Day: January 18, 2012

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Well, It Ain’t Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder

In answer to Aggie’s “assignment” (which I found out about here), submitted late because the Damned Dog ate my homework:

“That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It”

I am an Olde Pharte, the embodiment of the stereotypical irascible curmudgeon with a heart of antimony. When I do have to interact with people, I enjoy most twisting their tiny little brains into knots and leaving them thinking we were having fun, when in fact I was having fun mocking them.

Almost no one catches wise.

And then…

It was a typical Thursday evening, and I was out, walking the Damned Dog. (I refuse to call my wife’s animated mop by the anthropomorphic name she gave it; as much as I despise people, it’s an insult to most of even the self-lobotomized among humanity to use a name one might in the phone book to describe this creature.) As usual, the Damned Dog was taking its damned time voiding its bladder and bowels—a necessity at night if I want to avoid stepping in “presents” deposited on my path to paying the mid-nightly water bill.

Well, it was a typical Thursday evening until, “Psst! Hey, mister! Can ya gimme a hand?” came at me in a whistling, oddly mechanical sotto voce from the shadows beside old lady McIntyre’s garage.

WTF? Whoever it was looked to be really short and sounded almost as though he were whispering through some sort of brass musical instrument. Well, even though I only had The Animated Mop as my great defender, I didn’t feel threatened by a midget whispering through a trumpet. If he (she-it?–couldn’t tell) had a whole brass band with him (she-it?), that could be a different situation, though. Oh, well, “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’m kinda stuck here.”

OK, button on my cap light. WTF?!? No, seriously, WTF?!?

Yeh, it was apparently an “it” and… and shiny, with what appeared to be tentacles. And its head? Stuck. In the hole it appeared to have poked through the side of the garage.

“How’d ya get stuck?”

“Ate too much, I guess.”

“Too much what?”

“Too much hydrocarbon.”

“What?”

“The vehicle inside this building was just full of bunches ‘n’ bunches of hydrocarbons, and I gorged on the stuff until I’m just too full to get out by the hole I came in by. Can ya gimme a hand?”

“What do I get out of it?”

“Interstellar goodwill?”

I considered the situation. I had a good knee brace on my right knee, and my left leg and hip hadn’t been acting up all that much recently, so I figured I could handle a little physical exercise.

“OK, hold still,” and I hauled off and booted the nasty lil bugger’s head into old lady McIntyre’s back yard. So maybe I didn’t consider what the lil critter had been eating and maybe its head did draw a spark off a trash can on its way to the back yard. These things happen. My eyebrows will probably grow back, old lady McIntyre’s insurance will replace her garage and car and the Damned Dog looks better with no fur.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it. Stop laughing at me, or I’ll hit you with my cane. (The knee brace wasn’t quite as good as I thought.)

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Sometimes Fast… Isn’t

Sometimes reading one to three lines of text at once (scanning and “absorbing” is how I tend to think of it) isn’t really as fast as it might seem. Recently, I had to back up and “re-read” (mentally review) “mixed martial artist” which I had “read” as “mixed martini artist”.

*heh*

How I scanned those two letters as “ni” instead of “al” I really don’t know. The occurrence gives me a little more reason to exercise patience with OCR software, though. In my case, though, I’m blaming coffee deprivation.

At times, though, it’s just not my fault that my reading simply MUSt slow down. *heh* Take for example the inexcusable,

“…those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them.”

Oh, heck, “those interactions” apparently even “surpass… the human brains [sic] ability” to write about them grammatically. *heh* If the author of that ungrammatical comment isn’t able to comprehend the possessive form “brain’s” (and whatever editor might have passed that abortion of English doesn’t even have brains enough to correct it), then I just have to slow down and gripe about the stupidity and poor ethics it reveals. “[P]oor ethics”? Yeh, the author of that comment accepted payment for furthering illiteracy. Evil troglodyte. *heh*

(Worse, the moronic thief–yes, “thief” for taking pay to utter crap–repeated nearly the same ingrammatical crap with, “The world’s complexity may simply outrun our brains [sic] capacity to understand it.” There, the proper formulation ought rightly to have been “brains'”.)

But, of course, this sort of stupidity is common among our “betters” who presume to be able to tell us how to think. To show I’m evenhanded, I’ll even class the WSJ’s James Taranto as among the stupid bright people. Take this Taranto’s piece of stupidity as an example:

“Understand, I don’t want the Obama’s [sic] $81 steaks.”

In an otherwise fairly on target piece about Dhimmicrappic hypocrisy, Taranto loses sight of how to create a possessive form of a plural. Since he was referring to the Obamas (The Zero and Moochelle), what any literate person would have written in his place would have been “Obamas'” with the apostrophe following the plural “s”. Some might have written “Obamas’s” although that formation is non-standard. As Taranto wrote it (and his lazy, subliterate editor(s) approved) he refers to ONE “Obama” (THE) and makes of the ONE “Obama” a possessive referencing the $81 steaks (big appetite for ONE Obama, but then we knew the Obamas have big appetites, for various things).

Gripes me off that people like that don’t have their pay docked for doing such things.