KP duty

Reader's Digest 4月号 "Humor in UNIFORM" からの引用です。
During KP duty, my sergeant ordered me to prepare 100 gallons of soup for that night's dinner. When I told him I had no clue how to make soup, he handed me a cook-book and instructed, "Follow the directions carefully."
Not long after, I had a large kettle of soup simmering. The sergeant came in, grabbed a spoon, and took a taste. "This is really good," he said. "Are you sure you followed the recipe?"

KP: (Urban Dictionary) Kitchen Police, the soldier who is assigned to the kitchen duties in the army or navy. Police means maintenance, repair here, not peace keeping: I was a KP in WWWII and never had a battel with the Japs, what a shame!

Who is dumber?

Reader's Digest 4月号 "9 Really Practical JOKES" からの引用です。
"See that kid?" a barber says to his customer during a haircut, pointing to a 12-year-old standing outside the barbershop. "He is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch. I'll prove it to you." The barber takes out a one-dollar bill and a five-dollar bill, then calls the boy inside. He holds out both bills and asks "Which one do you want?"
The kid takes the one-dollar bill and leaves the shop.
"See?" the barber says, laughing. "The dumbest kid in the world."
The customer leaves the barbershop and spots the boy coming out of an ice cream store. He says, "If you don't mind my asking, son, why didn't you take the five-dollar bill?"
The boy takes a lick of his ice cream cone and says, "Because the day I choose the five, the game is over."

cuckoo - brood parasites

カッコーは托卵する鳥として知られていますが、カッコーが生んだ雛を托卵された鳥はよく騙されてカッコーの雛を育てるのか不思議に思っていましたが、Richard DawkinsのThe Selfish Geneを読んでいたらその答えが書かれていました。
I think that cuckoo nestlings must be doing rather more than just 'fooling' their hosts, more than just pretending to be something that they aren't. They seem to act on the host's nervous system in rather the same way as an addictive drug. This is not so hard to sympathize with, even for those with no experience of addictive drugs. A man can be aroused, even to erection, by a printed photograph of a woman's body. He is not 'fooled' into thinking that the pattern of printing ink really is a woman. He knows that he is only looking at ink on paper, yet his nervous system responds to it in the same kind of way as it might respond to a real woman.
...
So enticing is the red gape of a cuckoo nestlig that it is not uncommon for to see a bird dropping food into the mouth of a baby cuckoo sitting in some other bird's nest!
雛が大きな黄色い口を開けているのを見ると親鳥は餌を与えずにはいられないのと、人間の男が女性の裸の写真を見て興奮するのはどちらも同じく神経システムに作用しているからで、騙されていると分かっていても反応せざるを得ない生物の不思議な性質なのですね。
カッコーが托卵することの説明はWikipediaに書かれています。
Wikipedia: Some species are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other species, but the majority of species raise their own young.

eminence grise

Richard DawkinsのThe Selfish Geneを読んでいます。
Indeed the least successful of all the strategies (except Random) was the most elaborate. It was submitted by 'Name withheld'--a spur to pleasing speculation: Some eminence grise in the Pentagon? The head of the CIA? Henry Kissinger? Axelrod himself? I suppose we shall never know.
"eminence grise" は大物の様ですが、どんな人を指すのでしょうか？　辞書を見ます。
・Dictionary.com: (French) a person who exercises power or influence in certain areas without holding an official position: The President's wife is an eminence grise in matters of education.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: someone without an official position who has power or influence over rulers or people who make decisions: Civil servants are the ones who really have the power - they are the eminences grises behind the government ministers.
・Collins Dictionary: a person who wields power and influence unofficially or behind the scenes
大物と言っても陰で操る黒幕ですね。

in the teeth of

Richard DawkinsのThe Selfish Geneを読んでいます。

Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.
"in the teeth of" の意味を調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: In spite of or contrary to (opposition or difficulty): We defended it in the teeth of persecution.

・Collins Dictionary: If you do something in the teeth of a difficulty or danger, you do it in spite of the difficulty or danger.: In the teeth of the longest recession since the 1930s, the company continues to perform well.

・Cambridge English Dictionary: If something happens or is done in the teeth of difficulties, the difficulties cause problems but do not stop it: The road was built in the teeth of fierce opposition from the public.
Richard Dawkinsは宗教については辛辣ですね。同感ですが。

bugs good to eat?

Reader's Digest 4月号 "9 Really Practical JOKES" からの引用です。
One evening over dinner, a boy asked his father, "Dad, are bugs good to eat?"
"That's disgusting," said the father. "You know the rules--we don't talk about things like that while we're eating."
After dinner, the dad asked, "Now, what was it you wanted, son?"
"Oh, never mind, Dad," the boy said, "There was a bug in your soup, but now it's gone."
昆虫を食べることはほとんどありませんが、昔信州名物缶詰の蜂の子を食べたことがあります。昆虫は栄養豊富だそうです。

meme

Richard DawkinsのThe Selfish Geneを読んでいます。

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
"meme" はこれまでに（3/23/2012、7/5/2018）2度取り上げましたが、"meme" を造ったのはRichard Dawkinsだったのですね。

Wikipediaで確かめると次の説明がありました。
The word meme is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins.It originated from Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins's own position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically" and proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain".

co-opted

Reader's Digest 3月号の記事 'Before They Were STARS' からの引用です。
He even dug up graves for body parts and made masks out of human skin. Robert Bloch who wrote the novel Psycho, co-opted many of Gein's strange obsessions for Bate, including his morbid shrine to his overbearing dead mother.
"co-opted" は見覚えがありますが、意味を思い出せないので辞書を引きます。

・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: to take into a group (such as a faction, movement, or culture): absorb, assimilate: The students are co-opted by a system they serve even in their struggle aganst it.
・Collins Dictionary: to appropriate as one's own; preempt: The dissidents have coopted the title of her novel for their slogan.

torch singer

Reader's Digest 3月号の記事 'Before They Were STARS' からの引用です。
Miss Piggy--yes. But also her inspiration: the divine Miss Peggy Lee. It started with the farm connection. Bonnie Erickson, the Muppet Show puppeteer who created Miss Piggy, was, like Lee, a North Dakota native, and her mother adored the legendary torch singer.
Peggy Leeとは懐かしい名前ですね。生きていれば来年100歳なので今の人は知らない歌手でしょうね。私は映画をほとんど見ないので知りませんでしたが、俳優であったり曲も作るなど多才な人だった様です。さて、引用文の最後に出てきた "torch singer" の意味が分からないので辞書を引きます。
"torch" で調べても上の文に当てはまる意味は出てきませんでしたが、"torch song" で次の説明がありました。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A sad or sentimental song, typically about unrequited love.: She can write an incredibly personal torch song ballad, but at the same time, with a little wink in it.
・Collins Dictionary: a sentimental or romantic popular song, usually sung by a woman
語源は "from the phrase to carry a torch for (someone)" とあるので "carry a torch" を見ると次の説明がありました。
If you say that someone is carrying a torch for someone else, you mean that they secretly admire them or love them.: He has always carried a torch for Barbara.