i (we, i was married at the time) made the kids to it too.

my son liked to do magic shows, and became quite adept at slight of hand. when he was young, the old aunts and uncles went along, and pretended to be surprized, but one year, they actually were!

when they were young teens, they discovered archie mcfee (out of seattle) and invested in fun stuff like the 'can of nuts' (out pops a snake) and little packets of what look like candy, but unwrapped are plastic, (very realistic plastic) bugs. Dribble cups were popular too.

these jokes were mostly limited to summer BBQ's or informal dinners. (much to my kids disappointment)

The brain has a specific structure called the thalamus, and it also has a hypothalamus. I had not known the meaning of thalamus before epithalamion was the WOTD. I'm not sure why early anatomists assigned the thalamus its name, but it is sort of a central point through which many types of signals and stimuli travel. All the sensory inputs except smell travel through the thalamus. I've often wondered if this is at least partly responsible for our inability to conjure up a smell in our head, whereas we can sort of hear a favorite song in our memory without even humming to ourselves.

The word epithalamion reminded me of an older thread about the light verse form known as the double dactyl. One of the best ones I've encountered on the internet uses the word. It's an extended example of the form. Its author is, according to the source page, Jan D. Hodge.

Romeo and Juliet

Saddest of tragedies--
Juliet Capulet
tumbles in love with fair
Romeo's grace,
but to her sorrow an
irreconcilable
quarrel denies her her
lover's embrace.

Troublesome circumstance--
Romeo Montague,
killing her kinsman in
combat of arms,
finds himself subject to
prosecutorial
fervor and flees from his
Juliet's charms.

Frantic and woebegone,
Romeo's Juliet
hopelessly hoping her
lover to keep,
gets from her chaplain a
pharmacological
wonder that brings on a
death-aping sleep.

Rushing to be with her,
Juliet's Romeo
swallows a poison, be-
lieving her dead.
Waking, she--pitiful
epithalamion!--
joins him in death on that
sorrowful bed.

Very interesting, this thalamus story. Come to think of it, true, we cannot conjure up a smell in our head. But we can memorize smells up to a point where we can almost smell it, don't you think?
A coffee factory on a street in Hoboken and the chocolate factory close to where we used to live. The smell through the open window in the night train towards the Provence. How all of a sudden somewhere down Lyon in comes the smell of the south.Lavender and thyme.
Memory and smells are closely connected. Maybe it's good we can't conjure up smels in our head and so are protected from too great apetites.(chocolate! )

And yes,it is a strange idea to have a bridal chamber as part of our brain.

A lot of anatomic names seem to reflect a fairly straightforward approach: the foramen magnum in the skull is just that, a "big hole"; the tough, fibrous coating of the brain, the dura mater, is the "tough mother"; the bone that looks like a plow is named just that, vomer. I suspect the thalamus gets its name from the fact that various sensations are joined there, but that is pure conjecture on my part. It might have been assigned that name long before the neural connections were understood.