For those who can’t wait for 2014 to be behind you: I wouldn’t trust 2014 while it’s still breathing, and maybe not even after 2015 has driven a stake through its heart. You’ll have to keep looking over your shoulder for a while yet for Zombie 2014 shambling along, parts gradually falling off.
Takeout
I now want to write a Liam Neeson thriller called TAKEOUT.
Bryan: I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. You haven’t placed your order yet. If you are looking for haute cuisine, I can tell you I don’t have it. But what I do have are a very particular set of containers, containers I have acquired over a very long career. Containers that will get food safely to people like you. If you place your order now, that’ll be the end of it until you hear the knock on your door. The delivery boy will look for you, he will find you, and he will expect a reasonable tip.
Zen GPS
I want to invent a Zen GPS unit. Periodically it would say things like “The road you are on does not take you to where you need to go.”
Pizza delivery – before, during, and after the game
I heard an ad on the radio for a local pizza place. They advertised delivery “before, during, and after the game!”
Then I started to worry. “But what if there’s no game on? WHAT THEN?!?” – until I realized that they didn’t say how LONG after the game they stopped delivery.
After all, it’s ALWAYS either before or after SOME game or another. Right now, it’s 17 1/2 hours before the SU basketball game on Sunday.
And they didn’t specify WHAT game. “Hey, I was just about to start a new game of chess by mail! I WANT MY PIZZA DELIVERED!
The nature of fairy tales
Fairy tales are “… a counter-history, a ceaselessly whispered assertion of truths that cannot be reached by the straight and narrow road of realism. You can travel that road as long as you like, and certainly the sights to be seen along it are splendid. But it cannot take you where it does not go.”
~ Laura Miller, “Jean Thompson’s ‘The Witch: And Other Tales Re-told’ “, New York Times Book Review, October 24, 2014
You’re doomed, plants
I talk to my plants.
Mostly, I just sigh, and tell them, “You know, you’re gonna die.”
A few things to do on Christmas Eve
It’s Christmas Eve, and I haven’t baked any cookies yet to leave by the fireplace!
Also, I must build a fireplace.
(Doesn’t matter what you call them. They won’t come when they’re called, anyway.)
Note to people on TV and radio: if you’re talking about a bunch of hidden weapons, cache is pronounced “cash,” not cachet (\ka-ˈshā).
Birth of the Ermine Avenger
Forecast is for possible thunder on Christmas Eve. Donner and Blitzen may be dodging actual thunder and lightning.
Me being me, I am now thinking about a story about what would happen if Santa’s sleigh got hit by lightning.
Maybe a new superhero would be created. BIRTH OF THE ERMINE AVENGER. Or maybe the result would be a Santa hybrid: half-man, half ermine.
At least being a superhero would give Santa something to do the other 364 days of the year.
This probably means another year with coal in my stocking, doesn’t it, Santa?
And I was so close. 363 days of being good, down the tubes.
Better than some humans, I’d wager
I just heard tell of a town considering a local law governing the behavior of farm animals. Absent pesky inconvenient things like the actual substance of the law, I am free to imagine what they might be concerned about.
Are they going to institute a dress code? Have they finally gotten fed up with Donald Duck not wearing pants? Are they going to outlaw playing leapfrog with a unicorn? I mean, that’s a good idea, but I’m not sure it needs to be a law.