Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Answers and Questions - The Weirdness Just Gets Weirder

Thanks, y’all, for your valiant efforts at playing the Fake Crap on SkyMall game.  We had votes for the following fakes: Home Piercing Kit, Dog Shoes, and the AutoMojito.  That’s doing pretty well, folks.  But not quite well enough.  As it turns out, I made up ever second entry on the list.  The others are real.  (and check out those initials you can brand onto some whining liberal’s pale quavering ass.) Tragically, the automojito is still on the drawing board.  Or under it, if things have gotten bad enough. 

so, looking at those seared initials from the branding iron, it reminds me in a roundabout way that Kel and I now have to trade off on our tuesday night yoga class - one of us hangs with the Zachtion figure and one can go to the Y for some twist-n-bend action.  This comes to mind because last night I stayed at home and was not able to revel in the mysteries of the maim shirt.  The maim shirt?, you mumble with thicklipped confusion.  Indeed, the maim shirt, I reassert - allow me to explain. 

Yoga class is held in a room with two walls of mirrors, one of which we face.  When I’m in class I try to concentrate on my own work and the burning soreness in my hamstrings, but sometimes I check out the other students - just for form, of course.  I noticed a few months ago that one of the students, whom I saw in that mirror, was wearing a shirt on which was proudly emblazoned the less-than-zen phrase, “I MAIM.” This is a nice young woman whom I’ve seen in the neighborhood and on my bus every so often, and she’s hardly the sort of aggro workout fiend to advertise a desire to rip off someone’s limbs at the gym.  It seemed anomolous, yet something about the lettering seemed familiar.  It took me a few weeks to remember what it was: the green and orange serifed font.  I was reading the damn thing in a mirror.  She wasn’t saying “I MAIM” - she was wearing a shirt from the University of MIAMI.  Heh.

Except that’s when I noticed something else written underneath the I MAIM - something that wasn’t easy to read backwards.  It couldn’t say what I thought it might be saying when I caught brief glimpses of it between postures.  I didn’t want to stare at her, in the mirror or in real life after class ended.  It took several sneaky peeks before I was fairly confident that her shirt actually said, beneath MIAMI, the word “cornhole.” This struck me as a bit strange.  I saw Office Space like all the rest of you; I know you’re supposed to watch out for those things - not to advertise them on your yoga shirt. 

It took me a while to get around to looking it up on line, and as it turns out, it seems that in Florida “Cornhole” is a fairly conventional name for competitive beanbag games - toss a bag filled with dried corn through a board with a hole in it.  Cornhole - good clean fun for the hole family; as the linked ad asserts, it’s “perfect for tailgate parties.” I’m relieved.  The thought that this woman was wearing a shirt that actually meant what I thought of when I thought of the phrase “I MAIM CORNHOLE” was starting to make me a little sensitive about getting into those downward dog poses.  Now I just have to make sense of the fellow with the “Pork the Dolphins” culottes.