Slow Roundup 4

Thursday, April 17, 2008

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.

18 comments:

Michael Neibel said...

Sometimes when someone exclaims "Jesus Christ" in my presence, I'll respond with "You called?"

Gus Van Horn said...

Heh!

I favor a mildy-surprised, "Yes?" myself.

Lynne said...

"Yes?", is also my standard response upon hearing "Jesus Christ" and "Oh my God". Sometimes, if I'm feeling particularly magnanimous or omnipotent I like to add, "what is it my child?".

Gus Van Horn said...

Just remember to forgive them if that upsets them!

Lynne said...

Always. That's where the magnanimity comes in most handy.

Anonymous said...

When behind slow folks at the ATM, my temptation was always to ask "What are you doing, negotiating the national debt?"

Anonymous said...

Regarding typos, the best one I made was when I was IM'ing someone about some leftwing propaganda protest screwing up traffic in L.A. and typoed "proptest".

Gus Van Horn said...

And he's not even being a "good" looter! Every statist worth his salt knows to have someone else print large amounts of paper money so he doessn't even HAVE to make a withdrawal!

Anonymous said...

The whole "Jesus Christ" thing reminds me of something I used to do back in my college days. One year, I was rooming with a guy named Dan. I used to answer the phone with the phrase "Hi, is Dan there?" People calling were either trying to reach me, in which case they had succeeded, or they were trying to reach Dan, in which case I had just pre-empted what they were about to say. The reactions were often amusing as people found themselves off their standard conversational flowchart.

This worked quite well until a mutual friend, whose name also happened to be Dan, responded with "Yes, speaking." That broke my conversational flowchart. Hoist on my own petard!

Gus Van Horn said...

That story made me laugh out loud, and reminded me of some like-minded folks I knew back in college.

Myrhaf said...

That reminds me of when I was in the Air Force. When someone passed gas, the inevitable response was, "Captain who?"

Gus Van Horn said...

.









Moving away a bit from that....

I tend to think of hippies reeking of patchouli as "olfactory comets" as they walk by.

Unknown said...

Yo, Gus, you write, "I tend to think of hippies reeking of patchouli as "olfactory comets" as they walk by."

At such times, would that they were as far away as comets...

Reminds me of a funny blog or other website I saw once. The young woman keeping it was discussing religion and wrote something like, "I'd probably make a good Unitarian except that I'm allergic to patchouli." Now there's a censer to censor!

Anonymous said...

Probably the best typologism, other than typologism*, I've heard is when I heard Sigmund Freud referred to as "Fraud." That was pretty good.

-Inspector



*which I just made up

Gus Van Horn said...

Adrian,

Or a censor to censure.

Nice quip about Unitarianism. Hadn't heard that one.

Inspector,

It may have been a Fraudian slip....

Gus

Anonymous said...

Gus,

Touche!

Unknown said...

Yo, Gus, you relate: "One more: 'That was a snap of cake!'"

Hey, no skin off my nose!

"It may have been a Fraudian slip...."

Hey, I always refer to him as "Sick-Man Fraud." The fraud bit at least I think has been around for decades. (Though I'm still probably most fond of Nabokov's phrase for him, "the Viennese witch-doctor.") In any case, it's sad to think that the field's earliest luminaries were Fraud, Junk, and Addled.

Gus Van Horn said...

"Junk" and "Addled" are new to me.