Hail and farewell Terry Pratchett. Born April 28th, 1948, died March 12, 2015. Libraries were made for books like his. It’s checkouts all the way down.
And here’s one more book–the back cover of my copy of Good Omens given to me by my friend James. Pratchett stands under a winged hourglass. Tempus fugit, but there’s always time for books.
When you’re at the grocery store do you ever keep walking past the same person again and again so you feel like you’re unintentionally stalking them? When that happens to me I assume we’re both shopping for the same thing, so when they’re not looking I steal their cart. I figure it saves me a lot of time. And when I get to the register and the cashier asks, “Did you find everything you were looking for?” I say, “I’ll know when I get home.”
Pansies are tender, delicate flowers that must be treated with the utmost care. That’s why it’s an insult to call someone a “pansy”, right? And yet pansies are the only flowers I see that thrive in the winter. They seem to love the cold.
Weird fact: the name “pansy” derives from the same French root as “pensive”. I have no idea why because pansies always seem pretty relaxed, especially when the rest of us are freezing. At one time pansies were called “heartsease”. It was probably changed because that sounds too much like “heart seize”, and 
nomenclature is very important in the flower world. Nobody wants to grow something that could be mistaken for coronary thrombosis.
The Oxford English Dictionary says another definition for “pansy” is “A male homosexual; an effeminate man; a weakling.” That’s supposed to be an insult. Calling someone a flower that thrives in bitter cold that kills most other plants sounds like a compliment to me.
All those who recognized the title as a line spoken by the Black Knight in Monty Python & The Holy Grail ask yourself: which would you rather be?
Some one-legged creature crossed the snow here. Was it a monster? A hideously deformed being? An alien? An atavism? A kid on a pogo stick? And is it in any way related to the great Devon mystery of 1855?
We may never know.
Feel free to add your own thoughts, ideas, musings, speculations, extrapolations, considerations, deviations, palpitations, renovations, innovations, pollinations, excavations, abominations, characterizations, fictionalizations, retranslations, or other assorted cogitations here.
Happy birthday Rik Mayall, born March 7th, 1958.
Taken from us too soon on June 9th, 2014.
Dear E-mail sender,
Thank you for what I think is a quick reply. It’s hard to tell because you didn’t include my original message in your reply. You also seem to have replied from a different address than the one I contacted. This made searching my Sent folder useless. Your terse response was also admirable in its ability to straddle the vague and specific: “Yes, they are available. Please confirm and I’ll send you an invoice.” I know exactly what that means. The problem is it could apply to about a dozen different emails I’ve sent in the past month, most of which, as far as I can tell, haven’t been answered yet. You really seem to have thought of everything. If I wanted to spread paralyzing confusion around the world I’d certainly follow your example.
I didn’t even know not including the original message in an email reply was an option anymore. If I 
wanted to turn it off I’m not sure how I’d do it. It seems like including a copy of the message you’re replying to is such standard email etiquette that I can’t remember the last time I got a reply that didn’t include my message. It wasn’t the default back when I first started using email, but that was a time when everybody was still getting used to it and most people thought they’d be using their AOL address forever. It was a time when email was so new and so strange to some that I sent an email to a company that had just gotten it, and they printed it, typed their reply at the bottom, put it a stamped envelope, and mailed it to me. They didn’t quite grasp the concept of the “Reply” button, but at least they were nice enough to include my original message with their reply so I knew what they were talking about. And then we moved into the time when people would send ridiculously long emails which would prompt ridiculously long replies with the occasional <snip> but mostly consisting of the original message broken up into parts with each section replied to separately. And every line of the original message would have a > next to it, which always kind of bugged me. In math class > meant “less than”, and I didn’t like the idea that someone else’s message was less than mine, but that’s another story.
How do I even know this is a legitimate reply? Yes, it does sound like a reply to something I sent, but 
the more I think about it the more this sounds like it might be some kind of phishing technique. And I don’t mean the ‘90’s band, which seems to have gone the way of printing emails. Why is it called “phishing” and not “fishing”? The idea is to hook a sucker, right? When I got my first computer I knew there were people called “phone phreaks”. The “ph-“ there made sense because it was visually as well as aurally alliterative. All I really knew about phone phreaks was they had ways of getting out of paying for long distance calls. This was a time when “long distance” meant the next county over, and the rates were pretty high, two things which seem to have gone the way of AOL addresses. Not paying for long distance never interested me, because there wasn’t anyone that far away I wanted to talk to. If I’d had that power I would have been too tempted to do weird things with it. Somewhere in Utah a phone would ring. A woman would pick it up. We didn’t have caller ID back in those days so she wouldn’t know it was me, and I wouldn’t bother with introductions because she wouldn’t know who I was anyway. “Hi,” I’d say. “I’m doing a report on your state for school. So can you see the Great Salt Lake from your house?” 
Conclusion: Does this worm make my hand look fat?
I was walking home when a small dog came running to the edge of his yard. “Bark! Bark! Bark!” I stopped and waved at him and said “Hello!” He stopped then turned and looked back at his house. I swear I could hear him speaking.
“Do I know this schmuck? Somebody come and help me out here.”
I’m not the only one who hears things like that, right?
Sleeping late for me means staying in bed until around 8:00am, unlike when I was younger when it usually meant getting up around the crack of noon. And that’s okay, especially on Sundays, because 9:00am is when my local NPR affiliate broadcasts Says You!
If you’ve never heard it Says You! is a word game where two teams of three panelists have to “define and divine” various words or phrases and work out other wordy puzzles. They also face off against each other in the bluffing rounds, where one team gives two fake and one real definitions for an obscure word and the other team has to guess the right one.
My favorite moment from the show was when one of the bluffing round words was “bream”. I was yelling at my radio “IT’S A FISH! HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW THAT?”
At the center of it all was the host Richard Sher. Sometimes it’s startling to see someone you’ve only heard on the radio. You have an image that goes with the voice, but which turns out to be very different in reality. Sher, for me, was not one of those cases. He looked exactly like he sounded. He sounded like that favorite uncle who’s easy smile and kind eyes hide an eccentric sense of humor. He died February 9th, 2015 after a fight with colon cancer and leptomeningitis. The show will go on, but I’ll miss that voice.
Regular listeners know he ended most shows by saying it was best “when we get your comments, when we get your suggestions, but most of all when you show up.”
Hail and farewell Mr. Sher. Thank you for showing up.