my hovercraft is full of eels

That Monty Python sketch where the Hungarian traveler has been given an English phrasebook that has wildly inappropriate translations of things a tourist might want to say. It gets him in terrible trouble and he’s finally dragged away by the authorities, protesting loudly: “My nipples explode with delight!” So I was thinking maybe he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Maybe what comes out of his mouth is not what he wants you to hear. Maybe, I thought, he’s not really a jerk, just misunderstood. But then I thought to myself, I’d probably be a jerk too if nobody liked me.

Save The Date

An asteroid with the catchy name 2024 YR has something like a four percent chance of hitting the Moon on December 22, 2032, at about 3:19 in the afternoon UTC. That’s odds of 1 in 25. For the Powerball jackpot, odds are 1 in 292,200,000. So the smart money’s on the space rock. I’m adding 2024 YR to my list of stuff to not worry about, along with GMOs in my pancakes and microplastics. Especially microplastics. Anybody who’s ever been hit in the face with a Frisbee will tell you that macroplastics are what you have to watch out for.

Warsaw shine

It doesn’t seem right that orb and zest are actual words while vun and thort are not. Especially since we could use some new words; so many of our existing ones have to serve more than one meaning. Like the ribbon on the front of a ship (bow bow), tedious drilling (boring boring), or a wrapped laceration (wound wound). I’ve asked around and there doesn’t seem to be anyone with the authority to supervise this sort of thing. Somebody should do something. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up living in a world where we understand one another very poorly.

To Summarize

So far I’ve been a pretty good guy, not necessarily a great guy. I’ve done some rotten things. I feel bad enough to make a little grunt if I happen to think about them. Which I try not to do. Then I recall doing some profoundly dopey and embarrassing things which I feel less bad about, because at least I wasn’t being a jerk, just a dope. Okay. But really what I want to emphasize is that however many regrettable things I may have done in the past I never bought one of those J. Peterman dusters. So there’s that.