Open your eyes! (Or don't)

Years ago, while reading a newspaper I saw something in a gardening column that looked to my bleary eyes like this:  "Spring is a good time to dig up dead animals."  After a Berle-worthy double-take, I reread it properly as "... dig up dead annuals."

So this morning in my email was a notice from the cable/internet provider for what appeared to say "Autopsy Due Date Reminder".   Not quite...

Not again!

This was also on Xitter today.  I heard many years ago that you could tell a lot about someone if they hear the William Tell Overture, and the first thing they think of is the Lone Ranger.  And here, if someone like me sees a serious history tweet, while reading it I think of Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First?". 

"Hu received a call from FDR..."  "That's what I'm trying to find out!"  

"FDR asked the State Department to request Hu's autograph."  "Whose autograph?"  "That's right."  

As you see in the last clip, the author tells us who was FDR's last visitor.  Naturally.

Life in our back yard, plus something unrelated

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And now for something completely different:

Exactly like the Woody Allen joke:  the food is lousy, and such small portions.  

I liked it, anyway

Can't believe that the quip is original, but I didn't copy it from anyone, so giving myself credit for it.

And a happy Donald Fagen's birthday to all.

 

Far From Perfect

From a video on Facebook featuring Charles Phoenix and a pink 1959 Cadillac.  The original owner was in fact a craps dealer at Harrah's casino.

 

Sociology

Professor Lehrer, although not available for comment at this time, has already made his thoughts clear on the subject...

 

Senator, you should know better!  We should have gotten *those* planes long ago... 

...ohhhhh.  

We should have gotten planes *for them* long ago.  

English.

I love cats.  -- Yes.

I love them. -- Yes.

I love them cats. -- NO.

I love those cats.  -- Yes.

I love those. -- Maybe?  Now we're getting into rules versus experience and "feel", always a weak spot with me.

    Here is a roomful of cats.  I love those black ones over there.  Do you like these white ones?  Yes, but I prefer those.

In honor of today's Wordle

Hasty

Pasty

Tasty

Nasty

What comes after "son of no coincidences"?

Chrome's history page tells me that at 4:50 this afternoon, I was reading Christopher Buckley's guest essay, "P.J. O’Rourke and the Death of Conservative Humor".   

Two minutes later, I read, "Humorlessness has crept in its petty pace to the right, where it is conducted with North Korean-level solemnity by the bellowing myrmidons of MAGAdom."  (I guess Chris Buckley didn't fall far from dear old dad's tree.) 

Immediately I Google the mysterious "myrmidon" and satisfy my thirst for knowledge.

Learning a new word, and at my age, too. 

Zoom ahead to 8:15 or so, "later that same day"; the film "Twentieth Century," and this bit of dialogue:

I ran it back several times, and I don't know what he's saying at the "inaudible" point, either.  Sounds sort of like Pearl Atomics, which I doubt.

- - - - - - - - - -

Minutes later:  Why guess when you can Google?  "..bath tubs, slews of Myrmidons" brought up this article from AV Club:  

“That’s not a contract,” he tells Lily. “It’s a coronation. Barrels of rubies. Enormous carpets for your pretty feet. Pearl and onyx bathtubs. Slews of Myrmidons at your beck and call.”

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who wrote the screenplay (based on their own stage play), didn’t fret about whether audiences knew that Myrmidons were Achilles’ soldiers in The Iliad. Like many scribes of Hollywood’s Golden Age (or, say, the Coen brothers today), they valued historical and cultural literacy for its own sake, weaving it into even the goofiest of material.

Van Lingle Mungo

RIP, Dave Frishberg.  There's a version he re-recorded with just his piano as accompaniment, but this is the one I like more, the one I heard on J. P. McCarthy's show on WJR as a kid.     

Good for a smile

Someone's trying to tell us they think they have a better option than the water dishes on the floor of the lounge.