My Favorite Fake French Words & Frases

These are some of my favorite fake French words and phrases. I know I have several, but these are the only two that I can think of at the moment. I promise to add more as I remember them and create new ones.

"Lezgowheat" - translated from Fake French into English is "Lets Go Eat".

History: I would say this when we would get out of the car headed in to the restaurant, ah, my favorite French word. My younger son, who had taken (not sure about the words "struggled through") French in high school, would say, "Thats not real French!" - "Did I say it was?" - and try to pronounce it as 2 syllables. "lez+gwheat", but no pause, with a trailing almost inaudible plosive "T" exhale as the tip of your tongue pulls down and back from your nearly closed teeth.

Straw-bear-eee-jo-lie - translated FaFr->En, is "Strawberry Jelly". The accent pattern is "XoXoX" and sounds a little bit like the name 'Angelina Jolie'. The 1st, 3rd, and 5th syllables are slightly longer than the 2nd and 4th.

History: One day I was grocery shopping and I gave myself this noble quest: "Try pronouncing everything you buy with a Fake French accent and see which one is your favorite." Strawberry jelly (the wife's, not mine, never touch the stuff on my tongue) won by a far margin.


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Update: 2013.07.21 - Today's new word is a food item: Cheddar Peppers - The accent goes on the dar syllable. I give the first sound as "shay" instead of "ched". Try to say both words as one word, making a slight popping sound, including changing pep to pop and pers to pars

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Remember my main rule about spelling in authentic French: All French words are spelled wrong. There, now doesn't that lighten your load?

If Michael Jordan Was A Mouse

MJM

If Michael Jordan was a mouse,
and MJM lived in your house,
this is what you just might see,
what appears to be a white bright light of
very high intensity,
a doorway in the wall all aglow, I'm thinking
"how can this be?",
that suddenly appeared quite
unexpectedly!

(Remember this is just a piece of fiction,
and I don't expect a future expensive
restriction,
if my mansion goes up for auction,
and mouse haters arrive with false
expectations,
and they ask for complete X-rays of the
walls as part of the inspection.)

Emanating from inside my wall,
It sounds as noisy as a pool hall!?!?!
I didn't remember installing this at all,
And you would think that I would remember
something quite that tall,
for the mice in my past were typically not size thrice,
but just the normal size "one",
brown & round, and nice & small.

And I thought to myself, say, isn't that an
outside wall?
Well, sure enough there are things a tall
rich mouse will install.
I checked it out and its luxurious, several
mousey (size 3) floors tall!
He couldn't get the building permits to go
north horizon-tal,
So he settled for what he originally wanted
after all,
straight up inside, a build between the wall
studs filled, all verti-cal.

MJM looked over this piece to see if
anything was askew,
as neighborly gesture, I thought, as a
poetical editorial review,
and he felt my rhyming patterns were
okay, as far as he knew.
BUT found it highly unacceptable in section
number two,
as he said whatEVer made THIS thought
appear in you,
to think that you could sell MY megamouse
size condo here at house number 102?

And on MJM went to clarify that "man"-sion
isn't quite the descriptive word for what he
had in mind,
but rather, "mice"-sion or "mouse"-sion,
(words in a human dictionary you are likely
to not find),
and these now seem to me, in better sight
hind,
to signify the more important occupant(s),
those of a rodentia kind.





Poetry Link: to my next poem in the blog ...

It's 10:12 AM, Do You Know Where Your Coffee Is?

Several things delayed me getting my very first sip o' coffee this morning.



[[[->This list is in reverse chronological order, SO if you read it from the bottom upwards ^, .sing fus con less far is therefore and sense more far makes it<-]]]

Photograph TQBQT - "Turned Quasi-Burned Quattro Toast". (Can you tell I have been watching TOO much food lately?) I have devised a way to cook four pieces of toast instead of just two in my toaster. I put two pieces of toast in each slot and a few times throughout the cooking process (no exact number or times just yet) I reverse the two ZAP pieces of toast in ZAP each slot so that ZAP what was on the ZAP inside goes out to ZAP the outside and then ZAP receives an even amount ZAP of thermal radiation. SPRING-BING-DONE. Oh, SAFETY!!! I forgot to mention that I rotate the toast at a 45 degree so that a corner sticks out the top so that one corner remains cool and undercooked during the whole process, and doesn't damage my fingers which are needed for performing the Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. And I noticed that it puts lovely marks on the toast at a 45 degree angle. Rotatoasterie!!! He, he, I just invented a new word, boys and girls, aren't you so proud of me?

Begged and pleaded with my wife to let me include the "Sumo" paragraph, and she FINALLY relented after going through an editing process where she got to pick and choose, so if children happen to read this; R->G.


SUMO: Helped my wife put a protective broad white band around her middle portion to provide post-abdominal operation support, only she looked like a sumo wrestler when we got finished. Then after she sat down I had to go through the motions of a S. Wrestler in the ring, sparring with an invisible partner, throwing the salt around, hands on my knees, complete with a "sumimasen" (excuse me) and a "domo arigato" (thank you very much) and some other Japanese I don't remember now because there was just too too much laughter interspersed.



Socked my wife. Socked my dog. Those are two completely different things and involve only a smattering of violent behavior, mostly from the dog. I helped my wife put on her socks, and just as soon as Cooper saw me fixing to do this, he saunters over and kinda stands there "playing dumb", ready to play one of our favorite games. Quick as a bunny, I take a sock (always clean, of course!) and cover up his eyes and try to hold it in place for 8 seconds (rodeo connection to mychildhood?) while he growls and tries to get away and bite the sock portion that covered his eyes, and I'm trying to make the same exact growling noises only louder than him. Of course, he naturally comes back for more....



The last thing I was doing as the machine Café do Senhor was making the last of his "hot water is still passing over the ground coffee" noises, was trying to find my coffee cup insulator because the house keep/rearranger had been there the day before.



Talking Korean Cow. In Korean with English subtitles. I know, I was as surprised as you. I was walking across the living room when suddenly I saw the last half of a TV commercial with a talking cow. Now I have seen plenty of talking cow commercials, but I am linguistically stopped in my tracks. The cow is talking in Korean with English subtitles. The cow lives in Korea (South probably) and would like to come to California where happy cows live and she would like for the viewers to vote for her in a contest at somethingsomething.com so she can come to America. So I asked my wife if she was watching something recorded from the DVR, and she said no, so I had to take the extra time to rewind the live broadcast to record that little segment. And watch the Kohler toilet commercial right before the Korean Cow where these spies are trying to find a place to hide something, but are foiled by the design of the toilet, extremely modern toilet. The spies were speaking in FRENCH with English words at the bottom of the screen! So I have transcribed the dialogue for you:



[Cancel Korean transcribing]



I helped my wife with her meds. She has gone from sharp pain to soreness, so that's a good sign.



I started working on a title for a blog in MySpace. I came up with:

"Up, Up and Away, By Trebuchet, My Trebuchet"

I am sure you can figure out what the musical tune that goes with those words without me telling you otherwise it would just, please, delay my 2nd cup of coffee.



Sidetracked imagining a conversation of mine 47 years from now in the old folks home at 106 (106 ? No, not my age, my street address if I buy the house to the south of me thereby allowing my average street address to go back to the original 104 [(106+104+102) / 3] where I am talking about my aunt from South Dakota making a fabulous meal for me once in May 2007 "Yes, she was a very pheasant person, and asparagus, too". I suddenly had these images and sounds of a geriatric Dustin Hoffman in the movie "Little Big Man", a 1970 movie which I never really saw, only a snippet of video probably during my cinematographic studies of 2007.



A musical moment with the dog. After I got out of bed I spent some quality time with Cooper performing this mainly instrumental (did he really mean heavy 'meNtal' music???) piece where I use my dog as a percussion instrument and mix in some sounds, usually going for a vocal combo of Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, and Jimmy Durante with a touch of gangsta rap/hip hop/boy band/Moron Tableknuckle Choir. Every once in a while I stop with my hands frozen in mid-air and question the dog, "whats the next line? [pause] Oh yeah" and continue....he just loves it!



Decided to try performing and filming a "Thumb Sync/Finger Sync" version of my hands performing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major, one of my favorite pieces of music. See next paragraph for more explanation or previous paragraph depending on whether you followed my advice to read this note/blog backwards. Of course, I meant backwards one paragraph at a time, so if you made it this far and you were doing it one word at a time, I am sorry for giving you a dyslexic-illogically induced headache.



I remembered a piece I wrote just before I went to sleep where I demonstrated how difficult it is to keep one thumb perfectly still, while moving all the fingers and other thumb very fast, and then stop and switch stationary thumbs, and resume. [9 - 1], then [1 - 9], thumbs out to the side. There. See? That's difficult. (Just for Brandon: 'Those aren't spirit fingers; THESE are spirit fingers')



I woke up

Ernest In Exile: Excuse Me, I'm Just Having An Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn Moment

I don't really know for sure what my true legal status is just yet, whether I'm 'fired', 'retired' or 'rehired', so let's just go with my new combo word of 'refthired', knowing in the near future some of those middle letters 'f-t-h' will be silenced/removed. I am sure there must have been at least one person who was 'ired' in order to get me 'fired'.

I woke up today in the middle of writing multiple pieces. My finger tips have been busy for the past 97 hours, banging away at a keyboard. I have a sitcom idea started based on the previous 3 decades of my life, letters to lots of people, several versions of the same letter to one particular person.

But for now I have to get back to the more important things in life, coffee, bacon, and biscuits. Man does not live by bread alone; there must be jelly, really good jelly.

..more.. later.. gotta .. go .....for ......now .......

REsume at 12:01 PM Central Time

I wrote about Iceland over in Facebook this morning, explaining the mysteries of the universe, a little, actually very little, and never got around to applying my answer to my high school chum's question about Hollow Earth, how protons, neutrons and electrons actually make up a very tiny fraction of the volume of an atom, so the earth because of its atoms, is actually very very hollow.

I plan to study the city of Baltimore today after a brief glance at the article in wikipedia and then go wandering around Baltimore later in the day using Google Earth.

I am going to see what hyperbolic functions are good for on my scientific calculator.

I am going to be at peace now that one of my favorite possessions of the entire earth has been returned to me safe and sound by a dear friend. My favorite screwdriver Stubby Jr., a Klein Model 603-1 IN 2 PT. On May XXth of the year XX-0V (thats my own way of doing Rowman Bi-nary-numberalls, not to be confused with Roman numerals or binary numbers, that I just now created while typing this sentence), for my XXVth anniversary of my employment, I decided to buy myself a new screwdriver with my very own money to replace the ailing missing tooth Stubby Sr. (and safely retire him and tuck away for safekeeping until I, too, could retire in the year XX-XIII) so that someday I could have a wonderful shadow box filled with a few trinkets of my 33 year and 11 day employment:

a)My two favorite screw drivers Stubby Sr, and Stubby Jr
b)A handful of various microprocessors
c)A syringe from an autoinjector of Gas Chromatographic Mass Spectrometer.

<<Sigh>>, I guess I'll never get my shadowbox.

.... more later today ......

Here is part of a poem I am writing about a friend's coastal house in southern Texas. Shortly after she got the property we looked and it was just a piece of unoccupied "dirt" on local live, a 'not quite as high as a satellite' view, but the other day when she mentioned that her business address had changed, I just happened to take a look to see if her new house was updated yet, and the answer was: almost. The static photo work of local live had captured the process of the condos in their almost finished state. The swimming pool wasn't finished yet, there was a giant trash lugger commonly used by construction companies, there were no vehicles around - there was plenty of day light - but nobody was home. I told her that I had found a picture of her house right before it was brand new.

Home, Home On The Beach

Before your house was new
It was being still being built for you.
There were folks a scrapin',
some of them a diggin', others call it landscapin'
Then somebody said, "you know what would be really really cool?
An in the ground, to be seen from ALL around, concrete swimmin' pool !!"
"You mean one just like Ellie Mae
of the Clampett's fame from out by Califor-ni-a?"
So they dug up all the dirt and had it hauled away,
and said there's a bedder place that you outta be
and so loaded up the rocks and they dumped 'em in the sea,
Gulf, that is, of Mexico.
Well the next thing know the price tag's just for billionaires,
And who could really afford to be a livin' over there?
So they chopped the giant home into pastel colored pieces,
with low innertrust or 30 year subleases,
condo's, that is, swimmin' pool, movie stars

She really has movie stars there??? No, I am just having trouble writing that last line and it is 2:11 AM and I am ready to quit for the day with DAY meaning yesterday, not the realy day which at this moment feels more like a tomorrow. Eyes getting heavy trying to explain some period of time when I am awake when at this very moment I want to be alseep or lasepe or lapees or asleep, there, I knew I would get it wrote right eventually. Well, to reanswer your question, it really matter sexactly what your definition of a 'movie star' is, for instance .......

Got Socks?

Now that I am retired, although it felt alot like getting fired, and I am not sure about ever being rehired, I have started doing a few new things, thinking about fewer new startling things and been thinking about starting to do a few new things, things that involve fire. (Cooking?)

I have started working on learning the Gettysburg Addresses. I am about half way finished. Since the populations are 558 + 7,490 + 1,352 = 9,400, I know exactly where approximately 4,700 "GbA" people live in 3 different states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota, the ones that have got a burg named a Gettysburg.

I wrote a rough draft for this piece of humor while in the drive up window at the bank a few hours ago. (Actually I just wrote the third line which most of you may happen to recognize the first two lines but because my one MONSTER-o third line is bigger than the first two put together, I can probably legally say its all mine.)

GoSo?

I was sad because I had no shoes.
Then I met a man who had no feet.
Then I was no longer sad. Because I asked him, "say, buddy, you look exactly the same height as me from the ankles up, so I was wondering, before you lost your feet, what size were they? Were they anywhere close to my 11 1/2, 4E Wide and so I was wondering if you happen to have any brand new shoes just laying around you are no longer using from your old longer days, oh yeah, and socks, Got Socks?"

(Did you notice how I chopped the end of the words off in the title?)

So now there will be a plethora of sock advertisers stealing MY new GoSo slogan with super athletes wearing white socks to match their white milk mustache.

The Answer To This Question is Either '4' or 'Space'

Question: what is the difference between 1 1/2 and 11/2 ?

11/2 = 5 1/2
Then 5 1/2 - 1 1/2 = 4

But also, take "1 1/2", eliminate the space character between the two 1's and POOF! you have "11/2". SO space is alSO the answer.

Its a slow cold night here in Texas. The dog and wife are already asleep. Whats a guy to do, except sit around and make jokes and riddles and puzzles about fractions? I know, I know, you're sitting there reading this wondering, is there enough oxygen in the air that boy is breathing right now???? Did they seal his house up a lil toooo tight?

In all seriousness, after the events of this recent weak week. for those people out there who are concerned about me and love me, we are doing fine, & the wife made it back home, safe and almost sound. Thanks for all the calls, texts and e-mails. We love you. Well, most of you, some of y'all we just tolerate! The "Toleratians" generally know who they are.

A Recent Interview of Mine

So, you had your purple glasses on while you watched the crippled musical serial killer movie???

Yes, I viewed the invalid violent violinist violate in violet on video on my Vizio tV

Who starred in this movie?

It was a remake of G.I.Jane only with Jane Fonda on a Honda with a Panda suffering from a pandemic sickness as eucalyptus (I can’t believe I spell that word right without looking it up) trees died of a non-diagnosable dendrite disease. That’s what he gets for trying to eat ukaliptuss, (now, how did I suddenly forget how to spell that word?) instead of bamboo.

Hold it, are we talking about the same movie?

No

Where did the movie take place?

In the south of France

The movie was shot in France?

No, I thought you asked me where the place was that I took the movie, where I stole it from, the answer to that question was ‘In the south of France” at some Bloque du Buster, where I go to steal movies. Its just like that sign on the back of school buses and tanker trucks filled with petroleum products “This Vehicle Stops At All Railroad Crossings” And it makes me ask the question that is on everyone’s mind right about now, do they mean every railroad crossing in North America or the entire world??? Cause that would take a very long time for each and every bus and tanker truck to go around and stop at each and every railroad crossing in just the SUSAN (Southern United States of America North), like from Texas to Florida in order to make the claim that they had stopped at EVERY single railroad crossing in the entire NorthAmerica. There must be at least maybe, I don't know for sure, 400 railroad crossings in NorthAmerica. And would that mean that they had gone BOTH directions at each crossing, hmmmm? I asked my 4^th favorite Stewart this question at work the other day and he said that on weekends and holidays and the evenings the school buses would be available to go around and find all the railroad crossings and stop at them. This was the piece of the puzzle that finally brought it to fruition and settled it in my mind once and for all. Thanks, 4^TH Fav Stew.

(He keeps gradually getting a bigger N^th number as I keep remembering about my relatives who have the same name that I like better than him and on most days (the ones I am at work) he is close to the bottom of the list of favorite Stewarts anyway, but don’t tell him that. Oh-kay, you can; he would be amused.)

Ernest - The Other White Meat

I have decided to change my life completely and spend all my time devoted to one thing, just a single solitary thing - making travel safer for people who look like me when journeying through the wilds of Papau-New Guinea. I have been told that the place is just chock full of cannibals. But don't worry about me, as always, I have a plan, and I am going to take care of this terrible problem.

Plan: I am going to take a huge dose of poison with me, and if Iam captured by head hunting cannibals, and they are fixing to "HAVE" me over for dinner, as in over a bed of coals, Rotisserie-Ernie with BBQ sauce, I will consume the secret stash of poison, then when they consume me, I will wipe out several cannibals. Then the word will spread far and wide to avoid eating anyone who looks like me. So slightly overweight, white NorthAmerican males with brown hair and glasses will be safe, and other white people will have an increased amount of safety.

(Of course, that might mean an increased risk to NELPs (Non-Ernest-Looking People), so that might lead to a sudden increase in the demand for plastic surgery for people traveling to P-NG to look more Ernestesque. Doctors, get ready for an increased work load, thanks to me. You're welcome. For a slight fee, $4000, I can provide you with photos of what I have looked like at various stages of my life, including that time I dressed up in drag for that "beauty contest" where the girls played football in high school and three of us guys - well, lets just say I won the contest and keep it at that. Special thanks to a dear friend named Palma who applied my makeup and provided the clothes, turning me into a winner!)

A Marital Pre-Blessing

When you have been married as long as we have been, somethings are automatic and somethings happen (ab)normally around our home in a semi-automatic mode. I will explain one in a very brief story that probably lasted less than 5 seconds. It probably happened faster than you can read it.

I am in the dining room area standing and my son passes between me and my wife who is on the other side of the bar that divides the kitchen and dining room. Just as my son passes between us, I say, "Bless you"

Puzzled, he immediately turns around and says, "Why did you say that???!!???" - thinking that I am talking to him.

I didn't answer him. I let my wife do it.

I just waited a few hundred more milliseconds and my wife completed her sneeze.

Salmon:1 Bears: A Bazillion

I was having a conversation with one of my children just now about a movie. He was telling me some of the scenes and dialogue from the movie "Strange Wilderness". Caution: I have not seen this movie so this is not a recommendation for or against it.

He mentioned a line from the movie:

"It is estimated that bears kill over two million salmon a year. Attacks by salmon on bears are much more rare."

My son mentioned that salmon have never attacked bears.

I responded that that is probably not true.

He adamantly defended his position that salmon have never attacked a bear.

I responded with, "I am sure that in the entire history of the earth at least one time a dead bear has wound up in a river and salmon have come along and ate it"

His response: silence - grin - more silence - "d_mn, I think you got me on that one"

Ironing The Ceiling

I decided to remodel the bedroom ceiling.

A thin sheet of iron was bolted to the ceiling and then painted sky blue. I gathered several photos of myself & family and then printed them in black and white. The pictures were then mounted on individual pieces of plywood with the edges painted white. Magnets were then attached to the photo-boards to hold them onto the ceiling. Experiments were performed so that just the right size magnet per unit size/weight of photo-board were used so that the photos could be easily moved with a long photo adjuster (old pool cue).

Now I can easily arrange photos of myself to look like clouds. This leads to sentences such as "look, honey, you look just like a cumulonimbus", or, "look at that cloud made from pictures of our 25th anniversary party, it has a silver lining"


Invention Link: The Next Invention in My Blog

On The 3.5th Day Before Christmas My Uncle Said To Me

Online chat between Ernest and His Niece M


Niece M - is excited there is only 4 days until Christmas :)!!!

Uncle E - Isn't it closer to 3.5 days?

Niece M - I know!! But if I did it that way I would have to change it like every hour and I just dont think I am willing to do that :) So I will stick to the rounded number! :)

Uncle E - I agree you should stick with "rounded numbers" anD my answer is mUCh more 'round', just look: 4 versus 3.5 - see how straight the '4' looks? How many round parts ->ZERO!!! Now look at my numero: 3.5 - its got all kindza roundies, two on the 3, the "." is completely round and the "five" - has one, so that is 2+1+1 equals "four" - notice how I spelled out MY four so that it would be rounded, it has 4 roundie parts. And to think I have a minor in math. My surely dead-by-now-cause-he-was-ancient-back-then first college calculus professor is probably rolling over in his grave right now.

Niece M - haha i dont even know what to say to that!!!

Oh, Christmas Two-ree

D
ec
emb
er 200
8

At the morning meeting a few days ago the supervisor of one of the maintenance groups said, "later today we'll be flipping a coin to see whether the plant Christmas tree gets installed downtown at the main corporate office OR stays here at the plant"

...... so when the meeting was almost over a few minutes later, there was the usual question by the meeting leader for any other items. I raised my hand and taking a cue from King Solomon, said,

"I think we should just cut the Christmas tree in half and keep the smaller ^top portion that still looks
(a few people now begin to giggle)
like a Christmas tree and let the folks downtown have the goofy looking _bottom portion
(more people smiling, giggling even harder, just barely contained)

THEN someone on the west side of the room immediately speaks up and says, "all in favor of Ernie's idea, raise your right hand!" and of course the entire room shot their hands in the air with laughter and said "aye".


Invention Link: The Next Invention in My Blog

I Name and Rename Two Teenage Girls at the Groc Store

Groc store shopping is one of my favorite things. The chemist in me loves to discover new things to cook and to taste, that Martha S side of me. I also enjoy my subset of friends, mainly women, who work there. My Groc Store Group. I never know who is going to be there; the mystery of which miss or missus I might meet that day.

About a month ago I was visiting two of my young teenage feminine friends, groc store checkers, a quiet one and a never very quiet one, short and tall respectfully. I suddenly gave them male sounding nicknames without warning. 'P???' and 'R?p???'. Little did I realize that they would actually begin calling themselves that. (The '?'s are hiding the real letters – just wait, there's more, and a reason for the mystery)

The Sunday before Thanksgiving my mother was in town and we made a quick trip to the store and I was hoping that I wouldn't run into these girls, because, I told my mother, I had given them nick names AND my fifty year old brain had forgot what the names were! I did say "Hi" to at least 14 people I knew during our short groc visit, which is about 1/10 of 1 percent of the 14,302 population of Borger. Luckily, 'P???' and 'R?p???' were not there.

The next visit to the store a few days later I saw the short, quiet, very tired 'P???' when I first came in and said "Hi" and a little more, briefly to her as she was busy checking out a customer. Then I heard the tall-not-so-quiet 'R?p???' a few aisles away, so I unsuccessfully tried to sneak up on her. Just as soon as I said "Hi", she said, "Did you see 'Pete' when you came in the store? She's working down there" -> pointing west. Ah, I suddenly remembered, 'Pete' and 'Repeat'.

So earlier today driving home from yet another groc store visit I decided to rename them, only I haven't told them just yet. I will have to catch together some time to make my proclamation. I decided to go with something a little more feminine and Italian sounding, so I chose 'Pita' and 'Repita'. (I have no idea if 'pita' is an Italian word. It just needs to sound Italian.)

Marked for Life

I am sitting on an I-beam 30 stories above much lower, Lower Manhattan in the midst of a cage of buildings rising around me in my early 30's eating my lunchtime poultry based deli sandwich. My fellow steel worker and best friend Mark and I are enjoying the spring day, watching bits of my flaky chicken leave my fingers as I declare with flair, "Fly, My Little Bits of Chicken®, fly!" in a wicked witch voice from The Wizard of Oz. We watch the flaky bird bits reach their floating version of terminal velocity.

I suddenly become curious of Mark's ethnic origins and heritage. He answers, "My parents were a dangerous combination of Mohawk Indians (well known for their balance and working high steel) and hippies. They tried very hard to be 100% of each and that's why I ended up with such a weird name"

I questioned, "Well, 'Mark' doesn't sound very weird or very Indian to me". He filled in by saying that Mark was only a piece of his middle name. On the way to the hospital to be born, they didn't make it in time so his father pulled the car over to a roadside park. So immediately after he was born, his father looked around to see what object to name his son after, and hence the name 'Historical Marker'.

I replied, "That is weird, even for hippies, and yet follows an Indian tradition."

"I do think I fared better than my sister Tab though"

"I don't think that sounds very Indian or weird"

"Its because it is just the first piece of my twin sister's middle name, 'Picnic Table'"

The Evolution of My Old and New Pen(cil) Names

The Old

Dr. Seuss was the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel, a beloved American cartoonist and writer. A pen name is something you can hide behind if you wish to publish anonymously or in his case, semi-anonymously. My first pen name was a play on the single word 'anonymous' busted apart into 'A. Nona Mousse', which I thought was interesting considering it had a feminine middle part and there was someone in my department at work with the same rare name as one of the three pieces. And when I wanted to attribute a quote at the bottom of my e-mails to one of my children, I would use 'A. Nona Mousse Jr'. Only that made it even more confusing as I would not distinguish between the two children, they both had the same pen name.

The New

One day at work I wanted a new name to go with a silly piece of Seuss-like poetry, and I created the pen name "Dr Suez", and I thought, hmm, that's cool. That has slowly changed through the following path of evolution:

Dr Suez
Dr Sue Sez - another feminine name?
Dr Soo Sez - no, already have one feminine pen name, lets sound a little more Oriental, which I am not, adds a bit of con^fu_sion.
Dr Sioux Sez - Oh! Lets go with a piece of my Dakota heritage even though I am not Indian, at least I don't think so, and surely not Sioux. No reference to the Johnny Cash song, that was 'A Boy Named Sue'
Dr Sioux Says - ah, yes, I like that, it sounds like a sentence, Dr Sioux is making a proclamation.......

(Do you shun vowel e-vol-u-tion? You do?!?!?)

Squirrel Assassins

I have evidence that squirrels are trying to kill my dog.

a) I have no nut trees on my property.

b) Whole pecans are showing up in my back yard right under the "Squirrel Monorail" furnished by utility companies.

c) Squirrels sit on the SquirMono and see their deadly adversary (Cooper) jumping up and down barking and snarling and have watched his behavior to learn that he is a true omnivore - one squirrel told the others at an emergency local squirrel session, "I've seen him, he tries to eat basketballs and empty coffee cans and hippos - he must be 'elimi-nut-ed', do I see a show of tails wagging in agreement?",

A flurry of furry fans the meeting room,

"do I have a volunteer assassin?"

--silence--

"what a bunch of chickens"; exclaims the leader, "guess we'll have to get outside help for this job"

Photo Notes: The second photograph, of the squirrel with the nut in his mouth, was taken right by the backyard gate that is in the first photograph. There was no editing or "Photo-Shop-ing" of the photographs except for cropping. The second photograph was taken several weeks after I wrote the original story.

Yesterday’s MISTS-ery and Assassination Explained (It was just me messing around)

When I was younger I proved that the advertising slogan for the margarine product

" Everything's Better With Blue Bonnet On It! ™"

was not true.

a) Babies – Proof: 17 mad mothers at a day care center at the end of the day

b) Iced Tea – Proof: Numerous disgruntled customers at the restaurant that I only worked at for 3 hours mainly to do this experiment

c) The brakes on my sister's bicycle – Proof: The mysteriously dented fender of our car and dented forehead of sister. Don't tell anyone in my family about this.

Yesterday I finally got my MISTS (Make It Seem Time Stopped) machine to work. So if the day seemed kinda goofy for 7 minutes at 3:15 PM, it was just me. I also pushed the "Repeat" button, so today's tomorrow will seem like yesterday from now on, but only for 7 minutes which will feel actually like nothing really happened at all again.

Someone yesterday asked me 'what is the largest thing you've ever had thrown at you?'

Answer: Four E's - Once I was falling off from a building in Shattuck Oklahoma during a roofing job at approximately age 21, so for several milliseconds, 'The Entire Earth Except for Ernest'.

This is the most important question that someone asked me the other day: Why does your dog not like it when you blow on his face but wants to stick his nose out the window when traveling in the car?

Answer: Your dog obviously prefers carbon monoxide, diesel fumes, and ozone in preference to what on earth must be wrong with your mouth.

Second most important question: How important does a person need to be before their death is considered an assassination instead of a regular murder?

Answer: The main clues are A) notice that there are 2 "ass", and not just one, embedded in the word from which you can draw your own conclusion and then B) "nation" at the end which means that the death has to affect the entire country. Oh, I almost forgot C) the "I" in the middle is for conspiracy theorists who think that "I" might know what really happened or more importantly who didn't really die but just wanted to secretly sneak out of the country with lotza money and sit on a beach somewhere, quietly soaking up the rays and eating giant shrimp.

(Now I hope no one important, "A.A.", dies immediately after "I" post this, and then the whole nation gets the notion that I was in on it, especially if it seems to occur at 3:16 PM CST. Now, where did I put my emergency suitcase, tub of Blue Bonnet and fake beard?)

Invention Link: The Next Invention in My Blog

My German Slept-herd

I have trained my dog to do something very useful. Herd sleep. Sheep? No, sleep. I gave him a verbal request to get my wife out of bed to make us breakfast. This is more proof that he has learned the word 'bacon'. He not only went by himself and made his usual request "noises", but got his "nose" in on the action too, getting up on the bed trying to push my wife out of bed. I had been sick for several days with no end in sight, so I needed the pampering and he came to my, or rather, our rescue on cue. The wifey came through the living room grinning and asking, "Did you tell him to come get me out of bed ?!?!? I've never had him do that before. He was up there pushing me out of bed".

Now, I would only ever ask my dog to do something that I would do myself. I asked him to get my wife out of bed to make us breakfast. Licking her on the face was his idea, and it obviously worked.

A Question for A Confused Cooper

A poem for my dog and wonderful daily companion, Cooper

A Question for A Confused Cooper

In the course of every day
I ask my dog several questions
along the way,
Such as what he wants to eat
or what he wants to play.
But the one that was the funniest
from yesterday
Was when I asked him,
"Did you lose your hippo?
I think he flew (_from your ^mouth)
-> that a way"


Poetry Link: to my next poem in the blog 
(actually this one will be song lyrics !)

Proving That Esfahan Is Not Half of The World

Today I learned that there is Persian proverb:

"Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast"

which mean "Esfahan is half the world". Half the world??? That is a very tall claim. So I looked up the city in wikipedia. Esfahan is a beautiful city that is in the middle of the country of Iran. It is located on the main East-West and North-South routes crossing Iran and was once one of the largest cities in the world. It was the capital of its part of the world a couple times, I believe. The pictures included in the wikipedia article alone show a city rich in culture and beauty.

Esfahan has a sumbol that seems to indicate that it is half of the world:

I would think that the left side looks like a globe with lines of longitude and the right side is the pretty part, so the right side must be the Esfahan part (?), I'm just guessing here folks.

So now we tackle my mathematical proof to see if Esfahan is truly half of the world.

I tried examining Arabic fonted words, but they were not much help and then I learned there is a language called Unipers which tries to take Farsi (the main Iranian language) and use a Roman font. So here goes my word math....

From the best that I can tell from the transliterated phrase, the word 'jahan' is the word for 'world'. I noticed that 'Esfahan' has some of the same common letters in a row, 4 of them, the 'ahan' part. So, doing some fractional math (don't get all 'I forgot that stuff years ago' math-whimpy on me if you have read this far), 4/7 of the word Esfahan is equal to 4/5 of Jahan. I guess (?) we should do fractional multiplication:

4/7 times 4/5 = 16/35 = or 45.714% of Esfahan is the World

So mathematically we half a proof that 'Esfahan' is a little less than half of the 'World'.

So I propose that this should be the new symbol for the city of Esfahan:

And if you want something a little fancier, I made this one too, as a gift to the people of the artistic city of Esfahan, a city well known for it Persian rug manufacture:

My New Occupation: Mitsubishi Dealership

Its not what you think, unless you know me really well. Its not cars or WWII aircraft. Its pens. Yes, pens. Probably the finest tipped pens in existence for the common man. Yes, there are Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, but they are a pain in the &utt, and expen$ive (x10). These Mitubishi's write smoothly and rarely skip.

I just got in a new supply of Mitsubishi Gel Ink pens

This is my current inventory as of 2008.Nov.07:

Size 0.18 mm Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo Bit UM-201 $3.00 each

Black
Blue
Emerald Green
Light Blue
Light Purple
Mandarin Orange
Pink
Purple
Red
Turquoise

Size 0.28 mm Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo DX UM-151 $2.25 each

Black
Light Blue
Blue
Red
Emerald
Lime Green - New Color!

They are also available at JetPens.com
I just re-order in a large enough quantity to avoid their shipping ($25 minimum at jetpens.com) and then sell them at my cost. My wife says (loudly), "YOU AREN'T MAKING A PROFIT??? Whats the use in doing it?" ..to bring fine things to fine people, honey.

Desk 13 and Sponty

Desk 13

When Sister Mary Agatha would leave the room, I would begin. But first, the geography of our setting: The classroom in Parochial School had 25 desks laid out exactingly in a 5 by 5 grid and 24 were occupied. The distance from the desk to the walls and desk to desk perfectly matched occupying the square part of the room. Only the room was a rectangle, after taking a section of the front area for Sister MA's podium and circular trash can on one side and giant globe on the other. The lone desk in the middle of the 25, Desk 13 from the beginning or the end, had recently been suddenly vacated when the occupant had told her father that she wanted to be a nun, too, just like Sister MA when she grew up and the enraged father took his daughter from our midst forever.

0[_]0

x x x x x

x x x x x

x x o x x

x x x x x

x x x x x

Now I return to the word 'begin' near the beginning of my story. I would quietly count 1,2,3 after the door would click shut behind Sister MA. Then in unison all 24 of us would turn to the middle empty chair, together speak in monotone, each one slightly above a whisper but the collective voice was heard just outside by Sister MA in her current sister-sister chat through the ventilation system which made remarkable metallic reverberations as an intercom:

"And then there were nun",

followed by a brief 1200 millisecond pause and then two voices (always mine and Cindy, it was our idea after all), slowly shaking our heads,

" none? ",

and the 22 would chant, turning, breaking into 2 banks of 11 each for myself and Cindy, 22 index fingers in the air slightly blocking the passage of the their breath,

" not one "

Sister MA would open the door and poke her head inside to see us all motionless, turned back around with our heads forward and down dissolved into our books.

"Did someone say something?"

A silence on our part and then Cindy, our spokeswoman, would say,

"Not one person spoke"

Sister MA reflected a pause back, squinted while turning her head 17 degrees to the left in a manner later made famous by John Belushi, and then closed the door.

Sponty

When we were young and would get terribly excited, whoever was the least excited (LE) of the bunch would say,

"Stop, or you'll burst into flames with excitement",

and then whoever was the most excited (ME) would say,

"or what, I'll turn into ashes?"

and the LE would finalize,

"a dash of ash to stash in the trash".

And we would all fall down giggling in great excitement hoping not to catch fire spontaneously, and although we didn't know that spont word just yet, we just felt all sponty inside. And then we would sing our Dash/Ash/Stash/Trash song for the next hour or so and giggle until our faces hurt. Oh, that felt so good.

Hold it. In each of those memories I am a little girl with strawberry blond hair, dimples and freckles. Sorry, those must have been someone else's memories, as I am a 50-year-old brown haired man who has never been inside a parochial school; no dimps, no frecks.

Sudoku Rectangular A-B-B-A B-A-A-B Rule

While playing Sudoku this morning I think I noticed something new (at least for me).

Every Sudoku puzzle is supposed to have a unique solution. It is not supposed to be possible to have a pair of numbers in a 3x3 square that can be switched and then have the corresponding pair in another 3x3 square to the side or above or below then just be switched, what I call an A-B, B-A -> B-A, A-B swap AND have those 4 cells form the corners of a rectangle

(see fig 4).

For instance, this morning in a puzzle I had deduced that the pair of numbers at pair position A-B was 1 and 6, (see fig 1) but didn't know which order. Shortly after that I figured out that B and A' were also 1 and 6, (see fig 2) in the middle column of the puzzle, but again I didn't have enough information at that time to make a final determination of the pair B and A'. Then I tried to figure out the position labeled ? in fig 3. At that point I realized that the cell at B' could not contain a 1 or 6.

Reason: If A & B and B' & A' can be swapped with 1 and 6 or 6 and 1, then there would not be a unique solution to the entire puzzle. The swapping of 1-6 & 6-1 to 6-1 & 1-6 would not break an otherwise completed Sudoku puzzle, as each row, column, and 3x3 grid would still contain 1 through 9

Fig 1

Fig 2

Fig 3

Fig 4 Illegal Combination

If my logic is incorrect, incomplete or unsound, please let me know.

This may prove to be a useful tool when trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle. I don't think I have seen this "trick" explained before.

Update 2009.04.08 - Note: All 4 corners of the rectangle have to be updateable cells for this rule to apply. Sudoku games begin with a certain amount of cells filled in, non-updateable. I noticed several examples in completed puzzles where rectangles do exist, but at least one of the corners was a non-updateable cell, to which this rule does not apply, hence the alternating A-B-B-A B-A-A-B in the title.