Textbooks
People were asked by The Week Magazine to come up with a likely chapter title in a history book approved by the Texas Board of Education. FIRST PLACE: Abraham Lincoln: Kentuckian or Kenyan? SECOND PLACE: The War on Indian Aggression THIRD PLACE: Mission Accomplished: The Alamo HONORABLE MENTION: The Texas Contribution to the Revolutionary War [...]
More Vocabuphilia
Caroma (n): The interior smell of a new automobile, which tends to fade rather quickly, but which can elicit a host of memories Fritterati (n): A word used to describe the nouveau-rich who just fritter away money on more and more flashy things to impress their peers Mallzheimer’s Syndrome (n): The inability of a shopper [...]
News of the Not Necessarily Normal
An unnamed Danish man traveled to Vienna, Austria, for a trial on his lawsuit against the man who had sold him a defective cockatoo for the equivalent of about $15,000. In a demonstration in the hallway outside the courtroom, the bird flew “lopsided”, with the probable cause (according to the purchaser) of chronic gout. (Honorable [...]
AN ONGOING CASE OF VOCABUPHILIA
1. PEDESTRACEBO (n): A button, placed at a crosswalk, that a pedestrian is instructed to push to make a signal change, but that in fact, does absolutely nothing. It does, however, give the pedestrian some modicum of hope. 2. GARAGE MAHAL (n): An oversized house, with the primary distinguishing characteristic being an oversized three-or-four-car garage [...]
The Prophet Motive
In the deep, dark recesses of time before history was invented, mankind as a whole was unbelievably ignorant. It wasn’t their fault, of course – the larger brain pan hadn’t evolved just yet. The would-be tribal elders were too busy improving the odds of basic survival beyond the ripe-old age of 23. This period of [...]
The Red Planet – On Final Approach
My apologies for forwarding without checking the facts. I finally remembered this piece from 2003: After a late-evening theater performance, Fred and Norma and I (with a collective IQ of at least 300) were standing in the alfalfa field admiring the glorious appearance of Mars in the southeastern sky. We were awed by the splendor [...]