Halved in this week’s SI: shared a partial attribution for a similar entry. {Howard Dean: “We are ahead. We are near ahead. We drew. How are we down? We won! We are now hardened! Do we need a new war, or Enron honored, or Roe-Wade deadened? No, no, and no! We head on! NH! And OH. And DE. And OR and WA. And NE, and ND! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”}

Though the funniest piece of journalism would have to be the headline “U.S. Army to Leave 13 Bases in Germany”.

I so just did one of those things that you clearly aren't thinking at the time, and only when you realize the severity of your errors do you realize the severity of your errors.

“My parents never let me see “Jesus Christ Superstar”.”
He dies at the end.

“What if they made hair color keyed to one’s emotions?”
“What color would confused be?”
Blonde.

Hey- how does Auld Lang Syne go?
Um? Do you mean the lyrics or the melody?
The melody.
Um? ba baaa ba ba/ba baaa ba ba...
Okay, thanks. <click>

Lime Shrimp Ramen not only would be better without the Shrimp, but without the Ramen. The artificial flavoring is that good.

Thematically, Minute Maid Limeade was on sale at Schnucks: $3/gallon.

What’s the difference between a duck?
( ) The left leg is identical.
( ) It has one leg alike.
( ) One leg is similar.
( ) One leg's twice the same.
( ) One of its legs are both the same.
( ) Cantaloupe

(Eider one will do.)

Things I hate about Cingular:
1) My online account, unable to be accessed.
2) The itemized bill for last month that does not seem to exist in any form.
3) The $106.93 they are charging me despite (1) and (2).

One has no excuse for not knowing what an Internet chat acronym which appears in the OED stands for, imho.

“Naked Pictures of Famous People” had some very clever premises, but suffers from seeming to be poorly edited. The worst essays are at the beginning of the book. The humor of each essay seems diluted, resulting in most of the wit being sapped, with an inconsistent tone ruining most of the satiric effect. It’s no “America”, and I miss Daily Show.

CUSTOMERS
INNOVATION
INTEGRITY
TEAMWORK
ACCOUNTABILITY
EACH AND EVERY ASSOCIATE WEARING PANTS

Destination vs. journey: sometimes there may be no plane to sleep on.

Jesus died for all of our sins- but that’s a lot of Jesus to be divided up. Meaning that each individual will be left with a small fraction of Jesus. And with new people being born constantly, that fraction will be decreasing. Slaughtering people would free up some Jesus to be reapportioned among the survivors; but murder, being a sin, will increase the amount of sin to be Jesusified. And then the sins that the slaughtered people won’t be doing on account of being dead must be subtracted. The math gets messy.

So I think this Holy Spirit thing has to be a fudge factor, some hypothesized dark matter to make things zero out. And that’s a sloppy way for sins to be accounted for.

Unlawful to Copy.

The problem with Outburst is that most of the answers are wrong.
For example, for "Ten things found in a pond":
Pond scum should an answer.
*Water* should be an answer.
Amoeba should not.

Does every city have a bad part of town?
“Pretty much. Well, except the Vatican.”
Ah yes, the slums of Vatican City.

Of the languages you might take, what are they?

I’d go right from French to German.
That’s what Paris did in WW2.

It asked for a communicable disease of the 80s...
You put cancer, right?
<wince> I put cancer.

What’s my password?
Um? Something47?
<shocked> How’d you know that?
Um?
Oh. Right.
Wait- please tell me that isn’t it.
No! I mean, it’s not S-O-M...

And from the front page of the Washington Post:
Don’t like the cable people.

Far too many undeservedly rejecteds for this week's SI to fit in this Away Message.

We would like to remind our Republican travelers that they may bypass the security checkpoint by showing proof of party affiliation.

Passengers in exit rows may be called upon to assist the crew in certain non-emergency situations. Federal law requires these passengers to be at least 18 years of age, but no older than 25. And female.

Attention, travelers: there is a sale on lingerie and skillets at gate 34.

Domestic travelers, we have some gate changes to announce. Please report to gate x^3 - 2x^2 - 5x + 53 mod 32, where x is your original gate. International passengers, please use mod 31.

For those passengers who have not yet reached Chapter 22, Hermione kisses Ron in front of Harry.

I once made an announcement that Brad Pitt heard.

“Who am I?”
“Crazy?”
“I said who, not what. Nice string of letters there after my name.”

“Nothing screams out ‘I am a slacker’ than wearing flipflops to class.”

“You can’t have an undog or an uncat, but you can have an uncola.”

“You don’t just learn linguistics in linguistics class; you also learn parenting.”

“Syntax is very touchy-feely; semantics is very violent.”

“If you want to have a successful marriage, don’t go to 7-11.”

“They won’t be playing the Canadian national anthem at the Linguistics Olympics anytime soon.”

“No one wants me to cancel class today? That takes all the fun out of saying no.”

“There are no weekends in linguistics.”

Pottermania.

(The remixed music is almost more clever than the concept. Listening to it is an excuse to keep watching the later movements for the differences.)

Let there be a stack of N coins, one of which is counterfeit. The N-1 real coins all weigh the same, but the counterfeit one is either heavier or lighter than the rest. Given a balance, find the counterfeit coin in three weighings and solve for N.

What’s in a name?

“The first recorded urban myth involved a choking Doberman in a Brooklyn closet in 1973.”

The Mall is a tourist attraction in DC.
It shouldn’t be in St. Louis.

If it's Friday, it must be Oh-let's-have-a-sludgy-kitchen-sink Day.

Will be looking for fun and meals that don't involve proximity to my kitchen this weekend. IM/e-mail/call if you can aid with either.

<fearless>

Experiencing deja vu twice about something that never really happened in the first place.

Not that that would be an excuse:
“My parents just died.”
lol Funny coincidence.

My Away Messages, totaling 165 pages (plus another 16 pages of yet unused esoteria) have managed to break Word’s spellchecker. Apparently there is a limit to the number of red squiggly lines that can be generated, and there are enough proper words and other text not listed in the dictionary to trigger the cutoff. Meaning that henceforth there might be a few more typographical errors within my Away Messages. As always, feel free to IM an edit, but now I have an excuse.

"The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn’t suck is the day they start making vacuum cleaners."

“...It's cold / It feels like Independence Day / And I can't break away...”

Suffering summer, season of irony.

“...There's got to be an opening / Somewhere here...”

War of the Worlds, described as “simultaneously Spielburg’s best and worst movie”, I found suffered from thematic deficiency, containing only the too simple “survive”. Other ideas were never fully developed and were chaotically contradictory to one another; I was particularly disappointed that the “heroic” rejection of xenia/regression to barbarism was lost. The ending felt especially anticlimactic

I would have liked to have seen it remade as a TV miniseries, perhaps narrated through news broadcasts, to update the this-could-really-happen theme which made the radio version so powerful.

Tripled in this week’s SI: 2 HMs and a win! From a letter/word ratio standpoint, I was disappointed that my earnosethroater: Hellenophobe's otorhinolaryngologist was edited. Considering that Dane-rot was improved in editing, I really shouldn’t complain.

I did have a bad pun on vernalism to answer a recent contest’s “Le Sacre du Printemps, but not the Sack of Rome.”. There was a much better but horrendously obscure pun on vaernal I didn’t even try to submit.

Other rejecteds:
beanrate: .2 cows.

bourneagain: Someone who is filled with wonder by another insipid sequel to another Hollywood action flick.

arenal: Of, like, or characteristic of holding it after a game because the lines at a stadium restrooms are way too long.

How are you spending your Fourth of July weekend?

(a) Vacationing with friends in the mountains.
(b) Going to a baseball game on a glorious summer day.
(c) Driving to Kansas City for the fun of it.
(d) Cleaning sludge off the kitchen floor.

If you answered (a-c), congratulations: You're not Danny.

[Call/IM; I'm going to be desperate to be doing *anything* once maintenance shows up.]

Melodic cacophony.
Somehow Media Center managed to replicatably glitch itself so that two playlists play simultaneously. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.