(Listening to: Information Overload by Living Colour; guitarist Vernon Reid was born August 22, 1958.)
This week, someone at work asked me what the derivation of the term “golden sombrero” in baseball was. I knew what it MEANT, but why that term? It’s hockey’s fault, according to the Wikipedia:
“In baseball, the golden sombrero is a slang term used to describe a player’s dubious feat of striking out four times in a single game… The term derives from “hat trick”, a hockey term for three goals that was applied to baseball as a term for three strikeouts. Since four is bigger than three, the rationale was that a four-strikeout performance should be referred to by a bigger hat, such as a sombrero.” There’s more about this topic here.
One of my racquetball buds was trying, and failing to tell this joke:
A man went into his doctor’s office to have a vasectomy, wearing a tuxedo. The doctor asked, “Why are you wearing a tuxedo to your operation?” The man replied, “I figure if I’m going to BE impotent, I’m gonna LOOK impotent.” (Say it aloud – it makes more sense.)
Anyway, he was failing in his joke telling because he couldn’t remember the word vasectomy. It happens – the word just doesn’t come. He was trying to describe it and said, “You know that thing that you have to kill your sex drive.” And while we got what he meant, another of my racquetball guys quickly noted that, in fact, a vasectomy doesn’t kill the sex drive.
One of the things I need to relearn again and again (and again and again)is the fact that what I think passes for “Everybody knows that!” doesn’t necessarily apply.
Case in point: last week, the racquetball guys were BSing, as they are wont to do, giving each other a hard time, when one said, “Well, even a busted clock is right twice a day.” Another of the guys, who was in his 30s, laughed heartily at this, so hard, in fact, that I said, “Surely you’ve heard that one before?” He laughed, “No, I haven’t. That’s really funny!” O.K., then.
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I was reading the articles about the new Census data released this week, which the Albany mayor has been complaining about an undercounting of the city’s population. I don’t really understand the problem, because the “group quarters” (dorms, group homes, prisons) are not counted, and weren’t scheduled to be counted. They won’t be counted in the future either if the Census Bureau budget gets cut, which may very well happen, based on preliminary legislation.
One of the pieces that I read showed the growth as a percentage of white, non-Hispanic people in only two states, West Virginia and Hawaii. In the latter case, white people are a growing minority population.
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In some music exchange I was in last year or early this year, someone included Led Zeppelin’s The Lemon Song. This piece touches on my general ambivalence about uncredited stealing by the group, though in fact I have at least a half dozen of their albums.
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Mark Evanier posted a video link about Post Crispy Critters, a cereal from the 1960s, and even before the video ran, I remembered the punchline: “the one and only cereal that comes in the shape of animals!”, music and all. What an extraordinary waste of my brain power.
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GUIDANCE FOR AIRLINE PASSENGERS from DHS. In its latest airline security restriction, the FAA has banned all people from flights. Which is the satire?