11/26/02’s illustrious band:

8-Minute Milestone

Brought to you by Amy 2.0 and the Soup Group.

How lame is my out-of-office social life? My social life is so lame that my friends and colleagues at work (with whom I meet for soup every Thursday lunchtime) are taking up a collection to get me a date. That’s right, they’re willing to pay cold, hard cash to get my hat thrown into the dating ring.

The plan is for the Soup Group to sponsor my enrollment in a speed dating program. Speed dating is a relatively new phenomenon in which about 10 men and 10 women meet in a central location. The women sit down at tables, and each man sits down opposite a woman. Ding! Let the dating games begin! You spend 7 or 8 minutes talking with your partner, then the bell rings again and the “date” is over. Men get up, women remain seated. You get a couple minutes to make notes on the date you just had, then the men rotate to new partners and you go again. Lather, rinse, repeat until you’ve dated all the available partners in the room. (This used to be considered questionable behavior where I come from, but I guess times change.)

No last names or contact information are to be exchanged at the speed dating event. A day or two afterward, the service contacts each participant to report which of their dates wants to see them again. After that, you’re on your own.

The speed dating services assure participants that they don’t accept just any application; they do some pre-screening first. So hopefully I won’t find myself facing an axe murderer. Speed dating is supposed to be a fun and safe way for busy single professionals to meet potential dating partners without having to hang out in bars. Events are usually organized by age group, so I’ll be meeting people in the 30- to 40-year-old range.

My friends are sending me on this adventure because they’re (A) curious about the speed-dating phenomenon and (B) convinced it’s time for me to get back in the game. This Thanksgiving marks two glorious years of post-marital freedom for me, and the high soup-sipping council has decided that I am now fully rested and ready to tackle a new challenge. I can get you the ringleader’s address if you want to send in a contribution to the cause. At last count she already had enough pledges to sign me up and keep an organizer's fee for herself. Uh, thanks?

These are the same friends, mind you, who recently attempted to marry me off to a valued vendor to save him from being deported. This guy Lars, whose products we like to feature in our magazine, is Danish, and his visa was about to expire. So El Queso Grande and the Flaxmaster conspired to e-mail him my photo along with a tongue-in-cheek assurance that my marrying him could be considered part of my job — “other duties as assigned.” They must have sent the wrong photo, though, because we haven’t heard from him since. Should this worry me?

I think some of us need new hobbies.

OK, I’m headed south for the Thanksgiving weekend. Wish me good weather and good gravy; at least half your wishes are guaranteed to come true.

11/25/02’s illustrious band:

Bad Chili

Brought to you by Senor Editor and Skeeter.

Last week Senor and Skeeter and I were thinking up good excuses for playing hooky from work. We touched on all the usual ones -- car trouble, pet problems, dental appointments -- and agreed that while these will do, one excuse trumps them all: “bad chili.”

With the other stories, you might be asked for further information and find yourself spontaneously elaborating upon your fiction, perhaps not very well. However, if you call in to work and say you got hold of some bad chili, the conversation is over. No one wants to know more. It’s code for “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and everyone is happy to play along.

I know many couples have private signals, either verbal or gestural, that indicate “I want to leave this boring party now” or “You’re doing that thing again. Stop it.” The ex and I had one we used when talking on the phone from work, an everyday phrase that didn’t reveal the personal nature of the conversation. If either of us worked “standing up” into a sentence, it meant that the boss had popped in and we had to get off the phone immediately, no questions asked.

With my friend the late Ms. Aardvark, who in pre-e-mail days used to call me long-distance from her job, the code in that situation was “Can I get your fax number?” She’d even go so far as to write down a string of digits, usually my phone number, and politely end the call. A couple times my phone rang again a few minutes later, with the telltale sound of a fax transmission coming over the line; Big Brother was watching with an eagle eye, and she was obliged to play out the scene.

I’ve even heard of friends working under tight scrutiny sending e-mail messages consisting of white text on a white background. The words become visible only when selected or highlighted by the mouse (try it!) and therefore can’t be read by nosy coworkers or hovering supervisors. That’s not quite code, but still an example of private communication. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!

Got code? Share!

11/22/02’s illustrious band:

Hapax Legomenon

Brought to you by the A Word A Day service, www.wordsmith.org.

(HAY-paks li-GOM-uh-non) noun, plural hapax legomena: A word or form that has only one recorded use. [From Greek hapax (once) + legomenon, from legein (to say).]

Example: “Linda Tripp, the faithless friend, says to Monica Lewinsky about the President, ‘Right now I think he's a schwonk.’ This qualifies as what biblical exegetes call a hapax legomenon, the only known use in print, which makes it difficult to define.”

William Safire, Where's the Poetry?, The New York Times, Nov 1, 1998.

Hapax legomena pose particular problems for Biblical scholars and other translators, who see a unique word in only one context instead of many and therefore have fewer clues about its meaning. They must try to determine the word’s origin or derivation, or examine similar words in other languages for guidance.

I think this is just a very scholarly way of referring to stuff that’s totally made-up.

On a somewhat unrelated note, if you want to see the coolest online word toy ever, check out the Visual Thesaurus. Enter a word under the twinkly box at left, press “Click to launch,” and watch a whole bouquet of related terms sprout around your chosen one. Click on any of them for a new bloom. Point at the little circle-buds for extra information. Word nerd paradise (the technical term for which is nerdvana)!

That’s-so-90s aside: When I spellchecked this document, the checker snagged on “Lewinsky,” and I had the very great pleasure of clicking “Ignore.” Don’t you wish we could do that with any news item we wanted to? Perhaps in the future we will. We’ll just aim our remotes at the TV newscast and, if the talking head is droning about something that does not amuse, we’ll laser-click the Ignore icon in the upper right. Lewinsky? Ignore. Local weather? Play. Sports scores? Ignore. This year’s Furby equivalent? Ignore. Pierce Brosnan in the latest James Bond flick? Play! Add to favorites! Zero in!

11/21/02’s illustrious band:

Let Them Eat Cash

Next time you stick your money in your mouth because you need your hands free, just think about how many hands have touched those bills before they reached your lips. Yark! I won’t take the last piece of pizza if even one person has touched it, but I think nothing of fondling dollars and dimes that may have belonged to a leper just a few days ago, then reaching for a sandwich. There could be anything from routine dirt to [use your imagination] crawling across my cash! And yours too!

I have no idea how many hands a dollar passes through in its life, but I'm sure it's plenty. If one new person per week touched your dollar bill in the last year (a conservative estimate), at least 52 grubby mitts have pawed it. Wait, no, it’s 104 — one mitt to spend bill and one to receive it.

According to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (www.moneyfactory.gov,), the life span of various denominations is as follows.

$ 1 .............. 22 months

$ 5 ................ 2 Years

$ 10................ 3 Years

$ 20 ............... 4 Years

$ 50 ............... 9 Years

$100 .............. 9 Years

Guess it's called filthy lucre for a reason.

11/20/02’s illustrious band:

Brown Noise

Brought to you by various anecdotes and a rude cartoon, and by the Chicken Step Lady, who revived my memory of same.

Brown noise is a slang term for a subsonic frequency — between 10.5 and 16 Hz, below the audible spectrum — that causes human beings to spontaneously vomit and to lose bowel control. (According to profane TV cartoon South Park, this frequency is believed to be “92 cents below E flat.” In one episode, a stadium full of children playing this note on recorders caused worldwide gastrointestinal distress. Funny!) Brown noise, which is apparently difficult to generate, is allegedly being investigated for military and crowd-control purposes. What a weapon that would be! You’re just casually walking through the DMZ and boom! There you go.

Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla (an eccentric genius whose biography is definitely worth reading!) came upon a brown noise phenomenon when developing his “electrotherapeutic” machine, which flooded the human body with electrical currents and strong vibrations, intended to soothe aches and promote healing. The device induced a bout of spontaneous diarrhea in his friend Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), and legend has it that Tesla then began to use brown noise to hasten the, er, evacuation of uninvited guests.

Brown noise is also a real term given to a particular kind of sound (which mimics the Brownian movement of molecules) by real scientists who study such things. But it’s not nearly as amusing.

---

The news on being on the news: I was, finally, or so I’ve heard. On Monday I was notified by the local TV news station that filmed the handyman service at my house way back on Oct. 2 that the segment would air that evening. (It had already been rescheduled at least three times, with the most recent plan being that it would run the day after Thanksgiving, so I wasn’t counting on it.) I wasn’t sure until Tuesday that it had actually aired, but a friend said she’d seen me on the news. She said I appeared very thoughtful and professional; I told her not to believe everything she sees on TV.

My next adventure, then, will be in trying to secure a taped copy of the segment. I’ve made a few phone calls and hope to have one in hand by the time I head south for Thanksgiving next week. Wish me luck!

11/19/02’s illustrious band:

Vaguely a Noun

Brought to you by Aunt Pedant.

Aunt P, who teaches school in a quiet rural community on the windswept plains, was trying recently to get her seventh-grade students to identify the noun in a sentence. One student insisted that are was the noun, while another was sure it was vaguely. Aunt P is understandably frustrated. These students have been covering noun/verb territory since the second grade; one hopes that at some point they would catch on.

I can personally vouch for the fact that near-illiteracy in our native language is not limited to seventh-graders, nor to rural students, nor to Midwesterners (although the unceasing wind does contribute to a certain amount of lunacy). When I was a bright-eyed young Grad School Sensation, working my way through a literature program by teaching composition to college freshmen, I encountered the same problem. My students were East-coast high school graduates who had not only made it into college, but whose test scores were high enough to land them in my nonremedial, middle-of-the-writing-road writing course. Yet most of them could not write simple sentences, could not tell a right one from a wrong one, and could not identify many of the basic parts of speech. They, too, had been hearing about nouns and verbs since second grade or so, and they, too, had Teflon brains when it came to English grammar. I was aghast.

Wanna know the worst part, though? I'm not much better myself. I'm a professional writer whose primary tool is the English sentence, yet I still have to crack a book every time I run up against a choice between who and whom. I can distinguish active voice from passive, but I have never known what a subjunctive mood was, unless it means the end-of-vacation doldrums. I’m thumbs-up on adjectives and adverbs, thumbs-down on diagramming sentences.

Why is this so hard? How can we use a language all our lives and yet know next to nothing about it? Most of us would not claim to be auto mechanics, but we can name the basic parts of a car and explain how they work. Why care so little about one of the few characteristics -- the ability to use language -- that separates us from hedgehogs?

I don’t have answers for these questions. If you do, send them in.

11/18/02’s illustrious band:

Toe Scuff

Brought to you by my sore big toe and the memories it conjures up.

I scuffed the top of my left big toe yesterday. I abraded the patch of skin just beyond the toenail booting the kick pad at jujutsu. Since I had just clipped my toenails, that area was a bit more exposed and tender than usual. This is by no means a life-threatening injury, or even really an injury at all, but I did have to apply a Band-Aid to keep my sock off the scraped spot.

This reminds me of when I was a young’un and used to scrape my toes all the time. I did it in the summer, either when I was barefoot or when I’d just gotten new sandals. I would trip or get lazy or hit a high stretch of sidewalk and drag the end of a naked toe or toes along the rough pavement. It’s a terrible thing to scrape a toe, because (A) it hurts and (B) it affects the way you walk for the next several days and (C) toe Band-Aids scoop up huge amounts of sand. I would inevitably do my toe scuffing on a Saturday, just in time to have to cram the sore, bandaged little piggy into dress shoes for church on Sunday.

Now I’m a grown-up, and here I’ve gone and done the same thing again. Yesterday, during kicking practice, I should have curled my toes back and struck the target with the bottom of my foot. But I was unpracticed and perhaps a bit lazy and did not curl them back enough. And here I am, probably 25 years past the last time I did this, again wearing nice shoes the day afterward and regretting my clumsiness. What’s that old saw about those who don’t remember history being doomed to repeat it?

Well, I remember getting scratched by a monkey at a petting zoo just fine, so let’s hope I don’t have to repeat that experience any time soon.

11/15/02’s illustrious band:

Nyctalopia

Brought to you by the A Word A Day service at www.wordsmith.org. Nyctalopia is night blindness, a condition in which vision is faint or completely lost at night or in dim light.

There are certain conditions under which we are all blind. When I was married to that loser Mr. Ex, I was blind to his veracity impairment. I used to work for someone who was blind to the no-work ethic of a longtime employee. Financial wizards had dim spots in their crystal balls about the whole Enron thing.

The question is, how do you know you’re blind to something if you can’t see it in the first place? You don’t know it’s there.

Maybe we, like astronomers, have to be alert for effects the “mystery body” may be having on our surroundings and trace our way back to it following the trail it leaves. Or maybe we must learn to rely on the reports of observers with different perspectives. Or maybe we should all just wear helmets so that when the mystery orb smacks us upside the head, it doesn’t do so much damage.

This reminds me of a song. It’s a song by that great à cappella group The Bobs from their My, I’m Large album. It’s a jaunty little tune titled, fittingly enough, “Helmet.” Read the lyrics below and see if you don’t think they’ve found the answer.

Before I forget, here’s a big porn star shout out to Spooky St. Charles and Zippy P. Zippy P writes:

“In 'find your name' option one, I would be Zippy P. I don't think that's going to get me too far on the 900 lines, but I might do well as a spokeschick for Proscar (the drug that reduces the size of the aging male prostate, allowing them to achieve my name). I might not look much like a babe to these aging gents, but I'm certainly nonthreatening!”

You go, girl!

Helmet

I can remember how it started

I followed the firemen -- I dreamed of the astronauts

They looked so happy in their shiny metal headgear

I knew that inside they were smiling



My mother feared I was abnormal

I'd take out the colander and put it on my head

People are happy when they know that they're protected

Just let me tell you why I'm smiling



I've got my helmet on

Nothing can do me wrong

I've got my helmet on

Ya-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba



In shining rows they sit in every beauty parlor

Down in the coal mines -- lighting the way

From distant battlefields to the tiniest motor scooter

There is peace on every single face



My friends all tell me I'm retreating

But how can they argue with true serenity?

If they would only try just once to wear a helmet

The world would soon be a better place



Come try my helmet on

Nothing will do you wrong

Come try my helmet on

Ya-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba



In shining rows they sit in every beauty parlor

Serenity on every face



Come try my helmet on

Nothing will do you wrong

Come try my helmet on

Ya-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba

(Repeat)

11/14/02’s illustrious band:

Squeegee Buffleheim

Brought to you by Squeegee him- or herself, a contributor to the Top 5 humor list I subscribe to.

Squeegee Buffleheim. How often do you hear a name like that? I’m assuming it’s a pseudonym, and I apologize for poking fun if it isn’t. But still. My guess is that the writer used one of those “find your soap diva/porn star name” formulae that instructs you to combine the name of your first pet with the name of the street on which you grew up in order to come up with a good stage name. This would make me Cuddles Lawrence. Not bad! Another option: Combine a pet’s name with your mother’s maiden name. Good thing I didn’t go with “combine your middle name with your current street name,” or I’d have a name with Avenue in it.

There are skillions of porn name generators on the ‘Net. Some provide a formula, as above. Others have you match the first letters of your real first and last names to a list and combine the names at the corresponding letters. I become Vanessa Spanky Spanky with one of these.

A more complex method of generation your soap opera name: Add your last name plus your brother’s middle name plus a popular talk show host’s wife’s maiden name. I’m not even going to attempt that one.

To find your Star Wars character name: For your SW first name, combine the first 3 letters of your real first name with the first 2 letters of your real last name; for your SW last name, add the first 2 letters of your mother’s maiden name to the first 3 letters of the city in which you were born.

Here’s my favorite name game, because it’s customizable. To find your superhero name: match your real first initial to the corresponding adjective on a list (supplied by the game’s author), and match your real last initial to a corresponding noun on the list. (I end up as Super Freak if I use my real name, Cat Runner if I go by Media Sensation.) Anybody who can think up 26 adjectives and 26 nouns can create his/her own name game. You might as well specialize the lists while you’re at it; use only cooking words to generate your Iron Chef name, or only crime words to create your mystery writer nom de plume. Create code names for your next children’s party by combining words like Squirky and Flufflebuns. Or whatever.

Caution: If you enter “find your porn star name” into an Internet search engine, or any phrase that includes the p-word, you will be offered links to XXX sites along with the harmless ones. Read URLs carefully and click at your own risk.

Yours truly,

Hopalong Nifflesqueak

11/13/02’s illustrious band:

Flocculent Ubuntu

Brought to you by the Xhosa-speaking Bantu people of Eastern Cape province, South Africa, and by Webster’s dictionary.

“Ubuntu” (oo-BOON-too) means kindness: humanity, compassion and goodness. It’s regarded as fundamental to the way Africans approach life. It’s a fun word to say and a pleasant concept to consider.

“Flocculent” (FLOCK-yoo-lent) means “having a fluffy or woolly appearance” or “composed of or containing woolly masses.” Think of a flock of sheep or a flocked Christmas tree.

So basically today’s band symbolizes woolly goodness (not a bad handle in itself). Forget the grey skies outside and think of things that are fluffy and nice and make life a little more worth living. Kitties and bunnies come to mind. Clean socks fresh from the dryer. Down-filled duvets. Crème-filled chocolate donuts. Nerf toys. Middlemarch. The Variety section of the newspaper. Dolly Parton’s hair.

Consider this brief list my ubuntu offering for the day. And feel free to spam me at jugglernaut@hotmail.com with all sorts of woolly goodness of your own.

11/12/02’s illustrious band:

Adult Buffet

Brought to you by the pizza place where Skeeter and I lunched today.

When our bill came to the table, the most important text on it read “adult buffet” — meaning we’d been charged the price for adult meals, not for children’s. Makes perfect sense. But of course my fevered brain could not leave it that way for long. (It’s flu shot day here at Media HQ, and whatever secret alien-DNA-splicing formula the government has injected into my arm is going straight to my head.)

Adult buffet. That could mean a couple different things. A buffet of adults, for example, just like a pizza buffet is a buffet of pizza options. Nice alternative to the impersonal online dating scene; just approach the selections with a clean plate, make your choice in person, and please don’t sneeze on the offerings. This would also work for job recruiting and the casting of movie extras, and it’s a much more humane term than “cattle call.”

And then there’s “adult buffet” in the same vein as “adult movies.” You know the kind I mean. Actually, I’m pretty sure something like this already xxx-ists. It’s called late-night cable TV. Or so I’ve heard.

Get your flu shots, kids, or you too could come down with a sick mind.

11/11/02’s illustrious band:

Regal Lager

Brought to you by Sister-san, who recently sent me a list of palindromes -- words, phrases or sentences that read the same backward as forward. Here’s a sampling, from both her list and my memory. Note the preponderance of palindromic nudity.

• Go hang a salami! I'm a lasagna hog!
  
• Egad! No bondage!
  
• Lepers repel.
  
• Flee to me, remote elf.
  
• Too far, Edna, we wander afoot.
  
• Sh... Tom see moths.
  
• Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak.
  
• Poor Dan is in a droop.
  
• Sit on a potato pan, Otis!
  
• "Reviled did I live," said I, "as evil I did deliver."
  
• Lager, Sir, is regal.
  
• I roamed under it a tired, nude Maori (my personal favorite).
  
• A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
  
• Madam, I’m Adam.
  
• Tips spill, lips spit.
  
• No lemon, no melon.
  
• Dr. Awkward
  

To view a truly frightening number of other palindromes in English and Canadian (He did, eh?), as well as some cool anagrams, visit www.palindromes.org.

11/08/02’s illustrious band:

Hair Pill

Brought to you by an anonymous member of a certain health and wellness club.

Sometimes members of the health and wellness club e-mail questions to the editorial offices to be answered by, according to our marketing materials, a panel of health experts. Sometimes the messages are clear and succinctly worded, and sometimes the “question” consists only of a list of the sender’s health problems.

And sometimes the subject line of the e-mail is the best part. Such is the case with a query we received recently for which the subject line read Hair Pill. The writer was inquiring whether we had heard about a new oral medication for preventing hair loss, but it took me a while to get that far.

Hair pill? I don’t know about you, but I envision a pill made of hair. A sugar pill is made of sugar, so logically a hair pill should be made of hair, right? And a blood pressure pill should be made of -- ick! But can’t you just see it? A mini-brillo pad stuffed into a clear gelatin capsule, with a few stray strands sticking out at the seam -- or no capsule at all. It would certainly feel . . . interesting going down.

So of course you’d take a pill filled with the kind of hair you wanted. Long and blonde? Dark and wavy? Electric blue and pointy? Down the hatch. Changing your color or style would be as simple as switching medications or adjusting the dosage. You’d have to take your medicine with a cinnamon roll if you wanted your hair in a bun, or with a pretzel if you wanted a braid -- a whole handful of mini-pretzels for cornrows.

Better than Rogaine, but I’m not so optimistic about the aftertaste.

**********

Note to Bloglet subscribers: To solve the problems with special characters, apostrophes, etc., I was thinking of having a link to the main web site, rather than the whole BND posting, sent to your mailboxes. That means an extra click between you and 90 seconds of band name goodness, but at least you would get to see the text as it is meant to be seen. Let me know what you think of this idea. PLEASE e-mail me at jugglernaut@hotmail.com.

11/07/02 Bonus Band:

Famous Squamous

Brought to you by this Media Sensation's very own Today's Health & Wellness magazine, winner of the Gold Medal for Best Feature Article (among special-interest magazines with circulation over 50,000) at this year's Minnesota Magazine & Publications Association awards. Winning story: "Special Bulletin: The Sun and Your Skin." Need pictures of the horrible things, like squamous cell carcinoma, that can happen to the human body's largest organ when it's left too long in the sun? We've got 'em.

Hooray for us!

Award-winning staff:

Editor: Claire Lewis (El Queso Grande)

Art Director: Kathryn Wiley (The Wiley One)

Associate Editors: Kelly Rice (Ms. Wild Rice) and Yours Truly (Jugglernaut, the Media Sensation)

Author: Lynn Madsen

11/07/02’s illustrious band:

Panty Hose Onions

Brought to you by Ms. Wild Rice and an anonymous member of a certain creative home arts club.

Ms. Wild Rice serves as the editorial assistant of the CHAC’s official publication. As such, she is the lucky recipient of mail from the club’s members. Sometimes they send pictures of their home arts/crafts projects, and while many of those projects are quite attractive (ask her about the rhinestone wreath!), some of them are . . . not exactly Martha Stewart.

One such project is known to us only through the Polaroid photo that was mailed to the magazine office. It shows a man standing among the legs of several pairs of pantyhose that are suspended from the ceiling, into which have been stuffed about 8 white onions per leg. No note, no label, no letter of explanation. The white strip at the bottom of the photo simply bears the legend “Panty Hose Onions” and a date written in black marker.

My questions are these:

• Who thought of this? The guy in the photo? The photographer? Some fiendish third party?
  
• What’s this guy doing with several pairs of unattended stockings?
  
• What’s this guy doing with so many onions?
  
• Did he wash everything first?
  
• Do healthy people really hang used pantyhose from the ceilings of their homes?
  
• What is the photo really trying to show us? This is a home arts magazine, after all; maybe the guy is demonstrating some new form of performance art.
  
• If so, what is the message of the performance art? That the roundness of the onions, contrasted with the linear shape of flaccid hose, represents the dichotomy of the yin and yang within all of us? That woman, as symbolized by the hose, is empty and transparent unless filled with earthy substance, as symbolized by the organic onions, which in turn clearly signify pregnancies/children? That the man is lost in the forest of female limbs? That the artist is a feminist who has chosen to subvert pantyhose, long recognized as a tool of female oppression, to bewilder and imprison the hapless white male trapped within and caused him to reexamine his hegemonic patriarchal notions of what should fill the pantyhose? That --
  

Ooh, sorry. Grad school deconstruction-speak got the better of me there for a minute. I’ve been out of that environment for nearly 9.5 years, but the old impulse still flares up again every once in a while. [Deep breath.] Sometimes an onion storage device is just an onion storage device.

11/06/02’s illustrious band:

Big Finger Foam

Brought to you by Señor Editor.

Yesterday Señor and I were lounging -- I mean, toiling busily -- at Media Headquarters when he received an interesting object in the mail. It looked like a ping-pong paddle that had spent three weeks in a dryer and shrunk to about 4 inches in height. It’s maybe 1/3 of an inch thick, and it’s squishy. There’s a single slit from the top of the paddle to its center.

This, it turns out, is the No Ding Nail Ring. If you’re pounding a nail but don’t want to risk denting the wood or wall you’re pounding into, you need one of these. Just slip the nail into the slit in the paddle and the NDNR will both steady the nail and protect the surface beneath. Handy!

And spongy. Señor said it was made of the same foam rubber substance employed in the manufacture of novelty hats. “Ah,” I nodded knowingly, “big finger foam.” Yup, just like the oversized “We’re #1” fingers you can slip over your whole hand to wave at sporting events. Same stuff.

So next time you’re waving a big foam finger, think of its humble cousin the NDNR, and pound something down.

**********

Note to Bloglet subscribers: I am aware that Bloglet does not do a very good job of translating special characters like the tilde-n in Spanish words such as “Senor,” nor with apostrophes and dashes. I am seeking a solution to the problem that will not require me to limit my creative use of punctuation or, like Commander Data, to expunge contractions from my vocabulary.

11/05/02’s illustrious band:

Island of the Sequined Love Nun

Brought to you by Skeeter, who recently read Christopher Moore’s novel of the same name. Other titles by Moore include The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Bloodsucking Fiends and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.

A title like this is too good to pass up, but there’s not much more I can say about it. Check the listing on Amazon.com to read reviews and even an exceprt from the novel — Skeeter says it’s pretty entertaining.

11/04/02’s illustrious band:

Rounds for Governor

Brought to you by Mother Media and the election season.

Last week Mother Media sent me a T-shirt on which appears a silhouette of the state of South Dakota in blue with the legend “Rounds for Governor” printed inside. Mike Rounds is a handsome Republican who wants to be SD’s next big cheese. Normally I don’t get into politics at all, let alone sartorially endorse candidates, but the shirt had the attractive qualities of being both free and clean.

So I wore it to my Eclectsis class (a martial art that combines boxing with elements of southern preying mantis kung fu). On a Saturday morning before the caffeine has kicked in, I’m admittedly not the sharpest crayon in the box. When my sparring partner nodded at my torso and inquired “Rounds?” I said, “Let’s go two rounds.” He shook his head and said it again: “Rounds?” “Yes, two rounds,” I replied. Finally he spat out his mouthguard and made me understand his question.

But it got me thinking . . . Why shouldn’t candidates go a couple of rounds, for governor or any other office? They use the language of battle, waging political campaigns the way generals wage military campaigns. They promise to fight the good fight for their constituents, to wrestle with tough issues and strike down bad laws. So why not take this literally and have opposing candidates glove up and duke it out?

I can think of several advantages to this method. “Debates” would certainly be more exciting, and you’d come away with a clear winner. The bouts would be time-limited, with beer and popcorn available to the audience. The stuffy NPR rehash would be replaced by energetic color commentary. And we could get that “boxers or briefs” issue resolved right up front.

And finally, like my sparring partner, the politicians would have a tough time talking with their mouthguards in place . . . which would mean they’d have to actually take a firm stance and DO something to prove their mettle. I’m especially in favor of a Rounds for President policy: If the candidate wants a job that empowers him or her to lead a country into war, let that person lead by example.

Oh yeah. Anyone besides me tired of campaign speeches, commercials and lawn signs? Don’t get me wrong; I value the democratic process and will definitely spend my lunch hour in the voting booth tomorrow. I’m just ready for the pre-election hype to come to an end. Then we can get on with the all-consuming Christmas hype.

11/01/02’s illustrious band:

Vegetal Vampires

Brought to you by scientist Martin I. Bidartondo from the University of California at Berkeley, via the ever-observant Skeeter. Bidartondo has discovered that even flowers are thieves.

Bidartondo and colleagues have discovered a new group of plants that live by sucking the juice out of others. Normally plants get their energy by using sunshine to convert water and carbon dioxide into fuel. They also absorb nutrients from the soil, employing threads of fungus called mycorrhizae around their roots to do so.

Some plants, however, exploit the abilities of their mycorrhizae, sending them to take nutrients not from the surrounding soil, but from other plants’ mycorrhizae. They’re like little Mafia goons, sneaking out at night to put the hit on other underworld bosses’ goons.

Some of these vampire plants have beautiful flowers, which just goes to show that beauty does not equal innocence. One is the lily-like Arachnitis uniflora. See some Bidartondo photos at http://plantbio.berkeley.edu/~bruns/monotrope.html.