Don't Fence Me In
Hello World,
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend! Of course, it seems late this year, but like a lot of these new-fangled movable holidays, it can be anywhere from the 15th to the 21st of January, and there just seems to be no way to pin these slippery devils down more than that. They don't build fences around these things, and keep them in some sort of compound where you'd be able to keep track of them, although that would be an idea that I personally would vote for, and no one would have to ask me twice. I say, give me a holiday like Christmas, or New Year's, or even St. Patrick's Day, where they just pick a day and stick with it, no matter what, and none of this loosey-goosey, higgledy-piggledy, can't-make-up-your-mind flim-flam about it. I have enough to worry about as it is, heaven knows, without chasing around after these wandering festivals, which don't even have the good manners to stay put from one year to the next. Honestly, the way they move around, you'd think they were running from a bunch of angry creditors, or worse, the FBI's most wanted list. Frankly, I've always thought that Labor Day looked awfully suspicious.
While we're on the topic of holidays, I hope that you had a very nice New Year's Eve, and rang in 2008 in fine style, without doing anything indecorous that would land your picture on the front page of the local newspaper, or a video of your misdeeds showing up on YouTube. In the current proliferation of camera phones, we should look upon everyone else as a potential Geraldo Rivera or Jerry Springer, and be sure to give them nothing more incendiary than a polite smile and nod, or risk international notoriety of the worst sort. We were taking no chances on New Year's Eve, and gave the paparazzi nothing to exploit, as we enjoyed a quiet evening at home as we usually do. But we finally wised up and ditched the usual pre-countdown programming, because every year we say that it can't possibly be worse than the previous year, and every year, it somehow manages to do exactly that. I remember when they started Dick Clark's New Year's Eve show because everyone thought that Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians were so boring, and now it's Dick Clark's show that's not only boring but unwatchable. The rest of the stuff that's on at the same time is just as bad or worse, and every year, we just get annoyed at it instead of enjoying it. So this time around, we decided to watch a movie instead, and only turn to live television just before the countdown, so we could enjoy all the excitement of the moment, without all the rest of the tedium that goes along with it. We settled on "Blast From the Past" with Brendan Fraser, which was intelligent and funny (and I don't have to tell you how rare a combination that is, at least in movies nowadays) and we found it very entertaining, with humor and charm to spare, and even a love story. It was way better than watching a bunch of awful singers, bad dancers and dull interviews in Times Square, and we were glad to spend the holiday with yummy Brendan Fraser, rather than that vapid Ryan Seacrest for a change, and I don't mind saying, a change for the better. Now, that's a New Year's resolution I can live with.
Earlier in the week at work, I was walking around the campus at lunchtime, and couldn't help but notice, when I came around the side of the doctor's parking lot, that where there should have been a 4-foot chain link fence, and in fact, there had been one there for all the years that I have worked there, now there seemed to be only a series of metal posts in the ground, and no fence to speak of. I thought it odd, but not wildly so, since the property seems to have a life of its own, and we shouldn't be surprised by anything that happens there anymore. A little farther along, I came across a very large pickup truck, which was emblazoned with the wording: Premier Fence Installations. Call me crazy (don't you dare!) but taking a 4-foot fence and making it disappear would never be my idea of any sort of premier fence installation, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps we had never paid these people for their fence, and they were ripping it up and taking it back. Just then, I spotted one of the workers, who was carrying a bucket of tools and a shovel, and I waved toward the row of empty posts and said, "I get it! Invisible fence!" He laughed.
Speaking of tools, even I thought we had gotten to the most elemental state in our last mention of Modern Marvels, as the show progressed from Ice and Snow to Water and finally Rocks, which as modern marvels go, were not even modern marvels to the dinosaurs, and you'd probably have to go back to single-celled organisms slithering up out of the primordial ooze before water could be considered anyone's idea of a modern marvel by any stretch of the imagination. But to give credit where credit is due, I have to admit that they really outdid themselves this time, as the TV listings for Monday set a new standard of achievement with this pinnacle of the genre: [[ Modern Marvels - Carbon ]] Well, all you can do at a time like that is tip your cap to them, because even though the dinosaurs and I said it would be impossible, they still managed to top themselves, surpassing even rocks, and getting down to the atomic level of the very building blocks of life itself. The dinosaurs are holding out for "gravity" next, but I've got my heart set on "magnetism," although that only goes back as far as the formation of the planets, so they'll probably opt for something even more metaphysical like "time," which is about the only thing that goes all the way back to before the beginning and shows no signs of slowing down. I'm thinking that would keep our friends at Modern Marvels busy for a while, say, 15 bazillion years or so.
Meanwhile, in local sports news, that wailing noise you hear is the sound of legions of odds-makers paying off customers who bucked the trends and bet against the Dallas Cowboys and Baltimore Colts, who unaccountably lost their playoff games, to the distress of their disappointed fans. A beneficiary of this unexpected outcome was the New York Giants, picked by just about nobody to advance past the Cowboys to the next round of the playoffs, so either the Cowboys couldn't face the prospect of freezing to death in Green Bay next week, or we have to accept that the Age of Miracles has not passed. On another frozen subject, after I complained about them last week, the New York Rangers actually won a game, but we knew all along it was too good to last, as they promptly lost their next one, making a strong case that the only team they can beat is the Montreal Canadiens, who lost to them twice in two weeks, and were probably their only wins in the last 12 games. Because we watched both of those games back to back (thanks, TiVo!) we couldn't help but notice something highly peculiar about the Montreal team. (Okay, I have to admit that only I noticed it, because I'm an obsessive compulsive finicky fuss-pot face, and Bill is merely humoring me.) The Canadiens have 6 players (out of 18 skaters) whose last names start with "Ko," which is uncommon enough as it is. There's Koivu, Komisarek, Kostopoulos, Kovalev, and not one, but TWO people named Kostitsyn, who happen to be brothers, not surprisingly. In the entire NHL, with dozens of teams, there are only 21 players altogether whose last names start with "Ko," and of those 21, six are in Montreal, which I personally think must set some kind of record for bizarre coincidences. At the NHL website where they have the team rosters, they very helpfully also provide each player's position, jersey number, height and weight, date of birth and where they're from, I suppose because inquiring minds want to know. It's easy enough to identify the ones from USA and CAN, and there's also plenty from RUS, and thanks to the Kostityn brothers, even I could figure out that BLR would be Belarus. I already knew that Saku Koivu was from FIN, and it wouldn't surprise me to find players with funny-sounding names coming from CZE or SVK, which I would guess to be the Czech Republic and Slovakia. But then I spotted someone from SVN, and I said to Bill that I reject out of hand that anyone from Slovenia is playing in the NHL, and that's all there is to that. And while I'm okay with CZE for the Czechs, then who the heck is CHE, who also showed up on the roster? Of course, everyone knows how Bill excels at research challenges (just ask him for the demographic information for Allison Park, Pennsylvania, please!) and he said that according to our new friends at the RootsWeb genealogy site, CHE is Switzerland, of all things. Now, just you hold on a minute there! I can take a joke as well as the next fellow, but you've got to go a pretty long way around the alphabet before you can explain how CHE can be translated into any part of Switzerland, no matter how you look at it. Bill said he thinks they're too busy making cuckoo clocks to come up with the right abbreviation for the country, and I will only say that I think he has that half right. Sort of like the Premier Fence Installation people, who came to the hospital and un-installed a fence we already have, and between you and me and the fence post, this is what you call something lost in the translation, and I ought to know.
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend! Of course, it seems late this year, but like a lot of these new-fangled movable holidays, it can be anywhere from the 15th to the 21st of January, and there just seems to be no way to pin these slippery devils down more than that. They don't build fences around these things, and keep them in some sort of compound where you'd be able to keep track of them, although that would be an idea that I personally would vote for, and no one would have to ask me twice. I say, give me a holiday like Christmas, or New Year's, or even St. Patrick's Day, where they just pick a day and stick with it, no matter what, and none of this loosey-goosey, higgledy-piggledy, can't-make-up-your-mind flim-flam about it. I have enough to worry about as it is, heaven knows, without chasing around after these wandering festivals, which don't even have the good manners to stay put from one year to the next. Honestly, the way they move around, you'd think they were running from a bunch of angry creditors, or worse, the FBI's most wanted list. Frankly, I've always thought that Labor Day looked awfully suspicious.
While we're on the topic of holidays, I hope that you had a very nice New Year's Eve, and rang in 2008 in fine style, without doing anything indecorous that would land your picture on the front page of the local newspaper, or a video of your misdeeds showing up on YouTube. In the current proliferation of camera phones, we should look upon everyone else as a potential Geraldo Rivera or Jerry Springer, and be sure to give them nothing more incendiary than a polite smile and nod, or risk international notoriety of the worst sort. We were taking no chances on New Year's Eve, and gave the paparazzi nothing to exploit, as we enjoyed a quiet evening at home as we usually do. But we finally wised up and ditched the usual pre-countdown programming, because every year we say that it can't possibly be worse than the previous year, and every year, it somehow manages to do exactly that. I remember when they started Dick Clark's New Year's Eve show because everyone thought that Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians were so boring, and now it's Dick Clark's show that's not only boring but unwatchable. The rest of the stuff that's on at the same time is just as bad or worse, and every year, we just get annoyed at it instead of enjoying it. So this time around, we decided to watch a movie instead, and only turn to live television just before the countdown, so we could enjoy all the excitement of the moment, without all the rest of the tedium that goes along with it. We settled on "Blast From the Past" with Brendan Fraser, which was intelligent and funny (and I don't have to tell you how rare a combination that is, at least in movies nowadays) and we found it very entertaining, with humor and charm to spare, and even a love story. It was way better than watching a bunch of awful singers, bad dancers and dull interviews in Times Square, and we were glad to spend the holiday with yummy Brendan Fraser, rather than that vapid Ryan Seacrest for a change, and I don't mind saying, a change for the better. Now, that's a New Year's resolution I can live with.
Earlier in the week at work, I was walking around the campus at lunchtime, and couldn't help but notice, when I came around the side of the doctor's parking lot, that where there should have been a 4-foot chain link fence, and in fact, there had been one there for all the years that I have worked there, now there seemed to be only a series of metal posts in the ground, and no fence to speak of. I thought it odd, but not wildly so, since the property seems to have a life of its own, and we shouldn't be surprised by anything that happens there anymore. A little farther along, I came across a very large pickup truck, which was emblazoned with the wording: Premier Fence Installations. Call me crazy (don't you dare!) but taking a 4-foot fence and making it disappear would never be my idea of any sort of premier fence installation, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps we had never paid these people for their fence, and they were ripping it up and taking it back. Just then, I spotted one of the workers, who was carrying a bucket of tools and a shovel, and I waved toward the row of empty posts and said, "I get it! Invisible fence!" He laughed.
Speaking of tools, even I thought we had gotten to the most elemental state in our last mention of Modern Marvels, as the show progressed from Ice and Snow to Water and finally Rocks, which as modern marvels go, were not even modern marvels to the dinosaurs, and you'd probably have to go back to single-celled organisms slithering up out of the primordial ooze before water could be considered anyone's idea of a modern marvel by any stretch of the imagination. But to give credit where credit is due, I have to admit that they really outdid themselves this time, as the TV listings for Monday set a new standard of achievement with this pinnacle of the genre: [[ Modern Marvels - Carbon ]] Well, all you can do at a time like that is tip your cap to them, because even though the dinosaurs and I said it would be impossible, they still managed to top themselves, surpassing even rocks, and getting down to the atomic level of the very building blocks of life itself. The dinosaurs are holding out for "gravity" next, but I've got my heart set on "magnetism," although that only goes back as far as the formation of the planets, so they'll probably opt for something even more metaphysical like "time," which is about the only thing that goes all the way back to before the beginning and shows no signs of slowing down. I'm thinking that would keep our friends at Modern Marvels busy for a while, say, 15 bazillion years or so.
Meanwhile, in local sports news, that wailing noise you hear is the sound of legions of odds-makers paying off customers who bucked the trends and bet against the Dallas Cowboys and Baltimore Colts, who unaccountably lost their playoff games, to the distress of their disappointed fans. A beneficiary of this unexpected outcome was the New York Giants, picked by just about nobody to advance past the Cowboys to the next round of the playoffs, so either the Cowboys couldn't face the prospect of freezing to death in Green Bay next week, or we have to accept that the Age of Miracles has not passed. On another frozen subject, after I complained about them last week, the New York Rangers actually won a game, but we knew all along it was too good to last, as they promptly lost their next one, making a strong case that the only team they can beat is the Montreal Canadiens, who lost to them twice in two weeks, and were probably their only wins in the last 12 games. Because we watched both of those games back to back (thanks, TiVo!) we couldn't help but notice something highly peculiar about the Montreal team. (Okay, I have to admit that only I noticed it, because I'm an obsessive compulsive finicky fuss-pot face, and Bill is merely humoring me.) The Canadiens have 6 players (out of 18 skaters) whose last names start with "Ko," which is uncommon enough as it is. There's Koivu, Komisarek, Kostopoulos, Kovalev, and not one, but TWO people named Kostitsyn, who happen to be brothers, not surprisingly. In the entire NHL, with dozens of teams, there are only 21 players altogether whose last names start with "Ko," and of those 21, six are in Montreal, which I personally think must set some kind of record for bizarre coincidences. At the NHL website where they have the team rosters, they very helpfully also provide each player's position, jersey number, height and weight, date of birth and where they're from, I suppose because inquiring minds want to know. It's easy enough to identify the ones from USA and CAN, and there's also plenty from RUS, and thanks to the Kostityn brothers, even I could figure out that BLR would be Belarus. I already knew that Saku Koivu was from FIN, and it wouldn't surprise me to find players with funny-sounding names coming from CZE or SVK, which I would guess to be the Czech Republic and Slovakia. But then I spotted someone from SVN, and I said to Bill that I reject out of hand that anyone from Slovenia is playing in the NHL, and that's all there is to that. And while I'm okay with CZE for the Czechs, then who the heck is CHE, who also showed up on the roster? Of course, everyone knows how Bill excels at research challenges (just ask him for the demographic information for Allison Park, Pennsylvania, please!) and he said that according to our new friends at the RootsWeb genealogy site, CHE is Switzerland, of all things. Now, just you hold on a minute there! I can take a joke as well as the next fellow, but you've got to go a pretty long way around the alphabet before you can explain how CHE can be translated into any part of Switzerland, no matter how you look at it. Bill said he thinks they're too busy making cuckoo clocks to come up with the right abbreviation for the country, and I will only say that I think he has that half right. Sort of like the Premier Fence Installation people, who came to the hospital and un-installed a fence we already have, and between you and me and the fence post, this is what you call something lost in the translation, and I ought to know.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 7:19 PM
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