Inappropriate Metaphor of the Day

From a fundraising plea junk mail from the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Program of the American Health Assistance Foundation, of whom I’ve never heard before and to whom I will never send any money whatsoever:

Major news in the research on Alzheimer’s:
Researchers funded by Alzheimer’s Disease Research including TWO Nobel prize winners–have made breakthrough discoveries that may signla the end of Alzheimer’s reign of terror!

Alzheimer’s reign of terror? Lord, love a duck, poorly written, poorly metaphored… I say we make it a trifecta by making it poorly funded, too.

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Minutiae

Crikes, I’ve got this mosquito bite on my neck like an inch from my jugular. You know that mosquito will be telling his friends about that bite, ad nauseum, for the rest of his life.

Probably a week tops, unless he tries that stunt again, in which case I’ll spill my own blood if needed to truncate his existence.

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Esoterica

Two thoughts that struck me as amusing, but I’ll probably be the only one:

  • Upon seeing the vanity license plate MO4 LL:

    We sure thought that “Alice” would make a credible candidate for president….

  • Somehow, I think even Peter Scaffer fans think me crazy when I go to the ballpark and cheer for the Cardinals’ lead off hitter by chanting:

    Eck….Eck…..Eck….Eckstein.

Because these things bounce around my disparate thoughts during the course of the day. Instead of a billion dollar idea, I get these.

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Historical Perspective

The last time someone other than Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France:

  • Companies were using Windows NT, and home users were buying Packard Bells pre-installed with the new Windows 98. First Edition.
  • Ken Starr was preparing a report that would lead to impeachment of President Clinton.
  • Bill Clinton had not given the televised speech saying he might have inappropriate contact with an intern.
  • NATO was threatening air strikes against Serbia for its continuing slaughter of Albanians.
  • NASDAQ was almost to 2000, less than half of its peak in the dot-com bubble.
  • Matthew Shepherd was an anonymous student in Wyoming.
  • The Truman Show really creeped me out, so I saw it three times in theatres.
  • I was four months into my first job in IT, and four months out of my last blue collar position. I had just moved out of my mother’s basement, rock on!, and was about five months ahead of my first IT layoff.
  • I was a mere days away from proposing to my girlfriend, whom I had tricked into moving to St. Louis from Columbia by pretending I was pregnant.
  • John Grisham had dominated the bestseller lists.
  • When you said “Potter,” people thought of Sherman T., but that was about to change.
  • More people still used Netscape Navigator than Internet Explorer.
  • Feminism was in an uproar when Ally MacBeal appeared on Time as an icon of feminism.

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A Real Estate Challenge The Noggles Share

Where to put the books:


    WHERE do you house 10,000 books? In an apartment with plenty of shelf space, of course.

    So that’s what Thomas and Katherine Cole needed when they moved to New York.

    Mr. Cole, 71, who retired five years ago as a classics professor at Yale University, likes working from home, which means having on hand the thousands of reference works he might need. (He is writing a literary study of Ovid.)

We can aspire to 10,000 volumes. We’ve got to be at several thousand now. Our next house will need a room dedicated to being the library. Probably not a finished room in the basement which might flood. You see, we’ve thought it over.

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Suburban Cred

That’s right, I got my first L.L. Bean catalog today.

You know, it’s really got absolutely nothing to do with Rowan Atkinson. Now I, too, am privileged to share in that information with my other Casinoport, Missouri, brothers.

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Dysophisticate

Don’t you hate it when, in a crowd of other young suburban professional aesthetes, you say topo gigio instead of pinot grigio?

No wonder the other tiny-glassesed IT professionals and accountant types beat me up in the parking lot outside the Whole Foods.

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Fightin’ Words

Spoons sez:

DC fans are conservative, Marvel fans are liberal. Discuss.

I won’t rejoin that, although I encourage you to do so, gentle reader, with all the righteous anger my fellow Marvelites can muster.

I will admit something interesting: I am a Marvelite, and my beautiful wife is a DC chick.

I don’t know how our marriage works, but it does. And lest you wonder, my collection is larger than hers.

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Working Theory

Apparently, our home is the air conditioning unit for the entire St. Louis area.

Whenever we turn the air conditioner on, the daily high temperatures drop. When the high temperatures drop, we turn off the air conditioner and open the windows….at which point the daily high temperatures rise…..

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They Would Change My Personality All Right

Dangerrrr: cats could alter your personality:

THEY may look like lovable pets but Britain’s estimated 9m domestic cats are being blamed by scientists for infecting up to half the population with a parasite that can alter people’s personalities.

British scientists think it’s a parasite changing people’s behaviors? You know, if our housecats were 9m tall (that’s 29.5275591 feet American), they’d affect my behavior, parasite or not.

More chicken, sir?

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