Archive for the 'Writing' Category

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Get Weird and Win!

commentgame
The Junk Drawer Blog is goofing off somewhere this week, but she left an assignment for her commenters. She stole a comment game from Comedy Plus.

The Junk Drawer Blog is fun, but whoooo boy, her commenters are just so vanilla, so white bread, so unimaginative.

Here’s how SHE explained the Comment Game.

It’s very simple. I start the game off by listing two words or phrases, like waffles or pancakes, and you pick the one you like better. You can explain why if you like.

She started with Twitter or Facebook. Nice start, but OMG, her commenters responded with choices like:

  • Mac or PC
  • Coffee or Tea
  • Boxers or Briefs
  • Peanut Butter or Jelly

I. am. NOT. kidding. And it goes on for over 100 comments.

I played too, here were my choice:

  • Po or Laa Laa – which the next person said they didn’t have a clue about. Dur, Hello Google? So I came back with…
  • Clarabelle or Crusty – which the next poster didn’t know, but chose Clarabelle because it was a nice name! OMG, puh-leeze! My final entry, before I decided to hijack this idea was…
  • Simon Cowell or Simon & Shuster. The next commenter chose Simon Cowell because she hadn’t heard of “the other one.”

LISTEN UP. Here’s the deal. I am taking over this idea.

There is a big prize involved.

A wonderful Marilyn Monroe shirt from the wonderful people at TeesForAll.com. I wanted a gift certificate from TeaseForMe.com, but haven’t heard back. TeesforAll.com is not doing this because they like me, they want to sell you some Tee shirts. Surprise. Surprise. Surprise. They have a really cool Stones shirt, and some other Boomer targeted stuff.

WIN THIS SHIRT

WIN THIS SHIRT

No, it doesn’t have to be the Marilyn Monroe baby-doll with pink stripes, unless you want it. And then I want a picture of you in it.

HERE’S HOW WE’RE GONNA PLAY:

It’s kind of like the The Junk Drawer Blog contest, BUT, the combinations need to be weird, arcane, tricky, smart, obscure, clever, whatever. (Like my examples! :-) )

AND: you must explain why you chose the word you did, to avoid miscellaneous fakery.

After a while, I’ll close the comments and then we will vote on the best combination.  Finalists may be contacted to provide a full and complete explanation of their word combinations so you can’t fake it easily.

Got it? Good.

Here is my combination, you take it from here:

Sky King or Enola Gay?

An Old Friend Showed Up at My Door in a Package

When I was a young lad, my family’s best friends were Rubened. Ruby and Eddie Hodge. Rubened to every one. They even signed their Christmas cards Rubened. Eddie went to a business school to become an accountant and one of the requirements was exquisite handwriting. My Aunt Morna attended the same school and their handwriting was very similar. Eddie always signed all the Christmas cards and correspondence with a big flourish Rubened.
His handwriting fit his personality. Eddie was the anti-accountant outside of work. He was a joke-teller extraordinaire. He always had a joke, some new, some old, some hilarious, some corny. But when Eddie told a joke, everybody laughed.

Heartily.

Including Eddie.
Eddie understood that you weren’t supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but he did. Mightly, and he had a contagious laugh, so the laughter kept going for a few beats more than the joke deserved. Ruby heard the same jokes over and over and over. But she always had a huge smile on her face and giggled at the punch line. She loved seeing Eddie having such a great time.

Today another entertaining friend arrived at my door.
bookturd

Head Rambles, the book, is like Eddie. I’ve read Grandad’s blog for a couple years. I felt like I knew Grandad personally and laughed out loud at the “most cantankerous auld fellow” and his life in Ireland, with Herself, Sandy, Laughing Boy, K8, and others that wandered in and out of his writing.
He is quite the sportsman too. Regularly taking potshots at passing tourist buses.

The gunfire sounded interesting, so I went down to the village to get the paper.  Sure enough, the villagers had caught themselves a tourist bus, and the tourists had tried to take refuge in the church.  That was foolish, because everyone knows our church is closed on a Sunday.

Grandad, kept his identity a secret. It must have been difficult for him to actually put his “real” name on the cover of the book. (If that is his real name.)

Like most of us, he slowly revealed parts of his life and his families lives and like most humor writers, seems to have suffered his share of life’s pains.

But mostly Grandad just fires off the top of his head. (Picture that!) Somebody or something is always pissing him off.

I pondered this as I stood there on the doorstep, stark naked.  Wouldn’t I look a right prat wearing a hard hat and nothing else?  I told him to fuck off, and went back to bed.

‘Who was that?’ says Herself from under the duvet.

‘Those fucking builders you ordered,’ I said as I decided whether to get dressed or not.

‘I didn’t order them. You did.  Make us a mug of tea.’

‘Fuck your tea.  If you didn’t order them, and I didn’t order them, then who did?’

‘Dunno,’ says Herself, and she went back to sleep.  Lazy bitch.

Did I forget to mention that Grandad lives in dream state most of the time? If he called Herself a lazy bitch to her face, I’m sure he would be two balls short of a juggler.

Grandad fancies himself to be a golfer, he practices a lot – usually with Sandy’s turds aimed at the neighbor’s home. This is the blog post that cemented Head Rambles in my RSS feed.

Then I remembered our K8’s idea about using dog turds. So I brought in a pile from outside the gate. They were nicely sun-dried and ripe for driving. All I needed was a target.

Our neighbour put up a rather ugly extension some years ago that blocks part of our view. I always hated that extension. But it made a perfect target.

If anyone is interested, dog turds are much more aerodynamic than pine cones. I could aim straight and true. The neighbours extension now bears a remarkable resemblance to a large Jackson Pollock. It looks a lot better. As long as the wind doesn’t blow from that direction.

Head Rambles is an excellent blog and an excellent book.
bulletholeinside
I was glad to have an old friend drop by and entertain me again with his tales.

Just that damn bullet hole makes it awkward to turn the pages.

Buy Grandad’s book, he shouldn’t be launching turds at his neighbor’s home. He needs some balls.

So Retronymish

Reading one of my favorite writing sites, Daily Writing Tips, I learned a new word that is just so appropo. Retronym.

It’s just such a perfect word for Baby Boomers who have seen so much change in technology.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary definition of retronym:

A neologism created for an existing object or concept because the exact meaning of the original term used for it has become ambiguous (usually as a result of a new development, technological advance, etc.). A retronym typically consists of the original term combined with a modifying word.

The best example is “movies.” When silent films were the standard, these were “movies.” Then “talkies” became the norm, and “silent-movies” was born. OK, Baby Boomers didn’t go through this phase, but remember when color movies were hot? And of course, Baby Boomers grew up with black and white television

I shared my new discovery with another boomer and she responded:

So when does a retronym become a idom? ‘Hang up’ or ‘Dial’ the phone for example. Seems the older one is, the more use s/he would have need for retronymity. Does that make oldsters more inclinded to be retronymists? Is it a special class in need of protection? Oh, the questions this raises!

Indeed! Baby Boomer language is archaic, or at least showing it’s age. She has examples of great idioms. But retroymns are different. Idioms are only figurative. Retronyms are literal, but have an adjective to describe the “oldster” version.

Some of my examples are words that have made the transition, some are going through transition, and some are future transitions.

Baby Boomers please feel free to add some examples:

(word today – retronym)

  • sewing machine – treadle sewing machine
  • camera – film camera
  • guitar - acoustic guitar
  • phone – landline phone
  • pool – in ground pool
  • television – analog television – also HiDef/StandardDef…lots of other television examples with black and white programming, flat screens, cable (it was on cable)
  • watch – analog watch (and almost anything else with digital in front of it!)
  • light bulb – could go a couple of ways: incandescent bulb if CFL’s catch on, or disappear if LED’s take over.
  • computer – main frame computer (and that will change as cloud computing catches on)
  • music – live music (in a club)
  • Going Like Sixty – Going Like Sixty blog

Going Like Sixty used to mean somebody was really boogeying. Today it refers strictly and without question to my blog. :)

Upcoming retronyms:

  • car - petro car – when we all will be driving hybrids
  • hips/knees - artificial hips/knees when the gummit decides that at age 50, all joints should be replaced.
  • mail - postal mail
  • boobs – natural boobs
  • erection – drug free erection
  • work – productive work
  • welfare – unproductive work

Got any cool retronyms? Real or made up? Baby Boomer era, or not!

Having Lead in Your Pencil


Of course you recognize this from the baby boomer at The Junk Drawer.

pencilsharpener

I wonder how young you can be and not recognize this? is this another bygone of the Baby Boomer era? Do they still have pencil sharpeners in schools? (BTW: it’s a picture of the blades of a pencil sharpener.) If they do have pencil sharpeners are they electric or are they the crank kind?

250x250q70

If they do have the sharpeners do they have multiple holes like the one above? Baby Boomers will remember fat kindergarten pencils? Harumph, at least I’m not a bad parent and saddled my struggling child with a skinny pencil. :)

Obviously we have both been through kindergarten and we had both used those fat little pencils to learn to write – but for some reason when it came to teaching our daughter we had forgotten about them.

I hated emptying the pencil sharpener in school. It’s not the wood shavings that make such a mess, it’s the graphite lead that just. got. everywhere. Because you removed the body exposing the blades the black junk always got on my hands, and usually on my face – usually on my nose!  Of course, I would walk around with a black smudge on my face like it was Ash Wednesday until the teacher would notice.

Preschoolers are getting Blackberries and the good Pastor Josh is forgetting about fat pencils.

My husband, the gear head, loves the concept of this gadget. My take? Getting my preschooler to write with a big fat pencil is hard enough. I can’t imagine him doing so on a teeny keyboard.

I think we have a pencil in the house – fat or otherwise. We have a whole crapload of pens – always two rooms away from the phone when needed. We have a crapload of pencils in the golf cart.

How’s that for a random post with no point? Where can I buy a blog sharpener?
!–adsense–>

Speaking of Jagged Lines Under Words

Since I went of on my tirade against Craig Cobbs I was reminded of the time I played poker against the guy who invented the jagged line underneath missppelled words.
I had not spent a lot of time pondering who invented this ever-present highlight when I type in Microsoft Word. But somebody had to have the idea.
It was Richard Brodie.
He plays poker professionally now and online at Full Tilt Poker as Quiet Lion. I was in an Hold ‘em online tournament and he ended up at my table. Chat was enabled and he was pretty chatty with the group. Someone made the comment that the had seen him on the TeeVee in a tournament.
I chimed in with something fascinating like: oh, wow, what do you look like? because in online poker, as in other online life, you can pick your own avatar.
This was mine (and you can change the expression at will.)
sharkavatar
This is pretty typical of the avatars… goofy characters and personnas.
He replied something like, Oh, I dunno, I guess like my avatar. This was his avatar:
richard-brodie-full

Dur. I failed to notice that his avatar looked like a person. I would do real well at “reading” a poker opponent in real life.

So I Google ™ searched him and found out that Richard Brodie, The Quiet Lion, was in fact one of the authors of Microsoft Word. He was the 77th employee of Microsoft.

I spent my first summer at Microsoft writing CS, then returned the next summer to work on a secret new project. It was to be a modest word-processor to serve as an inexpensive entree to the business software market.

Richard Brodie invented the jagged line underneath missppelled words! So balance the dopes I have met online against some really cool people, and I’m still way ahead.

BTW: Brodie took me out of the tournament – his full house was bigger than mine.  Board had trips, he had a bigger pair in the hole.