- It's Talk Like a Pirate Day! Yarrrr!
- My Mom informed me that Viagra is great for African Violets. I choose not to devote too much thought to this.
- The Boy (Incredulously): Daddy, you're even smarter than me!
- Actual exchange a few nights ago at dinner:
The Boy: I don't like salmon. It tastes like fish.
DD: Salmon is fish.
(pause)
The Boy: eeeewwww!
- (As The Girl continues to make faces at us at the dinner table, because we laughed at the first one)
The Wife: You know, she thinks you'll let her get away with it because she's so cute.
Me: She is so cute, and I will let her get away with it, but that doesn't make it right.
- The Sunday New York Times had an article about the singer Diana Krall, in which she was described as “a strapping five-foot-eight.” I can't get past the word “strapping.” What, exactly, is that supposed to mean?
- Overheard in the hallway: “they said it was intent to distribute, but that's such bullshit. It's mine!”
- I've also overheard three references to ratemyprofessor.com in the hallway in the last week, and I don't spend that much time in the hallway.
- The Ford Motor Company is circling the drain, largely because it's getting its clock cleaned in the small car segment. The Ford Focus, its only entry in the small car segment, sucks. Ford owns Mazda. Mazda turned a profit last year, based in part on the award-winning Mazda3, a small car that competes seriously with the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla. My annual suggestion to Ford: why don't you ask Mazda how they do it? Since YOU OWN THEM, they HAVE TO TELL YOU. This strikes me as preferable to going broke. This ain't rocket science.
- Thinking out loud: Mazda3 hybrid. I'm just sayin'...
- Whatever happened to Gary Sandy, from WKRP in Cincinnati? He had great hair; now he's gone.
- For that matter, whatever happened to Ann Jillian, from whatever the hell is was she was from?
- I'm thinking of trying my hand at national novel-writing month. Since I don't know jack about writing fiction, I'll rely on the blogosphere for guidance. Which premise should I use?
- A bodice-ripper set among the decadent aristocracy of, well, let's call it England
- A thinly-veiled allegory of the Bush administration
- A murder mystery set in a graduate program suspiciously like my own
- An arch science-fiction comedy
- An annoyingly self-referential eat-its-own-tail pomo piece, like Charlie Kaufman
- A picaresque romp through suburbia, highlighting the all-too-human failings behind the vinyl siding
- A classic updated, with key characters made gay
- An Iowa workshop special, with well-off white people musing conflictedly over maiden aunts who drink too much
- A sin-fall-redemption story about a prostitute who – here's the twist – has a heart of gold
- An edge-of-your-seat thriller about a secret agent who looks suspiciously like Ben Affleck teaming up with a marine biologist who looks oddly like Scarlett Johansson to fight an evil madman who looks vaguely like Fred Dalton Thompson before he sets off a bomb that would destroy Los Angeles.
Scurvy swabs of the literary public, I await your wisdom! Yarrr!
