I enjoy reading Ken Levine’s blog – he’s a TV writer that used to write for such shows as Cheers and M*A*S*H. This morning’s entry is about his recent trip to Vegas, and if you’ve ever been to Vegas, you gotta read this. The last line sums it up perfectly: “Las Vegas truly is Chuck E. Cheese for adults.”
See on MSNBC today:
Alicia Witt arrives for the Weinstein Company party in this Monday, Jan. 15, 2007 file photo, in Beverly Hills, Calif. The 31-year-old actress, whose previous TV credits include “Cybill,” has joined the cast of “Law Error processing field:Caption An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 1, position 2
Honourary mention: “George Foreman’s Big Book of Baby Names” (I saw that on some web site somewhere and got a good laugh)
Heard on the traffic report on a Toronto radio station this morning:
…and if you’re north of the city, on Highway 10 just south of Highway 89, there’s a dead kangaroo in the left lane…
I just hope that whoever hit the animal didn’t have any car damage:
Insurance company: You hit a what?
Driver: A kangaroo.
Insurance company: Rrrrrriiiiiight. Let me just check your policy…
Part of a conversation Gail and I had with Ryan and Nicholas the other day:
Gail: We’re the parents. It’s our job to keep you guys safe, to protect
you. It’s also our job to teach you to be nice, polite, helpful, to help you
learn, give you food and clothes, a place to sleep….
Ryan: Drive us to school?
Gail: Yes, that’s another one. All of those things are part of our job as
parents. Nicholas, what do you think your job is?
(Nicholas then rolled his eyes and gave a big sigh, as though he’s given
this same answer a hundred times before)
Nicholas: Remember my shoes.
I’m an English pedant. It annoys me when I read stuff that contains spelling, grammatical, or even punctuation mistakes.
Here is an article about proper punctuation, and here is one about grammatical mistakes. The second one contains all kinds of things that annoy me: “would of” instead of “would have”, “your” instead of “you’re”, and “it’s instead of its” (“it’s” is short for “it is” — it’s as simple as that).
A former boss of mine, Ed, used to say “irre-dis-regardless” instead of “regardless”. He was a very clever and funny guy, so I am quite sure he was kidding around, and didn’t actually believe that was a real word. We had a tool called “FIST”, which was short for “FIle STorage”, and one of my co-workers joked about the fact that “fist” sounded similar to the Polish word for (I think) potato. Ed, who was of Spanish descent, thought for a second and then told us that the closest you’d get in Spanish is “There was a bug but I fist it”. (Say that quote with a strong Speedy Gonzalez accent to get the full effect.)
Now that I think about it, the FIST tool was the source of another joke. FIST had both a client component (“front-end”) and a server component (“back-end”). One of our co-workers was in charge of the server component, and one day when he was working from home, someone asked where he was; the answer was that he was at home, doing the back-end FIST thing. Purely unintentional, but we all laughed for hours.
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| Toronto Rock forward Josh Sanderson |
Tobey Maguire, aka Spiderman |
The popular play “The Vagina Monologues” ran into some trouble recently (I
think this was in Florida somewhere, but I can’t find the link), when
a woman driving her niece by the theater was “offended” when the young girl
(don’t know how old she was) read the marquee and asked what a vagina was. She
complained to the theatre, and they changed the marquee to read The “Hoohaa”
Monologues (including the quotation marks). How stupid is this? It’s not
like “vagina”
is some vulgar or dirty or even slang word. I know that if my son read a marquee
that said The Vagina Monologues, he would probably just ignore it. If, however, he
read The “Hoohaa” Monologues, he’d laugh at it and make a big fuss, and ask what
a “Hoohaa” is. He already knows what a vagina is (well, I’m not sure he knows
what one is, but he knows that girls have one and boys don’t, and he
doesn’t consider the word dirty or taboo or anything), but I know that
he’d never let go of the word “hoohaa”, and we’d be hearing it all the time.
In any case, any child old enough to read the word vagina is old enough
to be told what it is and that it’s not a dirty word.
This reminds me of one of my favourite “my kid is so cute” stories, from when
Ryan was just two years old. Gail and I were going out, and we got a babysitter
for Ryan (Nicky wasn’t even born yet, so Ryan was definitely two). He was
sitting at the table finishing his dinner, and Lindsay the babysitter came in
and sat down next to him. She said hi, and he put down his fork, looked at her
silently for a couple of seconds, and then said matter-of-factly, “You don’t
have a penis.” Lindsay, to her credit, didn’t even flinch, but confirmed his
suspicion. He nodded and went back to his dinner, apparently satisfied with her
response.
Ryan was working on some homework the other day, and asked for some help. (He’s in Grade 2.) He was doing some logic puzzles, which I used to love as a kid. The first one was: There are four birds sitting on a fence. Colour each of them according to these rules:
“OK, this is easy”, I thought. Yellow is between green and blue, so we have GYB somewhere. Since blue is not last, it must be GYBR. But the last clue says that red is first, so it must be RGYB. But that makes blue last, so that’s wrong too. I must have looked at this for a couple of minutes before telling Ryan that there must have been a typo somewhere, since the puzzle is not solvable. He skipped it and went on to the next one.
Later, I was going to show it to Gail, and make some kind of joke about the fact that they gave Ryan an impossible question to answer, when I noticed that the birds had all been coloured in. I looked at the colours, and smacked myself in the head for being so stupid. Of course the question was not impossible. When it said yellow is between green and blue, I assumed that meant GYB in that order — it actually meant BYG. Putting red first (as clue 3 dictates) gives you RBYG, which fits all the clues. Boy, did I feel like a moron.
I knew there would come a time when I would not be able to help Ryan with his homework. I just figured I had a couple more years….
I received this piece of spam email today:
Subject: I speak?A most harsh one and not.
In a lawful deedAnd lawful.
Where are my other men monsieur?. I have butlittle more to.
Our houseBequeathed down.
I’m sure it means something deep and philosophical, but I can’t figure out what.
Cut The Chatter, Red Two 