To all the oil companies out there with a world to impress
It’s easy to do, just follow these steps:
- Spill some oil in the Gulf
- Put that oil in a box
- Pump that oil to a ship
And that’s the way you do it….
Category: Amusing (if only to me) Page 2 of 7
Thank you for randomly clicking on my name. (Perhaps you enjoyed my Gravatar.)
WordPress is great, isn’t it? It allows me to blather inanely about a wide variety of topics without having to upload an HTML file in an FTP program every time I get the urge to write. (That’s how this site used to work.)
Anyway, enjoy your visit.
We’ve all heard the New Age-y proverb about the Chinese word for “crisis” being a combination of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” (I just ran across the canard in the 2001 CLCV Scorecard [good luck finding it online; it seems to be long gone] and my skepticism was immediately piqued.)
According to a Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, it’s pretty much bullshit.
On his web page entitled “danger + opportunity ≠ crisis,” Professor Victor H. Mair writes:
The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. For example, one of the most popular websites centered on this mistaken notion about the Chinese word for crisis explains: “The top part of the Chinese Ideogram for ‘Crisis’ is the symbol for ‘Danger’: The bottom symbol represents ‘Opportunity’.”
He goes on to explain the three fatal errors in this misconception:
“sensonotoople”*.
*A failed attempt someone made to register for a site I administer, in order to spam it
While spring cleaning these last couple weekends, I ran across the brief journal I kept during my high school trip to Germany. On that four-week trip I had quite a number of experiences, some of which helped shape my life even to this day. For example, in Munich, I drank significant quantities of alcohol for the first time, and the following day I celebrated my birthday at what was left of the Dachau concentration camp.
On July 4, 1992, I wrote:
The next day [June 28] was my birthday. We went to Dachau. Dachau: the first Nazi concentration camp of WWII. A great birthday tourist attraction. Actually it was an amazing experience that affected me profoundly.
Sadly, I never expanded on that, because it was in a catch-up entry six days after the fact. Alas, I used the next 50 words to detail what I drank that night and the names of the Americans with whom we partied in Munich; considering I was a newly minted 17-year-old, that fact is not terribly surprising, though somewhat disappointing. (I had spent half of the previous couple weeks’ entries agonizing over my attraction to the girl whose family was hosting me. I think I was mad at myself for having such normal priorities.)
Later in the same entry, I ran across something interesting I had almost completely forgotten about:
In Oberammergau I went inside the Passionspielhaus (the Passion Play Theatre). It was amazing. In 2000 I will come back to see the Passion Play. (Done every 10 years.)
Ah, yes… the Oberammergau Passion Play. Every ten years, literally half of the population of the village of Oberammergau performs in a play about the life of Jesus that runs all summer. Since 1634, after the village survived the plague, the play has had 41 seasons.
1634.
If I were superstitious, I’d think I was good luck for Ben Sheets — at least when he’s new to a Major League Baseball franchise.
I attended his first win in an Oakland A’s uniform tonight — a relatively tidy 6-2 defeat of the sad, sad Baltimore Orioles.
What I had completely forgotten until now was that, just less than 9 years ago, I was at the game in which he got his first win as a Milwaukee Brewer (and, incidentally, in his major league career).
The A’s and the Brewers are the only major league teams for whom Sheets has played. A bit of a strange coincidence, nothing more. Something to remark upon that still seems just shy of remarkable.
Geoff Jenkins also hit three home runs in that game in Milwaukee on April 28, 2001, which also marked the first time I went to Miller Park (in its inaugural season). I still have the cap I bought that day. It’s pretty nasty by now, though.
Seriously, it is important to fill out your Census form. Or, if you need a job, work for them.
I happened to like the fact that they have logos available that feature a variety of languages, including German. I guess there are still some people that natively speak a form of German in the US, but not many.
This is one thing I did the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, during the week in which I was failing to clean my apartment.
I had a bit of a brainstorm after washing out this Kikkoman soy sauce bottle. I always have a few soy sauce packets around left over from Suruki’s take-out sushi (it’s usually packaged with two packets but I only ever use one). I never really know what to do with them other than toss them in the fridge (or add them to the pile of random detritus on the coffee table). But one of the things that always amuses me (if only me) is the strident command on the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle to REFILL it ONLY WITH KIKKOMAN. (I used it for homemade vinaigrette for a while. Sorry, Kikkoman.)
The rest is documented photographically.
This payphrase thing is ridiculous. Who came up with this crap?
As if I want to pay for my Amazon purchases by entering the phrase “Jason’s Romantic Mistakes.” Are they kidding? These are some other winning suggestions:
- Jason’s Implied Trip
- Jason’s Idealistic Trip
- Jason’s Eccentric Personality
- Political Misunderstandings
- Jason’s Extreme Pedantry (fair enough)
- Jason’s Unconventional Work
- Jason’s Precise Function
- Jason’s Only Function (seriously?)
- Jason’s Buoyant Manner
- Jason’s Exotic Character
- Sanguine Countenance
- Forceful Eagerness
- Maintenance Person
- Eager Swell
- Jason’s Rebellious Lifestyle
- Unruly Consumption
- Jason’s Personal Norm
- Moderate Pals
- Cellular Personality
- Possibly Personality
- Jason’s Hopeful Poems
etc., etc. Seriously, what?
UPDATE: As of 2/20/2012, Amazon Payphrases were (perhaps predictably) no more.
You may or may not be aware that some of the hippie types in Northern California are not fans of common expressions that involve cruelty to animals. The most common expression I’ve heard transformed since moving to the charming little enclave known as the Bay is “to kill two birds with one stone.”
Not cool, not cool at all: Better to say (and I’ve heard people say these unironically–and I must admit I have used one of them) “feed two birds with one seed” or “free two birds with one key.” (I just heard someone attempt to use “pet two rabbits with one hand” the other day, but that seems to miss the mark somewhat.)
I have my own modest proposal, which all must indulge since it is in fact my birthday. I used the phrase “the straw that broke the camel’s back” on Friday (for reasons I won’t get into here). I propose a new, cruelty-free variant: “the plaster that set the camel’s full-body cast.”