Movies: The Pirates! Band of Misfits

I wouldn’t want to have spent money in order to see this movie, but as a free checkout from the library, The Pirates! Band of Misfits not a bad family movie. The story is kind of wacky (actually the whole movie is kind of wacky), but there is a lot of humor, and a message about being true to your friends and to who you are (though even this last bit is saved from undue moralizing by its humorous context).

Pirates aren’t usually role models for the values of friendship and personal integrity, but these aren’t exactly your typical bloodthirsty pirates. The Pirate Captain (that is his name, not just his title) claims to enjoy running people through, but his motivation for attacking other ships is to collect enough loot to win the Pirate of the Year award.

Holiday humor

At the Holiday Springs and Sprockets exhibit I went to yesterday, there was also a display of Christmas cards sent or received by Steve Gerberich (the creator of the overall exhibit). One I found particularly amusing included a web address, so I checked it out when I got home.

www.winstanleylsw.com is a collection of four amusing virtual refrigerator magnets. Each is a parody of a familiar household product, altered to give it a holiday theme. My favorite is the bottle of “Yule Tide” detergent, which “Removes Stubborn In-Laws” and provides “Bing Crosby Whitening.” You can send a magnet by email (though the image will not be immediately visible in the email, as most email clients these days are set not to download pictures automatically).

The website was apparently created, several years ago, as the Christmas greeting of Lenox Softworks and its parent company, Winstanley Associates. I’m guessing the page proved so popular that they simply left it up for people’s continued enjoyment.

Arrrrgh – I didn’t talk like a pirate today

If I still worked in a large IT department, sitting at the front desk where I had occasion to chat with my colleagues over the course of the day, it would not have been mid-afternoon before I found out that today was Talk Like a Pirate Day. Not that most of the developers and system administrators actually went around saying “Avast” – but one of them would have mentioned something.

As it was, I was sitting down at a meeting when the VP of Student Services commented on the fact. He didn’t go on to actually talk like a pirate, and I wondered if he had acquired his knowledge from a student, his online resources, or a general interest in nerdy topics (an interest he may or may not have – he is my supervisor but I don’t really know him yet). He did mention that celebration of the day really took off ten years ago when Dave Barry wrote about it – something I hadn’t known before.

I found out from nationalGeographic.com that it could more accurately be called Talk Like Robert Newton Day. Or perhaps Talk Like Disney Day. Not that I ever thought the presumed pirate-style talk was all that historically accurate, but I was surprised to learn that it has such a recent origin. And from the purveyors of Mickey Mouse!

Despite the comments at the end of the article, I don’t think National Geographic is trying to spoil anyone’s fun, or take a silly topic too seriously. Their role is education, and people like me appreciate learning more about the origins of today’s good-humored “pirate talk.” It wouldn’t stop me from talking like a (Disney) pirate, if I were so inclined.

It was actually a crossword puzzle that made me realize, one day recently, how inaccurate the pseudo-pirate talk is. Consider the opening lines at the Talk Like a Pirate Day website: “Avast, me hearties! Welcome…” Wouldn’t you guess, from that opening, that avast was some sort of greeting? So I was very surprised to discover that a five-letter word meaning “Stop!” is AVAST.

Next thing you know, I suppose I’ll be reading that pirates didn’t really wear earrings and have parrots perched on their shoulders…

Test your typing

I was filling out an online job application, and one question asked for my typing speed. I was sure it was over 40 wpm, but thought it would be nice if I could find some kind of typing test to get an accurate number. I quickly found one on the internet, which has the great advantage of not only being easy to use but actually fun because the text you have to type is actually interesting.

I mean, wouldn’t you get a smile on your face as you found yourself typing out this sentence?

Basically, a tool is an object that enables you
to take advantage of the laws 
of physics and mechanics
in such a way that you can seriously injure yourself.

Not every test (I’ve tried five so far, I don’t know how many there are in all) is equally humorous, but they beat some of the dull text I’ve copied in typing tests before.

Check it out here: http://www.learn2type.com/typingtest/typingtest.cfm. I don’t know whether I type any better when I’m smiling (the humor is subtle enough so I don’t have to worry about laughing too much to keep my speed up), but so far my best score was a surprising (to me) 70 wpm.

Happy LOL Day!

I don’t know that I made anyone laugh out loud, but I did get a lot of smiles today when people saw the bunny hat I was wearing. I sit at the front desk, so lots of people got to smile as they walked past. And to visitors who asked, I explained that today was LOL Day in Iowa.

Our company wants to promote healthy habits, and laughter is healthy. So we were invited to wear silly shirts, hats, and/or socks today. My fish shirt isn’t quite “silly” but it’s not exactly normal work attire. It didn’t get nearly as much attention as my hat did, though.

We were also invited to play games in one of the conference rooms during lunch, but apparently no one felt an urge to play Connect 4, Operation, or Jenga. I played Bop-It for a few minutes (after checking to see that no one seemed to be in the CIO’s office next door – there’s no volume control on the Bop-It). I’m not really good with games that require speed, but after several tries I managed a score of 46.

It was a reasonably good day at work. But if you really want to laugh out loud, silly clothes are nothing compared to what you can find at the Damn You Auto Correct website. If off-color language really bothers you, don’t go there. But the fact that people don’t mean to say those things, and it’s the autocorrect feature of their phones that make them “say” such embarrassing things, is what makes them so funny. I don’t laugh out loud at much, but after reading these for a while it’s pretty hard not to.

The latest in canine fashion

I don’t think Kyra cares what she looks like, considering her sleeping positions sometimes. (See candid shot at right.)

But if your dog is more fashion-conscious, you might want to check out the all-new Warby Barker website. They have the latest in canine eyewear, and even a blog where readers may contribute photos of their dogs modeling various styles.

I especially like the FAQ section, as well as all the cute photos (be sure to check out the Man’s Best Friend page). The Dogocle is also most impressive.

 

Defense against the dark

I was typing up some Bible study notes for my husband the other day, and one phrase jumped out at me: “the best defense against the dark.” That would make for an interesting series of blog posts, I decided. Not a Bible study, or even necessarily religious in nature (though no doubt I will sometimes make references to faith and Scripture) – just thinking about what defenses we have against the “dark” things that come into our lives.

• Depression
• Doubt
• Discouragement
• Death
• Deceit
• Fear

I’ll start with the last one on that list, because fear is an element in just about all the others. Fear of the (unknown) future, fear of what others will think, and fear of failure are a large part of what makes it difficult to face those other kinds of “darkness.”

Games: Quelf

I found Quelf on clearance at Walmart and decided it was worth buying based on one thing I read on the box. Among the contents listed (game board, game pieces, cards, etc.) is “1 giant invisible harpoon (it’s invisible for a reason, use it wisely).” I decided that any game maker with that kind of sense of humor was bound to have made a fun game.

My guess was confirmed when we started reading the rules. The objective of the game? “To have fun. Duh!” Unfortunately it is made for at least three players, and my husband is not into board games. So Al and I had to wait for Zach to get home from college. (Having played it now, I don’t recall anything that actually required three players, so Al and I may try playing it by ourselves.)

As a number of reviews at amazon.com indicate, it is similar to Cranium, “but edgier.” I haven’t played the game Cranium, but we have some of the other games made by Cranium, Inc. Al and I both enjoy the wackiness of the games, and the variety of mixing stunts, trivia questions, word puzzles, and more. Quelf takes the wackiness even further.

Enjoying ComPost

The Washington Post isn’t one of the newspapers I normally read online (mostly I stick to the Muscatine Journal and the Wall Street Journal), but I think I’ll be visiting their site more often in the future. Not for the news – though I might read that too – but to read ComPost by Alexandra Petri, who “puts the ‘pun’ in punditry” according to the blog heading.

I found it to begin with by clicking on Google’s Doodle today, honoring Gregor Mendel’s 189th birthday. I had nothing in particular in mind to blog about this evening, and figured that something worthy of a Google Doodle probably also merited a blog post. But I was pretty sure I remembered having done that a previous July 20.

(Oddly enough, it turns out that I wrote that post July 22, 2008, based on what I found at infoplease.com. I checked tonight, and infoplease.com still shows that Gregor Mendel’s birthday is July 22. From wikipedia, I found out that his birthday is July 20; July 22 is often cited, but it is the date of his baptism, not his birth.)

Anyway, the first hit I saw was “Gregor Mendel’s naughty peas and our GM future.” I had no idea what could have been naughty about Mendel’s peas but I decided to find out. I was hooked with the first line: “It started off innocuously, in a garden. These things often do.” I admit I had to stop and think a moment to understand the allusion. Then I smiled, knowing I was going to enjoy reading the rest of the post. And I did.

I can’t say I enjoyed all Petri’s posts as much as the first one I read. Part of it, I suppose, is that they tend to deal with topics at the forefront of many people’s attention, but that I have little or no knowledge of. I had seen headlines about phone hacking recently, but hadn’t read any articles. I heard other people’s opinions about Casey Anthony, but chose not to learn details of the case. I’m not sure I had even heard of Charlie Sheen. (Is he an actor? A musician? A politician?)

But “Save the Oxford Comma! A Grammar Nazi’s Plea” is definitely worth reading. I didn’t even know what an Oxford comma was, at least not by name. But grammar is something I know and appreciate, unlike news about celebrities. Plus it’s just plain well-written. How often do you see punctuation compared to endangered species? Or the economy?

Good writing is probably an endangered species also. But I’m glad to find some of it at ComPost.

It’s against the law

I wonder how many times my husband has broken the law since we moved to Iowa. According to dumblaws.com, in this state it is against the law for a man with a mustache to kiss a woman in public. I doubt we kiss in public all that often (what is the definition of “in public”?), but I’m sure we do occasionally. And he does wear a mustache for about half the year (October through March).

I suppose it’s just as well we will probably never move back to Connecticut, where I grew up. (In the more populated areas, there is too much traffic and too much noise, which neither of us want to go back to after living in the rural midwest. In the less populated areas, there is too much green growing stuff, which I would love but it would set off his allergies and trigger his asthma.) There it would be illegal for him to kiss me on Sundays (whether he had the mustache or not). 

He lived in Nebraska for a good deal of his childhood (separated into five different periods, as his father was in the Air Force). I wonder how often he risked getting his mother arrested by burping while in church. (And since they lived in or around Omaha, he might also have violated the law against sneezing in church.)

We only lived in Illinois about ten months, but I’m sure I could have been arrested for vagrancy on many occasions, for not having at least one dollar bill on my person. I never contacted the police before entering the city in an automobile. And I spoke English every single day!

The website does include a disclaimer that ”many of the laws on this site have been verified, but many have been taken from sources which do not include law citations.” It points out that it is an entertainment site, not a legal resource. So maybe  it isn’t really illegal to go whale fishing in Nebraska – though I cannot imagine where one might conceivably expect to catch a whale in that landlocked state. (In Ohio, where I went to college, the law is less restrictive – whale fishing is only illegal on Sundays.)

But I still don’t think I’d want to go back to New Jersey. I don’t slurp my soup on purpose, but I wouldn’t want to risk arrest for unintentional slurping.