Father’s Day is here. Must be time for some “dad jokes.” Those of you in the know know that “dad jokes” aren’t jokes about dads. They’re jokes told by dads. And they’re “an obvious or predictable pun or play on words and usually judged to be endearingly corny or unfunny.” This definition comes from Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster. So, without further ado…
Why don’t you hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? The P is silent.
Termite walks into a bar and asks, “Is the bar tender here?”
What does the buffalo tell his son in the morning? Bye, son!
I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon. I wonder what’ll come first.
Did you get a hair cut? No, I got all of them cut!
Credit for all goes to Scott Simon from his Weekend Edition piece posted Saturday on NPR’s website.
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Got a favorite “dad joke?” C’mon, spill.
You’ve got nothing to lose but your self respect.
Some great father-son pix from NPR, here. And also from AVW:
Along the Oregon coast: Note the complementary “Hawks” ball caps.
On this day in 1884, the first roller coaster in America opens at Coney Island, in Brooklyn. Known as a switchback railway, it was the brainchild of LaMarcus Thompson, traveled approximately six miles per hour & cost a nickel to ride. The new entertainment was an instant success…
Hmmmm. Fathers Day and First Roller Coaster: Coincidence?
I think not!
Dad Jokes and Roller Coasters go together like… well, you make the call!
Today’s Word of the Day is totally useless as far as I’m concerned. Why not just say “dreamy” and be done with it?
oneiric
adjective
onei·ric|\ ō-ˈnī-rik
Definition
: of or relating to dreams
: dreamy
The notion of using the Greek noun oneiros (meaning “dream”) to form the English adjective oneiric wasn’t dreamed up until the mid-19th century. But back in the early 1600s, linguistic dreamers came up with oneiromancy, meaning “divination by means of dreams.”
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Stay tuned tomorrow for yet another useless Greek-derived adjective that starts with the letter “O” – Oedipal. Ah well, I guess out-of-work Greek scholars need to keep busy too?
One oneiromancer of note: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Riiiiiight.
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Bonus pictorial content here. Sixth one from the top is just the dreamiest. Ninth one comes to you in honor of today’s holiday.
Man o man o man. Just when I thought we’d reached rock bottom in this old world, along comes a story that establishes a new nadir. “Nadir?” I hear you ask? Yes, you heard me: Today’s Word of the Day. Which will be followed by… well, you’ll see.
Nadir
noun
na·dir|\ ˈnā-ˌdir, ˈnā-dər
Definition
1: the lowest point
2: the point of the celestial sphere that is directly opposite the zenith and vertically downward from the observer
1 nadir, 2 observer, 3 zenith
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A good friend who shall remain nameless pointed me in the direction of this recent HuffPo piece, titled “Deepfake Videos and the Threat of Not Knowing What’s Real.” It is truly terrifying – and not only from the political perspective. Click the link to read it in full if you dare – I won’t spoil it for you. All I can say is, “I knew there must a good reason for becoming a hermit – and this is it!”
A final word of warning:
“Even if the record’s corrected, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.“
— Hany Farid, digital forensics expert
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And if that’s not cause to give one pause… well, heaven help us all!
I came across this Washington Post article about succulents poached from the Northern California coast via a reprint in the Denver Post. So, among all three locales – DC, Mendocino, Denver – I guess we’ve got the entire country covered, eh? But about those sneaky succulent poachers…
Non-poached “design cliche” succulents on the windowsill at 392 Midstream Lane.
“$600K worth?”
“Overseas, retail for as much as $50 each?”
“Huge among housewives?”
“Succulent craze gone global?”
Holy cow – talk about a lucrative side-hustle!
Or, as one prescient DP site commentator put it so pithily:
“The apocalypse can’t come soon enough.”
Bonus Mendocino Coast Botanic Garden photos, here. Sorry, no succulents. Guess they all got poached?
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Ah, found one.
Thanks, Kate! <Also thanks, “Audrey” – with apologies to all “Little Shop of Horrors” fans!>
Yesterday’s post about pixie-dust on the dusty trail set me to thinking about other forms of faerie-dom. This includes that uniquely American form of monetized magic known as The Tooth Fairy.
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A recent Vox.com article by Lindsay King-Miller is titled “The Tooth Fairy Economy, Explained.” In it she explains that the going rate for baby teeth under the pillow currently averages $3.70 per molar. Also, the rate has historically fluctuated in sync with the S&P 500, beginning at $1.30 in 1998, and peaking at $4.50 in 2017. The capitalist correlation is explained by public radio as follows:
NPR’s Planet Money theorizes that the increase in tooth price over inflation is because when funds are more available, spending tends to increase disproportionately in the areas that people value most, such as creating treasured memories for one’s children.
According to folklorist Tad Tuleja, the Tooth Fairy’s main purpose is to teach children about the free market. Furthermore, you can now download apps that add the Tooth Fairy to photographs as proof for skeptical children. You can even call and leave her a voicemail. But monetizing childhood magic isn’t all the Tooth Fairy does. Consider this story about one Mom who…
…forgot to switch her daughter’s teeth for money on more than one occasion. But instead of confessing the sprite was a myth, she told her daughter that their Tooth Fairy was an under-performer at work. “I would have to pretend to be disappointed and tell her that I would email the tooth fairy’s supervisor,” she remembers. “After it happened a couple of times, her daughter would just say, ‘Mom, you need to email them again about the Tooth Fairy.’ ”
Oh man, ain’t the free market grand?
Our kids will attest that they got considerably less than the national per-bicuspid average. But it came in a form that perhaps shaped the future in ways we didn’t necessarily foresee at the time. Instead of leaving them familiar American dollars in exchange for their discarded deciduous teeth, we always left them some form of foreign currency. Our strategy was based on the perhaps fanciful premise that the Tooth Fairy is an internationalist at heart. She only stopped over at our house during long-haul travels to destinations mostly unfamiliar to us.
“Hmmmm,” we’d ponder aloud. “She must have come straight from <take your pick> “Mexico/Vietnam/Turkey/Honduras/France.” It was a way of expanding their horizons and at the same time saving a bit on the ever escalating cost of tooth enamel. They had no idea that the Yuen:Dollar exchange rate is 7:1 and therefore the cool Chinese coin under their pillow was worth the U.S. equivalent of 14 cents. To them, it was worth way more than a Sacajawea or a Kennedy because, well, it was exotic. And next time? It would be something totally different. That peso? Worth practically nothing at the going rate. But with the advantage of novelty, it became much more valuable in their eyes. That ruble? Worth even less than a peso after the Soviet Union’s ignominious collapse. But to our gap-toothed progeny, it was priceless.
Of course…
Little did we realize that our kids would end up traveling, living, and working abroad when they reached young adulthood. Stints in Chile, El Salvador, and the Republic of Georgia – not to mention India, China and (soon) England – have made our return on investment from those Tooth Fairy coins one of the grandest bargains of all time. Maybe it’s true “you only get what you pay for.” But sometimes, with a little bit of pixie-dust creativity added in, capitalist myth-making ends up paying dividends far beyond the S&P 500.
Disney’s take on pixies: “It’s a small world after all.”
A trail without angels is like a day without… well, you know.
In an archived issue of “Trail Life” at outsideonline.com, I came across an article titled In Defense of Trail Angels. Turns out – believe it or not – this is an actual thing. From the article by Pete Brook:
Outsiders plying thru-hikers with sodas and chicken wings might appall purists, but trail magic is here to stay — and that’s a very good thing. While logging 1,800 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) this summer, I thought a lot about how trail angels shaped my hike. They were everywhere — stationed at highway crossings and waiting with open arms in small towns along the way. They offered everything from chocolate cake and hamburgers to showers and shelter. My trip wouldn’t have been the same without them…
Read the full article if you like. It really is heartwarming and well worth a read. But for those of you (& that’s most of you) who won’t click, here’s how it ends:
I’m prone to cynicism and have looked suspiciously on unadulterated kindness in the past. But the PCT has softened that edge. From the trail, I see things differently. Angels believe in the goodness of people. They see strangers as friends whom they have yet to meet. And they trust that what goes around comes around. “You get back what you put out,” says trail angel Dalton Steele Reed, of Tehachapi, CA. “At some point, I’ll get it back. I don’t know when or how, but I will.”
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Or, forget about angels and just get out and take a hike. Either way? A little pixie dust never hurt anyone, that’s what _I_ always say. Well, maybe pixie dust plus a couple of chicken wings?
Then again, some folks you meet on the trail (see above) have only themselves to offer. And that’s just fine by me. Hike on, friends!
Well, it had to happen sooner or later. In this case it was sooner. Like a recovering alcoholic in a dive bar <or a recovering LDS’er in a coffee bar, like that hilarious scene in Book of Mormon>, I guess it was inevitable that one day I’d fall off the wagon and return to linguistics. Frankly I blame my linguist daughter. After all, what are progeny for except to point the finger for one’s misplaced keys, or for having left the car unlocked in the driveway? (Ahem!)
But hey, all that’s water under the bridge. And your understanding of the the Queen’s English will be so much the better for it. See here for today’s offering, from James Harbeck in something called “The Week.” It’s titled “In the future, will the English language be full of accented characters?” It’s a fun romp through the likes of latté and piña colada and Beyoncé and Mötley Crüe. Not to mention soupçon, éclat, façade, naïve, and – my personal favorite – jalapeño.
And just in case you were wondering, the final answer is….
Sorry. You’ll have to click and read for yourself if you want to find out.
Hey, don’t blame me. Blame my daughter. After all, that’s what I’d do.
Well, either my daughter or Johannes Gutenburg I guess.
Gotta be one or the other.
Looks a little like a guillotine, doesn’t it?
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…we adopt letters for a handful of reasons: usefulness, aesthetics, and because, well, we simply can. We abandon letters when it becomes too difficult to write or print them out.
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“I’m partial to using accent marks any chance I can get, because they are cute.” — Emmy J. Favilla in A World Without “Whom”
Today’s double feature here at dewconsulting.net/blog is not something you see just every day: Two for the price of one! Double the pleasure, double the fun! And when the price is always free free free…. Well, in this old world it doesn’t often get much better than that, now does it?
Please forgive the bombast, but that’s today’s Word of the Day. So, without further ado, here’s the first half of today’s bombastic double feature. Just the synonyms alone are worth the price of admission.
The original meaning of bombast in English was “cotton or other material used as padding or stuffing.” It is derived through Anglo-French bombés or bombace, from a Medieval Latin word meaning “cotton plant, cotton fiber or wadding.” Bombax was once thought to be a corruption of bombyx, a Latin (and ultimately Greek) word that means “silkworm” or “silk.” Etymologists weren’t certain why the shift from silk to cotton occurred. It turns out that bombast‘s origins are more direct and unassuming: the Latin bombax was borrowed from the Middle Greek bámbax, pámbax, which in turn probably traces back to the Middle Persian pambak (“cotton”). Bombast is no longer used in the sense of cotton padding or stuffing, but the word has been retained in modern English in a figurative sense referring to speech or writing that is stuffed or padded with unnecessary verbiage.
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Wow, after all that, I bet you almost forgot, there’s a second half – but I didn’t. It’s National Doughnut Day! Yes, you heard me: Doughnuts, Fasnachts (for my PA Dutch friends), Donuts (for those who prefer a lower cal version of the spelling), Fat Pills (for all you dietary cynics out there). Hey, it doesn’t matter how you say it or spell it. Just keep the concentrated carbs and those multicolored sprinkles coming this way, that’s what _I_ always say.
You’re the glaze to our cruller, the cinnamon to our twist, the jelly to our doughnut: With-out you we’re incomplete. Happy D-Day+1!
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Mmmmmmmmmmmmm – donuts!
And as if all that weren’t enough, click here for a heartwarming read in National Geographic about immigrants making it big in the Donut Capital of the U.S.A. I guarantee you, you’ll never guess where THAT is… C’mon. Try one. All you have to lose is your girlish figure.
• 1 can Red Bull (regular or sugar free)
• Powdered gelatin
• 1 cup vodka of choice
• 24 cherries with stems (optional)
• 1 mold (use whatever you have available)
Directions
1. Prepare your molds by spraying them with cooking spray or and cut your cherries in half and reserve for later. (This helps the cherries stand upright in the shots)
2. Pour 1 cup Red Bull into a medium sauce pan (should be almost the whole can). Sprinkle your 1 and 1/2 packets of gelatin on top (don’t stir) and let it sit for 2 minutes to activate the gelatin.
3. Turn on low heat and stir in the gelatin until it all dissolves. Let the Red Bull get to a light boil and turn off the heat. Let it cool slightly and then add your cup of vodka.
4. Pour half of your Red Bull jello mixture into your molds (or pan) let refrigerate and harden (about 2 hours). Place one cherry in each mold (or spread out an inch apart on in a pan) with the stem side up and cut side down, upright.
5. Top with the rest of the jello mixture gently, not disturbing the upright cherries. Let refrigerate over night. Carefully, take a butter knife and edge around each mold to help release the shot. Pop them out and serve. Enjoy!
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Good. Freakin’. Sweet. Jesus.
In case of emergency, please dial 911.
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Or…
You could just consume your TNT straight out of the can.
Cut out the middle man, right?
But don’t forget to add cherries.
After all, gotta get your minimum daily allowance of Red Dye #2!
