or interesting me in the slightest. One day I followed a writer's tongue-in-cheek livejournal suggestion & posted some surreal/Dadaist comments, but then I realized the stunt's essential stupidity and deleted them all. I've now finally decided to log (selective) brief notices of books/stories I've read or movies/television seen. I might as well use the useless account for something.

Anyway, you can check out my account if you're eager for some tedium.

If Thomas Pynchon ever won the Nobel Prize, would he decline it? Or would he attend the ceremony with a paper bag over his head?

(ETA: I'm assuming the equivalent of the National Book Award/"Professor" Irwin Corey schtick wouldn't be an option for such an exalted venue as the Nobels.)