Search This Blog

Thursday, July 14, 2011

VOLUME XIX - Tampering With My Bread or That's What They're Calling It These Days and Other Tales

c. May 1, 2011 Anno Domini

Apparently I can't sit in my new chair whilst using my XBox or playing Munchkin because it has a warning label stating, "Use this product as a task/working chair, NOT as a wheel chair, game chair or object for other purposes."  (Bolding mine).  Fortunately, my plan all along was to use the chair with my computer, and I hardly ever play PC games because my old monitor tinted everything red and it made it hard to see properly.

Of course, the downside is that  I can't watch monster truck rally videos on YouTube all day because, although I paid for the whole seat, the warning label also states, "DON'T sit on the edge!"

c. June 3, 2011 Anno Domini


Dramatis Personae:
Jonathan Roberts, a thirty year old single male
Random Woman, a random woman
Jonathan Roberts' Internal Monologue, a veritable font of wisdom

Scene: Aisle four.  Jonathan Roberts is putting his groceries onto the conveyor belt.  Random Woman has just impertinently removed a loaf of bread from Jonathan Roberts' cart and placed it on the conveyor belt, as if to assist him.

Random Woman: Don't forget anything.  She'll just make you comeright  back and get it.
Jonathan Roberts: She?  I'm single and live alone.  I don't have to worry about that sort of thing.
Random Woman: But you'll still have to come back.
Jonathan Roberts' Internal Monologue: But it will be of my own volition, dog gone it!

c. June 12, 2011, Anno Domini



If you wear a stylish, vintage 70's suit to the grocery store, make a purchase and request $40 USD in cash back, but moronically leave without your cash, walk out of the store, drive away, return to the store, tell the cashier you forgot your cash and politely request to be united with it no one will say they don't remember you being in store earlier.

The unfortunate part of wearing such a suit is that various ladies always want to be photographed next to it, and then you have to be in the photograph with them because (although they don't really want you in the picture) they only way for them to be photographed with the suit but without you is for you to take the suit off to allow it to be photographed, and no one wants to see that.

c. June 13, 2011, Anno Domini

I recently purchased The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, by Sir Philip Sidney from http://www.amazon.com.  Like the fool I am, I declined to first read the description of the book, assuming the edition I purchased was of a modern variety and would include innovations such as standardised orthography and the use of the character "s" instead of an integral sign.  When the book arrived, I opened it and found it to be a high-fidelity reproduction of an edition published in 1590 A.D.  So far, every "s"I have even come across was represented by an integral sign, with the exception of two such characters adjacent to each other represented by "ß"!  Sir Philip also tends to use "u" and "v" interchangeably and sometimes puts an accent mark over a vowel to indicate that it should be followed by "m" or "n" instead of actually writing "m" or "n" after the vowel, or maybe such practices were employed purely through the prerogative of the printer.  Of course, I wouldn't blame the printer for the inconsistent spelling.  In one sentence, Sir Philip writes, "Now, it is done onelie for you, onely to you," spelling the word "only" once as "onelie" and once as "onely."  Despite my enjoyment of the book so far, it does make me want to construct a time machine to send a legion of editors back to the sixteenth century.  In the interest of fairness, I must say Sir Philip's spelling is more readable than most people's text messages and he doesn't use arabic numerals (like everyone other than me these days) or roman numerals (like Boyz II Men) in place of words.


c. June 19, 2011 Anno Domini

At 6:15 a.m., I got out of work and attempted to start my car.  It didn't work.  I attempted to open the hood to investigate, but that didn't work either.  Seeing as how my contingency plan for my car not starting consists of opening the hood, staring at the engine for a bit, hope the battery just needs a bit of a charge and ask a co-worker to help me jump start it... the failure of the hood to open was problematic.  I ended up calling a tow truck and killing time by walking several laps around the pond behind my workplace until the sidewalk got too full of dog-walkers.  After the dog-walkers took over, I went back to my car.  I won't lie and say it didn't feel as if I had been waiting interminably for the tow truck by that point but in reality it had only been about twenty minutes.  An uninformed observer, however, could be forgiven for thinking I had left my car sitting in the parking lot for at least a decade, because a large cobb webbe, extending from the outermost tip of the driver's side mirror to a point on the window, had formed (as such things are wont to appear in old abandoned houses in cheesy movies.)  Logically, I must conclude that either my life is a satire of such cheesy movies or the Spider Queen of Menzoberranzan Herself (that chaotic evil taffeta punk) despatched one of her minions to play a cruel joke on me.  Due to the lack of tumbleweeds blowing through the parking lot and the failure of my beard to grow to a comically absurd length, my money is on the latter.

c. June 27, 2011 Anno Domini

Last week, I was driving Bella around and she asked if I was speeding, because if I was speeding that would make me a bad citizen.  I told her I was not speeding and that I was a very good citizen because I picked up some litter in a park a few days prior and threw it away.  Bella totally burst my bubble by saying picking up litter and throwing it way made me a bad citizen because it increased the size of landfills and someday the whole Earth would be full of landfills because of people picking up litter and throwing it away.  I can't win.  :( 

c. July 3, 2011 Anno Domini

I don't know anything about ancient Greek except what the letters look like, so I can't rightly say whether or not Sophocles used an ellipsis or other such indication of a pause in the original, but the following, taken from Paul Roche's translation of Sophocles' "Oedipus the King," is the best use of a dramatic pause in the history of drama:

Messenger: Can you tell me please, good sirs, where is the palace of King Oedipus, or better, where's the king?
Chorus: This is his palace, sir, and he's within.  This lady is his wife and mother . . . of his children.

c. July 7, 2011 Anno Domini

Not that I condone (or would ever attempt) online dating, but once, I got the idea into my head that in order for all to be right with the world, http://www.carbon14.com needed to be the address of a geeky science nerd dating site.  I took a look at it, but it turned out to be all about an art gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  I most definitely wasn't planning to register and use the site to find a geeky science nerd lady or anything, but it was still a huge disappointment.