Church in the morning, pub fights in the evening. In the middle of the day we’ll have an Irish stew which is lamb and potatoes stew. On the side there’s a bacon cabbage dish which is delish. We may have soda bread, if everyone feels like it. For dessert there will be apple cake and fifteens (a dessert which combines biscuits, marshmallows, and cherries). To drink there’s stout for the old beggars with big noses. The old beggars have a smell you don’t want to cultivate though, so stick with the cider—it’s not yet fermented. Sometime during the day there will be a rugby game, a futbol game, and a horse race. For the faster set, there will be a Hurling game. It’s played on a futbol-sized field with lots of players who sometimes don’t know they’re supposed to be on the bench. Hurling is like lacrosse except they don’t catch the ball in a small net on the end of the stick. In Hurling, they only smack the ball around. Hurling is what you do when your hockey stick is broken and you only have half a hockey stick.
Some Irish words and phrases you may want to mix in your St. Patrick’s day, or every day:
A Chara = friend.
A Chroi = my heart, my love.
Acting the maggot = being rotten, swimming in filth.
Time for the first annual Smart Off, sponsored today by WordNerd, the language learning program that wisely teaches you all the cuss words before anything as common as “Hello.” So, “Hello,” all you bastardos apestosos. Welcome to the Smart Off, a challenge of witty proportions. Should you choose to participate, you’ll need to borrow a #2 pencil from someone, break it in half and give them back the half without the eraser. Now that you have an eraser, travel to any poster, magazine, or newspaper (your town may have some free ones) and once you’ve gained access to one of these, take that eraser and erase all the eyes out of or off of the whole thing. Try not to put holes in the product; it looks so much more freaky if there’s some two-dimensional material left behind. Now that you’ve performed the pre-game ceremony, it’s time for the real program. Take yourself to the nearest social media where you can comment on anyone’s and everyone’s words. Get on there and make your first five comments “Yeah, right.” Make your next five comments “As if.” There may be something better, more clever, smarter, wiser you could say. If such cleverness comes to you, dispense it! Fifteen to twenty smart comments gets you a bronze medal in the Smart Off; twenty to twenty-five is a silver medal; thirty is gold!
It was the longest cold spell in Walkerville history. All the kids were excited that the schools were closed. All the kids, except the ones who were supposed to go on a field trip. Their bus was the only way they could get around to places like Hawaii and Pompeii. And why did they want so badly to go to hot places? Not because they were sick and tired of snow. Everyone loves snow. They wanted to learn about the physics of the volcano. And their field trips were usually such a mix of education and entertainment, it was worth it for these kids to attend school. They wanted to check out lava from inside the volcano more than they wanted to build snow forts and throw snowballs at each other. It was a strange culture they had fallen into, yet they embraced it with their every fiber, yes, their every molecule. Next time the bus was running, these strange kids hoped to study even those.
School was closed for a snow day, and the Frizz-kids of Walkerville Elementary School could not enjoy it.
It hasn’t crossed our minds lately because we start to get accustomed to it after a short time. We take it for granted that there are companies vying for our personal information. They want the information because they can sell it to other companies who might benefit from selling us their products.
The idea is not new, though it is more easily employed these days since so many of us voluntarily offer up our personal tastes and opinions daily.
It was John Stuart Mill who saw the possibility in 1843. Even though he didn’t prophetically predict the digital-age marketing engine, he did see that there was a potential for the practices of that engine when he said,
“Correctly conceived, the doctrine called Philosophical Necessity is simply this: that, given the motives which are present to an individual’s mind, and given likewise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred; that if we knew the person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements which are acting upon him, we could foretell his conduct with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event.”
The gist of it, if you didn’t understand the Olde-English, is that watching someone closely enough will tell you what they would do in any certain situation.
And this is every free website, of course. Any service that is “free” is still going to either advertise up front or sell a product on the backend, and if it’s on the backend, then that product is whoever signs up for the service.
The inspiration, should you need it, is that there are people in this bold new world who don’t even offer the marketing engine a binary digit. If it’s what you want, you can do like those people and just deny the marketing engine any information. It does require that you ignore the desire to hear news or voice an opinion.
We can stay out of sight from the info sellers.
We can also live in their sight, and it will be just fine, as long as we don’t mind our personal likes and opinions being sold, as long as we don’t take for granted that the marketing engine is working behind the scenes.
As a man, I am in a unique position to tell you some of the secret rules of men.
One of the first rules to know about men is this: “Bigger is better.” For instance, a man wants a big truck. If some other man has a bigger truck than him, the man will make up for it by going to the Maverik and buying the biggest possible Pepsicoke he can find (somewhere in the vicinity of a keg, complete with a bendy straw), and he’ll load up on the mega nachos, and don’t forget the Everest-size pack of beef jerky. This will make him feel better about seeing someone in a bigger rig, but you do have to understand, if he could upsize to a monster truck and legally drive it on the highway, he would.
Likewise, when a man becomes a cook, he wants an oven big enough to roast an emu or a moose. Not while they’re alive, of course; they will have been properly marinated.
This rule is how the idea of an addition to a house was born. The man looked at his house, decided there could be more, and he added an extension to it. Adding an extension to an extension is not out of the question, or out of the realm of possibilities. This is of course how the Pentagon was built. It started out as a ranch-style rectangle, then the first addition came off at 72 degrees. Another was added and another, until they were obliged to complete the pentagon shape to comply with the second rule of men.
The second rule of men is: “If you can make it look cool, do.” This is how chrome was invented. Man could look at rust and think it’s cool, but he also wanted to be flashy around the ladies, so he put chrome over the rust. It didn’t matter what the object was. If it could be catalyzed or dipped or coated, he was ready to make it reflect the sun. Everything from a car bumper to a spade, and many objects in between, have been chromed, if only to make them look more amazing than they really are.
That whole leaning tower of Pisa? You guessed it. It wasn’t built that way on accident. A man dared to ask, “Okay, so how can we make this stand out?”
The bike has followed all the rules of men by men over the ages. Bikes have been made bigger, shinier, and better looking in many ways. Even the riding of the bike has followed the rules: bigger air, flashier tricks, faster velodrome times, faster downhill. Now, this is not to say women haven’t contributed to the variety of biking sports. Marianne Vos, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot, and Haley Batten are top-tier at what they do. The point is that men have an innate desire to make things bigger somehow, or make them stand out in some way. This includes the physical object and how it’s used.
It was a man, after all, who, following a woman’s successful ride, decided it would look cool to go over the falls of Niagara in a chromed barrel. Charles G. Stephens made the fatal mistake of tying an anvil to his feet, thinking it would keep him inside the barrel. Upon impact, the anvil shot through the bottom of the barrel, and those watching only ever found one of his arms with the hollowed out remains of his barrel.
The third rule, and not the last, is one word: “Embellishment.” According to men, any story worth telling is worth embellishing. Otherwise known as BS or exaggeration, the man can’t tell a story without the main character being eaten by a wild animal, even if the main character is himself. And all this didn’t take place in the jungle, where wild animals are usually found, but it might have happened on the moon, or in a cave leading to the center of Earth, or in your backyard if that makes the tale all the more outlandish.
Remember the third rule whenever you hear the word “actually” come out of a man’s mouth. It’s probable that whatever facts he promises may be less reality than they are pure fantasy.
He has a full deck of jokers. He has a college degree from Wisenheimer University. He has a monster truck that can fly because he inflated the tires with helium. He learned how to spell from listening to old blues records. He is 150% M-H-I-N.
As a man, I might be subject to these rules, especially when I talk about architecture (wink, wink, hint, hint).
Xenosthesia.com 