What's Italian for lasagna?

Languages are created so that a relevant set of ideas can be exchanged, and so the Inuit have many words for snow but English has more words for angry. Math is the language of astrophysics. I don’t understand it but I read rough English translations. When I read,“The exact events leading up to the Big Bang are still not fully understood,” I got the giggles, because as I understand it, before the Big Bang there was no such thing as an event. So why a Big Bang? Because without it, there’d be nobody to ask questions pertaining to its occurrence.

Hell bent for leather

Lean and rangy, lanky, maybe somewhat gangly but certainly not in the least bit willowy, Tab Capslock let his gun hand drift toward the handgun on his gun belt and looked the stranger up and down. He had had just about enough of this crap. Tab Capslock was not one to suffer fools lightly. Suddenly, three things occurred simultaneously, or at least in such rapid succession that it was impossible for a human observer to determine the exact sequence of events. Careful review of high-speed camera footage would have helped, but that was not an option in Tulsa in 1908.

By way of introduction

Lean sun-bronzed Tab Capslock stepped from the cabin of his aluminum rocketship and surveyed the alien horizon with a grin that had little to no humor in it. It was in truth more a grimace or smirk that showed his white even teeth gleaming in the pitiless glare from the cloudless sky. It was definitely not a sneer, but neither was it a smile; he was not beaming. It was a crooked grin, possibly a sardonic crooked grin, although it lacked mockery or derision. It seemed to betoken a wild adventurous spirit tempered by an innate sense of fair play.

(Les Soliloques Decortiques)

There is a trombonist and composer named Vinko Globokar. One might think that a person of my maturity and discernment would have attained the stage wherein I had transcended the tendency to giggle at funny names. One would be utterly wrong. I find the name Vinko Globokar to be absolutely intoxicating. Plus, without his earworm of a name, I’d have never listened to his music, which it turns out I really like it. I’m drawn in by a names like Osvaldas Balakauskas while no doubt missing out on scads of great music from composers with unhilarious names like Ron Nelson.

This changes everything

It’s like that joke about the doctor calling with bad news, the one that ends with, “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” What it is is, I saw a headline that said: “The universe may end trillions of years sooner than we thought.” Seems the universe might only last another 33 billion years. I looked up the research that led to this conclusion; it was published in May of 2025. A year ago. Why was I not informed? I could have spent the last 12 months preparing, laying in canned goods and converting all my assets to gold. 

phoning it in

Many nouns can be verbed while some it seems cannot. You can salt your soup, comb your hair, brush your teeth, iron your shirt and then button it. Lace your boots. Buckle your belt. Hammer a nail, shovel the snow, water the garden. In fact, you can plow, hoe, rake, and seed it. On the way into the club you might get carded, later on in the parking lot you might get knifed. Seat yourself, chair the meeting, pen the notes. Oh. And paper the walls and carpet the floor. But nobody ever says they’re going to broom the porch.

roughly equivalent

The average service life of an automobile is 16.58 years, while globally the average human life span is 73.1 years. So, unless my math is majorly skew-whiff (my math is not in the least bit skew-whiff),  if you’re driving a 2016 vehicle, your ride is actually about 44 in car years. “Wait,” the attentive reader may be thinking, “Why is he calculating such an absurd and useless number and also using a wince-inducing Britishism like ‘skew-whiff?’ Can he be so desperate to reach 100 words or is there some obscure, hidden, and perhaps fascinating reason,” to which I reply