~Wednesday~ Today’s buscapade: At one stop a young man—a student I’m guessing—got on the bus with a totally clear plastic backpack on. I never saw such a thing.
That phrase so reminds me of this infamous sign on I-95 running between North and South Carolina:
But I digress…
The clear backpack was tightly packed with stuff, and one ( read: I ) couldn’t help looking all up in there to see what he was carrying around. It reminded me of looking at toiletry bags through airport x-ray machines.
There was one thing in there that was long, white, cylindrical-shaped, and about 8.5 inches in length. And I mean regular inches, not Internet inches. In all honesty, I didn’t want to look long enough to spot an On-Off switch somewhere on it.
In lieu of reading Anna Karenina this morning, I listened to three podcasts while riding—three episodes of Grammar Girl:
- Troublesome Contractions (e.g., I’d’ve), which I loved, because I’ve used that contraction in my blog off and on, and whenever I do, I always wonder if it’s a “legitimate” contraction. Now I know.
- Using “For” to Mean “Because”
- Swear Words in Text
That last one on swear words was very, very, very interesting. It introduced the vocabulary word “grawlix” to me. In the graphic off to the right, #%@$ is a grawlix. That is one of several ways swear words are dealt with in text.
Two other techniques for representing swear words in text that this podcast noted were by “disemvoweling” words and using asterisks, as in, “Don’t fckng act like you don’t know what the h*** I’m talking about.”
One other thing that really tickled me about this episode was when Grammar Girl was talking about how people pronounce these modified swear words, saying, “Grawlixes are often read out loud as ‘bleep.’ For example, in 2004 there was a movie with a grawlix in the name and it became known as ‘What the [Bleep] Do We Know?'”
She went on to say, “I may be unusual, but I don’t read grawlixes as bleeps, I read them as funny words like ‘brickinbrackin.’ The cartoon character Yosemite Sam was the king of those kind of implied swear words. He was always saying things like ‘yassin sassin snazzum frazzum’ and ‘Come outta there, you blabber-spat-nazzed trap!'”
I called my doctor’s office today for the second missing item on the results of my recent labs for my physical. The results of my labs are always two pages long, and my doctor’s office, for whatever reason, consistently only scans the first page into a PDF and emails it to me. On the second page are the results of my HIV test, as well as the results of my PSA test.
I’d already sent an email to them asking for the results of my HIV test, and they had responded. But shortly after that I noticed that the PSA results also weren’t on the first page. Three days ago, I sent another email asking for the PSA results. Still no response as of today, so I called the office and asked them to mail me (in the U.S. mail) a copy of both pages of my results. Scatchin krazeldo frakenzidol grenchin! Fckng f***ers.
On the way to the afternoon bus, I picked up the new Independent Weekly, which comes out on Wednesdays. I always nab it for the crossword puzzle, and today I peeked at the classified ads on the back page to see if my favorite one was still being published. It was:
| VOODOO SPELLS by Papa George, specializing in uniting & reuniting lovers. Difference between psychic and Voodoo, psychic predicts, VOODOO gets results! We succeed where others fail. 800-958-6636 and 402-564-8380. |
I absolutely love the clarifying distinction between psychic and Voodoo—complete with the use of the uppercase V in Voodoo to give it that extra legitimacy as the preferred paranormal phenomenon. Yeah, don’t get sucked in by that psychic crap; Voodoo is where it’s at.
I took it easy dancing tonight, choosing dances deliberately, trying to give my knee a break from the ones that are hard on it.
We had a good number of dancers, including Carl, Bill, Geromy, Ernie, Wayne, Michael, Rob, and myself. It was Rick Enlow’s birthday and he made an appearance, but is not allowed to dance for medical reasons for several more months.