Journey to the Bottom of the Bowl

I feel compelled to answer another TITMT question from Janet: “What’s the strangest food(s) you’ve ever eaten?”

And by compelled I mean that I already had a partially-written post nearly on topic [which, coincidentally is also how I had all the Lily Tomlin stuff for the last one of these I did] and since I’m scratching around for posts anyway this is as good a time as any for this one, not that I want to ramble on or anything….

But first, here’s a quick story about something I did not eat. My first trip outside the U.S. was to Costa Rica [a beautiful and friendly country and I highly recommend you go there]. I know only a very little Spanish. [The basics, you know: Cerveza, Baño, ¿Tiene una hermana?] We relied on a phrase book and the English skills and good graces of our hosts to muddle our way through. One day we were sitting in a small restaurant and I was reading the menu posted on the wall. I saw the word “Perro” and thought, “I know that word! ‘Perro’ is ‘dog’. I have dos perro at home. Holy crap, do they really serve dog here?” Then I noticed that it was followed by another word that I recognized, “Caliente” — hot. Whew!

When I was a teenager, I could eat anything. And I pretty much ate everything. [This came back to bite me, so to speak, when my metabolism slowed down and my eating habits didn't....] After dinner, clearing the table usually meant that I would eat anything that was still left. I just got taller and stayed skinny as a rail. One night I was “clearing” the table, grazing. I don’t remember what the main course was that night. In fact I remember only two specific things that were on the table because I have been allowed to forget. We had salad and we had some kind of meat [which was all gone] with gravy. I picked at scraps of lettuce while clearing away the plates and at one point I grabbed a piece of lettuce and dipped it on the gravy and popped it on my mouth. To my teenage mind [to be honest, also to my now middle-aged mind, but that's not necessarily relevant] I figured it all goes to the same place anyway. I had just had a meal that included those two items, just not in immediate proximity to each other.

My father did not [does not] share my viewpoint. For years [decades!] afterward, whenever that topic of odd foods comes up — like my little hot dog story from Costa Rica or my taste for Asian foods or trying chocolate-covered insects or reindeer stew or whatever — he says, “Well anybody that would eat gravy on lettuce would ANYthing!” [But he eats scrapple and I won't.]

I did eat gravy on lettuce. Once. Thirty-some years ago. And apparently, that is the strangest food I have ever eaten.

3SP: Cool Dude Resurrection

Ginger: Does anyone know the meaning of Easter?

Vera: I know! Easter is when we build snowmen, decorate a tree, and a big guy in a red suit brings us presents.

Ginger: No, honey. You’re thinking of Christmas.

Chuck: I know! Easter is when we dye eggs and a big bunny brings us baskets of candy.

Ginger: Lots of people do that, but it’s not really the true meaning of Easter.

Dave: I know! Easter is when Jesus was nailed to a cross and died. Then he was put in a tomb and three days later he rose from the dead. And if he saw his shadow….

• Jesus was a Capricorn by Kris Kristofferson
• Day By Day from Godspell
• I Don’t Know How To Love Him from Jesus Christ Superstar

Fearless Leaders

I am extremely grateful to those men and women that have volunteered to serve our country in the armed forces. However, I think that our leaders have placed them in an untenable situation. And the arrogance of those leaders is deeply disturbing.

Five years… and counting….

3SP: Are You Feeling Lucky, Punk?

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

My apologies in advance to anyone that is offended by ethnic humor. [And really, shouldn't we all be offended? -- I'm so ashamed of myself, but I'm going to post this anyway. I think I have a little Irish in my heritage, so I can say I'm making fun of myself in a roundabout sort of way....]

An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman sit at a bar and each is served a beer.

The Brit finds a fly in his beer so he pushes it away and orders a dark stout.

The Scot finds a fly in his beer so he pushes it away and orders a whiskey.

The Celt finds a fly in his beer so he grabs the fly and yells, “Spit that out! It’s mine!”

Get lucky with these songs:

• Lucky Me by Sarah Slean
• Lucky Girl by Patty Scialfa
• Lucky Man by Emerson Lake and Palmer

The song titles link to YouTube videos and the artist names link to their official web sites.

Alienated

True story: A colleague once asked me [out of the blue], “Are you an alien?” While I stood there [slack-jawed, probably] she continued, “I mean, are you from another country?” She never explained why she thought I might be, except for the fact that some people do seem to think I’m from another planet.

Janet’s TITMT question of the week is “What are your thoughts on life outside of Earth? Do you believe in aliens?”

The first thing that comes to mind is not exactly on topic. [I know... hard to believe!] I had the pleasure of seeing Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe [written by Jane Wagner]. Through a myriad of characters in hysterically funny and heart-wrenchingly poignant situations we learn:

• Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
• I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.
• If I had known what it would be like to have it all…I might have been willing to settle for less.
• Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

And slightly more on topic perhaps:

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Arthhur C. Clarke said, “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” And he echoes Tomlin with, “I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.”

Wernher von Braun opined, “Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.” More current estimates are 250 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy 70 sextillion stars in the visible universe.

I’m not sure whether it was in the book [I have a copy around here somewhere, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now], but in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s Contact his characters summed it up with:

Young Ellie Arroway: Dad, do you think there’s people on other planets?
Ted Arroway: I don’t know, Sparks. But I guess I’d say if it is just us… seems like an awful waste of space.

That is based on a quote from Thomas Carlyle, a 19th century Scottish essayist and historian, “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. It they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.” Sagan referenced this quote at a symposium on “Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man” in 1972.

So, considering the size and complexity of the universe [and theories that we may be only one of many coexisting universes, which I'm not even going to get into here] I have to say that there is certainly life outside of earth and quite likely intelligent life. [Although many days I find scant evidence that there is intelligent life on earth, but that's high school for you.... How ironic that this question comes during the week we are administering the FCAT, Florida's version of the high-stakes testing required by what most people call No Child Left Behind.]

And yet… Even though I believe there is probably intelligent life out there somewhere I do not believe there is any evidence that they have visited or had any kind of contact with earth. We should keep looking though.

[Note: This post made possible by wikipedia and wikiquote. Believe me, if I had to dig through my books, notes, and the library... well, I probably wouldn't have.]

3SP: Pointedly

Loss of reason, loss of heart, loss of trust. Heed the soothsayer? Do we ever? Dragons are about, but that is another game play.

O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason! Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
          ~Shakespeare

• Back Stabbers by The O’Jays
• Stiletto by Billy Joel
• Smiling Faces -You’ve gotta see this one [even though it's poor quality video] but this one is better for listening by Undisputed Truth [wikipedia]

The song titles link to YouTube videos and the artist names link to their official web sites [or wikipedia pages when I can't find an artist site].

Speaking of Talking

I saw a link to this quiz on Lime’s site. I hardly ever bother with such things because nearly all of these online quizzes are total crap. But this one does use words that I know indicate regional differences in speech. It did peg Lime’s Philadelphian tendencies. And I am often told that I don’t have a detectable accent… until I tell people where I grew up — a big southern city. And I currently live in Florida so I have to say it seems fairly accurate so far.

I just remembered something tangentially relevant. [Really!] A colleague recently went on a brief rant when a couple judges at a thespian competition referred to students’ use of a “southern accent” in their performances. Anyone trained in speech, she said, should know that it’s a dialect, not an accent. [Don't tell Tom Petty. He'd be... um... heartbroken.*] Apparently, the author of this quiz doesn’t know [or doesn't care] that it should be “What American Dialect do You Speak?” Hmm, it just occurred to me that we may speak a dialect, but we have an accent….

Personally, I’ll always love the sound of a soft southern accent dialect. [Sorry, I've called it a southern accent all my life.] My speech patterns are mostly southern, I’m sure, even though my pronunciation usually isn’t. [But I reckon y'all knew that, huh?] I can speak southernly [that's my word and I'm sticking to it] and I do a bit more when I’m back home. Which brings me back to how to pronounce my home town. I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky.

Despite what it says in this Louisville Convention and Visitor Bureau logo, we would NEVER pronounce it Lewisville, unlike certain other U.S. cities that spell their names the same way [but pronounce them all wrong]. And we generally forgive visitors for pronouncing it Looeyville. It is, after all, named for Louis XVI.

Wait…

Ginger: This table goes back to Louis the 16th.
Fred: That’s nothing. All the furniture in my living room goes back to Walmart the 30th if I miss another payment.**

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

…I had to get that out of my system. When we natives pronounce Louisville, it usually comes out something like this:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

***

*Sorry, sorry, sorry!
**Sorry, sorry, sorry!
***This is not my voice. I stole this clip.

Suddenly…

I’m not picking on anyone here. But I’m curious about the phrase, “all of the sudden”. I’ve seen it written this way several places recently and it just doesn’t sound right to me because I learned it as “all of a sudden”. I’m wondering if this is one of those regional things? I did a quick search online and found a couple references that claim the way I learned it is the “right” way. None of them attributed any particular origin to the phrase in either form. One diatribe went as far as stating,

…idioms are shaped by widespread usage, so that if enough people over a long enough period of time say “all of the sudden,” eventually that will become the preferred idiom, and someone many years hence will write an article deploring the fact that some benighted speakers and writers don’t know any better than to say “all of a sudden.”

But that day has not yet arrived, and until it does, the proper phrasing remains “all of a sudden,” and those who use “all of the sudden” will be marking themselves as imperfectly educated, or at the very least as careless in their use of language.

Wow. Calm down. [You can read all of that short article here.] I’m not on a crusade to change anyone’s speech pattern. Not on this point, at least. There are other mangled idioms that bother me far more. Still, if you… suddenly are willing to change, please do….

The origins of some phrases are inscrutable [clear as mud] while others are pretty obvious [crystal clear]. As I said, I’m curious whether this is regional. So, do you say “all of the sudden” or “all of a sudden” and where did you learn to talk like that?

3SP: Drop a Dime

Alexander Graham Bell was born on 3 March 1847. And, according to Wikipedia,

Patent Number 174,465 was issued to Bell on 7 March 1876 by the U.S. Patent Office which covered “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically… by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound.”

That apparatus, of course, is the telephone, but his claim as inventor [despite what I was taught in every history class I ever took] is not without controversy. Regardless of who we blame, the telephone lets us reach out and nag someone at globe-spanning distances, added “drunk-dialing” to the lexicon, and lead eventually to songs like these.

• Telephone Line by Electric Light Orchestra
• Operator by Jim Croce
• Memphis by Johnny Rivers

The song titles link to YouTube videos and the artist names link to their official web sites.