Monthly Archives: January 2011

Snow day #2

5 Replies

Good. Now I will be forced to bury myself in DT prep all day. But first, a couple of Do Not Go Here sites (again, I disavow any responsibility for your wasted morning):

1. Letters of Note is a huge collection of actual correspondence from various famous people, photographed and submitted. Very interesting. Some are hilarious (make sure to read the “Tiger Oil” memos), others heartbreaking; they’re all quite revealing. Prepare to waste some time. It’s Angry Birds all over again.

2. I saw a link to this site on the Facebook page of one of my former students. I laughed. Surviving the World will spin some clock for you, Jimbo. Guaranteed. If you can get through all 855 “lessons,” you have my respect (I especially like Lesson #49, heh).

There. That ought to get you started on your Wednesday. Me? I’m off to the kitchen for some breakfast, then to the basement with my tap shoes. Maybe I should wait till the Thriller wakes up, though.

~

~

Nah.

:-)

Late = Hate

4 Replies

I mean, I get up at 5 a.m. every day, fuh cripesake. You’d think I could get out of here on time. Truth is, there’s just too much I want to get done in the early mornings, and I end up trying to do it all, at the expense of my getting-ready time. So now I dodge the raindrops in the shower and schlep the makeup kit to school with me so I can finish getting ready — hopefully before anyone sees me without my warpaint on. It’s bad enough to be seen with it on, Lord knows.

The custodian who vacuums the carpet in the mornings has seen me without makeup — something I rarely allow humans to experience — and survived. Barely. But he’s old like me and likely understands.

And now, fiends, I must fly. Please leave an articulate and compendious greeting for my lunch break.

FO

WotD

7 Replies

New year, new category. Word of the Day! I’m excited.

I could conceivably do this post *every* day, but I imagine I already annoy too many of you with the whole werd-nerd penchant. I also considered “Word of the Week,” but I don’t want to be chained to any particular subject on a regular basis. So this is my compromise: “word of the day, whatever day it happens to be.”

Today’s WotD: uncanny. According to Harper-Collins, it is “characterized by apparently supernatural wonder, horror[.]” American Heritage lists the definition as “Peculiarly unsettling, as if of supernatural origin or nature; eerie.”

It’s a fun one because of its openness to context. It can be used in both positive and negative lights:

She was a girl of uncanny beauty.
He bore an uncanny resemblance to Jeffrey Dahmer.

I personally like 19th-century psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch’s take on its meaning: a psychological instance where something is familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.

Uncomfortably strange. That sums up my feelings about how short was the time span from the last time I had to put on tap shoes, to the current time. Uncanny, I tell ya.

Happy Monkday. Pretend you’re fine with it.

:-)

Ouija or wouldn’t ya?

9 Replies

Good thing I’ve been up since 4; lots of time to read. :-/

I don’t know why, but as kids, we loved to scare each other. Sitting around a campfire telling scary stories, sitting under a blanket with a flashlight while telling scary stories, and sitting in a circle at a Halloween party telling scary stories are all part of my past. Remember chanting I believe in Mary Worth in front of the mirror, then running out of the room shrieking? I do. And I think it scared me even more because I was the little hanger-on in a group made up of my older sister and her friends. Crazy times, I tell ya.

Notice the city and state in the fine print? Well now.

We were never allowed to own one of these, but believe it or not, Parker Brothers manufactured Ouija boards from 1966 – 1999. [The creepy slogan, “It’s only a game — isn’t it?“, is honestly quite clever.] I can’t remember who had one, but I sat next to someone and watched him/her play once. The player moves a planchette around the board after asking questions, supposedly guided by the “oracle.” Questions are answered yes or no, or they are spelled out letter by letter.

“Ouija,” arguably taken from the combined French and German words for “yes,” first appeared on the entertainment novelty scene in the late 1800s. The history of the game can be found at The Museum of Talking Boards website — home of the ooky planchette cursor.

All *very* important questions.

Of course, you can’t have a cool new naughty toy without some puffed up Poindexter throwing cold water on everyone’s fun. From flat-out calling the Ouija boards satanic tools to yammering about the ideomotor effect, naysayers labeled the game — and anything claiming to have the slightest connection to divination — a hoax.

Well yeah, but…what about Jumanji? How cool was that?

Can you see Hasbro hawking Ouija boards nowadays, when everything’s supposed to be happy and cute and super-positive, and nobody ever shoots the bad guy anymore? Big fat chance.

Did you ever play with a Ouija board, or play the Jumanji game? What creepy stories can you share?