Category Archives: Word Play

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

Pardon My French

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The title of this post accurately reflects my knowledge of most languages actually, not just French. I could say pardon my Spanish, Russian, Yiddish or any other language. I’m bound by the silly English languish. However, I’ve managed in the last 5 or so years to learn various programming languages at least well enough to get things done in them. Why is it that programming languages are simpler than spoken languages to learn? Often because they’ve got similar syntax or a similar approach to things.

Right now I’m learning C++, a language written in what seems like the dark ages after having used Java, but I’m catching on and I think that its going to prove useful. Its a lot faster than older versions of Java and it can be written rather efficiently as well since many function names are terse and remove all vowels. Of course without vowels you have to play a guessing game about what things like the following mean:

atoi
memcmp // oops, they left a vowel in that one
strcmp
strcpy

However, there’s a secret decoder ring that came with one of my books so I was able to figure those out 😉

Poor Italian Girl Totally Gets Blown Off

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So there’s a commercial on TV for some sort of low carb pasta that comes on with this mother and daughter going into a store. The store looks so expensive that I would probably have to take out a small loan or donate some organs to afford to shop at… once. In the background the commercial has some Italian opera music. I don’t know what the guy is singing about so I often join in with an English translation that I can only assume reflects the intents of the original lyrics in my native tongue.

However, the middle of the commercial shows this girl lifting up one of the pristine boxes of noodles that the competition sells. Since the mother is health conscious and wants the rest of her Italian family to live the Adkin’s lifestyle she shakes her head, ‘no,’ and holds up a box of [marketed brand name here] noodles. Then, they show the woman lifting a noodle on the end of a fork into her mouth. The camera changes angles and she actually ‘chews’ a noodle. Or so it seems. Actually showing anyone masticating like that is not sexy, therefore they show this part from a great distance (which shows that this family has some serious cash since their kitchen can handle a distant shot panning around the room).

Then, to further insult us they show a family of four: a man, the woman, the girl, and a boy all sitting at the table eating some sort of pasta dish. However, these must be droid children because the fact that the sauce is so sparse on the noodles makes it look like they’re just eating a plate of these low-carb noodles with bits of tomato for decoration. No United States of America born child actually eats noodles plain, they drench them in so much sauce that the noodles become a medium for the sauce. In most homes it probably looks like a Tomato based soup with noodles in it.

I still insist that the opera words go something like this:
A woman and her daughter
Love to buy noodles
The daughter is skinny
The Mom is anorexic
[it should be noted that the words don’t rhyme because this is a direct translation, word for word].

The mom is on Adkin’s
Please put it back kid
I’m the boss
Don’t mess with me

She looks so sultry
Eating the noodles
Look how her fork glimmers
In her sexy hand
[Those Italians know sex sells]

The family is eating
Smile or a beating [that rhyme was not intentional]
We’re so stereotypical
It makes you want to throw up

Bird: Feeders and Poop

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So we got a bird feeder a couple weeks ago and the birds didn’t touch it. Mostly because we got a song bird feeder and the song birds apparently run the same circuit and our house was not on the map. Then one day a bird, who was lost and didn’t want to go home anyway, found our bird feeder. He and a few of his buddies, being the kind of gluttonous birds that birds can be, started singing songs in our neck of the woods for food.

So we bought more bird feeders.

Dumb.

Now there is bird poop all around the feeders and I have to ask the birds to keep their language clean so that Abby doesn’t pick up any fowl mouth stuff**.

** I so crack me up.

It’s My United States of… Whatever

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The title of this post comes from an Liam Lynch number. It’s odd, but so is Lynch. I like it. However, this post is about the phrase “Bush’s America.” I’m tired of reading it and hearing it and tasting it and feeling it. Google Search: Bush’s America. There’s over 19,000,000 references to said term.

Yuck. It’s my United States of America. America is a contenent, and it doesn’t belong to Bush. Nor does it belong to any one person or nation. Lets stop calling it that silly, short sited name shall we? When Clinton was in Office politically right winged folks said that he and Hillary were going to pull some coup and never leave power until they, or their clones, died. Now, left leaning folks are calling this Bush’s America and saying Bush has some secret plan to do the same.

Stop! I’m ready to get off this ride and realize that the political system of this Democratic-Republic is not a simple system to break up and destroy. If Bush were to pull some scheme you can bet that all sorts of chaos would erupt. Much worse than if Michael Jackson had been found guilty 🙂

OK, I’m done.

ACLU and Spammers Join Forces to Stop Blacklists

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The American Civil Liberty Union has joined forces with various spammers around the United States to try to close down various so called ‘blacklisting services.’ Attorney M. Jackson, Esq. was quoted as saying, ”This is outrageous that bigotry against people of color and people who send emails is tolerated in this country. Especially since this technology has been developed after the civil rights movement, much of it within the last five to ten years! We will stop these propagators of racism and bring freedom to email senders as well.” An un-named representative of the spammers, going by the pseudonym 5p@//.//.R has publicly released a statement on aclyou-and-spammers-untie.valium4all.ebay.phishingscam.com stating:

“Why do system admins have to be haterz? We just want to make money like everyone else. We are joining forces with the ACLU to help stop racism and bl@cklisting as a whole.”

Links to other sites from that page included ‘Asian women’, ‘Black Teens’ and various other sexually oriented content involving various races and live stock. Apparently this is to show support for the people of color in the nation that the ACLU is promoting as well as the spammer’s bank accounts.

Representatives of the blacklisting sites were unable to reply due to DOS attacks coming from IP addresses in the China and zombie AOL user machines.

Reproducing Legalese

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It is now an important American tradition to require labels to restate the obvious. Obvous things like the ingredients of food products and that gluttony is probably a bad choice. With that in mind, I give you the label of a health food product made in Boulder, Colorado:
[Click to see the Nutballz wrapper, by reducing the size of the image to fit on this site I lost clarity].

For those of you who won’t click on that link out of fear or laziness or the fact that the name sounds naughty I’ll pass this along:
There are two warnings on this wrapper:

  1. There are 9grams of xylitol in Nutballz(TM), a sweetener derived from plant cellulose. (It is generally recommended that you do not exceed 50 grams of xylitol a day unless you want to poop!)
  2. Alert! This product contains nuts (duh)!

I had to buy just one package to prove that this was real. They don’t taste great, but they don’t taste bad either. They’re a rather typical ‘health’ food flavor. Bland.

The Piano Movers are Coming

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The Piano movers bring with them an old piano from the year 1372 and a half, predating all other pianos by several hundred years. Actually, it’s not that old. It is however the piano I composed quite a few original tunes on – none of which I can play any longer because its been so long since I had a piano in my possession. The piano was given to my parents by Christopher Columbus upon arriving in California. They traded it to him for some corn, wheat and fish. He said, “Though canst have mine pinano [SIC] if thine food doth sustaineth me.” Which, for a Italian was pretty good English. My parents, being 20th century metropolitan folks said to each other, “This guy must have been hanging out with all of the other hippies – I can’t understand most of what he is saying.”

And so the piano became a family heirloom.

I am looking forward to having this piano in my home until my parents get another dwelling that they can store such things in. It will give me a chance to polish up my chops so that I can sound like ‘Fats’ Waller, ‘Fats’ Domino and many other Adkins diet inspired piano players. I also hope to play a little Tchaikovski, as Victor Borge said, very little.

You see, I’m a lazy bum when it comes to playing sheet music. My sister-in-law Becca plays very well and is quite accomplished. I measure my accomplishments differently simply because if I look that far up in the piano world I get a kink in my neck and I have to go immediately to Boardwalk, pay $200.00 passing ‘Go’ and then head straight to the Chiropractor. So, I play, I have fun, and I mash up my favorite Beatles Piano hits with the mirriad Beasty Boy piano hits until no one recognizes it… then I call it Jazz.

I’ll try to record some of this ‘so called’ music some time.

Update: It’s hear, and in as sound a coundition as this piano can be. The movers were quick, courteous, and tried not to make fun of this shabby old ‘pinano’.

Post Script: Abby calls it a ‘pinano’.

Two Abby-isms

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This morning Abby got the ‘unk.’ That is to say she used two words that had ‘unk’ in them. The first was that she wanted peanut butter on her toast, but without the ‘junks.’ That’s chunks for you readers who were concerned with junky peanut butter (read:partially hydrogenated vegetable oils).

Then, she listened to our discussion about paint in the kitchen and she said, “That’s a good color. It’s funky.”

I can feel the James Brown coming on my iTunes now.

Fold Art

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No, not Origami, it’s a spoonerism. I’m finding that in my old age I just have a harder time empathyzing with younger teenagers. It could be any combination of things, but I’m going to give you a list of a few:

  • There is a growing age gap
  • There is a growing culture gap
  • I could be talking to all the wrong teenagers (don’t take that wrong)
  • Most young teenagers don’t know about the Far Side
  • I’m wearing the wrong clothes
  • I’m married and obviously must not have a clue about Jr. High drama
  • I don’t care for the clothes of the 1970’s 1980’s and the fashion is coming back therefore I look like a goofy 1990’s wannabe.
  • My sophisticated word humor including puns, spoonerisms and general vocabulary confuse them [“his lips are moving, I hear sounds, but I don’t know what he’s saying.” or, “Stewardess, I speak Jive.”]

In short I’m a relic at 27.5 years of age. I’m considering taking up cave dwelling and combing over my hair like my ancestors before me**

**not really, I’ve got a mortgage and my hair will never be combed over unless I’m incapacitated and the nurses are cruel to me.