Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Rabbit Droppings

Call this one random musings of an untidy mind.

Or call it snippets of acerbic ponderings.

Or call it leftover crap of which there's not enough of to cohesively fill out one single story, no matter how many modifiers you glue to a noun.

The German language does that; modify nouns until your nose bleeds. They stick adjectives to the front of nouns and capitalize (kapitalise?) the damn things into entirely new nouns. What results is a car crash of a word where descriptives have telescoped into each other and the whole thing has rammed itself inextricably up against the original noun which, come to think of it was plenty descriptive all by itself.

A society of engineers, never leaving well enough alone. Sturm and Drang was perfectly incomprehensible all by itself and then they had to go and craft Romanticism out of it and suddenly we're all world citizens, laying about on lush meadows dreaming of blue flowers.

How that all devolved into Mercedes and Blaupunkt within three hundred years is beyond me.

I crossed an international border recently. Apparently the latest ploy to catch terrorist operatives, smugglers and fugitives from justice is to ask inane questions until an alibi falls apart.

Here's my example. I pull up to the inspection station, the officer notes the State on my license plate.

"Where are you from?"

I refer him to the State on my license plate he just noted.

Ahem.

"And this is your car?" He points helpfully at the shiny metal thing with wheels I'm sitting in.

No, this is my pet platypus, Oscar. My car is invisible and following me about twenty miles back.

Go ahead, trip me up asking me my shoe size and employer all in the same sentence. You'll never figure out that I'm the one that stole the prize science project in eighth grade and threw it in the storm drain behind the football field.

Golly, I wonder if blogs are traceable.

It amazes me how, when it comes to mid-life dating, everybody pretty much accepts that people make mistakes and divorces happen. However, they also are pretty much with me that we all get just one mulligan. Show up on my course asking for a penalty stroke and a ball drop and you'll have to find another set of links.

It's not that we give idiots guns and bullets, it's that we give them gasoline. Sure, guns don't kill people, bullets kill people. But I would venture a guess that your run of the mill idiot has a better chance of cleaning the thing into his frontal lobe than actually hitting someone. However, give this same moron five gallons of gas and suddenly the bozo is on a dirt bike or helmetless and popping wheelies in a suburban tract or instant messaging in Dad's new bimmer. There really should be a mandatory cooling off period at the pumps. There's a helpful diagnostic: If you routinely breathe through your mouth behind the wheel, you may not be smart enough to continue operating whatever motor vehicle you are dragging the rest of us into your personal hell with.

A decent interval of time should be observed between graduating college and being hit up for your first alumni donation. My line was that I've just given you a hundred thousand dollars, what'd you do with it? Don't tell me you spent it all in one place. Didn't your mother teach you how to budget?

Especially don't hit the finance majors up.

Bunny on.

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