Molotov Cartail

Back in the 1980s, there were a couple book collections of Sniglets (a “sniglet” being “any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should”).  Looks like you can still buy the books and such from Amazon.

Several favorite sniglets remain in my personal vocabulary more than 25 years later, including “Alfred Hitchcooking” (repeatedly stabbing a block of frozen vegetables to make it cook faster), “arping” (moving your head in circles trying to read the label of a playing record), “Adam69” (two police cars facing opposite directions, exchanging information), and “Essoasso” (the person who cuts through a gas station in order to bypass a stoplight — guilty!).  I still have the original books somewhere, I think.

(Hmm, with the rise of cook-in-the-bag veggies, the demise of vinyl records, the old Adam-12 TV show being long out of circulation, and Esso being absorbed into ExxonMobil, those terms become way more obscure and less valuable as time goes by.)

Here are a couple web pages with lists of sniglets: one with many of the classics and one with new ones.

When I was in Las Vegas in August, though, I had dinner at the Palace Station casino and I parked next to this car.  I never thought I would see a “Molotov cartail” in the wild.  (That’s a car with a rag used in place of a missing gas cap, of course.)
 

Jesus Probably Rode Dinosaurs!

Kudos to artist Derek Chatwood for this illustration.

I had it as the lock screen art on my iPhone for about a year, but only just found out the proper origin.  (Dang, I had thought it was real.)
 

Counting Sheep

Around five years ago, as I approached 40, I started having an increased problem with falling asleep.  Not quite insomnia, I think, but I would sometimes lie there on the edge of sleep for quite a while (often 20–30 minutes, occasionally an hour or more, and a few times, genuine “I’m not going to sleep, am I?” insomnia).

I assume that this was primarily biological, part of the aging process, but I was having some issues with my relationship at the time — which ended in late 2007 — which sometimes kept my mind whirling.  I’ve also recently seen some news stories that the glow from electronics can have a sleep effect, and around that time, I was trying to find a clock radio to replace one that had died; I went through three before I found one that didn’t keep me away from the glow, so that may have had an effect as well.  Hmm, I was also in the middle of an unhappy period at work then.  Man, it all piles up, doesn’t it?

Anyway…

Trying to find something that would help (other than drinking myself to sleep), I resorted to counting sheep, something which I had also pooh-poohed before.  But when you’re desperate, you’ll try anything.  So I imagined up a setting with a pasture and a fence for the sheep to jump over, but something very cartoony and almost a stage setting with cutouts of trees and clouds, a lot like one of those late 50s/early 60s Bugs Bunny cartoons.  (Wish I could find a pic.)

Out trotted the first sheep — white and puffy, very cartoony, little blinky eyes.  He trotted over to the fence, jumped it, and trotted off stage.

The next sheep trotted on, jumped, trotted off.

The next one trotted on, jumped, didn’t quite clear the fence, scrambled over, and trotted off.

This continued on for several more sheep, each having progressively more difficulty getting over the fence.  Some tripping over it, some squeezing between the bars, etc.  Still not sleeping, I rolled over, from my right shoulder to my left.

Suddenly the stage flipped 90 degrees in my head!  The next sheep plummeted from the right side, smashed into the fence, and bounced over and fell off to the left side of the stage!  And another and another followed it!

Fuck.  I think I got up and had some cocoa with peppermint schnapps in it at that point.

These days, no cartoon sheep die to put me to sleep.  Instead, I start at 100 and count my breaths backward to 1.  Usually somewhere in the 80s, I’m off.  Sometimes I come back to awareness that I’ve stopped counting and I pick up again where I think I left off.  If I make it to 1, I roll over and start back at 100; if I make it to 1 a second time, I give up, get up, and do something else to shut my brain down.
 

The 2004 Presidential Election (joke)

Dr. Seuss wrote a children’s book about the 2004 Presidential Election:

One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State

Winnie the Pooh (joke)

You heard that Winne the Pooh came out of the closet?

He’s a silly willy nelly little bear.

Original to me, circa 2002
 

Sondheim and King (joke)

You heard about Stephen Sondheim doing the music for the new Stephen King Broadway musical?

It’s called Misery Loves Company.

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Original to me, circa 2002
 

Mutant Trivial Pursuit

No, this has nothing to do with X2: X-Men United.

Back in my college days (1984-1990, including grad school), Trivial Pursuit was in high flower.  The original Genus Edition had been out for a while and we were just starting to see all the various sub-editions (Silver Screen, etc.), plus all the card sets put out by other companies which could be used with the game (I remember a religious one, and I know there were others).

My college crew had been playing Trivial Pursuit for a few years, and by then, most of us had gone through the entire original card set: mostly legally, although some people had just sat down to read every question/answer pair in the set.  So the game itself was getting a little boring.  Until we came up with our own spin on the game: Mutant Trivial Pursuit!

Here are the rules:

• Everyone takes a stack of cards (50 or 100, maybe; it doesn’t really matter).
• Choose one person to be the first reader.
• The reader chooses a question from his or her top card and reads it aloud.
• Everyone else chooses the “best” (funniest, usually) answer from their top card.
• The reader (or group consensus) chooses the “winner” from the answers provided, and that person becomes the next reader.

A guideline for choosing what question to use:

• Avoid questions whose correct answer is a number; many cards will have no adequate answer.

Some guidelines for choosing what answer to use:

• A truly correct answer (it happens) always wins.
• Answers involving dead presidents or sex are good choices.
• Answers which are numbers don’t usually work.

Some of our best mutant question/answer pairs:

• What do you throw into a boxing ring to stop the fight?
  — John F. Kennedy.  (Guaranteed to work, no?)
• What is receding from the Earth at a foot per year?
  — A brassiere.
• What is the symbol for the zodiac sign Gemini?
  — Testicles.  (Twins, eh?)

(You can also reverse the game, of course, and read an answer, with the other players offering the best question.  That’s Mutant Jeopardy!, though.)

Note that there is no score kept and no overall winner (although you certainly could score based on how many rounds each person won).  The point is to have an hour or so of offbeat hilarity.
 

Jenna, Barbara, and George

A few months ago, someone sent me a link to a page with a host of Photoshop touch-ups, attaching Bush’s face to supermodel bodies.  Funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time, even better than Bill and Al as gym studs or Hillary as a dominatrix.  At one time, they apparently came from DeGrave.com (dead link), and then from GeorgeWGirls.com (no longer hosts the images), but as you see if you visit those sites, not any more.  A web search on “WGirls” yields a bunch of sites, but most of them seem to be defunct.  (Do you suppose someone wasn’t too happy about the parody, hmm?)  I finally found a link (nope, that one’s dead, too), although who knows how long it will remain viable.  (If that link goes dead, let me know and I’ll try to find a new one.  This is the web we’re talking about; trying to kill things like this off can’t be done.)

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Updated on June 29, 2010

Here’s the latest viable link.  Seven years later, these images still tickle.  Great Photoshopping work.