These cheese curls are more like cheese straights.

Over the years I’ve heard people use made-up words that I like (either because they’re funny or useful) so I decided to collect them here for everyone’s enjoyment.  I didn’t invent these myself except as noted.

Ruint : I wrote a post about this one!

Gravitoward : a shorter version of “gravitate toward”

Turtling : This is what kids do when you are in a hurry and trying to get out of the house but they won’t get moving.  (I invented this one).

See also, Words I like and hate

Is it just me or has the world become noisier?
It seems that as soon as I go out my door, I am bombarded with useless, incessant noise.  It even comes out of the sky.
Earlier, I went to get the mail and a big noisy rattling pickup truck pulled out from a nearby side road and roared by.  No matter where I go, there are loud cars and trucks and motorcycles.. everywhere.
I always remember hearing that sort of thing occasionally, but I don’t remember it being constant.
Are the vehicles falling into disrepair, or are there so many more people around that even a small percentage of the ones who want to intrude on others’ right to quiet enjoyment now amounts to so many people that you can’t get away from them, even in the middle of the night?  wtf?

[Later]

Sometimes I get curious about the weirdest things.  Earlier, I was wondering if I’m the only one who cooks with a blowtorch.  I don’t really *cook* with it, but when I make chicken wings, I always burn off those little hairs with a blowtorch.  I hate those.

After I put the wings to soak in hot sauce, I started wondering if any of the wings in that big pack were from the same chicken.  Or are they all from random chickens?

Someone told me today that I “have an uncluttered soul.”  I’ve never heard anyone say something like that and it made me happy.

These are good stuffed grape leaves: Aris Dolma Yalandji.

They sell them for $2/lb. at the Shillington Farmers Market.  The people who sell them to me see me coming and ask if I need any “cigars”!

Didn’t get in to the banished words list, so here’s another nomination.

Word to banish:

“us to get pregnant”

Reason:

Oh, if it were only possible for couples who were wishing for “us to get pregnant” to both get pregnant.

I’ve been wanting to complain about an html macintrash bug, as seen in this spam subject:
Stop Your Dog’s Annoying Barking
The apostrophe (‘) shows up as a with a ^, a Euro sign, and a TM superscript.

I see this all the time, and always know it was written on a mac.

What’s a Dogâss Annoying Barking?

Here’s another as a screen shot… done on a mac lol:

I was at the mall earlier, and saw a guy using a pushbroom, sweeping up pennies and algae into a pile where the water in the fountain used to be. I’d venture a guess that’s not within spec on the coin counting machine, but it was funny!

Also, some funny things my kids have said:

Jeremy didn’t want an alarm clock: “Alarm clocks distort me”

He used to refer to gibbous and full moons as a Loud Moon.

I fail to understand how “pop culture” writers can use the word “inimitable” (is this a contraction for in (un?) imitatable (sic) without the apostrophic contraction), a word that someone even as literate as me has to contextually bluff that I know it and hope for the best, and at the same time pervert the language to say “an historical” because people are too lazy-talking to put the accent on the hard ‘h’.

Getting that into the MoS, imho, is a political feat akin to a unanimous worldwide adoption of the Kyoto Convention. I wonder who {verb1, verb2, verb3, …} someone or who knew who to pull that off.

“An historical…” is an abomination to humankind. “An honor” and “a historical record” are different. More dumbing down of the language, like the lately-accepted interchangeability of the very different terms “I’m anxious to…” and “I’m… eager to…”! I don’t know where that manual that everyone is forced to use is printed, but I would venture a guess left coast, and it was an intentional attack on extraordinarily literate 80s graduates, just like the deletion of the last comma in a comma-delimited list (which, I’ve been told is called an “Oxford comma”). Every time I see that, it annoys me, 10 years in, 50 more to go. I’d like to recast the sentences that comprise their job descriptions.

I got three hours sleep today.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had to appear for the dreaded drivers license renewal at the PA “Motor Vehicle Services Center”, which is closed Mondays and closes every day at 4:15pm. Isn’t that convenient for people that work.

The four highlights of my experience were:

• arriving and voicing my irritation for the line of people that extended from the service desk inside, through the available space inside, out the door, and down the sidewalk and past the Mail Room (an authorized UPS shipping facility with a superhot customer service girl with the strangest name I’ve ever known) and saying out loud to the amusement of the other agitated customers, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
• watching the motion-detected electric door opening and closing two thousand times as the line proceeded inside to be serviced by a single, unexpectedly pleasant individual handling service requests and giving out thin paper tickets sequentializing those seeking mugshots.
• walking around, wishing I wasn’t there and having a random guy pass, take a look at my awesome Killola ‘shattered’ shirt and saying “NICE SHIRT!”
• listening to another customer talking to his family and relating to his complaint of it taking too long and that PA is the worst state in the nation for service at the DMV.

I was not amused with my half hour wasted, but he was a commercial licensee and needed to recertify.  They drove 45 minutes and had been waiting for six hours.  Mark my words:  One day, someone will go DMV and replace an expression.

The anti-highlights were the two hundred people there who did not speak a word of English, one of them with a cute little baby girl who desperately needed not only a diaper change, but a parent change. Isn’t the definition of ultimate failure as a parent, to impose upon the most important thing to ever exist in your life, such a disadvantage as not speaking the predominant language of the country in which you live?

I’ve been talking to a Blondie fan in Brazil who learned English because of Blondie, so she could meet other fans and communicate and have more personal choices.  She’s more literate in English than most of the people I’ve encountered in waiting rooms in the last three years.  Now there’s someone I respect.  No wonder the economy is in the toilet.

Back to today:

At the traffic light in Kenhorst, I finally parted company with a 40-in-a-45-zone driver clogging a train of cars.
Entering the left turn lane and looking through aligned windows, I had the privilege of discovering the source of the impaired driving:
She had a cigarette in her left hand, and was texting with her right hand on a cell phone held midway between eyes and windshield.
Left palm on the wheel, right hand on the keyboard, no eyes on the road.  WTF?  Prison is my recommendation.
And prison for everyone who thinks that’s not more impaired than a .07 BAC, which is now just shy of a felony.  The only reason it isn’t is it generates more cash per year than could be stuffed into the volume of my house.

My skin is disintegrating from my infection of no-longer-dormant chicken pox virus that I had 39 or 40 years ago.  eeeek!

10/3/10 around 3:30am

I am 99% sure that hearing intense electrical buzzing noises and seeing flashes of brilliant white light emanating from my microwave a few minutes ago means I’m probably going shopping for a new one later today, first thing after coffee.  Ruint.  At least there wasn’t an explosion like last time.

“someone on facebook is looking for you”.   Wouldn’t they just send me a friend request?

“blk claim your pack of cigarettes”.   I think anyone would know just by googling my name that I don’t smoke.

Late last night, I emailed Helen something funny about how much I hate birds. She thought it was funny, and this got me to wondering whether there was a facebook group for people who hate birds, and sure enough, there was. “I Hate Birds” has 3,948 members. I joined and posted part of my email to her, here for your amusement and/or horror (you have been warned):

just a little while ago, the moon set. it’s still nice out, though much cooler than earlier. and guess what. there’s a fucking bird tweeting. not just once in a while…. like crazy, and on and on and on. like the ten millions others do at sunup, but here we have one that is different.

I asked myself just one question, and it’s the same question I ask of myself: in the grand scheme of evolution and influence on the world, how will this individual do — success or failure? be interesting to know. I only knew one other bird, that I can recall, that tweeted at night. It was in 1991 at my dad’s when April was there. we had a couple of drinks and just laughed and laughed and laughed…. eventually I was like, “I hate birds. I’m going to go shut it up. do you want to come along?” (she did), so we went outside, snuck around to try to get close, and blasted a gun near it (which I had conveniently remember to bring along). It shut up. 5 minutes later when we got back in the house, it started up again! You might imagine the uproarious laughter we extracted from that experience!

Now bringing this story up to the present (yesterday):

Today not long after i got up, before coffee, i heard really loud tweeting….now remember, I hate birds with a passion except if they’re cooked and served on my dinner plate (or flying around in the air near me, shotgun in hand, on their way there). I’m one who will let the windows open at night and who detests the morning, but will get up just to shut the windows so I don’t have to listen to those fuckers tweeting, squawking, chirping, squeaking, screaming, twittering, or making any other heretofore unmentioned useless obnoxious noises, except possibly the screeching of an owl in the night and the quiet clucking of a chicken living in oblivion.

So I’m hearing this tweeting, looking for an open window to close, but all the windows were shut because it was so hot today… perhaps you’ve heard scientists describe the planet Venus in the daytime. it was like that only different. I traced it down not to a window, but to the garage door… I threw the door open to surprise it, and sure enough, a bird flew out of the open garage door. As I was looking in the area it flew from, searching for a nest, another flew out — right out of my tool box! those little fuckers had built a nest in a cardboard box in the top of my tool box. there were no eggs in it so I dumped it outside and picked up all the little pieces of grass and then put a grinder in the box… which was labeled “Angle Grinder”, not “Bird Nest”!

the bastards can’t read anything for shit, but they sure do shit on anything they can’t read.
which is *everything*.

A bird is just a digestive tract with a mouth at one end and a perpetually open asshole at the other where black, white, and purple shit constantly emanates because nature forgot to design them a sphincter!

I can’t believe I just typed that out loud but I *really* hate those disgusting little fuckers.

Do you?  You can join my own I Hate Birds facebook page.  The other eventually went away after attaining 6000 likes.

I like the 22nd of months. Maybe I’ll explain sometime.

Completely unrelated:
Today I was thinking that I know very few people nearby (there are a few proportionately speaking) who I think are genuinely good people (all you have to do is drive anywhere to know what I mean), but realize that I know so many genuinely good people if I look at everyone I know online and include those who aren’t nearby geographically. I don’t know that I could count them all. This got me to thinking: do people who are genuinely good to others have more of an impact on the world (more accurately: on the people living in the world) than those others who are “average” or not genuinely good. I think this is true. I don’t quite know how to express this idea, but here’s an example:

Five years ago, I ordered a really tasty Hungarian Goulash (Gulaschsuppe) at a local German restaurant, and being a cook, wanted to develop my own recipe. My process is to do a lot of internet research and then iterate with revisions until successful. I am at the point now where I can think in my head how a recipe will taste just by reading it, and I invariably know if it would be good and how it would need to be changed to make my zero-calorie imaginary culinary delight into its real-world reciprocal. One of the things I did to develop this one was read voluminous material on recipe sites (allrecipes etc.) and I found someone who seemed to have just the right background, so I scrounged around until I tracked down an email; I wrote her, and she wrote me back, contributing her personal recipe, experience, and insights, uncompensated, just because she agrees with me that recipes are guidelines and she’s a genuinely nice person sharing a common passion.

Last week, just after Debbie did the rainforest benefit, I was looking for something specific in my old emails, and of all the things, I found her email from four years ago, so I wrote back with the link to return her favor with my own version of the recipe I developed (which is one of my best, at least in the “easy” category). Such a delight to discover this morning through her reply that her email was still valid.

It really put me in a good mood, and I try to return favors and give back to anyone and everyone who gives something of themselves, something that makes a difference in the quality of life of someone else. Do you know anyone who just radiates? I do, and I gravitoward them.

Also on unrelated tangents:

I liked Google’s playable pac-man logo today, but I had to keep closing it because the cpu fan on my lapdance, er i mean laptop lol, ran constantly at cruising speed. (My car has six speeds, but the laptop only has four: Off, Turtling, Cruising Speed, and Jet Engine).

I made shawarma today, but had to mix up a new batch of Baharat (the spice that’s the primary flavor in it). The big batch I mixed on 12/2/07 got used up. I haven’t cooked it yet. It’s one of my very best recipes… if I ever get an opportunity to cook for Debbie, it might be this one.

I like snakes (and reptiles in general) and was trying to figure out why some people don’t like or are even afraid of them…
Snakes are just flexible tubes covered in hard little plastic scales (like glitter), and upside: you can even order them in different colors and sizes!

At least once a day I get the stupidest spam emails perhaps ever. The subject line is “Please update your firewall” (the capitalization varies).

What this makes me wonder about is whether there really is someone, somewhere, who would act on an unsolicited commercial email asking you to install any software, let alone a firewall. Could someone look at this and actually believe that their firewall (assuming they even use one) needs updated, and go to this site and download (or purchase?) and update and execute it?

The only thing I can think of is comedian Ron White’s You Can’t Fix Stupid.

(see also, another article I will write in the future about stupidest and funniest spams).

I really like libraries. In Mechanicsburg, where I grew up, we had a great library that was supported by a library tax that was overwhelmingly approved by the voters. I always voted yes on those.

I still live in a county that has a great library system. Where else could you go to a place that’s exactly like one of those big bookstores with a music and movies section, choose all the things you want to purchase, and go up the checkout counter and have someone ring you up, say “That will be zero dollars, sir. Come back anytime” and then you get to take your three DVD movies, six music CDs, and a shopping cart full of books home for free.

Now maybe this next idea belongs in the halfbakery, but the one thing for me that could improve a library is if it would be noisy some of the time. I’ve noticed that for some reason, all the places people go that have books are quiet and all the places that have drinks are noisy. What if someone were to open a library with a full bar? Nuclear explosion maybe? I’m fairly sure that in Pennsylvania, you need a trillion dollars to get a liquor license, so if that’s out, how about a library where people who read something they like are encouraged to read it aloud or to start impromptu discussion groups so other patrons can listen in, discover new and exciting literature, and meet people just like library day at Monroe Elementary!

I owe my dear friend April “Apes” Kincaid a debt of gratitude for teaching me that great word. I don’t really know how to define it, but I can describe it by example and I know when something is ruint. It doesn’t mean ruined or match any of the urban dictionary definitions. Try this example that just happened and made me want to write about it:

So I have this “sort of” friend who calls from time to time, but she really just wants to pump me for information about life updates and gossip about people we know in common…. she doesn’t actually want to talk to me, and we don’t have much in common, and she is always elusive, doesn’t ever tell the truth (then wonders why I don’t believe a word she says), never answers a question straight up (changes the subject or talks about something unrelated).  ‘She doesn’t take calls / she only makes calls’ [Killola reference], and she only calls me while driving (probably when no one else answered and I’m the last resort) then brags about some dickhead guy she hangs out with and…. never mind. I want to hear about that about as much as I enjoyed listening to everyone throwing up on South Park last night. Then, when I didn’t answer, she left a voicemail that was just four seconds of that farting noise that kids make. What did *I* do?!

Ruint!

One definition I wrote that’s close but not quite on is this:

“Ruint” (adj.) pathetic and without foundation; irrelevant; consisting only of meaningless diversion or distraction.

That definition came to me after reading a somewhat nonsensical article on Yahoo news about scientists who allegedly cooled atoms below absolute zero (?).

Like most of their articles, stupid people who can’t spell wrote completely worthless comments, references to politics, Obama, whose fault it is, that sort of thing.  Ruint!

I wrote in a reply to one of those comments:
Are you right?  Who knows.  But I thought this was supposed to be a science article.  It’s definitely not a politics article.  Right or wrong, these comments are off-topic and stupid.  No wonder everyone who wants news and can spell is looking for a better source.
I propose the introduction of a new word into English for your comment:
“Ruint” (adj.): pathetic and without foundation; irrelevant; consisting only of meaningless diversion or distraction.

It’s different than “annoying”, which would be like how I was just now making a drink and putting ice into my glass from a container, carefully avoiding a small bug that had flown in there, but observing when my was glass was full of ice, the bug was unaccounted for. [No, I didn’t just drink it you fools! I threw it all out and got new ice after washing everything!]

A person can’t feel “ruint”.  In fact, usually “ruint” applies only to situations and actions that people do, rather than the people themselves (like in the above example).  Here’s another really good example:

An ice storm froze my car window and caused it to detach from the regulator and fall down inside the door (letting a lot of rain in as well).  On Jan. 7, 2014, on the coldest day of the past year, I spent many hours cleaning the garage to get the car in, and worked off and on for the next two days tearing the door apart to fix this.  The procedure is very involved: I had to follow 23 steps to remove the door panel and more than 50 steps in this great online tutorial for fixing the window problem.  Although I got it fixed, just as I was finishing up, of course I had to get injured.  I cut my hand down near the wrist… out of all that, when I was cleaning the window.  Ruint!  Hit some stupid sharp edge doing the most mundane step in the entire procedure.

Now you know what Ruint means.

And that I like South Park. Don’t miss Grey Dawn (old people driving! eeeek!), Cat Orgy, Scott Tenorman Must Die, Gnomes (underpants gnomes!), Cow Days (“I Declare Shenanigans”).

Although I’m very allergic to cats, I have two: Belly Rub and Velcro. A few months ago, I discovered that Velcro insanely loves sauerkraut. He never gets on the table, but he climbed over me to get to it. I never heard of such a thing. I gave him some and he ate it all.

Velcro got his name because when he was a kitten, he always had the claws out which fastened him to the carpet. When you’d pick him up and pull him loose, it made that same sound as velcro does when you pull it apart. This would happen repeatedly if you’d put him down and pull him back up again… one day I was demonstrating and said “Look, he’s just like velcro” while I was sticking him to the carpet and pulling him back up five or six times in a row, giggling.

I think Belly Rub has itchy skin because I just saw him rolling around on the concrete patio to scratch his back, and when I scratch his back, he licks my arm. Continuously. It’s very funny (and scratchy!) and I need to get a video of it. Belly Rub is fully recovered now from his horrible ordeal last July, my pretty baby lovecat.