A puzzler, Sho Nuff, me Googled, and picking up Joe…

~Monday~ A recent Car Talk puzzler: What’s so interesting about this sentence about the infamous lousy handwriting of doctors?

“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting, nevertheless extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability transcendentalizes intercommunications incomprehensibleness.”

The number of letters in each word is greater by one than the number of letters in the word that precedes it!


My friend @abbyladybug who gave me this shoutout on Twitter about my Friday blog entry:

 @nematome is such a thoro documentarian. His recounting of Friday is so detailed. Can’t believe he does this EVERY DAY! http://tr.im/q76M

later, in a Facebook status update, put me right back in my place:

 Running into Sho Nuff is always entertaining. I was at The Borough on Friday having dinner with my friends John, Hugh, and Ian (and later Emily) when he showed up. He was on fire that night! (John, I can’t believe you didn’t mention him!! )

You simply must detour over to Abby’s blog entry about SHO NUFF, and click on the audio bar above his pictures to hear his “Three Rules of Life,” which he shared with us after telling us he was 66 years old, single, and loving his life.


No buscapades today. I read on the way in to work, as well as on the way home from work. Book progress:

Anna Karenina, 817 pages, 463 (57%) read, 354 (43%) to read.


About a month ago now, I guess it was, I created a Google alert for my name. I’ve been getting the alerts long enough now to know these things:

  1. There is a John Martin who races cars in the UK.
  2. There is a John Martin who is a sports writer for the New York Times.
  3. There is a John Martin who is a county commissioner in Garfield County, Colorado, who feels strongly about retaining key county offices in downtown Glenwood Springs, Colorado. And, evidently, he still thinks the U.S. Department of Energy is forcing private firms to act as “guinea pigs” in the risky business of exposing workers to potential radiation poisoning, and refusing to compensate landowners for their inability to exploit their mineral rights for profit.
  4. There is a John Martin who is a cop in Keller, Texas.
  5. There is a John Martin whose son, Donovan David Charles Douglas Rankin, “was born asleep into the arms of his mother, Holly C. Rankin.”
  6. There is a John Martin’s Irish Pub in Coral Gables, Florida.
  7. This John Martin was murdered in New Bedford, Massachusetts, no less, which is about 20-30 miles from where I grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts.
  8. There is a “little” John Martin who just got his bangs trimmed.
  9. There is a John Martin Reservoir, which I already knew, because a girl I went to high school told me, after we reconnected after many years, that she drove by it every day for years going to work and she always thought of me when she passed it.

I picked up Joe at the airport at around 11:15, and we stopped at The Borough on the way home, which was not at all on the way home, but open, offered food that late, as well as a couple of cocktails.

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