Friday, October 27, 2006

Random Adages - as the door hits my ass on my way out

It’s time for me to leave - I’m heading out for a week with various subunits of my family.  It will be a fun trip and I may even have amusing anecdotes to report upon my return, but I make no representation that I’ll be updating this bad boy while I’m on the road. 

However, in my frenzy to get everything done before I leave, I do think it’s a good time to disgorge a small handful of weird phrases that I’ve had floating around my head lately, and that have wound up in my memopad with no where else to turn for public humiliation - hence:

* I’ve got an aglet for your grommet.
* Filling may be hot.  Damn hot.
* By the gladsome stank of Dan Tanna’s bandana!
* It’s one thing to be ignorant - another altogether to be stupid.
* Is the glass half-full with liquid gold.... or is this your urine sample? 

You can see why I was loathe to keep those to myself.  Enjoy them till I get back, at which time I’ll be expecting a full report. 

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Addenda

When I was like six years old I went to a school where they made me buy a little dictionary, and in particular, the Little Oxford Dictionary from Clarendon Press, and in particularly particular, the new 4th edition.  With addenda.  This has turned out to be the coolest little dictionary in the world.  It’s about 3x4, hardbound in blue, and it’s got most all the words you will ever actually need to look up in a non-technical environment.  It’s been in steady use since I got it. 

It strives to be concise and to include all words in common discourse.  I’ve often been impressed by its breadth.  For such a little book, it has quite a lot of words in it.  And of course after so many years I do have my favorites, but many of the best of those are from among the ones in the Addenda section - those that just recently “qualified for inclusion.” I’m not sure what that qualification process consisted of, but here is a list of:

18 of the 129 Words Appearing as Addenda to the first printing of the 4th Edition of the Little Oxford Dictionary (1969)

addictive: (a) causing addiction.

admass: (n) part of community easily influenced by mass communication.

afromosia: (n) ornamental African wood used for furniture.

ALGOL: (n) algebraic computer language.

benzedrine: (n) drug inhaled as stimulant etc. P.

bongo drum: (n) one of pair of small drums played with fingers.

breathalyzer: (n) device for testing amount of alcohol in breath. breathalyze: (v.t.) test with this.

cannabis: (n) preparation of Indian hemp, esp. for smoking.

COBOL: (n) computer language using common English terms.

D.J.: (abbr) disc-jockey.

enantiomorph: (n) either of two forms each related to the other as object and its mirror image.

flexagon: (n) folded-paper polygon, esp. hexagon, that can be made by further folding and unfolding to reveal different faces.

FORTRAN: (n) computer language for programming scientific problems.

hallucinogenic: (a) (esp. of drugs) inducing hallucination.

hippy: (sl.) person (appearing to be) given to use of hallucinogenic drugs; hipster.

hipster: (2nd def., n) person alive to or following the most up-to-date fashions in dress, music, etc.

meths: (n, colloq.) methylated spirits. 

spacecraft: (n) space-ship.

Words are like perfect golden fishes - too beautiful to touch, too heavy to swim.  No, wait, that isn’t it.  I don’t know what words are like. Sorry. 

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

A Whiff of Cyborg

It’s not just that it’s big – it’s very sensitive, I know how to use it, and it’s given me countless hours of indescribable pleasure.  Do I thank genetics for it, or just fate?  I’m hedging my bets and thanking them both.  Sometimes it’s a real handful, I guess, and sometimes it’s hard to keep it out of trouble; sometimes it’s so engorged that I can barely see straight.  None of that matters.  The plain truth is, I really like my nose.

I have a pretty sensitive sniffer, when all is said and done.  Of course, it doesn’t like getting punched, but even short of that, when Z rams his tiny digits up into it on a mission of juvenile exploration, it damn well hurts.  If I don’t take my allergy meds it can back up and make me choke and weep with discomfort and effluvium.  But in the big picture, such moments are by far in the minority.  As an overwhelming rule, my schnoz is there to make things better for me.  It conveys plentiful oxygen to my bronchioles.  It leads me not into temptation, or at least not into lame boring temptation.  And it endows me with a most discerning sense of smell.

I’m usually among the first to notice new odors.  I get lots of practice in this discipline on the bus and on downtown streets, but even apart from such exercises I pick up most scents pretty darn fast: biological, chemical, foodacious, whatever.  If something has a scent, I will notice it quickly and it will linger with me for a good long time.  Sometimes that’s a good thing – fresh fruit, redwood groves, cut grass, chocolate…. But of course that cloud of scent has a stinky lining, and I have no defense against those odors I’d rather not experience: septic scents, body funk, coffee breath and leachate, to name a pungent few.  And this brings me to Cyborg the 3rd. 

Cyborg the First was bought new at Ikea and lives in the dining room.  It is finished and has no scent.  Cyborg #2 was bought new and unfinished at Ikea, and now back up the computer area – it smells like pinewood. 

And so it came to pass: that the boy rendered my old nightstand an unsafe area for himself and for items of a delicate or senitive nature.  Z delighted in pulling down the antique lamp, shuffling my bookmarks, and reprogramming, and then dropping, the clock radio.  He was figuring out how to pull out the drawer, which would fall heavily on him when he eventually worked it free.  Basically, that nightstand was an ever-more-serious disaster waiting to happen.  We needed to change that nightstand out.  Urgently.  Enter Cyborg the 3rd.

Kel found it at a used furniture shop - $50 for 100 pounds of solid oak construction.  It’s 40 inches tall, five feet long, with four heavy doors and lots of interior surfaces that the boy can’t trash.  It’s not great design, but it fits and it fits in.  I was delighted when we finally got it up out of the garage and into place. 

The damn thing was too heavy for Kel to handle half of it up the curvy steps.  It took close to a month before we got a burly friend over to give us a hand with it.  So, after we got it home, it lived for a month in our garage.  Plenty of time for it to air out, eh?  Then, before I slid it finally into place, I cleaned it thoroughly with furniture polish.  So I knew it was clean.  Yet the truth could not be denied: it continued to stink.  By the curse of the sniffer, I could smell its past in a chain smoker’s home. 

You know the smell of a beach where a driftwood campfire blazed the night before?  The scent of a wooden match, lit for a candle and then blown out?  The sharp tang of pyrotechnics, sour in the sweet summer air?  It doesn’t smell like any of those.  Cyborg III smells like many, many cartons of cheapjack cancersticks.  Inside and out, it’s essence of ashtray.  And not one of those nice hi-class ashtrays, either.  No gauloises or shermies.  This is pure cut-rate cut-leaf – generic, lowbrow smokes all the way and plenty of’em.  There’s no burns or stains, and it’s slowly getting more understated as time goes by, but the cyborg bears mute witness to countless hours of cheap smoldering cigs – and I can damn well still smell it every time I walk into the room.  I head to bed and the stench permeates my thoughts and turns them ashy-grey.  If I get chilly at night and pull out my fuzzy sleepycap from the cyborg’s convenient depths, it is redolent of rancid guttering weeds. 

I find all this smelling of some stranger’s cigarettes most disquieting. Kel doesn’t notice it so much.  She disclaims any awareness of the cyborg deathstench.  The stale rankness of a cherry flaring and smoldering in a dark room is my burden alone to bear. 

Thus is it all too often.  I solely own the benefit of my magnificent proboscis – but with the benefit comes the detriment.  I just need to make sure I even the score daily with a delicious scent or two that I can bring to mind as I get into bed next to Smokestink the Cyborg. It’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Update: I think I figured it out.  The outside was basically okay, but the doors were never left open for long enough for the insides to air out.  AIRING OUT THE INSIDES IS IMPORTANT, people.  Air yours out today!