Nov 16

Riddle me this

In honor of Heather’s and my 17th anniversary on the 17th of next month I gave my Sunday School students a custom-made riddle. I told them that they had until our anniversary to give me the answer, in writing, and that the winner would get $17.

So far I am in no danger of losing any money. One of my students mentioned that he googled the riddle but came up with nothing. Duh. Like I’m going to give a kid the price of a new CD because he knows how to google.

I think it’s a decent riddle, but that estimation is coming from someone who doesn’t typically care for them. Right now I am playing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the riddles and puzzles in the game are very good: they require a lot of thought, when you get them they make sense, and you feel like you have read the equivalent of a clever magic trick.

Riddles I despise are those that rely on some sort of semantics to cloak their meaning, and when you are told the answer, you simply feel like you have been deceived.

Like this:

Q: You have two coins that total 35 cents, and one of them is not a quarter. What are they?
A: I don’t know
Q: A quarter and a dime! I said one of them is not a quarter–but the other one is.
A: Tee-freaking-hee.

Anyway, I’ll post the riddle and the answer after our anniversary, and you can decide if it is clever, or just like most every other riddle.

Nov 10

Quotable: Adam Clarke

“Even the success of apostles depended, in a certain way, on the prayers of the Church. Few Christian congregations feel, as they ought, that it is their bounden duty to pray for the success of the Gospel, both among themselves and in the world. The Church is weak, dark, poor, and imperfect, because it prays little.”

Nov 07

sagan

n. A unit of measurement equal to at least four billion. It was created as a humorous tribute to astronomer Carl Sagan.

Nov 05

Collective platypuses

You are probably familiar with some of the more colorful collective nouns used for groups of particular animals, such as a crash of rhinoceroses or a spoonful of pandas. A group of crows is a murder, while a group of ravens is merely an unkindness.

I decided to look up what a group of platypuses is called. According to the Australian Platypus Conservancy there is no collective noun–as platypus are solitary animals that do not form social groups or family units.

By the way, a group of cobblers is called a drunkship.

Nov 01

Quotable: Thomas Hart Benton

“The human figure is coming back into fashion in painting, and what are all those poor [expletives deleted] going to do now? They never learned how to draw.”

–Thomas Hart Benton, referring to painters from the Abstract Expressionist movement, via Robert Wernick

Oct 28

Corn gangsta

n. One who attends a small, rural school in the middle of the Corn Belt, but dresses like he is growing up on the mean streets of Compton.

The girls brought this wonderful term home from high school. As far as I know the usage is entirely localized to our school.

Oct 24

ambeer

n. tobacco juice, or perhaps more accurately, tobacco spit.

From now on when I highlight a word, I am going to try to, as the OED does, offer a quotation. In this case, a story:

So we’re all sitting around playing D&D: Me, Mike, Kevin, and other people unimportant to this story. Kevin and I are drinking Coke, and Mike, a non-Coke drinker, is drinking that weird Pepsi Blue. Kevin had finished his Coke and was using the bottle as a spittoon. Mike had finished his Pepsi Blue and had squashed the bottle, recapped it, and laid it sideways on the end table.

We’re sitting there playing, rolling our polyhedral dice and keeping our eyes on Tony, the DM.

Suddenly we heard this peculiar sound: PA-TOOONG!

We all turned to the direction of the sound–Mike had absentmindedly reached for his Pepsi, and instead grabbed Kevin’s bottle of ambeer. The sound we heard was a mouthful of the brown liquid being hastily expelled back into the bottle.

And then Mike loudly told Kevin what he thought of him.

We laughed so hard–for hours.

I don’t know what the big deal was; it least it wasn’t more Pepsi Blue.

Oct 18

Who’s Gary Busey?

The girls and I watched the Back to the Future trilogy this weekend. It was the first time we’d watched them in a long time, and more amazing than ever; we caught so many things we hadn’t see before, and the girls could actually understand the entire plots (they were just wee ones the last time they saw them).

After watching BTTF2, I made them watch Biff’s Question Song by Thomas Wilson (Biff, Griff, and Buford Tannen).

After we laughed ourselves silly, the girls asked:

“Who’s Gary Busey?”

“He was in The Buddy Holly Story and a bunch of other stuff,” I said.

“Never heard of him.”

“He also starred in a bunch of mugshots where he was high on cocaine.”

Oct 15

Dog

My dyslexic friend got kicked out of church for singing ‘Our Dog is an Awesome Dog.’

Oct 12

My niece