Saturday Grab Bag of Trivialities

It's entirely possible that you guys don't pay much attention to the ads on this blog (though clicking on sponsors is always appreciated!) and of course they rotate randomly so the ones I see aren't necessarily the ones you see. But I had a good laugh this week after my Wednesday post went up. I was scrolling and scanning to see how the final layouts looked, make sure I hadn't accidentally smashed three paragraphs into a wall of text, &c. The words all looked fine, but the graphics were telling their own story: in between Wednesday's picture of a giant explosion in Neo-Tokyo (from Akira), and Tuesday's picture of the demon Chernobog (from Fantasia), was an ad for "Keeping Up With the Kardashians". One of these things ... is exactly in line with the other two, honestly.

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Here's a little something to tie together two different things I mentioned this week: when my Very Little Bro took his leave early Monday morning, he accidentally left behind the beer from the previous night’s cookout. My wife and I had expected him to fetch a six-pack or maybe two, but he returned from Total with no fewer than 24 beers, including multiple six-packs as well as several mixed-and-matched singles. Clearly this was far more than four adults (including one who is currently nursing) would drink in one sitting, and I fully anticipated the leftovers would be packed up and gone the next day. We actually noticed the forgotten beers soon after VLB and his girlfriend had left, and we texted him just in case they hadn’t gotten very far, maybe had stopped off for coffee, and wanted to come back and retrieve them. But my brother only texted back “Our loss is your gain” and kept on driving. Presumably he and his girlfriend wanted no delays at all getting out of town and on the highway, in the hopes that they might condense the return roadtrip on Monday to less than the 12-hour epic length of Friday’s. (They got their wish, mostly because we helped them figure out an alternate route that avoided the dread congestion of I-95.)

Anyway, we had all this extra beer lying around on Monday night, yet it remained untouched. Why? Because my certification exam was the next day, and I was too petrified to drink. I didn’t want to oversleep the next day, or feel in the slightest bit off my game, and I did not discount the possibility that even one beer might have disastrous repercussions. Thus I abstained, and clearly (given my narrowly passing score) it’s probably for the best that I did.

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From the Vanity Plates Archive: The other day I was driving to pick up the little guy from daycare and I saw a car with tags that read IFPTHNQ. Forthwith, a demonstration of how hopelessly warped my thought process usually is: my initial attempt at interpreting the tag started with the assumption that the last four letters, THNQ, were a condensed form of "thank you". And of course by definition a vanity tag is all about the ego of the driver, so a lead-off I is pretty self-explanatory. FP, though ... I immediately heard this in my head as potty humor. Like some weird combination of Andy Kaufman's Foreign Man character mixed with the Jerky Boys' Paco, asking to go to the bathroom by saying something like "I heff pee, thenk you?"

So how many seconds should I admit that it took me before I realized that the tag was actually saying "If P, then Q"? Furthermore, should I admit at all that when I was in college I actually took an entire semester-long course on symbolic logic? To be fair, I did pretty terribly in that class. But I really should have realized that the dude in the little beater with an Autobot sticker on the back gate would probably go with a programming reference on his license plates.