LW Pestering me about Twitter

She stands there asking, Do you Twitter? Do you Facebook?
I answer no, but I blog.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I just got a business communication filled with u for you. What's next? Resumes? It's high time to take our revenge on those whose instant messagings have wrought depredations on our lovely languages. Everything is shortened, homonymophied, abbreviated, uncapitalized. enuf alredy! if u wont spel rite i wnt ethr. Let letters become words. Let elisions become enlongenations. Let the phonetic substitutions begin!

Oscar Mike Golf this is fun! Uniform can't stop once Uniform get started. Where's my India phone? I've got to India Mike my Baker Foxtrot Foxtrot right away!

Arguing about Rolling Rs

I'm sitting here with Peter and we are arguing about rolling Rs. I say they do. He says they don't. I gave him the practice sentence: Rapido corren los carros del ferrocarril. Naturally applying all the appropriate rolls for the r-r rs.
He still doubts. Foolish boy.

From Speech Therapy--Or What?

I remember a sentence from my youth in the 60s. I had thought it was something my parents said for fun, like "How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood." Now I'm not so sure. It may be something I had to say in speech therapy to correct my lisp, though my lisp was for R not for S. Here it is:

Theopold Theopolis thrust three thousand thorny thistles through the thick of his thumb.

It must be important. Why would I remember it this long if it wasn't. But I don't find any references to it on the Web. Is it possible that this piece of our culture has avoided rampant webification? Or maybe it was just something my parents made up. Is it possible?

A Perfect Commute

It's not often you come across a perfect commute. There's always a tailgater/lanechanger/slowpoke driving stupid or road conditions less than ideal, be it rain, be it snow, be they oil drops dripping from a supercharged Chevy Nova. Not today. Today the commute was perfect in its every moment. Despite the morning chill and dew, my windows were not severely fogged. The line to get onto the freeway was only one car long - mine. The merge was easy because the traffic was spaced out, and I'm not using slang. All the way into town traffic was swimming. It slowed a little on the narrow bridge, but the slowdown didn't result in madman lane changes. Very uncharacteristic. The merge back onto the byways downtown was wide open. The last two blocks to the parking lot I couldn't see another car, and not because I was blinded; because the roads were bereft of automobile traffic (There WERE six pedestrians, but they weren't walking in the traffic lanes.) And (This part is not unusual, because I park in the most inconveniently located lot) I had no trouble finding a parking space.

If I'd been playing Strauss waltzes on the car stereo instead of listening to Bob and Dave cut up about The Balloon Boy it would all have seemed like a dreamy dance.

"... all this stuff will be moved. You would be right about that..."

Fractured cell phone conversations. I walk half a mile through the downtown area every morning and afternoon, bracketing my workday with a constitutional. Almost every day there is at least one person declaiming loudly into a cell phone or earpiece/mic. (Sure beats the old days when there'd be at least one person declaiming loudly into the air or at other pedestrians [ME!].) Sometimes the cell conversations are happening in a language I don't understand. I recognize it as a dialect of English, but the flow of words and their pronunciation don't carry meaning for me. Those are the days I ask myself just exactly how out of touch with common parlance I am becoming. Today wasn't one of those days. I understood every word.

Headlines with no text under them is just bad blogging

Flat stomach, White teeth, Good hair. And a nice personality.

Not very likely. The gall bladder attacks make my stomach swell out like a big beachball made of swinehide. The GERD has de-enameled my teeth, and no amount of soaking or scrubbing is going to make my yellow-brown dentin as bright white as a TV star's. And the male pattern baldness that runs rampant in my family pretty much prevents good hair days. Especially with that big mangy patch on the left side above the ear.

Good thing I've got the physique of a Devil's Island escapee after seven years of degenerative muscle disease and the personality of your average Schizoid or I'd have nothing going for me.

What happens if you drink a quart of concrete?

Hard soles save a lot of elevator rides.

I ride the elevator many times every day. When I hear approaching footsteps that seem to be rushing or accelerating, I presume they are hurrying to catch the elevator, so pump the open-door button until they get there. If they happened to be wearing soft-soled shoes, I'd never hear them coming. Think of the energy savings this ride-sharing is achieving. I've reduced my carbon signature so much that now I spend my weekends roaming the state forests with my chain saw, lopping branches and felling things willy-nilly.
Does that make me a bad person?

Blogger Is Too Spam Smart

A moment ago I tried to quote a spam-message in my blog in order to make witty MST3K-style commentary about it.

Blogger blocked the posting.

Now, I appreciate anti-spam policies as much as the next recipient of endless spam come-ons. But when the policies start preventing you from even talking about the spam, well, that strikes me as taking it one iteration too far.

But what the heck, Blogger is a free service and for my money they're entitled to set up any rules and filters they want.

Come to think of it, this gives me an easy way to find out whether any particular email is spam. Just automatically forward all my mail to my blog. Any mail that doesn't show up was a spam message Google already knows about. Only ---- how many times can I post known spam messages before Blogger concludes I, myself, am a spammer? I know now that it is more than one. But is it less than two? I don't even dare to find out.

A Math Puzzle

Given there is a word T that completes all these equations:
3x4=T
4x5=T
8+4=T
T-8=T
then .... Where are you?

Answer:
Princeton, Louisiana, where the value that is T is pronounced twe'h or twe'eh, twe'h being the lesser and twe'eh being the greater. They both sound the same to my old Yankee ears, except twe'eh has a hint of nasality at the apostrophe which you don't hear in "twe'h." A nod and a wink, no doubt, to the missing N.

At least that's the way it sounds to me, and I am known for my twe'eh-twe'eh hearing. This morning my breakfast cost me "si' dollah an' twe'h cen." I still wouldn't know for sure how much that was, except I got thirteen dollars and eighty-eight cents back from the twe'eh I paid with.

Corollary:
Any culture where one number is a homonym of another number deserves its low standardized test scores.

There Are No Uvulectomologists

Oh, there are plenty of uvulectomies being done. I may get one myself if my apnea gets much worse. But there are no doctors who do only uvulectomy work.

And I think that's sad.

It would be great fun to tell people, "I've got a 2-o'clock with Dr. John the Uvulectomologist." Or even uvulectomist. C'mon! Everybody's got one; the uvula-gone-wrong is a common theme in cartoons, literature and nightmares; why aren't there any specialists?

The Universe Is All Connected

Every little piece of the universe is connected to every adjacent little piece of the universe and there are no discontinuities. Not even the Masters of Boskone. Which makes it all connected, albeit there may be a gazillion degrees of separation between one little piece and another.
So if anyone tells you "You can't get there from here," you can angrily retort that Vanda disagrees, and Vanda is never wrong. So there.
Like this morning, the groundskeeper at the courthouse was sweating like to rain. His monochrome blue work shirt had become two tone. Light about the shoulders, dark sleeves and back. He was so wet with sweat that you could tell what brand of soap he used if you were anywhere downwind.
And one day in 2001 there were 7 men at the top of Guadalupe Peak in Texas, none of whom knew any of the others, and all of whom were sweating like to rain. BUT THERE WAS NO SMELL OF SOAP.
See?

Suddenly I'm Prescient!

Last night I awoke at 2:30. I had been dreaming that Fender Tucker, one-time editor of Loadstar, had donated his woodcut of the Secretary of State handing the Emancipation Proclamation to President Lincoln to the Library of Congress. And that the LOC had put it at the tail-end of their online "American Freedom" exhibit.
Then when the clock-radio turned on at 6AM with the news playing they were announcing that today many Americans were celebrating Emancipation.
Coincidence?
I Think Not!
Prescience?
I Think Not Either!
Because I WAS looking at a LOC exhibit a day or two ago. And I DID talk with Fender yesterday on the phone. And it WAS in the news yesterday that Congress officially apologized for that slavery incident from the 1500s through the 1800s. I may even have known deep in my hind-brain that Juneteenth was the 19th of June, living as I do just a few miles from the border of Texas.
But it FELT like prescience until I remembered all those pre-dream triggers.
I guess I'll put my career as a psychic back on hold.

An Upqiuitous Image

It's Harry Stephen Keeler! No. It's Bob Dobbs! No. It's Fender Tucker!

Who?????

Fender Tucker, editor, proprietor and sole employee of Ramble House, the only publishing house with the grand carjonkles to publish every book Harry Stephen Keeler ever wrote, and a few he didn't.

You've probably seen Fender Tucker before on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (Yes, THAT Wall Street Journal) the expositorium of the capitalist elite, and now you can see him in the Keeler News (Yes, THAT Keeler News) the exploratorium of one of the oddest authors the world has ever known, bar none. A fact!

Congrats Fender! Next stop, Time Magazine's Man Of The Year.

The world's longest self-referential email subject line palindrome that endlessly repeats:

error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re: error re:

etc, adding an infinite number of "error re: error re:" pairs...

Whatever Happened to Gabel-Risdon

In case you are wondering what happened to Gabel-Risdon Creamery, the Gobles News of Gobles Michigan reported that in 1932--

"Gabel-Risdon and Belle Isle Creamery companies of Detroit were merged January 1 to become the Borden Farms Products company of Michigan, C. Rowland Risdon, president of Gabel-Risdon, has announced. Both companies are owned by the Borden company of New York.
"Mr. Risdon will be president of the new concern. Adrian M. Heyboer president of the Belle Isle company, will be vice president and general manager; Norbert J. Roder, executive vice president; Herman Koelz, vice president; W. A. Foster, vice president, and C. E. Stowe, secretary-treasurer."

I reckon I don't have to tell anyone what the current status of the Borden company is.

Willa A. Foster: Quality quote perpetuates idiotic mistake.

Thousands of people with very little original to say about quality are prone to quoting this quotation, and attributing it to either Willa A. Foster or William A. Foster.

"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives."

I can forgive a little sloppy attribution, but to make a mistake transcribing the name of the author of this quotation is so ironic that I won't even bother to complete...
Here are the facts, people:
Around 1930 or 1931, Will A. Foster of the Gabel-Risdon Creamery Co., 16900 Grand River, Detroit, MI (long since gone) gave an address entitled "Advantages of a Business Depression to a Sales Organization." In that address, he said what is quoted above, but those words are the middle part only of his statement, which I here quote in full:

'Whatever you or the public may consider quality to be, this definition is always a safe guide to follow: "Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives, the cumulative experience of many masters of craftsmanship; and it also marks the quest of an ideal after necessity has been satisfied and usefulness achieved." '

You can find an abstract of Will A. Foster's full address in the Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Convention - International Association of Milk Dealers. There's a copy on file at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And you can read a snippet at Google Books: Sales and Ad.... of Milk Dealers
An alumnus of the University of Wisconsin, by 1947-53 Will A. Foster was Vice-President of Advertising and Sales at the Borden Cheese Company. In 1958 he wrote "All Honor To The Cow--Facts and Fiction."
So the question becomes-- Who was Will A. Foster quoting, National Geographic? Or did he make up that definition himself?

I Long To Roam The Ouachitas

O Ouachita thou wrinkled land
Of woods and streams and rock
I love to take a stick in hand
And climbing you go walk.
Burma Shave

No More Gote Grun

I had that one scary dream about the Gote Grun - the lava-based man who chases and eats people. What a mouth that guy had on him. But since that night I have not again dreamed of the Gote Grun. Why would I fear being eaten by a lava man for only one night? It seems like the kind of thing you'd be scared of for a long time once you latched onto the possibility that it might happen.

Maybe it was symbolic of something else. What does a man made out of molten lava symbolize? Birchbark canoes? Ballet? Bolshevism? Has to be something with a B, but what it could be, I just don't know.

Squawkbox L. Telephone

That's my real name. Really. Look it up.
Nah. I just wanted to remember it so I put it here.
Vanda.

Essence of Trombone

Just wanted to use the phrase. Nobody else was so I figured it was available.

World Of ZombieCravt

Zombies Don't Breathe

But they can use their diaphragms to move air into and out of their lungs.

So they can whistle. And whistle good.

And if their lips have rotted off, they can still whistle. Through their teeth.

Barney Fife and the Spice Farm

Scene: Andy's office.

[Fragment Missing]

END

Mixed Metaphor

Scating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

Mixed Metaphor

We've been sitting on our hands while typing our book.