Category Archives: Word Play

Odd words, phrases and jargon from about the world and web

Fourth of July

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So to celebrate the Independence of the United States we did racks of ribs.  Jessica and I don’t have a lot of experience in feeding large groups ribs so we bought 4 racks.  That would be roughly the gross national income of a small country in ribs, but I guess I’m a generous host.  Jessica had read that you should count on half a rack for each person eating.  We had 8 people (7+2 youth + 1 Abby) so I got four.  I think combined everyone ate about 1.3 racks of ribs.  So we have left overs.

LOTS of leftovers.  At least the local grocery store was open when my propane tank went dry on me 🙂  The ribs were good, but took about 5 hours to cook so it was a labor of love.  And my love, Jessica, did most of that while I went to help my buddy Craig chop up wood from his tree that had blown into the neighbor’s yard during our funky storms of the last three days.

Speaking of storms we went out to watch fireworks in the car.  In the rain.  In a Toy ‘R’ Us parking lot.  And the fireworks did not come… because rain and fire do not play well together, sort of like Pam Anderson and the 1700’s shakers [the shakers believed in celibacy].  One thing that was fun though is that we had Kailey & Trystan with Abby, Jess and I so we played the camping game.  That’s the one where you say, “I’m going camping and I’m going to bring [insert item name] to start it and then each person has to add one item to the end of the list after reciting it from memory.  One of the tricks to the game is that you can add complicated adjectives to the items so it can be the ‘ooey-gooey green sleeping bag’ instead of the ‘sleeping bag.’  Abby did surprisingly well.  I, on the other hand, did poorly due to being quite tired.

I think fun was had by all and in the end I still have about 3 pounds of ribs to eat.  Tonight?  Abby’s first baseball game, if it doesn’t get rained out.

Viewing the Stars

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If you’re like me you’ve never watched ‘The View’ all the way through… and the only reason that you watched 15 minutes of it in the first place is because you were sick and you happened to have dropped the remote control far enough away that the increase in nausia brought on by moving towards the remote had to outway the nausia from the show.  Its tough to guage that number because its different for everyone.  Chuck Norris probably gave his television a look and it changed the channel while people like myself had to deal with the emotional battle brought on by the predicament.

Lately in the news it appears that Star Jones-Gastric-Bypass-Reynolds is at odds with her co-host Barbera Mummy-Walters.  And by odds I mean she pretty much wishes she hadn’t lost all of the weight through *cough gastric bypass surgery cough* diet and exercise so as to sit on Barbara’s frail skeletal structure and end the feud.  Barbara on the other hand has handled things really well if by really well you consider that she’s playing the media – her only source of attention – against Star Johannesburg-Reynolds-Wrap.

This sort of jockeying around is just rediculous if you take into account that most people don’t give a rip about Star Jones’ celebrity status.  Once someone finally takes out Kathy Griffith Star Jones can have her show, “My life on the F list.”   Barbara Walters could have her own show, “How being under intense lighting for interviews can help keep your skin looking young and looking like old suitcase leather.”  I think the only solution will be for the two of them to go onto Montel William’s show and kiss and make up… until Rosie O’Donnell comes out from the back room and changes the dynamic of what I meant by kissing and making up.

The View may forever be dead now that they’re losing Jar Stones-Reynolds, and gaining Rosie O.  And it won’t have anything to do with either of them… I think someone’s going to discover that Barbera Walters is secretly Yoda and can the View.

The Best Kind of AOL is the Dead Kind of AOL

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I am at my in-laws in IN [that is the kind of alliteration that I dream of using on a daily bases].  They have teenage girls which means that they have AOL.  This is part of standards compliance for teenager girls apparently.  I am logging in on my wireless laptop at least.  However, AOL totally barfed on my older version installed on this laptop.  All it did was log me into their network and give me internet access.  None of the AOL crap loaded up.  None of the crap was blinking, popping, fading in and out, or demanding my attention.  It is beautiful.  It is the first time AOL has brought a smile to my face in a long, long time.

The Last Post About Dodge Calibers

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This morning at about 7:35 I turned in the keys to Enterprise Rent-a-Caliber and am finally rid of the Dodge Caliber.  I don’t want you to think that I hate the car, except that I do.  I have had 4 men (I notice that women dont’ do this) ask me how I like it when the family piles out of the vehicle.  Each one got a standard three word response, “I hate it.”  Yeah, that’s a pretty strong statement to make about a car.  Except that a car that big and heavy needs a very serious engine, 6 cylinders at least, or maybe an iVTEC 4 cylinder engine that pushes various Hondas around.  The 4 banger inside the Caliber is most at home at a red light.  It purs and hums there until the light turns green.  If you stomp on the gas the car gets even more fidgety because it doesn’t know how to accelerate.  I was at a left hand turn, the light was green and a car was more than a quarter mile down the road so I thought I had room to turn left.  I hit the gas.  The gas laughed (laughing gas?), the car jittered forward and finally started to move smoothly as I was narrowly into the left hand turn lane before the other vehicle was going through the same intersection.
The upsides of the low visibility windows that the Caliber has are many and varied.  For example, not being able to see means your body will be in a relaxed state when you get into the accident instead of being tensed up.  Another fine quality of low visibility is that bullets flying at you from outside of a car in a high speed chase will have a smaller target if they have to go through the glass.  Of course most bullets would whip through the steel doors make that less of an issue.  The last upside I’m going to mention is that not seeing where your hood is makes it more likely for you to stay back from other vehicles at a red light because you wouldn’t want to bump into them.  15 feet until the next car may or may not be how far back I was from them… I don’t know, it was hard to tell unless I got out of the car to look.

There are some nice features that I have mentioned before like lights in the cup holders at night.  A stereo that sounds so horrible that you actually drive with it off so that your focus is more on the road (that you can’t see so well, anyway) helps.  There is a drink cooler in the dashboard.  Nice.  I can have cold drinks while I drive, but do I want to be driving?  Last, but not least, I love the fact that the ‘large storage space’ in the back is not any larger than my Honda Civic’s was.  Who needs to put things in the back of a vehicle?  Not me for sure.  Our stroller barely fit  in the back with anything else.

If you see a Caliber on the road, steer clear of them, they’re a mobile accident waiting to happen.

Undercooked Meat Hex

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The last couple times I’ve grilled non-Steak meats on the grill I have undercooked them the first time they were on the grill.  This was driving me crazy!  Then I realized that I have been cooking everything like its steak, and so I’m a complete moron and the problem is not my grill or the meat.  So, next time I grill non-steak meats on the grill I am going to do it right.  people will once again be able to eat when I say the food is done on the grill and not so much gagging, running for the bathroom and losing their appetite when they cut into mostly raw armadillo.

Dodge Crabbait II

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I can’t remember the name of the Dodge that we’re renting.  I keep calling it a Cobalt, which is wrong, it isn’t Cobalt, that’s a Chevy.  I think it starts with a ‘C’ but it doesn’t matter, because pretty much anything I come up with for a name falls short of its actual name [Randy Scurries off across the World Wide Web to dodge.com]. Caliber!  It is the Dodge Caliber.  Which seems to overstate the actual niceness of the car.  Maybe it is just the model we got but the whole interior is just a convoluted mess of plastic.

I want to retract my visibility statement from before by 1/3.  When you raise up the seat of the drivers seat you can see much more because your head is at a better height to survey your surroundings.  I still don’t like the car though.  The model we got must have a smaller engine than our old Honda because the thing is a gutless wonder.  I don’t hate this car, there are parts of it that are nice.  The back seat area is roomier than the Honda’s back seat.  The cargo space in the back is nice.  We had to get new car seats since the old ones were in the accident with us so we put the old ones in the cargo space and had room for 3 small elephants to boot (very, very tiny elephants.  In fact they were just in my imagination).  We couldn’t have done that in our Honda.  Technically I could have left them in the Baby’s ‘R’ Us parking lot but decided that I didn’t want to get in trouble for littering.

Another thing that bugs me is that the car stereo has to be cranked up to sound even remotely good.  Yes, I changed the three-band equalizer, but the thing just simply sounds bassy, which might be good if I was listening to hip-hop, but not so good when I am listening to the lyrical stylings of Missy Higgins.  Many of her songs have a simple accompaniment and it was hard to hear anything but her voice.  Jessica hadn’t heard the album before and didn’t particularly care for it.  I told her that it actually sounds good on every other sound source I’ve listened to it on.
I’m glad to have a rental car so that we’re not taking the bus or walking (though I am glad we even have a bus to ride on here) but this is not a car I will be buying for my own personal use any time in the future.

95% Chance of Hosery

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Well, today the ‘adjuster’ came out and looked at my car.  I liked him, his name was Andy and he had a goatee.  It was like a taller version of myself with brown curly hair, a slender body and boots on.  Who has a different job.  Who lives in a different part of Colorado with a different family.  Yeah, we had a lot in common.

Andy told me that due to the fact that the outside and inside of the quarter panel and trunk had been damaged that most likely the auto-body people would tell him that it would cost a quadrillion-bazillion-trillion-finity dollars to fix the car and that it would be cheaper to buy a new one. Heck, I only paid tens of thousands for the car in the first place, with repair bills that high its a bit steep to put it in ‘ship shape’ condition.  Not that I want to go sailing in a Honda Civic.
So, in short there’s a 95% chance that I’m going to be making a deal with the devil car dealer soon so that I can drive a new pimped ride.

Did I Just Say That?

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This morning I did announcements and sung along with the songs (though it was not like when I traditionally lead the worship).  Part of this responsibility is reading the passage that will be taught on in its entirety so that people have a general idea of where we’re at in the series (currently Isaiah).  I had to read a passage in Isaiah 22.  Except that when I got to the 24th verse that reads:

So they will hang on him all the glory of his father’s house, offspring and issue, all the least of vessels, from bowls to all the jars.

I screwed up.  Instead of ‘bowls’ out popped ‘bowels.’   I don’t know what mental image that brings for you, but I quickly corrected myself and went on.  Wow.  Bowels.  Pardon me while I mention that was a “crappy” slip up [that play on words was for Jenny Dalton, who will more than likely not actually read this post].

I was exhausted by the end of the main service because I had to teach on the errors of Christian Science (an MP3 can be downloaded/streamed at that link) during the adult Sunday School class.  Then I had to lead the main service (as mentioned before) and to end it all I had managed to talk or sing for over an hour and a half.  That’s a lot for a guy who quietly sits in front of a computer desk most of the time and doesn’t engage in hardly enough social activity.  However, there is just something fun about slip ups like this for others, they get to see that Randy Peterman is most definitely human, and that the folks that are leading are not there to put on a show.

Craw”Fish.” Fish! ->Fish

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When we were kids we lived in Carson City for part of our kidhood. And right about 30-45 minutes away was Lake Tahoe. I say 30-45 minutes away because it depends on which car my parents owned at the time. They had a white Volvo stationwagon that was so slow that it could possibly have been 90 minutes to Tahoe. They also had at one point in time a Suburban that was really fast, and really lifted, which made it really unsafe to drive to and from Lake Tahoe on US Highway 50. I take that back, it was safe if you went 20 miles an hour.

As kids we would go out in between the large rocks and boulders near parts of the shore and try to catch ‘Crawdads’ or Crayfish. Those critters were fun to catch because we would entice them out with bacon on a string, or bacon on a coat hook, and sometimes bacon on a large sheet of plywood. Pretty much anything with bacon got their attention. We loved to catch them and put them in a cooler so that we could show off our catch to our parents, other onlookers and gross out our sister and her friends. Now I think Becky would just cook them.

Well, I think that the nickname ‘crawfish’ should have caught our attention. Because fish, when they get dead and old, start to stink. And they don’t stink a little, they stink like you were buried up to your eyeballs in dead flesh. I mean that in the nicest way possible Crayfish activists. My brother and I somehow talked our parents (or parent if only one parent happened to take us up to Tahoe, I can’t recall which) into letting us take a few home as ‘pets.’ But crayfish don’t actually eat bacon alone, and they need their water changed and circulating. They also don’t live in a cooler as a native habitat. Coolers don’t provide those very important things that crayfish need to stay alive. And so it began. The stench slowly built up in the garage (mom wisely would not let us keep them in the house). And the crayfish moved slower and slower. And the use of ‘and’ to start off a sentence began to be beaten into our heads at school. And we did it anyway.

The crayfish died. But the smell lingered on, we didn’t want to throw them out because we didn’t want to get close enough to the cooler to get rid of the crayfish and then take on the responsibility of cleaning out the cooler. My parents finally made us do it. It was sad, gross and a valuable lesson: don’t bring home pets you’re perfectly glad to go visit in their native habitat. Which is why I don’t own dogs. I’m more than glad to go visit them in parks when other people are walking them in their native habitat.