Towels

Missy keeps giving me grief about why I keep the gnasty old white towels for my gym bag. Finally, I’ve got a good answer:

To look cool, wrap a towel around your waist when you change. Changing skirts are practical, but not very cool. To look Euro-cool, make sure it’s a white, thread bare towel taken from the cheap motel room that you and five teammates crammed into at your last stage race.

(Courtesy of PezCyclingNews)

(Also, it looks like I missed TowelDay this year.)

Elmo’s Christmas Countdown

Worth seeing. List of interesting bits:

  • Jamie Foxx and Elmo doing the hip-hop version of the Nutcracker Suite
  • Probably the first fart joke I’ve seen in a Christmas Special
  • The Sopranos playing Bert and Ernie
  • “Christmas Chutzpa”

Blog Devices that never get old

I hit the pool tonight for the first time in a while. The pool was good – I think, after three years of attempting self drowning, that I’m finally developing a little bit of muscle memory. No attempted drowning at this return. Bilateral breathing was working well, and while I was painfully slow, at least I didn’t feel like I was drowning. 25 laps or so – just over 1K. Nothing earthshattering, but nothing to shake a stick at.

Jake got his first book report back from second grade. His teacher gigged him for leaving out a comma in a sentence that doesn’t need a comma. I’m pretty spun up about it – dangling prepositions aside, I care greatly about grammar and good writing. Even the greats who took liberties with the English language knew how to write properly before they bent it. Missy’s not so worked up about it, though she agrees the teacher’s wrong. In her defense, the rest of the comments on the paper were ones that Missy and I made to jake when he was writing, so the teacher’s up overall in our book. The comma, I think, was added just ’cause second graders generally don’t think about things like that.

My kid’s the exception. He’s smarter.

(Just like yours are).

((And, for the record, almost all of my parenting decisions are made out of a pathological fear of being “that parent”))

Anyway, I finally came up with an idea for a blog meme. I haven’t googled it, so I’m sure that it already exists, but for a brief moment let me think that i had an actual original thought, instead of reprocessing things that I read half awake and forget that I read. The theme is:

Literary Devices that you use in your blog. Here’s my favorite five:

  1. Run as a song. Pick your current favorite song. Dissect your run as an embodiment of the song. My favorite use of this personally was when I used jazz as a metaphor for trail running.
  2. Invoke old girlfriends. This one is more dangerous than I give it credit for. Luckily for me (a) None of my old girlfriends read my stuff; and (b) Missy didn’t go to high school with me
  3. Stuff as a solution. We know it’s not really. But stuff gives us something to blame for our failures besides ourself
  4. Dialogue. It’s as old as people trying to fill pages – enlisting someone as a literary foil to make the protagonist (and, in a blog it’s always one’s self) look handsome, erudite, and sexy.
  5. and finally The list of 5 things. Pick a topic. Make a list.

So, what did I leave out?

Talk Like a Pirate Day

My pirate name is:
Dirty Tom Read

You’re the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean — not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the sterotypes. You’ve got taste and education. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

unstructured and less than committed

Courtesy of Warren.

My thought upon reading those words was pretty much similar to the first time I saw Animal House and heard Dean Wormer’s dressing down of Flounder – “Son, fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life”.

What lines have tapped your inner slacker?