Yassir, Dat's my Baby

Jami put a melon under her shirt and the fun began. Comedy can be this simple: a melon under a shirt - it's pregnant with possibilities. This may be the oldest joke in human history. Hieroglyphs indicate this being done to amuse the Pharaoh. Sometimes the Pharaoh did it to amuse his courtiers. Whole retinues put melons under their clothes to imitate pregnancy. And further back, there are Sumerian scripts that have recently been translated as "and then a melon was procured under the shirt in mimesis of pregnancy - we all laughed and had some more beer." The Romans combined Carthagenian fertility rites and Greek harvest festivals into their own slapstick creation of the Melonalia - where citizens walked around all day with melons under their togas and made mocking reference to getting too near the Priapas last night. Medieval Popes would carry melons under their regalia in demonstration of the text where Paul says that he is giving birth to the Church. Some early papyrii of the gospels contain palimpsests in descriptions of the Loaves and Fishes that say "and melons under the shirt." In Netherlandish paintings of the 1400s and 1500s women are carrying melons under their skirts in devotion to the melon martyrs, a group of holy virgins that were assailed by melons on a visit to the Holy Land at the behest of Louis Xth. A notable example of this devotion is seen in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage. The presence of the little dog in the painting is not so much an iconographic indication of fidelity as it is to the fact that the bride has a melon under her dress and the groom has a melon for a head. And there is Durer's wood engraving Meloncholia I- a figure, head slumped on hands, while a cupid plays with stilts, is surrounded by mathematical and engineering shapes, at a loss for motivation in a surfeit of knowledge. Melons under a shirt were seen to be a cure for this state of affairs - hence the title.
On another note of comic genius: this morning Jami and I were discussing buttermilk, the fact that it doesn't have any butter, even though butter comes from milk. Because she grew up on a dairy, she has a wonderful store of milk production and bovine nurturing lore. It's hard to gainsay anything that she might assert. But still: no butter in butter milk - this seems way too conterintuitive. But she affirmed that this is the case - butter milk is milk allowed to go sour (which begs the question of expiration dates) and that it contains no butter. That curds are not butter - and neither I suppose is whey (what exactly is miss Muffet eating?). She told me that butter is churned and that different churning styles and methods yield different types of butter. To which I said, perhaps too hastily, that there would seem to be a great margarine of error in butter making. I say too hastily because the room got real quiet. I don't know what happened exactly, perhaps the house is settling still after 60 years, but the door to the bathroom was closed very softly in front of me. This is the treatment I receive from a woman who has a photo of the town of Bath on our bathroom door. I remember when I was young and reading about the great depression that stocks were sold on margin - and I remember thinking to myself, "that tub of Parkay in our refrigerator? You'd buy stocks with that? No wonder people were depressed - margarine tastes awful on melons."