CSotD: It’s Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs Day!
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Today’s Grand Avenue caused a Wait-A-Minute Minute, because how could their grandmother … and then I realized that I have a great-granddaughter who isn’t much younger than this pair, and her grandfather and her uncle argued over the merits of Nintendo and Sega.
In the words of Basil Fawlty,
Zhoom!
What was that?
That was your life, mate!
Oh, that was quick. Do I get another?
Sorry, mate. That’s your lot.
As long as I’m headed back from the shadows again, Jonesy reminds me of the time I went to Shakespeare in the Park. I broke a rule and invited a really good looking editor, the rule being to never date a client. I got some cheese and crackers and grapes and two splits of chardonnay and settled down in the grass to discover that while she was charming in 10 minute segments while I was turning in copy, spending two hours with her was incredibly boring.
Which ended our dating and also ended my getting any work from her.
The happy ending was that I ran into her about 25 years later and not only did she not remember Shakespeare in the Park, but she didn’t remember me. So I guess I struck her as even more boring. There’s karma for you.
The play that evening was The Tempest and I enjoyed it because I had a friend who had named her dog “Caliban,” which may be the best dog name ever.
Speaking of dog names, Harry Bliss proposes a sort of reversal, since the humans at the dog park know all the dogs’ names but can’t remember the people. Perhaps it’s the opposite for the dogs, which would explain why they greet each other with butt sniffing.
Though I have a second explanation. There’s a Roman folktale in which Jupiter entrusts a dog with a vital message for all dogs, but as he’s running down from Olympus, he comes to a river, so he rolls up the scroll and sticks it where the water won’t get to it. However, when he tries to swim across, he’s swept away and never seen again.
Which is why, when two dogs meet, they each check to see if this is the one with the message.
I despise Steppin McFetchit Day, which is this coming Tuesday, and wish the Irish hadn’t been the last ethnic group to achieve acceptance in the degrading form of stupid jokes and insipid music-hall songs.
But I got a laff out of this one, because including Irish words in a spelling bee would touch off a flood of arguments and challenges. The Irish language doesn’t use a completely different alphabet like Arabic or Chinese, but it still requires transliteration, much of which is largely a matter of opinion.
When I met Tomas Cardinal O’Fiaich, we had about 45 minutes of interview followed by two hours of craic, and he was chuckling over Americans who Gaelicized their names but didn’t have Irish names in the first place.
He’d been Thomas Fee as a young man, but adopted the Gaelic version painlessly, since both names existed in Ireland already, but he told me of a fellow named Castle who had come up with something bizarre, since castles were built by the invaders, not the natives. Not that there isn’t a word for “castle,” but it isn’t a name.
In my editing days, I had to deal with people who gave their children extended faux-Irish names that defied spelling. One mother who’d named her poor daughter some ridiculous 12-letter extended version of Cait called me in fury because I’d gotten it wrong, because I’d copied it exactly as it had been given to me.
One more reason to despise St. Patrick’s Day.
On the other hand, (h/t to Graeme Keyes), I might go back again to the auld sod for this and to watch the suds flow down by Galway Bay.
But I like Pi Day, which this is, because you don’t have to do anything except occasionally hear someone rattle off the amount of it that they’ve memorized. Probably. I’ll believe anything after 3.14159.
The only other obligation is to eat pie, which is a great deal more pleasant than drinking green beer.
And there’s always room for more pi, while there’s a limit to how much green beer you can both consume and retain, as some gobshite is bound to prove before the evening ends.
This gag reminded me of a free period in 9th grade during which we measured the width of our female classmates’ shoulders and multiplied the results by pi in order to get their upper circumference. We realized it wasn’t accurate but they made us realize that it also wasn’t funny.
At all.
I don’t think many kids realize that, in “Little pitchers have big ears,” the word “ear” refers to the handle. It’s enough for them to recognize the metaphorical warning and to get as much joy as possible out of overhearing things they ought not to have.
This reminded me of being 16 and sitting out on nightwatch in case of a re-kindle of a brush fire we’d spent the day fighting. I was with a friend who is probably reading this, and three other guys, around a campfire. They went off to see if the guys on the next watch down had any beer, and, when it was just the two of us, my friend commented that he had never before heard the F-word used quite so often.
When the three returned, the first sentence one of them said included the F-word, which made us smile, and so did his second sentence, which made us laugh. To which he said “What the F are you laughing about?” which sent us into convulsions, while he just said “F you” and sat down.
We did get a re-kindle around 3 a.m., but that’s why we were out there: It only took a few minutes to extinguish. Meanwhile, we got two days off from school, minimum wage, and a F-ing vocabulary lesson.
You may think this was a slick segue, but it’s not. It’s just my way of signefying.
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