139 Comments

1. 

   I guess I fail the geezer test. I’m guessing he was on The Partridge Family?

   Of course, I do see what he’s doing here! This looks like it will be some sort of rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas, and this was for the “partridge in a pear tree” that my true love sent for me on the first day

2. 

   Have you seen these?

   

3. 

   ‘3 Belgian hens’: lol!

4. 

   We could in fact use some help for Seven and Eight!

5. 

   Something about the song I’ve always wondered about: Is the song repeating all the presents that were given on the previous days, or are the presents repeating? e.g. does the recipient get two turtledoves every day except the first day, for a total of 22 turtledoves, or just two total?

6. 

   Yes, that accumulation has been the basis for several parodic or comedic takes, as well as some math amusement!

7. 

   I’ve always assumed the “22 turtledoves” and so on interpretation, as does this great riff:

   http://kazza.id.au/2008/12/and-yet-another-partridge-in-a.html

8. 

   Thank you, Shrug! I’ve been looking for that!

   N.B. The collector running that blog Shrug has linked to, also provides (look in his first Comment) an MP3 audio file of what seems to be the original radio performance of the story. (I recall reading it but also hearing it over radio.) It’s about fifteen minutes and really gives it a flavor!

9. 

   Deety, you are like half right. Keith Partridge “was on” The Partridge Family — as a character name. The actor was David Cassidy.

10. 

    “Thank you, Shrug! I’ve been looking for that!”

    Quite welcome, of course. I’m happy I can pay back a little bit of the work you and the rest of Santa CIDU Bill’s Honorary Elves have put in to keeping the dream alive.

    I’d not actually heard/read the BBC ur-version before, but was familiar with retellings/ripoffs, most of which got a bit more vulgar in the milking maids, ladies, and lords interactions.

11. 

    They’re colly birds, darnit. Black. Like coal. Colly.

    I’ve also heard that the five golden rings are supposed to be ring-necked pheasants, thus preserving the pattern of the first seven days being birds.

    Still haven’t figured out why the maids a-milking make a good gift.

12. 

    The repetition aspect of this song is an old folk song tradition, known as a cumulative song. Another fine example is The Barley Mow.

13. 

    (End of comments from First Day.)

14. 

    Ah “the hybrids” — hybrids of turtle and dove, evidently?

15. 

    Powers says They’re colly birds, darnit. Black. Like coal. Colly.

    This is one of the variations most commonly lobbied for nowadays.

    That wiki article mentioned in the post includes a big table listing the gift and the phrasing for some 20 documented versions of the song. From a quick perusal, only one version (but it is the one they take as the standard to note variations off of) has calling.

16. 

    Okay, let’s see if big HTML will really paste and be accepted and be legible! (Next comment)

17. 

    Sorry, had to trash that. Displayed very very poorly.

18. 

    And here’s the next one! This looks like they jumped from five to twelve, to get it over with …

    

19. 

    Does Bob often show up in that strip? If not, then it’s a bit of a CIDU as to why he is there.

20. 

    Brian, are you talking about the Queen Victoria strips? And is Bob the guy with the pipe? I remember I used to know more of the lore around him, but at this remove can’t even recall if he was a prophet of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or what.
    Anyhow, the cartoonist is largely a cutout and collage artist, and has a variety of stock sources. I don’t remember Bob being all that frequent though.

21. 

    About the “parody similarly based in an assumption of accumulating quantities, in which the fair lady receiving the gifts gets increasingly annoyed in each letter, up to the cease-and-desist order.” — Perhaps this was what you had in mind. It ends with
    “5th January.
    Sir,
    Our client, Miss Emily Wilbraham, instructs me to inform you that
    with the arrival on her premises a half-past seven this morning of
    the entire percussion section of the Liverpool Philharmonic
    Orchestra and several of their friends she has no course left open
    to her but to seek an injunction to prevent your importuning her
    further. I am making arrangements for the return of much assorted livestock.”

22. 

    “Does Bob often show up in that strip? If not, then it’s a bit of a CIDU as to why he is there.”

    “Bob” is a piper… if piping means smoking a pipe.

    ” And is Bob the guy with the pipe? I remember I used to know more of the lore around him, but at this remove can’t even recall if he was a prophet of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or what.”

    The church of the sub-genius predates that rather banal FSM by about two decades. “Bob”‘s a profit of Jehovah-1 which is not to be mistaken for God. Jehovah-h has slack.

23. 

    ” Perhaps this was what you had in mind.” I’m sure there were many others. This isn’t that subtle an idea.

    https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-twelve-days-of-christmas

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2012/12/21/dear-true-love-thank-you-notes-from-the-twelve-days-of-christmas/

    etc

24. 

    “Still haven’t figured out why the maids a-milking make a good gift.”

    In the later parts of the song, when you’re getting people as presents, is it like you’re a lord, and getting new slaves/vassals/whatever? If so, those seem like pretty good gifts.

25. 

    In relation to the accumulated gifts, I don’t believe we’re intended to literally count each gift multiple times. The lyrics repeat as if it’s a memory game; it’s not really an exponential accumulation of gifts. :-)

26. 

    not really an exponential accumulation of gifts

    Okay, even on the super-accumulation model however, technically it would not be exponential would it? So the math challenge is:

    For a song with the same structure but covering a total of N days, for the gift of m items starting on day m and repeating each day, what is the formula for the total number of gifts of that single item?

    Question 2, What is the formula for the total number of gifts of all types over the course of the N days? Sure, you could sum the formula you got in question 1 with m going from 1 to N; but can you express it in a more self-contained, simpler way?

    Question 3, Hold N steady, and make a series of the N values you get in question 1 for the values of m going from 1 to N. So for instance for N = 12 the series is {12, 22, 30, 36, 40, 42, 42, 40, 36, 30, 22, 12} . Vague question – where else do you find this series? What is it equivalent to?

27. 

    A piper. But there’s only one of him. Where are the others?

    I’m not sure I should discuss it with an obvious Pink, but yes the figure with a pipe is J. R. “Bob” Dobbs.

28. 

    Sigh…

    1) m(N+1 – m)

    2) 1 + (1+2) + (1+2+3) + ….. + (1 + 2 + …. +N) = 1/2(12 + 23 + …… + (N-1)N)=

    1/2(2^2 – 2 + 3^2-3 + ……… + N^2 – N) = 1/2[(2^2 + 3^2 + …. + N^2)- (2+3+…. +N)]=

    1/2(N(N+1)(2N+1)/6 – 1) -1/2(N(N+1)-1)/2 = 1/2N(N+1)((2N+1)6- 1)=

    [N(N+1)(2N+1)-6(N(N+1))]/12 = (N(N+1)(2N-5))/12

    3) Its the parabola X(N-X)=NX – X^2. You see it if you throw a ball in the air and watch it go up and come down.

29. 

    (Woozy math,)
    Thank you for working that out! And working out a mostly-readable presentation!

30. 

    The narrator of the audio presentation sounds to me very much to be Penelope Keith, which makes it all the more special!

    (Indeed: “A Cautionary Tale for Christmas Showing that it is Better to Give than to Receive, written by BRIAN SIBLEY and starring PENELOPE KEITH as Miss Cynthia Bracegirdle with TIMOTHY BATESON as Mr Graball of Graball, Twister and Fleesum. Directed by JOHN THEOCHARIS and first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1977”)

31. 

    larK quoting the Radio 4 credits line: with TIMOTHY BATESON as Mr Graball of Graball, Twister and Fleesum

    Ha! Reminds me of the Car Talk attorneys: Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe!

32. 

    (End of comments from Second Day.)

33. 

    Okay.

    Three French Horns,
    Two turtle/dove chimeras,
    And Keith Partridge in a pear tree!

34. 

    Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe were in The Three Stooges as well, and probably date from Vaudeville days I’d guess.

35. 

    mitch4: Wait, was that the desired answer to question #3, “Vague question – where else do you find this series? What is it equivalent to?” Just it’s a parabola? That seems awfully generic.

36. 

    Brian: Church of the SubGenius??? Pink???

37. 

    Brian: Church of the SubGenius??? Pink???

    Who wants to know?

38. 

    It’s ” three French hens “.

39. 

    Big Chief, yes but the picture is Three French Horns

40. 

    WW says: mitch4: Wait, was that the desired answer to question #3,[...] Just it’s a parabola? That seems awfully generic.

    Well, I sort of was looking for something more, but that would have been on the “why” axis (LOL), and in a way there is no “why”-residue in math, once you’ve done-the-math.

    My implicit why question would have been “Why does the series {12, 22, 30, 36, 40, 42, 42, 40, 36, 30, 22, 12} (and others like it, from different N) go up and back down, and has that L-R reflective symmetry?”. Woozy’s answer didn’t directly address this. But it is there, implicitly, in his answer for Question 1, which gives an expression for a single term of the series:

    m(N+1 – m)

    Ignore the +1 for a moment, and note this has both m and (N-m), in a product. As m varies from 1 to M, the products m(N-m) and (N-m)m will both occur, and account for the symmetry. Shoot, I should have introduced some sort of i as an index variable to make that cleaner — but you get what I mean I’m sure.

    What this is reminiscent of, for me, is the binomial coefficients. (These are the things written with a number or variable at the top and the bottom of where the ends of a parentheses pair () converge.) I’ll say a bit more about these later if I have the chance. But when you look at the compact expression for the value of Comb(N,m) (to use another notation) it has a product n!(M-n)! which produces the same sort of up-and-down with symmetry.

41. 

    We learn almost by rote that x^2 + bx +c or takes the shape of a parabola pointing up and -x^2+bx+c takes the shape of a parabola pointing down. So I guess claiming m([N+1] – m) is hinting at a parabola because $m([N+1]-m) = -m^2 + m[N+1].

    But I thing the rote PARABOLA=2nd degree polynomial misses the issue of why does it have such a symetric arc shape. I think noting x(d-x) make it implicit. The x and d-x are simply left/right trasormation so much x by k to the right would be exactly the same as move d-x by k to the left and we by symmetric over the axis x=d/2. And as we make x or d-x larger the end values -x^2 overwhelm. And that is why parabolas look so pretty.

    And the simplest most common example of a parabola is a tossed ball. Of course that is because the lateral height is determined by gravitation which is bases an the square of time (ass opposed to vertical position that is strictly linear). So maybe the rote of second degree has its uses.

    ======

    French Hens <=> French Horns.

    Isn’t that a bit thin? And not a comic?

42. 

    French Hens <=> French Horns.
Isn’t that a bit thin? And not a comic?

    Let’s check in the rules book!

43. 

    But all quadratic equations are parabolas with L-R reflective symmetry about an appropriate axis. So the Q&A strike me as “Q: What is this series equivalent to?” “A: It’s a quadratic equation, just like all other quadratic equations.”

    (I’m vaguely reminded of a discussion in college about “What does it mean for two proofs to be ‘equivalent’?”)

44. 

    (End of comments from Third Day.)

45. 

    You could do this

    

    or this

    

    (And, yes, those are hens, not roosters. Hen’s have combs but they are smaller than roosters’; as are these chickens.)

    Or this: https://pics.me.me/thumb_not-sure-if-french-or-fry-france-comixed-com-web-comics-51445303.png

    Okay, the last is too thin. But not as thin as the one that was done.

46. 

    And if we are allowed to be self-referential

    

    And the classic:

    https://dyn1.heritagestatic.com/lf?set=path%5B1%2F6%2F8%2F1%2F2%2F16812499%5D%2Csizedata%5B850x600%5D&call=url%5Bfile%3Aproduct.chain%5D

47. 

    Thanks, Woozy, for all those fine comics and other images. I’m glad you were able to share them with us all. Things in this comments thread become an integral part of the overall compilation experience!

48. 

    Brian: You (DECEMBER 26, 2020 AT 10:19 PM) brought up “an obvious Pink” and “J. R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs,” which Google tells me is connected to “Church of the SubGenius.” When I see gibberish, it tends to make me curious.

    And if we ever get to play Christmas Concerts again, it might be cool to have the French horns stand up every time we come to the “three French hens” line. I wonder if anyone would get it?

49. 

    Ed, don’t fret, I take it they’re just taking on the pose of an alert, suspicious cult member, careful not to discuss internal secrets in front of outsiders.

    Do you remember (actually it’s still around) Transcendental Meditation? Big in the US from the 60s on. If you went thru the preliminary training, paid the fee, and came to an induction with the proper meditation objects like a piece of plant life, you would be told privately your special and secret mantra, picked out for you by the Maharishi, and which you must promise to always hold secret, even after leaving the organization.

    My friend Alice, who joined up with TM from a mix of genuine interest and on a lark, many years further on would joke about it as almost a scam, but would never disclose her mantra.

50. 

    How do we know the line isn’t really “Frenched hens”? https://www.thespruceeats.com/frenched-food-preparation-2313702 :-)

51. 

    here was a time in my fussy-eater youth when the only way to get me to eat green beans was from a packet of frozen Bird’s Eye “French-cut Green Beans with Slivered Almonds” or similarly prepared, and never ever under the name “string beans”.

52. 

    Sorry, I didn’t mean to cause any discomfort. Just kidding around.

53. 

    No worries, Brian. You got a few of us to go look up something interesting!

    I had a vague memory of the Sub-Genius camp being associated with Discordia. Wikipedia says both parties deny an actual connection, but there are similarities. When you (was it you or another?) first commented to point out Bob in the Queen Victoria strip, I think I asked about similarity to FSM, but was thinking of and forgot to say Discordia. The reason I am harping on their name is that there is a recently popular app/site/program/service called Discord, but it seems entirely above ground.

54. 

    Normally we would be tonight (and most nights in late December other than Christmas Eve/Night) at the local restoration village as our 18th selves. While I cannot carry a tune in a bucket or even a suitcase, many of members of our reenactment sing fairly to very well and other members of the unit play music – of course this year – not so much.

    In the 18th century all 12 days of Christmas were celebrated. December 25 was a holy day – spent in church, but then with December 26 the 12 days of merriment would start. Different neighbors would be giving parties nightly. Family would come to visit (and I as “Anne” explains to people – family does not come to visit for the afternoon or evening or day, but for days, especially if they are not living in the immediate community. It was common for weddings to take place during the 12 days of Christmas – George and Martha Washington and Thomas and Martha Jefferson both had their weddings during the 12 days of Christmas (not the same year or day).

    For the evenings we are doing this event after Christmas (often it starts before Christmas) we use the matching day to describe the party being attended – both by us and all of the visitors passing through (which can be a couple of thousand or more per night) so, today, December 28, it would be a third night party. For evenings before Christmas we talk about the customs of Christmas, but since the family whose home we are in were Dutch and Sinter Klaus items are left out, we are visiting them as they wanted to share their customs of same with us.

    The past several years the Village has been having a scavenger hunt (primarily for the children coming through, but adults welcome to try to find the items) in which each of the houses which are open for the event has something related to one of the 12 days of Christmas. Last year we had a square of fabric printed with the 7 geese. I had put it on the table with the Sinter Klaus related items next to me. I arranged the other items so the center of panel with the geese showed rather obviously (or so I thought) in the center of the items they would be shown when they came over. I would hear a family talking about it and call them over. Some times I would drop and pick up and drop again a number of times a plastic orange on the fabric or stand and basically point at it and they still could not find it! then I had several groups who came through who saw it, counted the swans and walk away upset as they apparently did not know the difference between swans and geese and there were too many geese for it to be part of the game!

    Our unit “music master” (as his military title) studies period music. Originally the song was the 7 days of Christmas and all of the gifts were birds – if you check, all of the birds fall in the first 7 days of the song – the other days and the non- bird gifts were added some time after the original version – but long before the 1770s.

    Robert and I heard a Christmas song from the period while at Colonial Williamsburg called “There was a pig went out to dig” and mentioned it to the music master and it is one of the most popular song he plays and the members sing. If anyone cares to hear it – a quick search online of the title brings up several versions.

55. 

    Quick oops – forgot to mention -while today the 5 golden rings are thought of and portrayed as gold jewelry rings, they were originally intended to be 5 birds which were golden ring pheasants.

56. 

    Yes, Mitch, I do remember Transcendental Meditation — or at least the mania for it — but I never really grokked on what it was all about. It really doesn’t matter to me what Brian was on about, with “an obvious Pink” and “J. R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs,” but just got my curiosity up.

57. 

    Thank you, Meryl, for verifying that there is a tradition of starting the Twelve Days on December 26.

58. 

    Twelfthnight (6th of January) was called that for a reason.

59. 

    BTW, for Woozy or others who may want to research and suggest entries for the song, a reminder that we still need comics or images for Seven (swans, swimming) and Eight (maids, milking).

60. 

    They are clearly tweeting birds!

61. 

    Also, Brian, don’t take Boise Ed’s capital letters as raised voice, that’s just the way the timestamp appears on the page. I do hope the maintainers get their Xmas wish and we can have numbered comments in a thread again. That would allow identifying a particular comment you are replying to without extensive quoting or using the odd-looking timestamps.

62. 

    For swans there’s this:

    

    Although I don’t really get it.

    There’s these https://www.thecomicstrips.com/subject/The-Swan-Comic-Strips.php which are all not quite but they are about swans.

    And a google on “Swans Comic Strips” in google images (https://www.google.com/search?q=swans+comic+strips&client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=ALeKk03uRRzhIDX2j7XannS4mJCgB2KkGg:1609228539300&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj828m72_LtAhVBsp4KHR-MC5IQ_AUoAXoECAUQAw&biw=1366&bih=607) will come up with a lot of Superman Illustrations. Without googling, anyone want to guess why Superman showed up so much.

63. 

    Geeze, Woozy, I don’t mean this to sound mean, but you might want to get some advice about how one of the ways “they” track you is by personalizing URLs. And then when you go to share a URL from a search or something like that, it’s a good idea, it’s good practice, to manually trim it down to the minimal valid part that will get your readers to the result.

    In your case, nobody needs to use a URL that informs the site that the browser is Firefox, for example. I will test if it still works when trimmed down to https://www.google.com/search?q=swans+comic+strips . Well not quite — I had to manually switch into Images in google. But do you see my point?

    Golly, all day long you can see people posting URLs with things like “source=email” and the name of a promotional campaign. Even an occasional account name! Clean it up, folks!

64. 

    Woozy, thanks for the effort.
    Although I don’t really get it. If you mean the first one, the one where the image did embed here, in the bottom panel the swans’s neck and body forms spell out a message: “Nobody [heart] you”. Maybe not what he (or we) was expecting from this pastoral scene!

65. 

    ” Without googling, anyone want to guess why Superman showed up so much.”

    I don’t need to google it, I said curtly.

66. 

    (End of comments from Fourth Day.)

67. 

    I don’t get the rings cartoon.

    It’s a fine choice for the 5 rings but as a cartoon… I don’t.

    ……..

    “but you might want to get some advice about how one of the ways “they” track you is by personalizing URLs”

    Meh…. Why should I care? Nobody’s interested in me. If the death squads came for me in the middle of the night I’d make them a cup of tea and be grateful for the attention.

    ……..

    “I don’t need to google it, I said curtly.”

    Clever Tom Swifty.

68. 

    Totally right, Deety (DECEMBER 29, 2020 AT 5:39 AM).

69. 

    (End of comments from Fifth Day.)

70. 

    This note added in Addenda section, as of Sixth Day:

    After completion of this thread in January, we will see about making a new post, or a series of comments right here, to sample or present some of those partial or full twelve-day series from familiar comics.

    Such as Mother Goose (& Grimm), Top Of the Mark, and Queen Victoria.

71. 

    What kind of geese are those from the top cartoon? Looks like a bunch of Foghorn Leghorns to me.

72. 

    ANyone care to explain the Five Golden Rings one?

73. 

    What kind of geese are those from the top cartoon? Looks like a bunch of Foghorn Leghorns to me

    I don’t know, but there are six of them and they are laying, or anyway lying .. down.

74. 

    woozy “Anyone care to explain the Five Golden Rings one?” –

    Just five Olympic gold medals, and the Olympic flag has five rings? But that’s all I have. The gold medals are arranged in the shape of the Olympic flag, sorta (though not overlapping as they orta).

    The cartoon geese are just lying down, so claiming them for “laying” is wrong.

75. 

    Geese can lay eggs, after a fashion they can even lay down, but you’d be lying if you said you were imitating those geese,

76. 

    I had to think about the billybob’s comment, and I think I get it and it’s not a grammatical infraction. It’s like, “How do you get down off an elephant?”

77. 

    There is a prescriptive account of lay and lie. I’m going to paste a reference I made in another thread, but it is relevant to these geese cartoons. The blog post is by Arnold Zwicky, but the main discussion is quoted from Geoff Pullum.

    Boise Ed says: I’ll give Liz Climo a try for a while. There seems to be no pattern of publication dates,

    I know. I ran across her with the one I used in the Twelve Days, with six geese. It was at Arnold Zwicky’s blog for today, and he called it “Liz Climo’s cartoon for today, 12/30, the 6th day of Christmas (“Six geese a-laying” — that is, laying eggs)” but I could not find it on either GoComics or her Tumblr site, even thumbing back to December 2019 in case that was where it really was from.

    (Precautionary note: don’t go browsing in the Arnold Zwicky blog if you’re not prepared to see some explicit content — though he calls it “A blog mostly about language” he also gets personal and sexual. For CIDU-relevant content, one could follow just his tagged “Linguistics in comics” category through url https://arnoldzwicky.org/category/linguistics-in-the-comics/ or more specifically his Comic Conventions category, thru the url https://arnoldzwicky.org/category/linguistics-in-the-comics/comic-conventions/ )

78. 

    (End of comments from Sixth Day)

79. 

    Is there something odd about that YouTube link (for the Sufan Stevens music, seventh day post)? It was pushing for me to “sign in”. But played it for me anyway, though I did not sign in. Did you link to some sort of Premium or reserved video?

80. 

    So is Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” grammatically incorrect or NSFW?

81. 

    When you’re lying in bed are you being untruthful? :-P

82. 

    The Arnold Zwicky blog link I posted previously had most of its content coming from a Language Log post from 2004 by Geoff Pullum, and was excerpted and linearized in a way that would not make it appealing out of context. So let me here link directly to the Pullum article on “Lie or Lay”.

    Both the original Pullum article and the threads in the Zwicky blog are good illustrations of the point that, as professional linguists, they are committed to a descriptive view on language, yet retain an interest in prescriptivism and enjoy examining and refining prescriptivist sources.

83. 

    Let’s see if a table from Pullum’s article will paste cleanly. This means to sort out the prescriptively preferred distinctions of the related verbs and how they are spelled and pronounced.

    	lie “tell untruths” (intransitive)	lie “be recumbent” (intransitive)	lay “deposit” (transitive)
    plain present form	lie	lie	lay
    3rd sg present form	lies	lies	lays
    preterite form	lied	lay	laid
    plain form	lie	lie	lay
    gerund-participle	lying	lying	laying
    past participle	lied	lain	laid

84. 

    Here is more from Pullum. Eventually it includes the Bob Dylan song title.

    (This part quoted by Zwicky) Here are the promised additional remarks. The general assumption is that the problem here is confusing the two verbs -- simply not knowing one from the other. But that's not quite what's going on. Everyone knows the difference between them, at least in some uses. For a phrase like The island of Madagascar lies several hundred miles off the east coast of southern Africa, no one is tempted to say lays. For a phrase like This hen lays a minmum of seven eggs a week, no one is tempted to say lies. For You are lying in your teeth, you lying bastard no one is tempted to say laying. For I got laid last night no one is tempted to say lain (it's a special idiom, of course, but the point is that the idiom is based on the verb lay, and we are intuitively aware of that). We know how to tell these verbs apart to at least some extent.

    Nonetheless, it is true that the intransitive verb meaning "be recumbent" and the transitive verb meaning "deposit" (which is essentially the causative of the first one: it means "cause to lie") are beginning to share some of each other's uses in a way that is not fully accepted as standard yet. In fact the pool of relevant data is beginning to be (from the purist's point of view) highly polluted. Assuming the standard prescriptivist version of how English is and ought to remain (basically as set out in the table above), we have large numbers of "errors" all around us. Here is a moderately random sample of what's out there:

    Phrase	Source	Prescriptivist judgment
    As I lay dying	William Faulkner title (a.k.a. Sally Dang)	Correct (preterite tense)
    As I lie dying	from a Bayne MacGregor poem	Correct (present tense)
    Lay, lady, lay	Bob Dylan song	Incorrect
    Lay down your weary tune	Bob Dylan song	Correct
    Lay down, little doggies	Woody Guthrie song	Incorrect
    When I Lay My Burden Down	Mississippi Fred McDowell	Correct
    Come and lay down by my side	Kris Kristofferson song “Help me make it through the night”	Incorrect
    Lay it soft against my skin	Kris Kristofferson song “Help me make it through the night”	Correct
    lie it on the floor	web page about indoor marijuana cultivation	Incorrect
    lay it on the floor	web page about yoga	Correct
    lay on the floor	web page about spine exercise	Incorrect
    lie on the floor	web page about abdominal exercise	Correct

85. 

    Grawlix – No, you are just lying down. (Well you could be also telling an untruth.)

86. 

    So, the Dylan song title (and refrain within the lyrics) is basically incorrect? Yeah, I think we knew that. But lay helps us hear it as what Mark in Boston calls the NSFW way. :-)

87. 

    (End of comments from Seventh Day.)

88. 

    For those following the math thread, please note the clever graphic added in the bottom Addenda section. Oho oh oh, what was the source? Did I note it anywhere? Oh, shoot, better fix that!

89. 

    It’s a bit odd that those eight maids a-milking from the Bailiwick of Guernsey are milking Holstein-Friesian cows and not Guernseys (which are brown and white).

90. 

    Sheesh, I guess their Post Office can’t get it right, even in their own bailiwick!

91. 

    This is the first time I heard of a bailiwick being a real thing, I guess like a county or township or shire.

92. 

    I indistinctly recall learning that the head of a bailiwick would be a bailiff! Just as a duke rules a duchy, and even a count rules a county. Well, not most American counties. Nice idea, in Seattle or in Brooklyn you could have the “Count of King” in charge.

93. 

    But “Lay, lady, lay” has a nice rhyming ring to it. :-)

94. 

    “I indistinctly recall learning that the head of a bailiwick would be a bailiff!”

    Baliffs are common, but Sark used to be rule by a Dame, and there is Nothing Like one of them.

95. 

    re: “I indistinctly recall learning that the head of a bailiwick would be a bailiff! Just as a duke rules a duchy, and even a count rules a county.”

    Not like a duke rules a duchy. A bailiff is not nobleman. Historically, a sheriff was the legal official whose jurisdiction was a shire. The shire was then divided into to bailiwicks, each of which fell under the jurisdiction of a bailiff hired or appointed by the sheriff.

96. 

    Headline: “10,000 men to lay Alberta Pipeline”

    Character with parody Italian accent: “She must be pretty hot, that Alberta Pippa-linna!”

97. 

    I’ve never heard them referred to as ‘tetrahedral numbers’. I’ve heard them called the cannonball numbers, which makes sense to my students.

98. 

    Fair enough. Of course, if you ask what the shape of a stack of cannonballs is, “tetrahedron” would be a good answer, if you had already introduced the term.

99. 

    (End of comments from the Eighth Day.)

100. 

     Though on reflection, what must be meant here is “triangular tetrahedral” numbers, but if you encounter actual stacks of cannonballs they may more likely be arranged in “square pyramids” .

101. 

     “Is that the correct number of ladies dancing?”
     No => “nein” => nine (what it should be)

102. 

     A local newspaperman penned a version of the Twelve Days similar to Sibley’s which purportedly dates back to the early 1950’s.

     https://philliesinsider.mlblogs.com/12-days-of-christmas-c331b7a91dc4

103. 

     There seem to be a few of these out there, with fairly short paragraphs/letters for each day, and different character names and milieus, but similar disastrous outcomes and denunciations.

     The Kaaza blog (where we picked up the Sibley script and audio, not having noticed it on the Wikipedia page) also has this Nola and Bognot version . A commenter remarks about the names: “”Dear Nuala”, with “Gobnait O’Lunacy” That’s the Frank Kelly version that most people know!”

     Also on that same page in the Kazza blog (I don’t seem to be able to pick up a within-page target URL) Kazza as a comment puts another, with Edward the lover sending the gifts and Emily receiving them and growing exasperated. It does resemble the Sibley script in tone and setting, even ending with a letter from lawyers rather than the woman herself; but is just a short paragraph.

104. 

     Shrug (JANUARY 1, 2021 AT 4:00 PM): Nothing in the world.

105. 

     As for “Lay, Lady, Lay”: That would be *correct, if you consider it an imperative because you want to get laid, or not, if it relates to positioning herself.

     *although it really should have an object, most likely “me.”

106. 

     I translated: “Is that the correct number of ladies dancing?”

     We should also raise “Is that the correct season mentioned?”

107. 

     (End of comments for Ninth Day)

108. 

     Day 10: I suppose those guys are peers, right?

109. 

     Day 10: I suppose those guys are peers, right?

     ✔😎🤦‍♂️🤞❗✅🍆 Too true!

110. 

     Day 10: I suppose those guys are peers, right?

     Some probably not exclusively.

111. 

     (End of comments for Tenth Day)

112. 

     I’ve tried counting them a few times, and can only come up with 10 plumbers/pipers.

113. 

     Danny Boy: I see 11. One just has a little bit sticking out from behind the staircase wall, and is in front of another that has is back to us.

114. 

     I only count one. But he’s in eleven places.

115. 

     I also count 11.

     Danny, can we help you? Which is the one you’re missing?

116. 

     Danny, can we help you? Which is the one you’re missing?

     Thank you! I think I can describe him. He has a very prominent, unevenly trimmed moustache; nose projecting thinly in front of that moustache; also very heavy dark eyebrows. Wearing a flap-top cap with extended front bill; black trousers; gray or brown shoes with strongly contoured tread soles; and a wide-collar pullover shirt with the company name on the back. Medium height, or a bit short and stocky. Only three fingers per hand!

117. 

     (Actually, I have spotted my missing piper, thanks to a helpful clue. I wasn’t counting the one mostly hidden by a wall, in profile and maybe conversing with a clone facing him and holding an elbow pipe.)

118. 

     “Danny, can we help you? Which is the one you’re missing?”

     Oh, ha. ha.

     But it is interesting in that it’s hard to figure which one is missing. I suspect WW has it that the guy stepping out from behind the wall is being merged with the guy with his back to us.

     The eleven are in Clockwise order:

     1) One guy hidden carrying a ruler behind the stairwell with his nose poking out.

     2) A guy with his back to us peeing against the far wall.

     3) A guy so disgusted with guy 2) he is about to bash him over the head with a wrench. Which is really unfair as guy 2) can’t help it. If you had an L vent embedded into your kidneys, you’d have uncontrollable peeing too.

     4) Mr. Magoo

     5) A guy feeding a slice of toast to a rat living in the pipes. (He has a jacket with the name of the company. the only one we can feed).

     6) the guy from the Electric Company’s “It’s the Plumber. I’ve come to fix the sink!” routine who is watching a horse race in the distance.

     7) Andy Capp standing on a rung in his bar stool.

     8) The guy tucking his baby into a lunch box (you can read part of the company name on his jacket.)

     9) A guy walking around with Captain Ahab’s spy glass.

     10) The guy being kicked in the back by number 10 (you can read must of his jacket).

     11) A guy who hates submarines and always rips the periscopes out of them.

     I guess Danny is thinking 1) and 2) a picasso eye view of one guy.

119. 

     Great cataloguing there, Woozy!
     Somehow I was just entirely skipping over #1, not as far as I know merging him with #2. But those whiskers growing out from the wall should be hard to miss, maybe I was unconsciously seeing them as somehow belonging to #2’s back shoulder.

120. 

     (End of comments from Eleventh Day)

121. 

     In case the caption / note for the Max Roach / Carmen Jones picture didn’t fit enough titles and names into one sentence, we might note that the character enacted by Max Roach is named Max, which we know (besides seeing it that way in the IMDb listing) because (1) the crowd calls out “Go, Max! Go, Max!” during the performance, and (2) he is addressed as Max by Pearl Bailey’s character Frankie — the counterpart in Oscar Hammerstein’s culturally transmogrified script of the character Frasquita in the opera Carmen.

122. 

     I guess the fashion of Brazilian drums ala Olodum and Ilê-Aiyê has finally passed then?

123. 

     larK, I am bypassed by so many worthy passions and fashions that my ignorance means nothing.

     But from your tip, I am enjoying this clip.

124. 

     And let’s see about embedding one:

     (How would they pronounce Açaí?)

125. 

     I find I’m a little disappointed not to find a certain Liverpudlian in the list.

126. 

     Chak, your point is well taken. I thought Ginger Baker could stand in for that broad category, sort of. But do share a picture if there’s one you like!

127. 

     For Chak:

128. 

     “Striking the mighty hammer-blows in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6.”

     Later, the mighty hammer guy had gender reassignment surgery, changed hir name to “Harley Quin,” and took up with The Joker.

129. 

     Ahhh, thanks Mitch.

130. 

     Mitch4: In Portuguese, açaí has three syllables. It sounds similar to Asahi (Japanese beer).

131. 

     Thanks Ed. But I was half joking around, as a crossover remark from another thread , where worthies like Winter Wallaby and larK have been carrying on a discussion of rule-following that at some point included the spelling and pronunciation in English of the açaí berry.

132. 

     “Striking the mighty hammer-blows in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6.”

     Looks like he’s about to surprise a trumpeter with a game of Whack-a-Mole.

133. 

     I think Niel Peart’s drum solo in Frankfurt should also be considered. He does enough drumming for 12 all by himself.

134. 

     It’s very difficult to get a good hammer-blow sound for the Mahler symphony. On many recordings it’s there if you know what to listen for but you might not notice it otherwise.

135. 

     MiB , this picture was screencap from a short docu on planning and building this hammer and target. They tried other model ideas too. They mention that , on their interpretation of Mahler’s scanty remarks, it is not supposed to be resonant, more like a big thud. And I have to agree with you, that’s about what I hear too, both in this clip and most recordings. Some of that I feel sure is the fault of the recording and reproduction chain; but maybe also a difference between the intention and the expectation.

136. 

     One work that might be added to the list is the Shostakovich Symphony #12 (Year 1917). In the last minute of the third movement, the Battleship Aurora fires on the winter palace.

137. 

     Thanks, Dwight. That’s a work I’m not familiar with, but glad to hear about. I recently missed an online-live concert where it was featured.

     And it reminds me about another remarkable Shostakovich moment with drum. That’s the “invasion episode” from the first movement of Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad), a weird and terrifying passage of several minutes length, built on top of a snare drum repeating a military tattoo in a long, controlled crescendo.

     Here is a newspaper review of a 2014 concert that I went to, with Jaap van Zweden as visiting guest conductor leading the Chicago Symphony. (He was at that time with Dallas, not yet taking over the NYPhil, but talked about as a very hot property.) In fact, I’ll quote a bit:

     Van Zweden built this "invasion" episode – based on a banal, jaunty march tune Bela Bartok famously lampooned in his Concerto for Orchestra – inexorably, making the repetitions as relentless and terrifying as Shostakovich no doubt meant them to be, over Cynthia Yeh's steady snare drum ostinato. Again the effect was not just loudness but overwhelming intensity, and van Zweden marshaled his orchestral juggernaut with exacting control.

     The drummer mentioned, Cynthia Yeh, is Principal Percussion of the CSO, and was featured in the topmost picture of this post, hitting the bass drum in the Verdi Dies Irae. As the review suggests, she was so very intense in this section! She was standing well forward from the usual percussion row, poised over the snare drum, and staring unwaveringly straight ahead, as the music built up and turned nasty nasty! If I had a picture of that, I would have featured that instead of the Verdi.

138. 

     Here’s a YouTube clip of a performance of that “invasion episode”. Sadly, the visual is not the performance but a photo (and poster) montage of some historical circumstances. Still, this has the advantage over some other clips I was looking at, of starting right at the beginning of the episode, so you can hear the drum and isolated orchestra instruments starting out just quietly and seemingly innocently.

     (BTW, this performance, with Bernstein leading the CSO, may be the one mentioned in that von Rhein review.)

     https://youtu.be/027gWqwl-OA

139. 

     About the Leningrad premiere of the 7th symphony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_premi%C3%A8re_of_Shostakovich%27s_Symphony_No._7

     The premiere took place during the siege of Leningrad. Outdoor loudspeakers broadcast it all the way to the German lines.