A woman wrote recently that she was in a class when someone mentioned that there are now Pringles with facts printed right on the chips. Someone else wondered what happens when you eat text. She was proud that she came up with an answer, "Alphabet poop!", and was rather confused when no one laughed. They gave her strange looks. She wondered if PHD candidates don't appreciate potty humor.
Having seen that same reaction to some of Jay's humor (and only occasionally to mine - I'm just not that fast), I think I can explain it. If the question had been phrased as "What do you get when you eat text?", then she would have got a laugh. But phrased as "I wonder what happens when...", that leads to philosophical musing. And when peoples' heads are off pondering the metaphysical, jerking them back to the potty results in a thud. It's just not appreciated.
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I usually have soaps in the background in the afternoon. Some things I've noticed-
There has been a spate of imminent (as opposed to immanent or eminent, gratuitous vocabulary lesson) birth, at the pushing stage, where the mother-to-be is in some precarious position, like on a cliff ledge, or a snake pit, or a crashed car, with one or two people in attendance, and in every case she is wearing skintight jeans or slacks, and nobody, but nobody, ever suggests that maybe she should take her pants off! The writers and directors must all be males, or at least not mothers. Every woman in the audience who has ever given birth has to be squirming! You get that pushing feeling, everything down there has to be clear! Outta the way! There ain't gonna be nothing to impede the action! Don't matter what kind of audience you've got! Those pants are gonna be off!
All the soaps seem to be centered on super-rich people who live in mansions. What cracks me up is that they never call it a house, or refer to it as home. It's always "I'm going back to the mansion". Marlena, on "Days" for example, never goes to her apartment - it's always referred to as "the penthouse". Sheesh. Worse, I've noticed a tendency to give the houses fancy names, so instead of lines like "Are you saying someone broke into your home?" or "...someone broke into your house?", we get "...someone broke into Bel BlingBling?" - like it's a store or something. If I'm going to keep up with the Joneses, I'll have to come up with a fancy name for my house. I'm considering "La Mouserie".
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I got a flyer for a Hawaiian cruise - fly from here to Hawaii, a few days in a hotel, then onto a cruise ship to visit several of the islands, total of 11 days, almost everything included, for a hair over $2,000. August of next year. Through Bloomsburg University alumni association. I am very very tempted. The only problem is that it's based on double occupancy, and of course, there's only me. Anyone else interested? I'll have to call sometime within the next week or so to reserve. I assume they could put two singles together - maybe I would luck out and not get assigned a roomie.
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I get very annoyed when people use "decimate" to mean almost everybody killed (or whatever). "Decimate" means "one in ten", or only 10%, which is a heck of a lot less than what they want to imply. I wonder if they confuse it with "devastate".
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I've been reading a lot of other journals ("blogs"). There are some terrific amateur writers out there, people who can turn a phrase, evoke a scene, transmit the idea without all the words I need, and some have really subtle or wacky humor. What's sad, though, is that they don't seem to have learned anything about punctuation (not that I am a good example), and they all seem to have trouble with homonyms. Sight/site. Peek/peak (they don't seem to have ever heard of pique, although a lot of things do peek or peak their interest). When we (we oldsters) were kids, we read a lot of great writers, who took care with the language, and we absorbed vocabulary and punctuation along the way. I think today's young people are reading perhaps asmuch - but they are reading what each other writes, unedited, and they are just propagating and reinforcing illiterate errors.
Because of my dyslexia (or whatever it is being called this week) I tend to read every word, and read literally, so grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation errors in an essay make reading it very difficult and even painful for me.
It's not limited to the internet. I am now reading Simon Lazarus, a professionally published, mainstream novel by M. A. Kirkwood (touted as "the modern Catcher in the Rye"). It's entirely in first person, so I at first tried to take all the errors as a character delineation device. But when I came to the line "I leave the library this afternoon with shreds of my dignity in tact", I shrieked, sobbed, grabbed a pencil, and started to correct the text. It's also full of dangling participles that leave me wondering who did what. Where the heck was the Bookman Publishing company editor who let this monstrosity get by? Do they really think that SpellChecker eliminates the need for an editor? It's actually a very good story, but it's so darned painful to read!
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The "Get-out-and-vote" TV spots keep saying that "this is the most important election in a generation". Hmmmm. Short memories. Must have been written by a 25-year-old adman. But even so, I should think that the 2000 election was more important than this one! Otherwise, this one wouldn't be so important.
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I was thinking the other day that all the fireworks I've seen have been in relatively clear skies - high clouds, maybe, but clear where the fireworks were going off. I wonder what fireworks in a light to medium fog would look like?
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Reese, to Malcolm, on "Malcolm in the Middle", when Malcolm is distressed because a neighbor kid has been telling lies about Malcolm: "You can't clear your own name. You can only ruin someone else's." So true.
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