Slow Roundup 4

How fortuitous! My list of random oddities has accumulated enough material for a post at just about the right time!

Without further ado...

1. By coincidence, I kick off this list with a continuation of yesterday's beer theme. I keep a beer a day calendar in my office at work, and two entries from late last year warrant inclusion. First, from the "just because you can do it doesn't mean you should -- or would even want to" -- department came the following "beer fact" on December 9: "At the Somerset House bar in Stourbridge, England, [patrons] have a unique spot to 'rest' a pint. The walls' pastiche of wallpaper, grime, glue, and tobacco smoke is so gummy that a filled glass can stick to them for as long as two days." If your beer didn't get stolen first, it would go flat. Frightening!

2. Second, from the same calendar on December 17: "In 2005, Connecticut officials briefly banned [Ridgeway's Seriously] Bad Elf, claiming the label, which had a tiny image of Santa, might entice children to drink. The elf firing at Santa's sleigh was created by Massachusetts artist Gary A. Lippincott."

3. I sometimes muse to my short, plump wife that I've married a hobbit. She likes that. Not surprisingly, she's also remarkably elusive in public, often vanishing even in mid-conversation from right under my nose -- especially in stores. I refer to myself as having been hobbited in such instances.

4. A running joke I have with some of my friends is that if I hear someone exclaim, "Jesus Christ!" I'll answer. I'm hoping that by some miracle of comic timing and presence of mind that one day, I'll enter the room right after someone in on the joke says, "Jesus Christ" -- and that someone else, upon seeing me, will deadpan, "Speak of the Devil...." It's a long shot, but I can always hope!

5. A pet peeve of mine is to get stuck at an ATM behind someone who apparently leads his entire financial life at the ATM. "Oh boy, I'm behind Donald Trump again!"

6. Our home phone number is one digit off from that of a nearby department store. We don't get that many calls for them, but when we do, most people dial the same wrong number seconds later -- even if we explain that the 0 on the printed receipt only *looks like* an 8. It's like they think we don't know our own phone number!

7. The last time I posted flotsam like this, item #10 was what I'd call a good typo. Now for a bad typo: "annoting". This error happens frequently, and the resulting "word" isn't clever like "givernment" was, or self-descriptive like " omplete". (But it certainly is annoying!)

8. Now we move into "Gus flirts with sleeping on the couch" territory.... My wife will sometimes start out saying one word or phrase and finish with another one similar in some way. She cheerfully admits that these [Insert her first name here.]isms can be quite funny.... But if I have too much fun with one, she retaliates by goosing me in the ribs, which is very draconian, if you ask me. My all-time favorite of these is, "satisfication". There are others, but I'm saving them for later.

9. Well, okay. One more: "That was a snap of cake!"

10. Why should we confine ourselves to playing word games with Barack Obama's name when his pastor, Jeremiah Wright could claim to have given the word "jeremiad" a whole new meaning?

And with that, I conclude the latest collection of random thoughts and an op-test of the post scheduling feature of Blogger in Draft. (For no apparent reason three hyperlinks in this post were replaced by underlines. I know that many people don't follow hyperlinks, but among other things, they do help your readers judge your credibility for themselves. This is probably some kind of anti-spam feature, but one of the links referred back to this blog! Verdict: Post scheduling is far from ready for prime-time.)

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Added three missing hyperlinks and comment on post-scheduling. (2) Added a parenthetical comment. (3) "Corrected" "misspelling" of "givernment". Oy.