fine whine

This post originally began with "I laughed harder today than I have all week" but since that today refers to a day many, many weeks ago (April 25th) it doesn't really make much sense any more.

Nonsense, though, is more or less timeless, isn't it?

Here's what was funny.

I was at a two-day off-site conference with many of my co-workers. Between sessions the organizers would play music to signal the end of the break, so all of us could stop chatting, checking our email, going to the bathroom, grabbing snacks and so forth and would return to our seats, ready for another riveting hour or two. The song they would play was John Fogerty's* "Centerfield", which, if you haven't heard it, has some (canned) clapping in it ("I'm ready to play...today"), which, as we discussed, isn't always so easy to clap for those of us less rhythmically inclined.

"Centerfield" isn't the only song with difficult manual percussion. I thought back for a moment and recalled, "It's like the Friends theme song ["I'll be there for you" by the Rembrandts ]... just when I managed to get it right they canceled the show", joking, of course, because I'd stopped watching it well before its cancellation, and also because I'd never managed to clap it correctly either.

Just thereafter, though, following through with the same idea, somebody else chimed in with "I know, it's like, 'Alright, I finally got the clap!'" - loudly, as the rest of the people in the room were starting to quiet down.

Moments later she realized what it was she said, but we were already laughing. I think it took the organizers a good five minutes to quiet us down.

* Until that day (April 25th) I never really connected "Centerfield" with John Fogerty. I'd been hearing it for years, even as a child, since my dad had put it on his definitive 1980s mix tape. My first guess was actually Joe Cocker, though for the life of me I have no clue what his hits would be. And yes, once told, I was able to recognize that this was, in fact, Fogerty and his rather recognizable voice. I'd just never made the connection before, at least that I could remember.

One of these days I need to update my resume again*.

SkillsLunch. Both with co-workers and vendor representatives.

Paradigm Shifting.

AccomplishmentsShifted a record number of paradigms enabling spectacular Q3 returns. Needed to think back inside the box afterward to cool down.

Ended forward transmission of at least one forwarded email every week, if not more often.

* 'Again' may be too strong a word. I've generally entirely redone it every time, since I never seem to send it for the same sort of jobs more than once or twice.

So we were up later than usual this evening, and things were already getting silly when Jessica found the following thread on the nest.

Before I continue, I think should warn you, the reader, that what follows below could be considered of an adult nature (yet it is totally immature) and I cannot in good conscience recommend that you read it. Feel free to scroll past all of this, and continue reading the more highbrow stuff I've written.

If you're still reading, that thread began with '410bride' writing:

Admittedly I have only played this drunk, but basically you take any movie title and substitute "vagina" for one of the words. Sometimes we end up cracking ourselves up, but like I said, usually alcohol is involved.

and then a list of many a clever title, including Three men and a vagina, My best friend's vagina, and The hunt for Red Vagina.

For a good ten minutes Jessica and I drew upon our reserves of silliness and my large movie collection* and came up with many a funny title. Then she went to bed and I thought the whole thing was over, but my brain kept coming up with more titles. Here follows a list of many of them, in the hopes that they stop bouncing around my head.

• Rosemary's vagina, or better yet, Joe Gould's vagina**
• Dirty rotten vaginas
• The discreet charm of the vagina
• Big deal on Vagina Street
• Vaginas in the mist
• Vagina on the moon
• A vagina in the sun or A place in the vagina
• Vaginabusters
• Wag the vagina
• All the president's vagina
• Two by Michael Douglas: Romancing the vagina and The perfect vagina
• The vaginas down under
• Some like vagina hot
• Vagina on the river Kwai
• Deep blue vagina
• Close encounters of the vagina kind
• Big trouble in little vagina
• Attack of the 50-foot vagina
• The incredible shrinking vagina
• Three by Pacino: Scent of a vagina, And vagina for all and Dog vagina afternoon
• The secret lives of vaginas
• The Spanish vagina or The vagina prisoner
• Vagina of the living dead
• Vaginas from a mall or Scenes from a vagina
• Clash of the vaginas or Vagina of the titans
• A boy and his vagina, or maybe Johnny got his vagina
• A fistful of vaginas
• The cook, the thief, his wife & her vagina
• The vagina that wouldn't die
• Vagina without a face or Fiend without a vagina
• The incredible 2-headed vagina
• The big red vagina
• In the heat of the vagina and its sequel, They call me Mister Vagina
• Joe versus the vagina

Having typed those up I'm certain still others will come to me, so mayble I'll add more in the comments. Feel free to join in, though bear in mind it's rather addictive.

* Which contains Snatch and The Abyss, among others.

** My favorite, I think.

I can but wonder why Disney considers 1971's Bedknobs and broomsticks to be a suitable film for children. Having watched it today for the first time since I was a child, I can't say that I appreciate it more now than I did years ago. Based on what I see now, I'm not sure I should have even seen it as a child. Set against a backdrop of World War II, the story weaves in some pretty heavy themes:

• child abandonment and the death of a parent (the three children are orphans of a sort)
• wanton and unchecked pollution (Miss Price*'s motorcycle spits out a cloud of foul yellow smoke)
• witchcraft (well, that one's obvious, but the scene where the witch joins the children in a post-prandial prayer stands out)
• dishonest clergy (the priest seems to have plans to somehow acquire Miss Price's land and estate, and seems to be faking illness to avoid military service)
• blackmail (the children know Miss Price is a witch and hold it over her for better food and a bed knob)
• obvious drug trip overtones (the psychedelic flying bed sequences)
• confidence games and scams (the Professor sings a song about selling 'cures' that don't work and charms that do nothing, though he sells only one broken trinket to the smallest child)
• wasting food (the Professor cracks eggs and pours milk on the head of one of the bystanders)
• mail fraud (the Professor didn't expect his correspondence course spells to actually work)
• illegal squatting and disobeying government orders (the professor has appropriated a nice mansion vacated by people more squeamish about the unexploded bomb in the front yard)
• taking children to pawn shops (Portabello Road, obviously the Disney backlot, seems to be where people sell things when they're down on their luck, but still ready to dance away their sorrows)
• art forgery and other misrepresentation of goods (Portabello Road)
• vandalism (again, Portabello Road, wherein the youngest child defaces a bust with a mustache, and the older boy breaks a couch)
• racial segregation (the tedious and interminable Portabello Road dance sequence is segmented many a time, but never integrated. Turbans and steel drums don't mix)
• threatening children with violence (a knife is held menacingly against one of them)
• children swearing (well, if "bloody" counts)
• a general disregard for the reality of physics and other science (nevermind witchcraft and a flying bed or breathing and dancing underwater, but talking animals? Give me a break)
• a disregard for proper grammar and speech (besides the children, the animals speak very poorly and do not set a good example for an impressionable audience)
• cheating and other poor sportsmanship (the animals' soccer game is brutal, particularly on the referee)
• theft (the professor steals the king's medallion, and the smallest boy stole a book from the Professor's squat)
• encouraging cohabitation (the shopkeeper is happy to think that the professor and Miss Price are shacking up without being married)
• butt-kicking (the witchcraft-animated pair of shoes kicks the witch in the rear end)
• overt sexual innuendo (one long shot has the Professor giving a large sausage to a pussy-cat, hmmm)
• cruelty to animals (he steps on its tail)
• general war-is-hell kind of stuff (shooting, fisticuffs, and whatnot, albeit with spectral solders on one side and scared Germans on the other)

All that, and it was rated 'G'. Go figure.

* 'Eglantine Price' seemed such an odd name that I was forced to run some anagrams on it. The most promising ones I found, well, weren't that promising.

• I nip a neglecter
• Certain peeling
• I pin a recent leg
• Inelegance trip
• Pelican integer
• Near nice piglet

Of course, "Eglantine" is merely an anagram of "Inelegant", but is it really that simple?

If I instead use 'Miss Eglantine Price' I also get:

• Mantlepieces rising
• Single priest cinema
• Grim penis latencies
• Replaces meningitis
• Angelic Mister Penis
• Genitalic primeness

Genitalic primeness, indeed. To think, this movie is for kids!

Google does not find any useful results for "ice cream truck versions of popular songs". I'd settle for ice-cream-truck versions of not-so-popular songs, too* or even calliope renditions, but alas, it seems to be an untapped niche, even in this modern world. I guess we're all moving to fast to mix together today's music with the music-players of yore.

Or maybe, just maybe, such a combination would be so horrendously annoying beyond mere human comprehension.

* Oft-quoted comedian Steven Wright remarked "The ice cream truck in my neighborhood
plays 'Helter Skelter'." but I think he made that up.

To have arrived in Hong Kong first, I now realize, gave me something to ease the transition from the red, white and blue to the Red. Hong Kong was different from that to which I am accustomed, and China doubly so.

Hong Kong is busy and runs at a breakneck pace, but there's an overall order (or at least sense) to everything. Not so with big brother China. The entire country is being simultaneously built up and torn down, oftentimes on the same lot. The people and the roads and everything is a chaotic mess, and I was doubly glad that I was in a chauffeured car with a seasoned driver and not behind the wheel myself nor in one of the buses that seemed far more susceptible to being caught in the gridlock. But on the way there traffic was relatively light on the highways and through the streets of Dong Guan.

Much of the scenery was realtively similar once we got past the border (rolling hills covered with trees, low buildings in bad shape, and tall skyscrapers, often all adjacent) so I was flipping through the paper on the way, and I came across my horoscope in both the Zodiac and Chinese systems.

First for Libra I found this:

You've had every right to be furious about the lack of support you're getting from those closest, but they could actually be doing you a favour. As you learn more you'll realise that you were being too optimistic, and their concerns were valid.

And for us Goats:

Don't indulge in rich food and neglect your usual high hygiene standard. You are likely to experience a health crisis which may stem from food poisoning. Likewise, you will need to keep a vigilant eye on your financial matters.

"a health crisis which may stem from food poisoning"? This is not the degree of specificity I usually expect from a newspaper horoscope, nor is this something I particularly want to be reading on my first trip into China, one that will include lunch.