Category: Fun

My most recent Obama moment

by philg

An acquaintance who is a Hilton Platinum member was able to give an unworthy person Hilton Gold status and she selected me. At the time, I said “Now I know how Barack Obama felt when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Here’s a more recent example of unearned status/credit:

Dear Philip,

I am seeking permission to use your quote from a Schinn article as an epigraph in my upcoming book, [title regarding children, climate change, and their tender feelings]

Thank you in advance for all you do,

[author]

“Children can be frightened if they don’t know there are adults who care about climate change and are trying to fix problems. It can help battle the sense of helplessness and powerlessness.” -Philip Greenspun (Shinn, 2020)

Regular readers of this blog know how important I think it is when a frenetically consuming American speaks sincerely about his/her/zir/their pure intention to “fix problems” and heal our beloved planet. The best way to raise critical awareness is to apply a climate change bumper sticker on a 6,000 lb. pavement-melting SUV.

The quote seems to originate in “Your Guide to Talking With Kids of All Ages About Climate Change”:

Wendy Greenspun, a New York–based clinical psychologist engaged in climate issues. … Children can be frightened if they don’t know there are adults who care about climate change and are trying to fix problems,” notes Greenspun. “It can help battle the sense of helplessness and powerlessness.” Let them know that there are, in fact, millions of adults who are working to protect kids, to answer our own questions about climate change, and to figure out the steps we will take to get to where we need to be, together.

Millions of adults working to protect kids and billions of adults working to burn fossil fuels as fast as time and budget permit!

I thought that readers would appreciate my moment of Climate Sensitivity Glory!

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Annals of English idioms

by philg

Conversation with a friend who immigrated to the U.S. to attend Harvard College:

  • Me: Do you and [Betsy] want to go for a walk in the woods tomorrow morning with Mindy the Crippler?
  • Him: I don’t know if she’s free.
  • Me: Can you ask?
  • Him: She’s working from home. I’m not allowed to go into her woman-hole.
  • Me: Take it from a native English speaker… that is probably not the idiom you’re looking for.

(It later transpired that his native-speaker daughter, whose room is upstairs, referred to mom’s ground floor home office as a “woman cave” and this had been slightly altered in the dad’s mind.)

Separately, we came up with a strategy in case any of the righteous townsfolk scolded us for failure to social distance. The response: “I’m sorry if you don’t approve of our lifestyle. My husband and I are accustomed to homophobia, but I think his sister here would learn from a dialog. Shall we head down to the rainbow chairs at the First Parish Church and discuss your feelings about same-sex relationships?”

Related:

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Samsung dryer drum cracked

by philg

The Samsung repair guy came into our pantry/laundry closet last week to fix the dryer. I cleared mountains of clutter away from the appliance, including 11 rolls of paper towels, 29 rolls of Charmin, 161 Ziploc bags, 33 squeeze bags of apple sauce, and a six-pack of individually packaged roasted chestnuts from China. I moved the quart of vanilla extract and the 3 lb. bag of walnuts that was resting on a pallet of Kirkland AA batteries. I slid the four tubes of Colgate back and asked if he needed a few of the ibuprofen pills from the yoked-together 500-pill bottles.

He said “Wow, I’ve never seen a household that was this well-stocked for a quarantine before.” I replied, “Quarantine? Those are just the leftovers from shopping at Costco in January, before we’d even heard of coronavirus.”

[For students of state-of-the-art appliances, this was an extra large gas dryer, 9.5 cu. ft. capacity, DV56H9100GW, purchased six years ago for $1,200. The theory was that we’d have to do laundry just one per week in our monster front-loading machines. In practice, we end up doing a lot of small loads and regular-sized machines would have worked just as well. Engineering the huge drum is apparently a challenge. The cracked drum generated a vibration, which took out some of the drive mechanism. The warranty period is two years and the cost of repairs is about $600, including two visits.]

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