As you can see, the beverage holder in the Grand Caravan is entirely inadequate for its stated purpose. My Merlot glass keeps tipping over on the bumpy dirt roads here in rural NH.
I shall have to write a letter of complaint to the manufacturer.
Hillary says:
“The voices of the voters in Florida and Michigan should be heard. Their votes should count at the DNC, or we betray the principles of our party.”
Hillary means:
“They voted for me, and I’m trailing Barry, so I want those votes counted. Never mind the fact that the Florida and Michigan Democrats chose to disenfranchise themselves after repeatedly being warned of the consequences. And never mind the fact that if they had voted for Barry, I’d harp on party rules and principle, and fight tooth and nail to keep their delegates off the tally sheet at the DNC.”
Here’s one thing that will never fail to make me chuckle when I see an occurrence of it: the use of a Roman ordinal as part of a name.
This seems to be a uniquely American thing, and it’s (thankfully) not all that common, but who came up with that particular idea? Is there any way to put “John P. Smithers, III” on a business card and not look just a little pretentious?
I understand the motivation behind the use–it’s supposed to fill the same function as the regnal ordinal for distinguishing between two people of the same name–but the problem is that the rest of the world uses it exclusively in the kings-and-queens-and-Popes context, so it sounds a bit pompous when some lawyer family from Poughkeepsie adopts the practice. In addition, the monarchical ordinal is used because regnal names are usually first names only, and the limited supply of those made the use of distinguishing ordinal suffix a necessity after the second king with the same first name.
The lawyer family from Poughkeepsie, on the other hand, consists of individuals who not only use their last name, but usually receive a first and middle name at birth, which means that there’s no need for ordinals if you don’t give all your kids the same first and middle name.
Am I missing something here? Is there a good and pressing reason to employ that particular affectation other than ego or pretentiousness? I mean, if you name your kid after yourself and stick a regnal ordinal onto his name because you want to feel like you’re building a dynasty, it should be clear to you that your offspring has a 50% increased chance of getting teased by his shift mates at Burger King sixteen years down the road.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read all year:
Pulp Fiction, as Shakespeare would have penned it.
Excerpt:
J: Thou sayest thou dost hail from distant What?
I know but naught of thy fair country What.
What language speak they in the land of What?
B: What?
J: English, base knave, dost thou speak it?
Genius. Pure genius.
Update: Here’s the Wiki with the script to date.
This little guy found out the hard way that glass is more dense than air. When Robin got home yesterday, he zoomed past her and smacked head-first into the window by the door, stunning himself for a good fifteen minutes.
Robin put him onto the ledge by the door, and when she came back to check on him ten minutes later, she said, “I think he’s dead.” He was sitting there with his eyes all glassy, not moving so much as a feather.
And then, as if he had heard her, he spread his wings and took off for an uncoordinated, low-level flight around the front of the house. It sort of reminded me of the old guy in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, who protests his pickup by the corpse cart.
“I’m not dead! I feel fine! I want to go for a walk! I feel happy!”
Hillary Umbridge Clinton got stomped in NC, and barely scraped out another Pyrrhic victory in Hoosier Land. The nomination has moved almost entirely out of reach for her, so what does she do?
She donates another $6.4 million of her own money to the Clinton Campaign.
The lust for power is strong in this one. Six point four million bucks, for a new set of lances to keep charging at windmills. And she has the balls to call other people “elitist”?
How many school lunches could you have bought with that? How many midnight basketball programs, soup kitchens, and college scholarships could you have financed? How many health care premiums, food vouchers, or heating bills could you have paid for the poor, downtrodden folk you’re trying to bribe into voting for you?
I don’t begrudge anyone their fortune, and I don’t claim the right to tell anyone where, when, and how to spend their own money, but damn. If your platform involves harping on the selfishness of the wealthy, and threatening the extortion of money from my pocket to pay for the ailments of the less fortunate, you had better lead the way by example.
Any of you folks in the Greater BoSox Allegiance Zone interested in a meet-’n-feed at Casa Munchkin Wrangler some time in the next few weeks?
It just dawned on me that we’ve been in the new house for close to six months now, and I haven’t met any local bloggers and Intarwebz pals yet. Now that the snow is gone, and the temperatures are climbing, we can actually hang out on the back patio and throw some dead critter onto the grill, shoot some guns, and do some of that socializing that everyone keeps raving about.
We’re in the Upper Valley, west-central NH, right by Lebanon and Hanover…an easy shot up (or down) I-89 or I-91. Chime in if you’re interested and willing to make the drive. It’s about an hour from the MA border if you come up I-91 through VT, and little more if you come up via I-93/89 through Manchester and Concord.
Bring the kids if you have ‘em, and absolutely bring whatever guns you want to shoot/show off.
What say you?
Via Atomic Nerds, we learn of the scientifically illiterate crowd concerned citizens filing suit against CERN because they’re afraid the impending test of the Large Hadron Collider will create a Black Hole that will destroy the planet, or cause some other similarly unpleasant event.
I love the snark in the CERN spokesman’s comment on the lawsuit, where he points out that the nature of quantum physics means there’s some probability of almost anything happening, including the chance that the LHC “might make dragons that will eat us up.”
Personally, I think the chance of creating dragons is a compelling argument for the activation of the LHC, because that would be totally awesome.
In related news, I am striving to replace certain expletives in my vocabulary with new, less blasphemous variants. I’ve grown particularly fond of “Reason H. Science!”, and “Oh, for Sagan’s sake!”, but I’m always shopping for new ideas, so if you have any scientifically-themed alternate expletives, feel free to submit them.
Some commando squirrel raided the bird feeder last night, skillfully chomping through the string to make the whole thing crash to the ground and dispense its contents.
Should have added “BIRDS ONLY” to that “FREE BIRD SEED” sign. Damn unintentional loopholes.
Can you believe I lived in Europe for the first twenty-four years of my life, and never once took the opportunity to go and see the Sistine Chapel?
If I was asked to compile a list of humanity’s greatest artistic achievements, this one would be right near the top of it. Four of the top ten slots on that list would list works by two Italian Renaissance artists, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. In no particular order, they’d be the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Pietà , the Last Supper, and the Mona Lisa.
The nice thing is that when I do go to Rome and Paris again to see those works in person for the first time, I’ll have Quinn and Lyra with me, and they’ll get to see them, too.
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