Slow Roundup 3

This was was already a long day five minutes after I got out of bed....

1. There's this really, really dark blue that occasionally pops up in my wife's wardrobe. I've called it "woman's blue" ever since she asked me to bring her blue slacks to her from her closet. All I could find was what looked like a pair of black slacks, but when I told her this, she assured me that those were the right slacks. So I compared them to a black sock and confirmed that the pants really were blue. That color, I am sure, exists for the sole purpose of toying with men, whose unaided vision cannot tell the two colors apart. But I've cracked the code! Bwahahah!

2. When I was about high school age, my Dad and I found John Madden's color commentary of professional football games quite amusing. "Add fourteen points to that and see what you get," once got a good laugh out of the Old Man.

3. And around that same time, I had some friends over to play games on our new Atari. (Yes. I'm that old. Shut up, kid!) One of them was called "Yar's Revenge." As soon as Dad heard that, he laughed and said that the name sounded like a social disease.

4. Recently, my wife and I were traveling in Mexico with her family. In certain areas, we would be incessantly pestered, sometimes even during meals, by street vendors selling mostly the same assortment of junk. I started calling them "human pop-up ads".

5. On part of that trip, we were in Cabo San Lucas for a few hours. Here's my short description: "A bunch of American restaurants grafted onto a desolate shoreline and frequented by Ernest Hemingway wannabes who can't afford to live in Key West." Remind me not to seek employment writing travel brochures.

6. One place I really enjoyed was Puerto Vallarta, whose shoreline is adorned with an assortment of interesting, and sometimes quite whimsical sculpture. One of them I can describe only as a statue of Cthulhu! In fact, it popped up as my first Google search result of "Puerto Vallarta statues", which is nice since I haven't had time to go through our pictures yet.

7. I recently overheard someone make an interesting comment on a news item. He recalled, incorrectly as I learned later when I tried to find a news report, that San Francisco had banned bottled water to eliminate the environmental impact of the plastic bottles. He opposed the ban on not for being a gross violation of individual rights, but because it was inconsistent. He held that the city should have banned all drinks in plastic bottles or none. I found it morbidly interesting that someone obviously not a huge fan of the welfare state nevertheless was not appalled at the very idea of the government banning plastic containers.

8. I find it mildly annoying when people say things like "Please RSVP." The "SVP" already means "Please."

9. And don't make me watch a Windows machine boot. "Built on NT Technology", a startup screen proclaims. Having been in the submarine force, I still tend to mentally pronounce each word in many abbreviations, so the Microsoft splash screen reads, "Built on New Technology Technology" to me. Come to think of it, perhaps I should be feeling a sort of grim satisfaction when I see that....

10. I name the following my typo of the week: "givernment".

-- CAV