Humor

Pavlov’s dogs, Fizzies, and my bladder

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Physiologist: One who studies how organisms function

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the Nobel Laureate of dog drool, was a physiologist, one who studies how organisms function. Physiologist rhymes with fizzie-ologist, one who studies the magic of Fizzies (“America’s Original Candy Beverage”). Yes, Fizzies are back, still fruity, still fizzy, and still effervescent. If you remember the lemony ones, you’re probably already drooling.

But let’s wipe our chins and get back to dog spit. Pavlov noticed two things: lab dogs drooled at the sight of food and soon drooled just looking at the lab technicians who brought the food. Putting two and two together, Pavlov understood that the dogs wanted to eat the technicians, so he began ringing a bell. This brought the dogs to the realization that if they ate the lab workers, there would be no one to bring them more food. This is where we get the idiom, saved by the bell. And that’s all you need to know about classical conditioning.

Fizzie-ologist: One who studies the magic of Fizzies

Although I would probably would have called the dogs’ behavior “anticipatory drooling,” Pavlov called it “psychic secretions.” I like this term very much. The next time someone in my family falls asleep on the couch and begins to drool on the cushions, I plan to ring a bell until he wakes up, and then say, “I don’t know what you were dreaming about but your psychic is secreting all over my cushions!”

All of this brings me to what I want to write about today: my miniature bladder, or as I affectionately call it, Buster. Pavlov’s dogs have nothing on Buster who can initiate psychic secretions after just hearing certain words. Buster’s favorite word is go. I have asked my husband not to scream, “Go, Pack, go!” during Packer games because I miss so much of the game that way. Thankfully, Buster is house-trained because merely thinking about going has him scratching on the bathroom door.

And that’s all I can write today. I really have to go now.

 

(Photo acknowledgements: Pavlov’s portrait is on loan from the Wikipedia Museum; the Fizzies picture was “borrowed” from http://cartoonsnap.blogspot.com)

A Word is Born

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I love the little book The Elements of Style for two reasons. First, it offers great writing advice, that I have often been tempted to put into practice. But more importantly, the author’s name is Strunk. If I had not been blinded by the kindness, faithfulness, funniness, and handsomeness of my husband, I would have married someone with a more interesting last name, something like Strunk.  Teacher Strunk has such a nice sound, although if you say it very fast several times, it begins to sound like teacher’s drunk.

Ancestry.com says the name comes from Germany, the place that also gave us Colonel Klink. Another name I wish was mine.  The Germans are also responsible for the pattern of vowel change in some of our irregular verbs like drink, drank, drunk and shrink, shrank, shrunk. But whatever happened  to the trio of  think, thank, thunk? Down in Texas we thank about things like that, and when we notice that we don’t think anymore, we say, who woulda thunk it?

But back to that tantalizing name, Strunk. Why has no one coupled the content of the book with the author’s name and coined a verb to describe the act of revising and perfecting a composition?

(strink – /strɪŋk/ verb, strank (past tense), strunk (past participle) — to apply the principles of The Elements of Style to a manuscript or composition)

Yearstricken: (passing the essay back to the student) You need to strink this.

Student: But teacher, I strank it last night.

Yearstricken: (growing more alliterative by the moment) Strink harder! Only the student who has strunk sufficiently succeeds and scores an A.

Thunk! The sound of me coining a word.

Pronunciation is Everything #1

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Have you ever had an out-of-body experience? Me, neither. But I’ve had several out-of-WORLD experiences, in which my body has been lifted high above the WORLD (aka America) and been transported to places far, far away. Oddly, just as in out-of-body experiences, along the way I have been probed by aliens with blank stares, large hands, and wands (aka TSA).

Some of these experiences lasted a long time. Not the probing, the being in places far away. Places where people do not speak English, like Japan. At first, to make myself understood, I tried speaking English slowly. People did not understand me, so I put on my American thinking cap and started shouting in English. LIKE THIS! Finally, in desperation and because I really needed to find a toilet, I learned the language.

Now I can irritate people with puns and wordplay in two languages.

Once upon a time in that land far, far away, some people who publish a small bilingual magazine in Tokyo were filled with desperation over how to fill the back pages of their magazine. I appeared and offered them six cartoons, which they published. Nothing happened after that. And none of us lived happily ever after; they still had back pages to fill, and I continued on my lonely quest to find desperate publishers.

The cartoon below is a play on the English word man. If you use the Roman alphabet, you can write the Japanese word for Y10,000 as man.  The “a”  is pronounced like “ah.” (Ten thousand yen is currently about $128.)

This is my attempt to fill the back pages of my blog.

A Word from the WORLD Champions

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Yes, the Green Bay Packers are the WORLD Champions. You may have seen them carried on the shoulders of all those Cheeseheads, looking like so many hors d’oeuvres, very large and helmeted hors d’oeuvres.

 

I find it necessary to capitalize WORLD, in order to emphasize the importance of all things American. (America, We are the World!) We have just finished the WORLD Series in which all the teams in the world competed. Sadly, the world is messed up and Texas lost.

 

What in the world, you ask, does this have to do with anything? Well, I feel sorry for those others, the not-the-world people and those places where they huddle together, places they call countries.

 

We took the best word, and they get the leftovers: planet, globe, cosmos, creation, and universe. Try plugging those in front of champions. See why it makes me sad?

 

We have two choices. First, we can change the word WORLD to U.S.A. or North American (Canada and Mexico don’t count, remember?). Or, we can subjugate and dominate all those other people and their countries until they are part of our new WORLD order.

 

You may be asking, “Is this one of those tricky multiple-choice type quizzes that teachers love to give?” Of course not. Everybody knows it would cost way too much to make new t-shirts, beer mugs, and pennants with the new logo. Plus, world domination is way more fun.

Something's here that is not the world! I've given you some hints.

 

Not enough hands to cover all those huddling places.

Sadly, One of My Students is Failing

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First, it’s important that you understand that as a teacher I try my hardest to help my students succeed.

Yesterday, one of my top students asked me what I was going to do for Halloween. I told him that I planned on staying home and passing out candy. Then he asked if I was going to dress up. “No,” I said, “every Halloween is the same; I always just go as myself.”

Later in the hall, I overhead this once bright student tell another student, “Teacher goes as a witch every Halloween.”

It makes me sad to see a student’s grade plummet like that.

Thankfully, I had lots of chocolate at home to console myself.

 

Tears for the Student Who is Failing

I Can Bring Manufacturing Back! Now With Bacon!

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Geniousness runs in (from?) our family. I, more than the others (whom I still love dearly), have blinding insights. How do I know that? When I share these insights, people close their eyes until I’m done speaking. (Note to reader: What follows is brilliance at it’s shiniest: if you close your eyes, you will miss the opportunity of a lifetime!) (Note to self: lay off the parentheses.)

After watching this video on TED about making plastic from waste materials and reading this article about harvesting stem cells from fat, I realized that I could bring manufacturing back to America.

Here is my big idea: Stem Cells from Waist Products!

I will build extra-large factories with individual work stations equipped with a recliner, remote control, large screen TV, and laptop.  Workers will have unlimited access to tastes-just-like-real-food stuff (now with extra bacon!). Their job will consist of just sitting and manufacturing future stem cells. Thanks to the food industry and their liberal use of corn syrup in 99.9% of all of those products they like to call food, we can create abdominal fat faster than you can spell triglycerides.

How are these jobs different from most other jobs? Well, sitting around in work stations talking, watching YouTube, and checking Facebook every 15 minutes will actually be in the job description. And, hold onto your love handles, it’s a renewable resource! (Look at me, all green and sustainable.)

Right now I’m working on some recruitment slogans:

  • Come Grow With Us
  • We Let Everything Go to Waist  – That’s the Way We Roll
  • Manufacturing is Back and It’s Big – You Can Be, Too
  • Flesh Out Your Future
  • Clean Your Plate and Dominate
  • Our Employees Have Nothing To Lose and Everything to Gain

I could go on, but I see that some of you have your eyes closed.

Lovesome Words: Feckless and Reckless

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Searching but not in the junk drawer

Yearstricken:  I’m feeling feckless these days.

Husband: Have you looked in the junk drawer in the kitchen?

Yearstricken: You think it means I’ve lost something called a feck?

Husband: What else would it mean?

Yearstricken: Didn’t we have a similar conversation last year when I said your driving was reckless?

Husband: Yes, and I still can’t understand why you were upset. Most women would be happy that their husbands drive without wrecks. And why are you looking in the knife drawer? I said the junk drawer.

 

feckless: ineffective; incompetent

reckless: utterly unconcerned about the consequences of some action; without caution

Why I Will Never Say “Oh Shoot!” Again

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While in exile, Ovid the Roman poet wrote:

 

The country here is grotesque, the people savage, the weather awful, the customs crude, and the language a garble. . . . [The people] all carry knives at their belts and you never know whether they’re going to greet you or stab you. . . .

 

Like you, when I first read this, I thought, “Whoa. He was exiled here in the States?” But as you know, just as many of his works are no longer extant, he himself is no longer extant. And considering the number of angry people out there, it’s amazing how many of us are still extant.

 

People seem to be getting stabbier. So you’ve got to wonder why here in Wisconsin, we are going to be allowed to carry concealed weapons at our belts or in our pockets or, for larger people, in our coin slots. November 1st we can all start carrying things that make us more confident and sure that we are right, and if you think differently, would you mind stepping over here. I have something to show you that will help you see my point: a gun, or as I like to think of it, a consensus builder. We are the 49th state to get in on all the fun of being not only belligerent, but also deadly. (The very reason I miss Texas so much.)

 

We are going to need new ways to describe new behaviors. Road rage is not enough. To save valuable time for the psychiatrists who will be defending all those shooters who were drunk and temporarily insane, and also were traumatized as children by clowns with inappropriately sized shoes (and, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, balloons!), I have created a list. I’m using bullets because that’s so apropos, and also fitting:

 

  • Avenue anger
  • Boulevard blowup
  • Freeway fury
  • Interchange ire
  • Underpass umbrage
  • Expressway exasperation
  • Street heat
  • Highway hotheadedness
  • Path provocation
  • Bicycling belligerence
  • Overpass outburst
  • Sidewalk surliness
  • Hall huffing
  • Roundabout rampage
  • Footpath frenzy
  • Pew pushing
  • Mall malice
  • Blog bulleting

Concealed weapon and concealed weaponer

F-word Fatigue (Part Two)

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The F-word is getting old

When the f-word rode into town in the early 1960s on his Harley, with his leather jacket, and fresh tattoos, he was everybody’s darling. People just couldn’t get enough of him. He could take people’s breath away just by showing up in a book or on a stage and flexing his muscles.

 

Now he looks a lot like the late Elvis. The extra-wide seat on his Harley isn’t extra enough, and his skull tattoo that used to scare little old ladies is starting to look like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Worse yet, have you noticed how often he brings his mother with him when he makes his appearances? I mean, what other curse word does that? I can just hear all the other tough words saying, “Hey, Mr. F-word, where’s your mommy today?”

 

Eventually people are going to tire of him, and stop inviting him over. I won’t feel sorry for him though. He has a cozy retirement home waiting for him over at the OED.

F-word Fatigue (Part One)

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Half a century ago, the Boomers (at that time more like little Poppers) came up with two culture-changing ideas: let it all hang out and tell it like it is. People today take this first idea way too literally. Have you seen how much is hanging out of people these days? We’re starting to look like a nation of vending machines what with our front and back coin slots.

 

We Poppers were young, hip, and oh-so-uncensored when we began telling it like it was. We needed the f-word in our shock and awe campaign to overthrow the establishment and bring peace, love, and drugs to the world. And did we ever bring the drugs. If you have enough of them, you really don’t care about the other two. Mission accomplished.

 

So, the f-word. Go here and type it in the search bar. You’ll see that after a bout of popularity in the 1800s, it went bankrupt, started hanging around sleazy bars, singing for food and sleeping in dark alleys. Now, it’s a celebrity, the kind who is famous for being famous. The kind whose face and body parts are plastered on every magazine in the checkout counter and who keeps appearing on the front pages of newspapers who should know better.

 

That’s why I have f-word fatigue. Every other noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, and interjection is being replaced by some form of this word. (Thankfully, no one uses it as a preposition or conjunction yet, but please keep this a secret, or it might change.)

 

In the future, will we all speak F, formerly known as English?  Or as they say in F: In the f, will f all f F, f-ly f-ed as English? This will cause people to run around saying WTF all the time, much like they do already. Maybe the future is already here and I just need new glasses.

 

Over half a million words are languishing in dictionaries, waiting for someone to adopt them. Do your part, take some home, put those puppies on a leash, and let them chew somebody’s leg or pee on their shoes. Or take pictures of them and post them on the internet. The f-word is a dog that has had its day. It’s time to put it down.