Hi! Here’s a giant-ass, full-color book completely dedicated to the one thing you fear most on this earth. Merry Christmas!
WHAT?!
Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: Elementary School Bulletin Boards
Yesterday, despite having what the doctor at the Urgent Care Center later described as, “possibly early pneumonia”, I went with my husband to vote. Our polling place is a local elementary school, and as we walked down the main corridor we saw a bulletin board celebrating the upcoming holidays.
This particular layout was dedicated to Thanksgiving. It was covered in traditional browns and oranges with a three-dimensional turkey in the center surrounded by paper plates, as if to resemble a table set for the big holiday meal. All of the paper plates had words written on them, instead of representations of food. Three of the plates had words you’d expect to find on a elementary school’s holiday bulletin board, things like “food”, “family”, and “fun”. But the fourth plate? The fourth plate was what made me stop dead in my tracks because on it was written the word, (and I swear I am not making this up), “DIABETES”.
Because nothing brings families together or says “Happy Thanksgiving!” like a shared fear that enjoying your favorite holiday meal will lead to an irreversible destruction of your body’s ability to produce and manage its own insulin.
Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: More Spam
It’s been really interesting to watch the progression that my various-and totally inappropriate-spam comments have undergone as spammers continue exploring new ways to get around our filters.
The spam I’ve been receiving lately has turned into a sort of twisted version of Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts. I’m getting all these weird comments that wouldn’t even make sense in a fortune cookie-things like, “He who to you does an ill turn, you he’ll never forgive.”
Um, what?
It’s like all the spammers got together one day and said, “You know, I bet if we distract all our targets with a stunningly profound opening, they won’t even notice that the rest of our comment is composed entirely of random words we shot out of our patented, ‘Foul Phrase Generator’, plus eleventy-four thousand links to “adult” websites.”
Yeah, right.
And while we’re on the subject of spam, I did experience a karmically perfect moment the other day upon receiving one particular piece of spam. Because the sender? Was “ass”. (See: The Word Ass, My Irrational Love For)
Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: Little Kids
Last weekend after visiting my brother and sister-in-law, we went up to Virginia to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins. We were there through the day after Labor Day, which meant that we were there when all of the kids returned from vacation to the daycare that my aunt runs.
As I am used to spending my days either alone, with cats, or with grownups, it was quite a different experience for me to be surrounded by a group of one and two-year-olds, especially when I overheard the kinds of conversations that routinely took place.
Like the time that my aunt had to yell out, “[Name of not-quite-two-year-old child], will you please STOP licking my chair!”
Or the time that I heard her helping another child to practice subject-verb agreement.
“Yes, she has,” I heard her say to the child. “She has poo.”
Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: Dubious Compliments
Things That Make You Say, “What?!: Video Games
This weekend my husband bought the video game “Prince of Persia: Two Thrones”. I was in the living room when he played it for the first time, because I like to watch the opening sequence of all his new games to see if it has a story I’ll be interested in following.
As usual, the first thing he did was to scroll through the different screens where he could set his gaming preferences, and when the “Display” screen popped up I saw this:
Tutorials-yeah, that makes sense
Progressive Scan-sure, that’s some technical stuff
Blood
Screen Adjust-more technical stuff
Wait-what? BLOOD?! Since when is that a technical issue?
Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: More Spam
Today I received this extremely helpful and thought-provoking email:
“Listen to the voice of your penis. He is asking to get Penis Enlarge Patch.”
And I thought, “Dude, if anyone’s ‘stuff’ actually started speaking to them, I think they would have problems W-A-Y beyond the scope of anything a penis patch could help them with.”
Is There Anything They Won’t Try It On?
This weekend we had a cookout here and a number of the guests were engineers, like my husband.
There are many benefits to being around engineers, such as the fact that they generally tend to know exactly where you are, where you need to be, and the absolute best way to get you there.
And then again there can also be some personality conflicts, especially if you personally are possessed of a non-engineer kind of mind. Like the time that my husband and I went to Germany with his family. He and his dad are both engineers. I, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law? Not so much. We had a lot of conversations like this.
We are all riding on the train.
We women: “So, how many kilometers is it until our next stop?”
My husband: “About 50.”
We women: “Do you think we might be able to find a drink with some ice there?”
My father-in-law: (wielding a sheaf of detailed maps, a calculator, a slide rule, and a stopwatch all at once) “No! It is exactly 47.975 kilometers until our next stop. At which point we will have exactly 6.025 seconds and only 6.025 seconds to walk from Platform 9 to Platform 17 and catch our next train. No ice for you!”
Or the time that we were entertaining another group of friends, 7 of whom were engineers, and yet not one of them was able to stop our oven control panel from beeping, beeping, beeping, beeping, My God! The beeping! Make it stop! And so they had to fall back on tripping the circuit breaker. (Their excuse? “We’re mechanical engineers, not electrical engineers.” Which is totally a lame-o cop out if I ever heard one, but whatever.)
So anyway these engineers were here this weekend, and one of them started talking about something called the “coefficient of friction” which, according to Wikipedia is “a dimensionless scalar value which describes the ratio of the force of friction between two bodies and the force pressing them together.”
He was describing a table he’d seen that gives values for the coefficient of friction between different materials, such as steel on steel, steel on aluminum, etc. And just as I was getting ready to completely tune out I heard him say this:
“And they actually had a value for the coefficient of friction for steel on steel that has been lubricated with bull semen.”
Dude, Where’s My Stuff?
We have a friend who works as a technician repairing laptop computers. We love to talk to her, because we are always stunned by her stories of the un-be-lie-va-bly inappropriate things she finds in people’s computers. She’s seen everything from infestations of roaches, to nails, to controlled substances, to every imaginable bodily fluid (both human and animal), to condiments, to WD-40 (because “the fan was too loud”), to holes drilled completely through the motherboard (because “it was too hot on my lap”) (and that was going to help how?), to more porn than you could possibly imagine exists in The. Entire. Known. Universe.
Also funny are her reports of the customers’ reaction to finding out what is wrong with their machine: “Whaddda ya mean ‘it’s full of soda’? That’s impossible! I don’t have access to any soda! I don’t even have running water!”
Or the technicians having to explain the situation to the customer: “I’m sorry sir, but your service plan doesn’t cover damage due to sitting on the computer and causing the lid to cave in.”
She’s also friends with technicians in other areas, such as the Department Of Finding People’s Wedding Rings Stuck In DVD Players, and the Department Of Discovering That Your Printer Isn’t Working Because You Apparently Jammed It Full Of Painkillers And All Your Spare Cash. (Apparently if these people are ever robbed, they want the thieves to get all of their valuables, not just their electronics.)
So one day she was talking to a technician from China who had been working on some speakers.
He said, “Yeah, when I open them up, I find joint.”
“You mean, like a finger joint?”
“No, JOINT.”
“Oh, you mean you found weed?”
“Yeah. Also live ammunition.”
My response: “WHAT?!”
Her response: “Well, damn! The next time I play Resident Evil 4 and I need some ammo, I’ll know exactly where to look!”
Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: Signs
