Friday, November 7, 2008

two Democractic administration "-nistas" in two minutes

I had been watching the video of today's episode of Democracy Now. With the episode on pause, I posted a "letter to the Obamanistas" on my other blog. Maybe a couple minutes later, I resumed the video. 30 seconds later, the guest, Robert Kuttner, used the word "Clintonistas". I just re-watched the portion of his interview that I had been watching before I paused it. Kuttner had been speaking for less than a minute and had not used the word "Clintonistas" before the pause.

Monday, September 29, 2008

roundup of the last few days/weeks

  • I was in the kitchen having an extended meditation on the use of the word "credibility" in international relations rhetoric -- thinking about Chomsky's observation that nations trying to maintain "credibility" act like mob bosses who rough up delinquent extortees as an example to others... then I came to the computer and found that my poly-amor Jaye had been reading an article called The Strange Credibility of Polyamory.
  • Three seemingly unrelated mentions of "vampire" on three consecutive days: first Jaye said that someone she knows would look like a vampire if he shaved his facial hair; the next day, our friend L. compared our daughter Nyx's dress, with a large white collar, to a vampire's; on the third day I'm pretty sure I read about someone labeling someone else a "vampire" in some national-politics context.
  • I was thinking about Teddy Roosevelt talking about his "bully pulpit" and Timothy Leary talking about how that usage of "bully" functioned on multiple levels simultaneously... then a few minutes later I looked at the front page of a newspaper in the grocery store and read about some U.S. financial expert lamenting that the U.S. was losing its ability to use the international dominance of the dollar and/or of U.S. financial institutions as bully pulpits in influencing the behavior of foreign parties.
  • Nyx was walking with me through the grocery store and picked some goldfish crackers from a shelf and put them in our shopping basket. We bought them and ate them -- probably the first time in her life she had eaten goldfish crackers. Later that day, at my monthly in-person meeting for my work-at-home job, somebody ate goldfish crackers at the table in the meeting room, early in the meeting before anyone else brought food to the table.
  • After drinking a 16-ounce cup of coffee, I was imagining a scenario where I was getting hyperactive and telling people I was high on caffeine... within about a minute of that I clicked on an article link at news.google.com called "No love for the bailout: CNNMoney.com" and found a picture of a guy holding up a coffee cup with "THE BUZZ" as the name of the column.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Kriss Kross

I'm pretty sure this happened on the same day as the Burt Reynolds thing; if not, then the day before.

One coworker was talking about the large-screen TV screens in a bowling alley (Grand Central Bowling) where he had just celebrated his birthday. Coworker B said: "Ah so you can watch the game while you bowl?"
A: "No sports games; they were playing music videos. So you can watch Kriss Kross."
B: "Hey, I was just thinking about Kriss Kross because I was taking a walk with my daughter and I looked down and realized her pants were on backwards. That's funny, you don't think about that every day."

As I started to type this entry I had been overestimating the connections here, confusing Kriss Kross with Marky Mark and connecting Mark Wahlberg with Burt Reynolds through Boogie Nights, but still.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Burt Reynolds

I was looking at several Wikipedia pages today. On the page for Marc Summers, whom I watched host Double Dare on Nickelodeon in the late 1980's, I read about "The Tonight Show incident" in which he and fellow guest Burt Reynolds traded insults and threw their drinks at each other. I had first pulled up the Double Dare page and from there clicked to the Marc Summers page.

A few hours after that, I overheard a conversation between two co-workers, including one of the two involved in the previous post's tinnitus synchronicity.
"William Williamson. What kind of name is that?"
"I heard you talking on the phone with someone with an interesting name this morning... like a famous person's name."
"Oh yeah? I'm not good with famous people's names."
"Some older celebrity, a really generic name like, I don't know, uh... Burt Reynolds, something like that."