Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Aqualanche



My mind has been a bit scattered lately, so I'm going to slip into one of those random type blogs. It's not usually my style, but it's a nice reminder to me to chill the fuck out.

Today started off really badly, though I came out with the best excuse for being late to work ever. "There was a spider in my car," I said when I called in to say I was on my way. Can you imagine my horror when I opened my car door this morning to find, not just a spider hanging out somewhere, but rather sitting smack in the middle of a freshly manufactured web that spanned the entire breadth of my door? I went in a complete panic. It was like coming home and finding a stranger in your house in a tent in the middle of your living room. Very alarming! It was too much to deal with on my own, so I went back inside, woke up Gregg and asked him deal with it. After making him do a thorough check that it hadn't left behind any friends or family, I was on my way and made my prize winning late call. I wish I had taken a picture of it, but I was far too distraught at the time. Who the fuck did that spider think he was?

A few months ago, someone asked me to come up with a word for when you are drinking something from a cup with ice and you tilt the cup back, trying to get the last bit of liquid to pour down into your mouth and then ice collapses onto your face. To a point, the ice stays mounted together at the base of the cup, but at some point, you go too far and the ice cascades, causing discomfort, numbness and embarrassment with ones own self. I came up with "aqualanche". I believe the person who commissioned the word threw in one half of it (though I forget if it was 'aqua' or 'avalanche'), but I came up with the final result of "aqualanche". I emailed it to him and then he never wrote back! Awed by genius, perhaps? Anyway, another one for fans of my words to add to "tosswad" and "oneion".


Example of an aqualanche*

Official dictionary definition:

aqualanche (noun) - The collapsing of ice into ones face as one tilts a cup too far in an effort to retrieve the last drops of a beverage nestled beneath a large quantity of ice.

Moving on, I really hate fart jokes. I don't think they are funny and I usually cringe when someone starts to tell me some kind of personal story involving gas. Thanks, but no thanks. But my classiness has been challenged since I was sent the video below. I feel justified in my enjoyment though, as this clip clearly transcends simple low brow humour by showing clever editing and impeccable comic timing. Perhaps I am just trying to make excuses for my fall from grace, but whatever the case, this video fucking rules.




As a wannabe stickler for good grammar and "punctuation", I stumbled upon this "blog" yesterday and I think it will make your "life" a whole lot better as it has "mine".


"Click" me

...and heavens to Pete, I haven't even begun to look at the other punctuation disasters that link from that blog, such as Apostrophe Abuse! I need a place to submit the photo below which seriously lacks an apostrophe. Well, there are many problems.

*an aqualanche can be avoided with the use of a straw.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

A new concept to embrace: The cake




Contrary to whatever this blog title may have evoked, this has nothing to with the end result of flour, eggs, sugar and an oven. No this is about the psychological phenomenon devised by Agatha and myself which we call "cakes". The name doesn't make any direct sense, but when we first started collecting these indiscretions of the mind we would gleefully say "I had one of those things. This is the icing on the cake." Then, "This is the cherry on the cake!" and, "This is the nuts on the cherry on the cake..." and so we ended up just calling them cakes.

So what is a cake, if not something baked? It's a strange, split second occurrence where your mind thinks something completely ridiculous, but for a nano second, it seems compeltely logical.

Sadly, we've documented only a fraction of the ones we've had, but I think I've got a good amount for you to get the idea.

One time Agatha was driving along and stopped at a red light. It was one of those lights comprised of a multitude of small lights. In this particular case, several in the middle of the light were burnt out and Ag thought (for a moment) "Those must have worn out from everyone focusing on the middle."

And here's one from me, just so she doesn't cop all the accusations as to the number of chromosomes she possesses.

I was at work and the email on this computer doesn't work, so I had to use a different computer to send the emails. I wrote two emails the previous week that I needed to resend from the other computer, so I was about to highlight and copy from the one computer, and thought the copy would transfer across the room which I could 'paste' with the other mouse!

I bet most of you are thinking "Man, that is fucking stupid," and be quite sure you would never think anything like that. Well, if you've been reading my blog, I think you've already figured out that I am not stupid, and you'll allow my intellect to vouch for Ag. She's not stupid either. Much in the way people manage to drop things, cut themselves and bump into walls without the aid of alcohol, the cake is a mere momentary lapse of the mind like those others, but still an application of some other logic, though inappropriate for the situation at hand. Again, I will remind you, they are not lingering thoughts, but split second thoughts which are immediately recognised, and due to our awareness of them, appropriately laughed at. I'm sure that now you are familiar with the format, you will soon be aware of them too.

I just searched my email and found way more than I thought I had, but here are some choice cuts from the cake shop.

When one of us is cooking dinner in the kitchen while the baseball is on, we have it on in the radio in the kitchen. Usually the other one is watching the game on the TV, but as the TV is about 8-10 seconds behind the radio, if something happens, whoever is in the kitchen may shout "YES!" or "FUCK!" and it gives it away to whoever is watching TV. Onto the cake. I was AT THE GAME by myself one day while Gregg was on tour. We (the Dodgers) had people on base and then Gregg called and I thought "Oh! He must know something happens!"

I was just watching the news and saw a story about these dolphins from an aquarium that are in the gulf somewhere after hurricane Katrina. Trainers are now watching them and feeding them. They talked about two that were most injured, and showed the trainers surrounding one and you could only see it's fin, not it's face. I then wondered if the were protecting the dolphin's identity.

Gregg was on the plane listening to his iPod and thinking how it would make the time go by. He figured with about 4 - 5 minutes per song, the flight would go along pretty quickly. Then he stopped and spent a bit of time perusing through the song list and suddenly thought he better quickly go back to listening or the flight would take longer.

As I was just entering the car port through a side gate, a fly whizzedpast my head and I thought "Oh no! I let a fly in!" This would make sense if the car port wasn't very open on the side and I was only opening a small gate, not a door.

I was driving home and I wont explain how I got onto it, but I was thinking about how former Presidents have Secret Service protection for life. Then I thought how they have to keep hiring more and more Secret Service people to protect Presidents as the years go on, but of course, I forgot that former Presidents regulary die.

I was packing up my computer to take to San Francisco with me. I put it in the notebook bag I bought at Dimmey's a few months before. I knew it fit, but this was the first time I was using it and I slipped it into a pocket I hadn't tried before to hold it in place. It *just* fit and I was glad. I was just thinking about it and worried for a moment. What if the computer outgrows the bag?