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Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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Fashion words and other BS*
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It is just me or is anyone else getting sick of the trend in the past few years of certain words and phrases suddenly becoming "fashionable" ? Terms and expressions that you rarely or never hear used, suddenly crop up in every newspaper article, newscast and commentary you hear. I'm talking about nonsense like the phrase "went missing" all of a sudden showing up everyplace. Went missing? Huh? Not that long ago, you never heard that someone or something "went missing." It's a stupid expression. It is particularly dumb when applied to situations like abducted children. "A 5 year old went missing in Boston today, story at eleven...". Makes it sound intentional on the part of the kid. Dumb. Another one is the word "busted." Not an unusual word, but sounds pretty silly in a newscast. As in "... the holdup was in progress when two police officers busted in on the scene..." We actually heard something near that exact phrase on a TV news report. I have heard "busted" used on one of the local TV stations late newscast maybe a dozen times in the last few months. Makes the newscasters sound stupid. A few others from the past year or two are "hubris", "gravitas" and "jingoistic." How about "paradigm?" Now I'm not at all opposed to using good words, I sort of enjoy it actually. What bugs me it that somebody, someplace says something once and suddenly it appears everywhere. What a bunch of sheep. Baaaaaaaa. This got into my head today while walking through the shop at work. Someones radio was blasting and the DJ was talking about some band that was not so well known in the US, but was "GINORMOUS" in Europe. This is the king of stupid words, so far as I am concerned. A melding of gigantic and enormous, this word was recently added to the dictionary as an official, non-slang member of the English language. One of my friends here uses that word from time to time, and it makes me wince and want to punch his head. It gives me a ginormous headache and makes me want to go missing. *BS = Baloney Slices. This is a family-friendly blog after all. And speaking of deli meats, I just had a toasted salami and cheddar on Syrian bread for lunch. Yummy. Amazing how the simple application of heat transforms an elegantly simple sandwich into the zenith of gooey, cheesy, spicy, goodness, much greater than the sum of its parts. |
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| thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 4:14 PM | |
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Sunday, September 28, 2008
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It's not easy being Teds.
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Just a short while ago, Teddy informed us all that tomorrow is going to be a long, hard day. Mrs A. asks; "Why is that, Ted, because tomorrow is a school day?" Ted says no, not really that. You see tomorrow Ted has to "... get all of his sticks that are outside together, then he has some rocks that he needs to break up with a hammer, and then he is planning to dig in the dirt for a while." "And if dad is working on the shed out back, I really want to help with that." Like I said, it's not easy. |
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| thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 8:30 PM | |
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
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Parallel universes. An allegory.
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Once upon a time, two soon to graduate high school students happened to apply to a small local club in an attempt to win scholarship money for college. They did not know one another, having grown up in different towns. They each wrote essays introducing their respective selves explaining who they were, what they planned to study, and why they could be helped by the money being offered. One was an attractive and bright young lady that planned to attend a small local private college to study nursing. The other was a well-spoken clean cut young guy, who planned to attend a local community college to study art with a specialization in illustration and cartooning. Their essays were sufficiently impressive that the club board chose those two candidates from among the applicants, and asked them to attend a meeting to interview them in person. Each learned of the other only that night, and their paths physically intersected for the first and only time. Each was asked to address the meeting, explain a bit about themselves and answer a few questions. After all of that was done, there was some discussion amongst the board members, and finally someone made a motion that the committee award these two fine kids $700 each. Most generous. An investment in all of our futures. Both were elated and each went their separate ways, checks in hand, off to begin their college careers. Fast forward some years. Both are out of school. One is out because she graduated, took her boards and became a nurse. The other, because he decided that he could do a better job of it by "teaching himself" by reading books. Interesting to compare how things worked out. As stated, one became a nurse. She cares for critically ill people with heart problems at a major local hospital. The other is presently running for state representative in his area, and lists himself as an "unemployed pharmacy assistant." Our nurse is gainfully employed and happily married. Our would-be state rep cannot work due to his "electro-sensitvity" that causes him to feel electricity everyplace he goes. Our nurse is working lots of OT, stashing away money to hopefully buy a house. Our rep wanna-be is telling the local newspaper that he is psychic. Our nurse, when she is not working, is keeping her home running and doing things like singing in her church choir. The other guy has indicated that he knows of a "water engine" that runs on (wait for it...) water, that will solve all of our energy problems. He says it is being supressed, but he does not know by who. And that stuff is just the beginning. As it happened, it looks like that universes are not at all parallel, they are diverging. Not sure what the moral of the story is, except to say that sometimes those investments pay off, and sometimes, well, not so much. |
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| thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 2:31 PM | |
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Monday, September 15, 2008
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Another Charlie question...
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Ted may have outdone even Charlie at this "Charlie Question" game. Yesterday, I was out in my garage working on some little thing. Ted was floating around out there with me. He was standing there staring at my welding machine, gloves and two welding masks stacked on top of it. Out of the blue he asks: "Dad, is there any way to look right at a solar eclipse?" |
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| thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 7:29 PM | |
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Thursday, September 11, 2008
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Flashback #203
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When Chaz was very young he asked lots of question, like any young kid. The thing was that he had a habit of asking questions, the answers to which were not only blatantly obvious, but things that you knew he knew. If you were standing by the stove at 5PM over a steaming pot of boiling water, holding two open boxes of spaghetti and were about to dump them in, little Charlie would walk in the room and ask: "What are you making for dinner?" If we drove by a burning building and there were a bunch of guys there in fireman suits spraying water into the building, he would ask: "What are those guys doing?" These got to be so common, that they came to be referred to as "Charlie Questions" around here, and were the source of many, many laughs. I was reminded of this the other day. Chaz and I were in the process of assembling the upper bed frame on Tessa's bunk bed. Chaz was doing most of the lifting and holding while I installed and tightened the various bits of hardware. As we worked, Teddy walked into the room and said, "Ummm, what are you guys doing?" Charlie looked at him and said "What is that, a Charlie Question?" |
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| thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 7:55 PM | |
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Sunday, September 07, 2008
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An interesting thing just happend to me...
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| ... I got an email indicating that Mrs. A had tagged me in a photo she had posted on Facebook. So I followed the link to see the picture, it was one of several that she took when we had the kids out fishing at the club. Nice photos. The odd thing was that off to the side of the photo, there was one of those little ads that facebook places on the page. This one said: "EXTREME TANNING - Lowell". That was followed by: "Get a beautiful, natural looking tan in only 7 minutes. Walk-ins welcome. Vist Extreme today. The funny thing was that in the instant before I read the second part, the thought that flashed through my head was "Wow cool! A place that can tan beaver pelts in Lowell! " | |
| thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 5:08 PM | |
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