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Text of the page (random words):
ld never figure out what anybody was talking about i m as sick as a dog my father said this sometimes the description relies on pure vagueness and the difficulty of verification no one can ever know how sick a dog feels but we can imagine dogs are constantly sticking their faces where faces shouldn t go eating things off the ground and going outside in the middle of winter without a jacket or gloves a patient mentions this to a doctor that he feels sick as a dog and nothing more needs to be said the doctor in turn is armed with a ready response take one of these pills twice a day in no time you ll be fit as a fiddle the doctor of course can sense that the person has never gone to medical school and probably doesn t know much about music either to the untrained ear the prospect of acquiring the health status of a finely tuned instrument sounds appealing also alliteration always cranks up the effectiveness by a notch or two fit as a tuba wouldn t have the same bounce she s as cute as a button i think this was made up on the spot by someone who needed to say something positive about a friend s baby but also didn t want to lie there are thousands of different buttons so the statement is meaningless it s like saying she s as interesting as a documentary he s as happy as a clam this one was especially perplexing clams live buried in the mud feeding mostly on particles of dead fish eventually a person will come along and dig the clams up with a shovel throw them onto a barbecue grill or into a pot of boiling water then crack open their shells and eat them whenever i heard someone say it i had to go find a dictionary and look up the word happy when you re finished washing the car i want it to be as clean as a whistle my uncle actually said this to my cousin and me one day in the early 1960s he was probably paying us twenty five cents each so he wanted to make sure he got his money s worth we assumed he meant that the car should be clean enough to put in our mouths although that only added to our uncertainty i don t remember but he may have also insisted that the interior be neat as a pin he looked as proud as a peacock i suspect we re way off on this one too we can t claim to comprehend the internal life or mental state of any large bird specifically we ve learned little about a peacock s ability to experience pride many could very well have real self esteem issues including deep seated insecurities and inferiority complexes yes most peacocks have nice feathers but looks fade and then what we were all pleased as punch being culturally illiterate i was totally confused by the punch reference if we don t know how happy a clam is feeling or how sick a dog is what can we possibly infer about the emotional state of a bowl of chilled fruit juice my mother was the most proficient at the use of these expressions she described things as being clear as a bell and easy as pie and people as cool as a cucumber old as the hills and slow as molasses my little brain took it all in and stored it away but in truth i was as baffled as a buffalo i made that last one up myself https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 08 17 baffled as a buffalo feed 91 6809 bronxboy55 punch dog button clam buffalo outta sight https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 08 09 outta sight https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 08 09 outta sight comments sat 09 aug 2014 15 44 57 0000 http mostlybrightideas wordpress com p 6790 you re just too cool that s what she said in fact those were her exact words which proves one thing she s never met me no one has ever described me as cool or any heat level for that matter if there were a television show called world s least cool human being i would be the permanent guest host when i enter a room even the goldfish pretend they re asleep in high school i was voted most likely to be forgotten and well before the five year reunion it was a great surprise then when a fellow blogger paid me a compliment by suggesting that i was too cool at least i think it was a compliment the word too snagged on my brain for a moment i ve been told i m too sensitive which is a polite way of saying oh grow some skin will you please and others have said i think too much which really means please shut up now and at least try to be normal so her comment did get me speculating about the general concept can a person be too cool and if so where exactly is the boundary is it possible to just brush up against the limit without stepping over it before we can talk about coolness we have to define it and there s part of the problem it s hard to analyze something that s cool without warming it up to room temperature first it s like explaining a joke you kill the humor in the process or pulling that goldfish out of the water in order to explain how it lives as my ninth grade biology teacher did while she pointed out the gill structures the thing was drowning in mid air we can t say for sure what coolness is but we know it when we see it for anyone growing up in the early sixties this guy was cool like any other personality trait coolness is also relative the description requires comparison and context in much the same way that height does a man who s six foot six and working at the bakery is tall if the same guy were a professional basketball player he d be average seated in your dentist s waiting room an old magazine about soybeans might seem like the most boring thing you can imagine but if you were floundering in solitary confinement in a bulgarian prison and stumbled upon that same magazine buried in the dirt floor of your grimy cell you d read it cover to cover even the operating instructions for a toaster oven would seem cool in 1986 huey lewis told us that it s actually hip to be square i ve been pondering this idea ever since is it true it s easy to be hip when you re on stage in las vegas with flashing lights and saxophone players and five thousand screaming fans in the audience but could my squareness be hip i never thought so until about an hour ago i believed the scale on which we measure a person s coolness was graduated and straight like a timeline or a thermometer however this does little to clear up the issue what s the opposite of cool is it lukewarm tepid maybe more complications beyond cool would be cold which is a completely different thing and at the other end past tepid would be hot which also has its own meaning in a flash of insight that was as notable for its intensity as much as its rarity i saw that the scale was not a straight line at all but a circle this is why when you don t even know or care how uncool you are that very tendency is itself considered cool it s something like an honorary degree when people drop out of college in their freshman year to pursue careers that have nothing to do with learning or knowledge and go on to become incredibly wealthy and powerful terrorizing their own employees along the way and demonstrating that our system of education is somewhat useless universities reward them with a diploma and let them wear a cap and gown and give a speech to the real students naturally this got me wondering about the recipients of those honorary degrees they didn t pass any courses or write any dissertations do they frame the piece of paper and hang it on the wall anyway if not what is it for my uncle used to give me two dollar bills on my birthday before i could even fold the cash and put it into my pocket my father would tell me that i should never spend it two dollar bills are rare he d say don t go buying comic books with them but if i couldn t spend it i thought it wasn t really money the worst part is this was the only piece of financial advice anyone has ever given me in the 1970s the cool handshake knocked me farther out of sync this was the vertical clasp let s go smoke some weed handshake i never adopted that greeting and it always led to a lot of awkward fumbling in the air which preceded a maddening conversation that would usually begin with my saying sorry i don t smoke weed do you have root beer i didn t say far out or groovy or dig this i didn t call my house a crib or refer to my car as wheels the expression right on was popular for a few years and it seems to have made a comeback of late i never even used it the first time around i ve said those words but only when embedded in longer sentences you can turn right on red here keep right on kicking me in the leg and see what happens you were right on tuesday when you said that wall was going to fall down i ve never been on a motorcycle or worn a leather jacket i ve never smoked a cigarette or gotten stoned or hitchhiked anywhere i can t tell you a single detail about any member of any rock band and when i m at the convenience store i see magazine covers featuring pictures of famous people and i have no idea who they are i ve never said bring it on to anyone or the more recent shortened version bring it when the expression gets reduced to just bring i probably won t say that either i ve also never asked what s going down or referred to sunglasses as shades or called anyone bro or dude i ve never said it s all good or no worries mostly because it isn t all good and i can think of a billion things to worry about on the other hand lately i ve been rolling up the sleeves of my tee shirts the way teenagers did in the fifties i m not trying to re create a trend though it s just been kind of warm in the house i ve also taken to wetting my hair and slicking it back but that s only because it s starting to grow in strange directions sometimes i resemble one of those nuclear physicists who hasn t left the laboratory in six months other than that i don t really care what i look like or what anyone says even friendly fellow bloggers and i guess you know what that makes me i invite you to listen to this song once then spend the rest of the weekend trying to get it out of your head https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 08 09 outta sight feed 91 6790 bronxboy55 cool prison paper listen carefully https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 08 01 listen carefully https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 08 01 listen carefully comments fri 01 aug 2014 13 27 17 0000 http mostlybrightideas wordpress com p 6779 here s a thing i ve noticed it has to do with accents but the theory can be applied to a lot of other things as well the farther away we are from a place the more everything seems to look and sound the same i ll give you an example because so far you have no idea what i m talking about in the united states everyone below iowa and east of new mexico speaks with what is generally referred to as a southern accent whether you re from cleveland or calgary or copenhagen that s what you hear and it s all you hear those southerners all sound alike don t they move in closer though and details emerge out of the haze you start to discern that people from texas don t really talk like people from alabama any more than residents of kentucky speak exactly like their neighbors in tennessee there are similarities and just as many subtle differences in fact the more you listen the more you realize that it s possible to distinguish speech patterns from within various parts of the same state even small towns can have their own distinct accents but in order to hear those distinctions you have to be near the action you also have to pay attention what does this have to do with anything i m not certain but i think failing to acknowledge this premise is one of the ingredients in a dangerous process it begins in ignorance winds through insensitivity and leads inevitably to hostility racism and xenophobia all koreans look alike yes from a distance they do just as any crowd of total strangers will seem to share only that element of strangeness we re too far away to recognize their unique qualities it s after you meet and get to know individuals that you can tell one from another the same thing happens with planets and cows and shades of color and disco music and girl scouts and identical twins and men with cerebral palsy and soldiers i keep coming back to accents though because it s a good example of how we influence each other over time how do local accents form does one person suddenly start pronouncing a word a certain way and everyone follows along what keeps it going and changing why do people in new england drop the letter r from certain words that have them and then insert them into words that don t were those conscious decisions or two separate tendencies that eventually converged sometimes i imagine a gigantic vacuum machine that sucks all the people out of the world blends them together in a big drum then sprays them back out in random places assuming everyone now had to stay where they ended up would the same accents return over time or would there be all brand new ones out of the varied mixture would there always be a single rhythm and pattern that would come to dominate the others when people are speaking a language we don t understand we can t hear the accent at all at least i can t again that s because of distance and inexperience people from different regions of algeria and argentina must converse with an identifiable cadence and set of inflections but i wouldn t notice to me it s all just arabic and spanish i wonder can people who don t speak english notice a southern accent can they tell a canadian speaker from an american melbourne from manchester speaking of manchester why do all foreign journalists have british accents i think they re faking they know that if they sound british everyone will think they re intelligent maybe that s how they got the job in the first place i m not even sure where that idea came from because i ve been to london and they didn t seem that smart to me they call an apartment a flat i m no genius myself but a flat is what happens to your tire when you run over a broken beer bottle and they refer to a drugstore as a chemist everybody who s ever watched cartoons must know that a chemist is a person who mixes liquids together and tries to make them explode what does that have to do with medicine if you have a migraine or a nervous condition a loud bang and singed eyebrows is the last thing you need so why a television reporter would adopt an english accent to impress us is beyond my comprehension one more thing people with irish scottish and australian accents sound normal when they sing so they re obviously pretending to speak that way in order to appear charming i guess that works for a little while but sooner or later we realize that they all talk that way and the charm begins to fade the fact that they all look alike doesn t help either https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 08 01 listen carefully feed 90 6779 bronxboy55 accident artist reporter i thought i d never ask https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 07 24 i thought id never ask https mostlybrightideas wordpress com 2014 07 24 i thought id never ask 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