In my previous post of Bruce torture, I used the punchline from this fantastic news blooper. It’s my go-to reply when I don’t know the answer to a question.
After watching this, it’ll be yours, too.
It’s a good thing I brought my towel. This gets messy.
For Ragle.
I’m selling this iPod Nano on Craig’s List because the volume down button recently got stuck. I got it over a year ago through Apple’s replacement program after sending in a first generation iPod Nano I bought on Craig’s List for $20. The guy I bought it from found it in a couch he got when someone put it out in front of their house with a “FREE” sign on it. So he made twenty bucks on a free couch and I got a new Nano. Everybody wins. I named it Sofa King.
OK, back to the point: I was happy to see that I got a reply to the Craig’s List ad. Until I opened it:
Wanna trafe
No punctuation. Just “Wanna trafe” with a link to my ad. No real words in English. I imagine if he had an actual ability to communicate he would have written “Do you want to trade?”
But not him. He typed and sent off an email that said “Wanna trafe”.
Well, I couldn’t let such an opportunity pass. So I decided to attempt to communicate with him in his own alien language. (Besides, I don’t wanna trafe. Or trade, for that matter.) I replied:
Trafe burna sharn delag wunga.
I used his alien word first to tip him off that I was replying to his non-English with my own non-English. I’m sure you’re shocked to learn that it didn’t work. He wrote back:
wat
Still. Not. English.
Come on, dude. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that a person who would type “Trafe burna sharn delag wunga” is not going to explain himself in a rational manner.
I’m clearly not rational, as evidenced by my subsequent reply:
Merdy folar bluge argen pleev.
I’m still waiting for a response.
Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews Nichelle Nichols on Star Talk Radio
Nichelle Nichols met Martin Luther King Jr. at the exact right time.
Nichelle recounts for Neil how she told Gene Roddenberry she was going to quit the show to go to Broadway, only to have Dr. King, who called himself her biggest fan, convince her to remain on the show because of the importance of her role to the black community, his family, and to Dr. King himself.
It’s a wonderful story. I welled up a few times.
Listen, download, and subscribe here.
I’LL TAKE MINE MIXED WITH JAMESON AND A STELLA BACK
I had no idea Burger King was giving flu shots.
STEPHEN KING by William Walsh
I hope Stephen King doesn’t get into a snowy car accident near their house. They’ll use him as a prop in their Stephen King game.
Pretty much the best love story ever.
My wife and I have been engaged in an ongoing game of Stephen King for about fifteen years.
The game began when we moved into our first home, back in 1996. The real estate agent described the house as pre-Colonial, and it was primitive. We wrote an offer for the house on a sunny day. We moved in during a three-day thunder storm. The previous owners left behind a sort of housewarming gift: Two shopping bags filled with Stephen King paperbacks. There was at least one copy of each of his books, and multiple copies of his really popular titles, like Carrie, Cujo, and The Shining. The bags even contained his pseudonymous books, written under the names Richard Bachman, John Swithen, and Cleo Birdwell.
My wife didn’t want to throw the books away, so she put them in the basement. I thought it would be funny to place the books on the dining room table one evening and deny that I had put them there. Then I thought it would be funny if I put the bags of Stephen King novels in the refrigerator and deny that I had put them there. She retaliated one night by filling my pillowcase with the Stephen King novels. She still denies having put them there.
Stephen King soon evolved into a game of hide and scream. One of us would hide on the other and then jump from the hiding place and scream, Stephen King. And Stephen King was also a game of whispers. If my wife dozed off in the living room on a given night, I would whisper in her ear, over and over, until she would wake, Stephen King, Stephen King, Stephen King.
In the early years, we never got tired of playing Stephen King. We played Stephen King at home and we played Stephen King in restaurants, shopping malls, airports, and hotels. We played Stephen King so much that we could have turned pro.
At some point, my wife added a physical element to Stephen King. She would strike me with one of his books or sometimes her hand. Two examples:
1) At the new Target that opened in town, my wife likes to wait until our paths diverge, then she will circle back to the book section to find the latest from Stephen King. She will sneak up behind me, hit me on the back of the head with the book and shout, Stephen King.
2) Stephen King goes to every Red Sox home-game, and he can often be seen in the stands when the camera is positioned to shoot a left-handed batter. If my wife sees Stephen King in the frame, she’ll pause the TV and punch me on the arm as she shouts, Stephen King.
I took my game of Stephen King in a more cerebral direction. Two examples:
1) A guy I work with has a practice of painting a new portrait of Stephen King every time King updates his press photo. He’s done dozens of Stephen King portraits, painted in oils, acrylics, dry-brush watercolors, gouache, and airbrush. One night when my wife was out, I hung these Stephen King portraits, gallery-like, in place of all of our family photos.
2) When our first child was born and just home from the hospital, I swaddled a copy of Firestarter in her pink receiving blanket and approached my wife in a panicked state. I said, There is something wrong with the baby. My alarmed wife said, What’s wrong? I said, She’s on fire! And I tossed the blanketed book to her, shouting, Stephen King!
We’ve had several Stephen King truces and a yearlong Stephen King détente right after the author was struck by a motor vehicle and nearly killed while out for an evening walk near his home in Lovell, Maine. In the last year or two, Stephen King has become a game via email, a midnight Facebook update, a ritual observed on Halloween, or just a shared laugh when we see the woman in town who looks just like Stephen King, with her spooky rectangular head, her short men’s haircut, and her squarish Stephen King eyeglasses from the Stephen King Collection at LensCrafters.
Our kids play Stephen King now more than we do. Just last weekend I overheard our daughters jumping rope in the garage. They sang a little rhyme over and over as they jumped. The rhyme went like this:
Stephen King, Stephen King.
You’re afraid of everything.
Stephen King, Stephen King.
You’re afraid of everything.(via The Kenyon Review Blog)
This may be the best tale of true love I have ever read.
Source: baitandswitch
