The Art of Conversation

Me: Hello! Would you like to talk about my headache? It's all I can think about.
Shari: My back is killing me.
Me: Would you like to talk about my headache to take your mind off of it?

Lest you think this blog is merely a catalog of stupid crap others say

Me: In my head, a group of children are yelling "thank you, TiVO chicken! Bok bok!"
...
Me: It's like Wil Wheaton. Well, it's like Wil Wheaton dressed as Colonel Sanders.

It's not all fun and games, you know.

Greg: God, this sobriety test is so boring!

Learning

Matt: I’m all about learning through failure. Lots and lots of failure. If it’s possible to screw it up, I’m there.

Two Snippets of Radio Announcements Heard While Abusing "Scan"

1. ...for various reasons. But that is why we have so many oratorios!
2. Elaine Stritch!

Greg Summarizes Rosemary's Baby

Greg: Yay, technology! Boo, devil worship!

So we're at this restaurant showing Jacques Pepin on a loop, right?

Me: Flanmergency!
Greg: How often do you have one of those?

Black Friday Shopping

Greg: The hard thing about Mike is you have to find something truly
awful. Just horribly, unforgivably bad.

Aloo Paratha

Me: Yesterday we had potato in a pie crust, so clearly now we need
potato stuffed in bread.
Joel: How far do you want to go with this?
Me: I want a turducken of starches!

Mathramblin'

Me: That's what your book of cowboy poetry will be called.
Greg: Ridin' across the prairie, I seen a five by seven grid of cows...

9.2% abv

Me: How ya doin'?
Greg: I'm almost capable of focusing on the task at hand!

Conversation Degradation

Greg: You gotta love a man who knows his sausages.
Me: Is that a penis joke? I've lost track.
Greg: When did they start?
Me: With the "rigor" joke.
Greg: Oh yeah. Anyway, I may not know my sausages that well, but I'm
reasonably familiar with them.
Me: ...okay, was that a penis joke?
Greg: Always assume everything is a penis joke.

Mart A

Me: One of the craft blogs in my reader has a free needlepoint pattern today: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." Do you see the flaw?
Greg: What flaw could you be talking about? Every pangram (the right name, I think) ever written joined every letter into a maze of language. Quite exciting!

Time to Decipher the Thermostat

Me: How is it colder UPstairs?
Greg: I don't know!
Me: Did heat not get the memo?

Don't Ask, I Won't Tell

Matt: Okay, who put words to the Minute Waltz?
Me: Barbra Streisand. Why do you ask questions you don't want the answer to?

Cold Weather Attire

Me: ...and I discovered when I went to the bathroom that there was a third layer I'd forgotten about.
Greg: "There's pants in my pants!"

With great power comes the obligation to dismiss people early

Loran: This is my first chance to be magnanimous, so take advantage of it.

Get us, bein' all topical and stuff

Mike: I'm not sure that goring is legal in football.
Me: Damnit, first that useless pass interference rule, now no goring? Where's the sport, I ask you!
Mike: Next thing you know, they'll take away our handguns!
Me: What's this country coming to?
Mike: It's the Communo-Fascist Terrorist Muslims in the government, I tell ya.
Me: We should all move to Iran, one of the most democratic countries in the world! According to them!
Mike: Plus, bonus: no gays!
Me: According to them!
Mike: Well, and why would they lie? That nice Mahmoud has such an honest face.
Me: And he's willing to stay in a normal hotel room. Unlike some.
Mike: Exactly. He's so down-to-earth and charming, it's easy to ignore the Holocaust denying. Everybody has flaws.

Nature/Nurture

Matt: I do some bone-headed guy things sometimes, but dude, some guys make guys look bad. I want to say, did your mama raise you, or were you raised by two dudes?
Me: Nah, two dudes would do it better.
Matt: No, not like gay dudes, like...
Me: Two asshats?
Matt: Exactly. You know what they say, asshats beget asshats.

The Contractors Finally Left

Matt: They did leave two ladders and a hammer.
Me: Maybe we can fix the light.
Matt: You want to fix the light with a hammer?
Me: Sure. Why not?
Matt: I can do that. There are two things I, as a man, can do: use a hammer and grill meat.

Moving

Me: We haven't unpacked any computers yet.
Mike: *spit take* No computers?! My god, woman! How do you live?

User Error

Marva: It's a good thing the copier can't talk. It'd be all "Oh hell no, don't you be looking at me like that, like I'm the idiot. You're the idiot." You'd get anywhere near it and you'd hear "Oh no, here it comes again."

Crap

Matt: You know what they say, crap wrapped in gold is gold crap. Actually they don’t say that. I just made it up. But you can sell your gold crap.

Me: It’s worth its weight in gold.

 

Explanation

Vinnie: I love to do that, just to give people cause to say "Why'd you do that?"

Programming

Mike B: It's part of the process. First we pick the tunes, then the sax section goes on and on and on about how all of the tunes suck.

Power Outage Vignettes

Chad: I feel sorry for the [auditionee] playing at the time.
Matt: If he keeps playing, he's in.

Jay: I thought we had emergency lighting in here.
Me: We do. It's called a window.

Gene: Oh my god, I just tried to use the paper shredder, and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.

Me: Hey, do me a favor and guard the men's room door. They have a window and I've already peed in the dark once today.
...
Me: Thanks! They're gonna be all "who put the seat down?!"

New Neighbors

Me: I was looking for someone on whitepages.com, and noticed the "search neighborhood" link, which finds the rest of the block. Households in our new area include the Gross family and the Neat family.
Mike: I guess I know who you'll be hanging out with.
Me: I don't know that we'd want either of them over for dinner.
Mike: I just hope they don't live next door to each other. I'm imagining lawn arguments.

Most Pathetic Attempt at Small Talk While Attending a Mandatory Event

Strange Woman: Looks like you got a good turn-out! Were you here last
year?

Ye Olde Eeeewwwww

Me: I am never going to a Ren Faire with you again.
Mike: Aw, man. I was counting on you for the urine.

Not like they could charge 48.75 cents each, but still

Me: CPT Pena just asked me to order the second and fourth movements of a suite for the chorus. I can pay $1.90 each for each movement, or $1.95 each for the whole suite.
Jennie: Here's your sign.

And those words are El Hambo

Me: If you're the guy who got Kde su kravy moje stuck in my head, we're going to have words.

As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer...

Me: God bless America.
Mike: And lasers.
Me: Yes, lasers bless America.

I Failed to Post This When It Happened

Mike: Wow, they Epic Failed 15 years before Epic Failing even existed!
Me: They were pioneers.
Mike: They took their Failboat across the Failsea, straight to the colony of Failsburgh, to start life anew. A life where the freedom to fail is an unassailable right.
Me: And we will call it Failtopia!

Original Thoughts are Inefficient!

Conductor: Do we have any of these tunes? [list]
Me: No, but I have the CD you're looking at.

Leadership

CPT: Is this gonna work?
Me: Beats me. I've assigned Matt the task of figuring it the hell out.

Movie reviews as a function of Leonard Part 6

Matt: ...and I realized I've never seen "Hair," and I was looking at the listings, and it's on AMC at like 4am, so I set the TiVo.
Adrian: You're proud of this? Something they only air at 4am?
Matt: Sure! I mean, it's "Hair," right? It's...
Me: Iconic.
Matt: There you go, iconic.
Adrian: As iconic as "Leonard Part 6."
Matt: Which I've seen like twenty times.
Me: You don't tell people that.
Matt: I was a kid! Plus, I'd rather see that twenty times than watch "The Happening" ever again.

Belly-Poking Standoff

Greg: It's like a John Woo movie! Except with fingers!

Advanced Topics in Shopping Theory

Mike: What I need is for the price to drop by a lot. At 50% off, I'd totally buy two.

Betty White

Adrian: She’s a lot funnier than Jack Black, I’ll tell you that.

Eating Habits

Me: How did you get parsley on your shoulder?
Greg: How could I not get parsley on my shoulder?!

Walk Tall

CPT: Who sings that?

Me: Beats me. I have David Tennant singing it.

Vinny: Yeah, but everything you have is a cover.

Me: Yeah, so?

YouTube, Summarized

Mike: The people, they have too much of the time, and too many of the
Legos.

That Certain Sound

Greg: What was that supposed to be?
Jake: A yawp of some sort or other.
Me: A barbaric yawp?
Jake: That's the one.

The Year of the NCO

Greg: The Army has a zodiac?!

(I'm Lying, Of Course)

Loran: There was a prolonged, very loud noise.
Jay: Uh, yeah. That might've been us.
Me: And even if it was, it had nothing to do with the blood on my head.
Loran: Uh huh.

He Has Opinions

Me: It's not so much math, it's probability.
Greg: Probability has math in it. Math that sucks.

And more.

Greg: My nose is itchy. And that has nothing to do with the Finnish
baserunners. I mean...
Me: What were you saying about Finnish baserunners?
Greg: Nothing!!

And yes, this did fit naturally into the conversation.

Me: You're signalling the Finnish undergound!
Greg: I wish!

Wherein Mike Wins the Text Conversation

Me: I'm at Catholic for a thing, and the room it's in has souvenirs from a priest's travels...
Me: ...and there's a carving of Ganesha from his trip to India...
Me: ...but since it's Catholic, it's labeled "man with the head of an elephant."
Mike: "Dude with lots of arms."
Me: "unknown figure seated on throne of skulls."
Mike: "Weird blue person."
Mike: "Monkey."

Clarification

Roman: By "bread," of course, I mean "pizza."

And yet this is itself true

Mike: Truth is stranger than Canadians.

Ah, inquisitive youth!

Dad: Do you have root beer?
Waitress: We do, but it's on draft, so it costs a little more. Is that
okay?
Kid: What's draft?
Waitress: It's where you pull down a big handle and it makes the beer
come out of a great big container...
Dad: ...called a keg...
Waitress: ...instead of a can.
Kid: Oh. What's a can?

Maurice Jarre

Me: Dangit, now I have Lara's theme from Dr. Zivago in my head.
Greg: Oh. I have "My Husband was a Weatherman."
Me: That's because you didn't collect music boxes as a child.

Game Day

Brian: The dragon is there whenever someone rolls a 1. So even if you
defeat him, the next time someone rolls a 1...
David: Cave of Infinite Dragons.
Alex: I need to remember to copyright that as a band name.
Greg: Eh, it's more of a debut album.

Truer Words Were Never Spoken

Greg: The internets is a dick.

Misery Loves Company

Me: I have "What's the Story, Morning Glory" stuck in my head now.
Guy from HFA: Try "Chain of Fools." That's what I've got.

were in ur dikshunaries

SGM: Since when is “vision” a verb?

Me: Since we verbed it, duh.

Career Advice

Greg: Don't get sent to Leavenworth for killing the band.
Me: But what if they need killin'?
Greg: Don't get sent to Leavenworth for killing the band.
Me: Ahhhhh, okay.

Why Is This Difficult?

Long-Winded Guy, summarized: I need a copy of [tune].
Me, summarized: Despite the fact that you failed to give me the title, composer, or any useful information, from your long description of the tune, I can tell you we don’t have it.
LWG, verbatim: I spoke to my friend today and he told me he thought the music went to the Ft. Dix music library. If you can locate the arrangement and get the exact title and the publishers name and address I can contact them and see what I can do.
Me, verbatim: I have forwarded your request to the band at Ft. Dix.

See also this classic post.

Brains!

Mike: Rarely does the addition of zombies lend itself to subtlety.

All Fear Google Street Views!

Mike: I kind of don't want to live in the Google Street Views world.  It's a very unpredictable and frightening place.

Me: What with the samurai and the UFOs and whatnot. And it’s impossible to pack for trips because of the weather.

Mike: Well, precisely. Not to mention the fact that cars and big-ass trucks pop in and out of existence from one moment to the next. Dude, dangerous!

All Hail Google Street Views!

Me: I scrolled the other direction and the sun came out!

Mike: Google Street Views is a powerful wizard!

How Not to Scam Music, continued

Navy officer: Yeah, I know we could buy it, but can’t you just fax it to us?

Another Day, Another Justifiable Homicide

Gene: So what are you up to?

Me: Oh, y’know. Not killin’ the concert band, a daily challenge.

Gene: That seems to be a common theme.

Accuracy

Me: I’m not making fun of you. In this case.

LT: Thank you for not making fun of me.

Me: …in this case.

LT: Thank you for not making fun of me in this case.

Me: There you go.

White Flannel Sheets

Me: How's the shedding going?
Greg: Well.
Me: Wow. It's amazing you still have any left on your body.
Greg: Oh my, no. I have a veritable fountain of hair.

The Salem Witch?

Me: Why would you name your boat that? Everyone would keep trying to
burn it!
Greg: Sure, but on the up side, when you put it in water, it floats.

Six Flags Under

Greg: Hurty, but fun.
Me: Worst amusement park ever. Hurty fun for the whole family! House
of Pins! Acid Flume! Tunnel of Bees!
Greg: The Bully Simulator!
Me: Teacups! Full of piping hot tea! Actual Pirates of the Carribean!
Greg: Botulism Bay!

Thursdays with Walter, week 11

There should be a technology fight song. Go, technology, go!

You'll be sorry you came to this class. This is the get jiggy class.

It's the Mothers of Invention. It's something old people use to like.

It's always somebody and his orchestra.

We have lugged in about 3000 pounds of equipment tonight, ostensibly to show you things.

I do accept coloring books in lieu of final papers, so if you threw anything away, ha ha!

Why you trickin' me, man?

What's this http thing I keep seeing? And three w's? Is that a mystical organization? They make things appear on my screen!

And that's actually Ronald Reagan!

Okay, let's not panic, we have options.

We don't have any sound off these things. What a cheap classroom.

Whoa! That's Moby Dick the sound recorder. Is that Edison right there? Whoever he is, he liked a beer after work.

That also is Ronald Reagan, by the way.

We could do ancestry next class.

Ah, it's beautiful: the music coffin.

Open the doors! Play it for the neighbors, see if I care!

If they want credit they have to stay! I love this!

Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville, ore Eddie Martin as we used to call him...

Oh geez, I've got a class and I forgot my crank!

In the modern era, today it's an iPod, tomorrow it's a peapod, I don't know what's coming next and neither do you, and don't say you do.

No, no, don't come up with a better solution, I can't handle it. My whole house is full of better solutions.

I'm s'posed to clean this and have gloves on and...you know, read.

We're gonna do one more yodel.

Okay that's Alpine Harry and his Bob Dylan impersonation.

That's probably the greatness of museums and libraries: that the past is still there.

If you go back through old issues of Scientific American, you'll see why our society is really odd.

This thing has more scratches than Gabby Hayes's whiskers on a cheesecake.

Who says that? Chico!

If you know this group, you have serious issues.

It's too bad we can't hear this, because this is awful.

They have metal things coming our of their heads, and they look at me like I'm some kind of tree fossil. They're surprised I'm alive.

Ah! This is one handout you'll really want to color.

It was like watching a xerox copy of a baseball game.

The wildest surrealist poet on all available drugs at the same time couldn't come up with these band names.

You inhaled, you put [Inagaddadavida] on, and the next thing you knew it was Sunday!

You listen to T.S. Eliot, you don't need an antidepressant, you need someone to see where you are on the floor.

We've got time for a song. Do you want Barenaked Ladies, or Mingus, or...ooh!

Okay, the first track is called "Oh Lord, Don't Let 'Em Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me," and the second one is "Eat That Chicken."

Thereby combining Gospel and the beatniks in an eclectic mix of noise.

Razzmatootie!

If you want to learn how to preserve it, read the material.

Thursdays with Walter, week 10

I don't want to look for it, I want it to come to me!

Then we'll see if he's just another corporate fraud.

Color wrecked all that beautiful imagery!

Ol' Hook-Nose Wellington we used to call him; I remember it well.

God, I hate the web!

A friend gave it to me. Shows what kind of friends I have.

I feel like I'm repeating myself tonight. I feel like I'm repeating myself tonight.

He tried to make an engine using gunpowder. One can imagine how well that worked out, when the engine landed in Ohio, even before there was an Ohio!

You can never have too many Google windows open.

He wrote a book, and said some people are coming up with an idea, only he was writing in Latin, so it was some people are coming up with an idea est.

I'm going to bed. It's 8:00. It's dark. There's nothing to do. There won't be tomorrow, either.

I hate to tell you, it's one guy in New Jersey with a whole lot of tricks.

These are very hypnotic, so if you're feeling sleepy, put $20 in an envelope and bring it to the front of the room.

And you'd go out and burn down a barn! You were in a tizzy!

No lights, lost kids, drunk uncles? Sort of like that experience.

There ya go. If you weren't having an epileptic seizure, wait 30 seconds.

An Edison cylinder hooked up to your ears like...an ur-iPod.

It's a venti, not a grande. Shoot me.

How many pixels on the head of a pin?

If you don't know by now, you're from Mars.

I swear, one more time, it's good that I don't have a gun, because we wouldn't have a TV, we'd just have a hole.

What you don't want is a Lincoln Log on your player head.

The next time the music comes on, you'll get blown out of your chair.

It's like a phone book of the dead.

If you know Oscar Levant, you know how funny that is.

You gotta save the footage of Hero the Wonder Dog!

Next week, bring your ears.

Thursdays with Walter, week 9

(I missed weeks 7 and 8, so don't ask me anything about disaster preparedness and recovery.)

Gigs? No, I play for the walls, and they're sorry enough.

People call me the book magnet.

Okay! I'm going to read your midterms out loud and comment on them as I go. None of you did really horribly, which was disappointing. Where are the flunkies?!

Oh, this one is in English. Good!

Some of you made a lot of sense. I was impressed.

This is a class on electronics, isn't it?

It's a waste of time looking. I won't bother. Oh, here it is!

I'm sorry, we can't hire you as investigative reporters.

When you have a good enough infection of preservation that you get the disease, then you start to be like me.

If I had not been watching the World Series, I would've read them with my other eye, too. This is the first time I didn't give any B's. See what baseball does for you?

Is the broadcast archives person here? See? What if she was my only pinch hitter?!

You'd wish it was absinthe.

Ha! This guy was really lit up!

We're saving these stories, and then we have to spend the rest of our lives trying to keep them away from children.

Okay, okay, show us Superman now!

Do you have a library card? Are you a convicted felon?

In this one, the people and the machines are robots.

Well, that's it. Sorry we didn't have popcorn.

No! 1957 was the Milwaukee Braves!

My training for that event was to go out in a school corridor and hide under my coat. A kid's winter coat that you wear for five years without ever laundering? *cough, cough* And if they dropped the bomb, who would care? It'd be an act of mercy!

You put all these bizarre stories together, and it turns out to be the truth!

Do you ever ponder? When's the last time you pondered?

You gotta start writing these names down and start reading stuff! You're culturally deprived!!

Lemon juice on the Constitution? She would've been so fired!

We're all moving way too fast.

Dewey Decimated: it's another story where someone gets murdered with a rare book.

Wherever the Right ends, he was to the right of that.

You're not gonna write this down, because come on.

That's our homage to the Native American

Why, it's the damn Book of Kells--again!

Oh where, oh where has my Book of Kells gone...

You can make your whole family look like they're from Jupiter with a few clicks.

I knew I shouldn't have drank that hearing stopper.

A, we couldn't cover it in five semesters, and B, no one will ever cover it.

If you want to save the forests, don't go there.

Billions of pixels per square nanometer!

I'm a little capture device!

You can't open a jpeg 354 Chrysler engine with a tiff six-cylinder Packard.

It becomes present with lots of little toasters. This is toaster paradise!

Millions of colors! You could go mad!

If you're not interested in this, you won't be interested.

I have two in my office--one for each eye.

That's the Achilles elbow...heel, neck, whatever you want to do.

It's like Lucy Ricardo packing chocolates.

There's a couple of words you don't hear at Yahoo: quality control.

What's your favorite M-word? Metadata!

They are trying to standardize things, because too many things are optional things in the world of thingyness.

Okay, we have Canon, and we have Epson, and let's say it's a new merged company, called Can-Epson. Conniption would be good. And your company is...Lego. It's very colorful and has a lot of components. And yours is the Deutchland Uber Alles, machine, the Hasselblatt. Ah, the Hasselblatt! If I had the money! And if I cared!

We're little federal pea-shooters, and they have cannons in the industry.

You have to really Hasselblatt it to get it there.

They apparently have petabyte servers in their cars.

You can see a huge XML parade!

Machines are profoundly stupid.

I'm from the future.

Isn't it a lot easier to just pick up Dewey Decimated and just read it?

You say that like you mean it: it's fun. I know what kind of fun that is.

Thursdays with Walter, week 6

I have very good notes on this. Unfortunately they're not here. So tonight, we're going to get very imaginative.

You start making bird noises until a hawk attacks you.

As funds become available...so in other words, they're never going to do anything.

I don't have a pointer. Does anybody have any tall chalk?

If I want to see how Bob Dylan burns, I just light him up.

Look at what age does to you, baby. Whoa. That's what happens to rock stars. Can we have a moment of silence?

To test this, you have to build a structure and set it on fire, or it doesn't count.

Y'ever have to buy a roof?

So the guy shoots you when you're wet.

Maybe giraffes work there.

Land of a million sprinkler heads, all in a row, like a big huge insect.

The water doesn't know, "oh, I have to go around this post."

Within half an hour, the place is full of water and smoke, so I'm parboiled!

This is giving grandfathers a bad name: anything that's grandfathered in is a bad idea.

They call that the Fire Triangle in fire talk.

This is why this is the ideal job: you can only work four hours, and then you have to take a two-hour break.

You're gonna put a fire out with ice?

He moved to one side, and the pipe went whammo! If he'd stayed where he was, he would've been whammoed!

You get Fast Eddie's pipes, and two years later you have Fast Eddie's leaks.

Big smart-aleck preservation namby-pamby.

You're not supposed to git 'er done, you're supposed to git 'er tested!

Aspiration! Let's all aspirate!

It's an orange tube full of noses.

We've got a heavy breather on 2.

They test it by lighting something, hopefully not one of your rare books.

Why should we have an alarm? We're the fire department!

Get to be a consultant if you want to get rich. Hundred dollars an hour? Why stop there?

Removes oxygen from the space in four minutes? Removes oxygen from you a lot faster!

One of the problems with CO₂ is it's gonna kill you. Kind of a nasty side effect.

It's not gonna kill you. You might walk sideways or talk in a funny voice for the rest of your life, but what a price to pay.

Oh, well, we had a Gutenberg here, but it got blown off the shelf, a couple of pages got a little damaged...

Are computers all we talk about anymore?

If we don't get air in here soon, we're goners.

You see what happens with technology! Lucy showed us!

There's not much you can do about the weather. The weather's gonna win.

Doesn't that sound like a good idea? I could sell it to you.

Haven't you ever noticed when you move the toaster aside there's a little shadow of stuff?

That's my new favorite peeve.

I've talked fire suppression systems to death.

This is the real stuff, not just what I imagine.

This is the show and tell kingdom!

You touch the electrodes here...

It's like the flossing community. Big discussion.

And if it's late at night, it's a midnight quire.

Good for tomatoes, good for books.

Ah, the kettle stitch. Remains a mystery to me after all these years.

Bone folder! The terms start to thicken as you get into this.

Do you miss being in this class or what?

It has that acid free look.

If you don't know who Jack Kerouac is, you're not from this country.

He took some things in addition to his coffee.

Benzedrine is what there was before Starbucks. Starbucks is like a slow benzedrine.

When's the last time you were a hep cat?

You don't get free benzedrine.

The reality is that while you're at the Kerouac grave site, the guys mowing the cemetery are doing wheelies.

I was young once! Student: I was alive during the sixties. Hi! Send water!

This is relevant to the course...I'll make it relevant to the course.

There's a certificate of purity that comes with every bottle. You won't remember reading it, but in half an hour, you won't remember anything.

You're seeing things Jack Kerouac never saw.

They didn't do much editing; they just produced. Dickens was a tad wordy.

Craigslist, Harryslist, Edslist, next week it'll be Maryslist. They're all the same people. they're all Google. Google has all these pseudonyms so they can make extra money. It's like offshore banking.

The textbook industry is like an auction of your soul.

Before we go, you're gonna get one more glimpse of what's good about life.

I've accumulated quite a few things.

She was reading Kerouac.

That loaf of bread is so great to find in a book.

I need a refresher course in my own course.

Thursdays with Walter, week 5

I hope I terrified everyone: it's the midterm of midterms!

With the midterm being a big bomber, the end of the year stuff'll be a piece of cake.

This is your midterm. It's like a vision came to me.

For next week, I want you to write a short story that begins, "On the way to the wedding, I drove past a bloody corpse on the highway."

I asked them for a sample, and they send me a bible.

I'm a sham and a pretense, but I admit it.

These are the really unemployable.

Does anybody care about Google to the extent that you want to go there and say "Hi, what's new?" We just use them.

This is a cruel trade! I didn't know conservators were so ruthless!

I cooked up a horrific midterm in order to mask my ignorance.

I ain't never lickin' the tip of a ballpoint no more.

Put that in your "don't" column.

It's alcohol, alright!

If you can drink it, you can breathe it. Ooh! Write that down!

Oh wow, this is horrific, but it's original, so it's 11 million dollars.

Those tricksy conservators are behind all this.

That's what I like about the web: you get what you wanted plus 80 pages of comments.

Next week, I'll show you way more wheels. I have so many wheels now I could build an 18-wheeler.

This is your guide for the midterm. If you have trouble, light incense in front of him. If you want a color version, send me ten dollars and I'll give you a paint by number. Now that you have your totem, let's look at what you've gotten into.

If you're not here, raise your hand.

What's a Hemingway? Oh, about five pounds.

I got all of these from one box, from one dumpster. Student: Are you just hanging out by the dumpster waiting for an old guy with a box of books? Nah, these are all coincidences. I have book radar. I should be a book dowser.

"Salvation is Created" for marching band

David: I'm going to assume (hope, pray, whatever) that it's the warm-up chorale.
Me: Pfft. You know there's gonna be a flag routine with it.
David: No. I will not have that.
Me: I think you mean, "do not want."
David: That too.

Tis the Season

Me: You're so vain, you probably think Adeste Fideles is about you.

Not Helping

Austin: Oh, just what we need, more grainy, out of focus pictures of
Bigfoot. It's people like you who are ruining the field of
cryptozoology!

Could you be a little more vague, please?

Jay: What was that movie, where that guy dies?

Vinny: That’s pretty much every movie.

How's Married Life

Greg: Oh, I don't feel too good about that.
Me: What? I'm just tenting my fingers!

Surf City, It Ain't

Me: Every group going into the bar has one female and two males.
Greg: It's a good night for the ladies.
Me: And a bad day for Jan & Dean.

Jackie Chan at the Salvadoran Restaurant

Me: You're watching a Chinese movie, dubbed into English, dubbed into
Spanish, edited for television, in a mirror.
Greg: I'm not watching it for the plot.

Implausible Deniability

Greg: I deny everything!
Me: Everything?
Greg: No!
Me: Hm, even that?
Greg: No!

Fire or Ice?

Greg: It's the apocalypse, with a vampire. Can it get any worse?
Me: There could be a zombie rising out of the back seat.
Greg: There probably is.

Comedy Tonight

Me: Is there a game on? Why are the stadium lights on? Oh, it says
volleyball.
Greg: Tonight, volleyball. Tomorrow...
Me: Tragedy tomorrow, volleyball tonight.
Greg: I was going to say curling, but that's more or less the same as
tragedy.

Overheard in Port Lavaca

Teenage mother: I didn't drink at all! I had beer at the reception,
and a couple of Jagers, and that shot you gave me, and that's it!

Not Helping

Me: They really have the worst dog toy ever over there. It's the gift that if I gave it to Mike, would once and for all make Jen forbid him to talk to me.
Greg: Lemme see it.
Me, holding horrible dog toy: Look at it. It's like a mess, with a handle.
Greg: It's fantastic. You should get it for Mike.

What was that?

Me: That would be the sound of Greg's heart breaking.
Greg: It'd be kind of a clanging squeak.

Logic

Greg: There we have it: proof that John Tesh is a commie.

Pok e joe's

Me: I don't know what's in these pickles.
Greg: Crack, apparently.

If a theorem falls in the forest...

Me: It's so mathematician of you to be allergic to something outdoorsy
and not know until you're 35 years old.
Greg: I've had poison ivy before! It wasn't this bad!
Me: Actually, it'd be more mathematician of you to never find out.
Because why would a mathematician go into the woods? To get to the
other side?
Greg: It's the only possible reason. And he wouldn't see the forest
for the trees.
Me: Terrible. But there's got to be a joke in there somewhere: why did
the mathematician go into the woods?
Greg: To get to the other side!
Me: That doesn't make any sense!
Greg: That's what makes it a mathematician joke!

Damn Ivies

Me: Okay, I'll say it: Cornell crazy.
Greg: Why?
Me: Beekeeping.
Greg: One word says it all.

Funereal Fun with Mike

(This is from my dad's funeral, June 2007; I just found it on a list of dad stories I keep meaning to write down. Hey: at least I have this, right?)

Mike: We have the photomosaic Christ, the needlepoint Last Supper, where's the decoupage pieta?

Honesty

Greg: I'm speaking from my heart here. My heart says "pickle."

Negative-Base Numbers

Me: Why would you do that? As a knee in the groin of the humanities
majors?
Greg: Yes! That's the whole point of mathematics!

Duration of entire conversation: 4 seconds

Greg: Stop accusing me of denying things quickly.
Me: But you do.
Greg: No, I don't.
Me: You did just then.
Greg: No!

Thursdays with Walter, week 4

about 15 minutes before class: What say we knock off early? See ya!

There's something in the atmosphere. Zombie. Spray zombie. We should all be hibernating.

I'm not real, I'm just inflatable.

"Please select logoff time." How about every fifteen seconds? That'll be fun.

One would hope that's a pseudonym, but maybe not.

What did Nicholson Baker call them? Cost-cutting, penny-pinching...whatever.

He's Canadian, so that's good. That makes him okay by me.

Let's buy a volatile toaster. BOOM! Wow! Did you see that one go?!

See what it does to people? Look at me!

Nothing exciting happens in these books unless you're about nine years old, and probably not even then.

So, you want to clean up after the parade?

Is there some place where it's just raining acid? Wait a minute--yes! America!

Call in the boys! Round up the gang!

Now we all have cultural assets, whether you like it or not.

You don't want your milk to have a friendly green putting-green top on it. Fuzzy!

I used to go to these meetings and listen to people bicker about the size of a cassette aperture. You ever wonder why that roll of 35 mm film fits in your camera the same as the last one? You forget that all of these conveniences are...convenient.

Everybody's got their master files as tifs, and now lossless jpeg 2000 comes along and it's got extensibility and flexibility and four doors instead of two and I don't know what.

Ah, dated comedy.

Why are you supposed to be using...Blue Fairy? Blue Ray? to play your movies on your...flying saucers? This is preservation class! We use technical terms all the time!!

They're in Bethesda; they must be good, because everything's more expensive in Bethesda.

Standards are a real strange business. These are people all over the world who get together and actually decide on something without starting a war.

They'd rather climb Mount Everest with nothing but a hat and bicycle.

If you speak German for more than an hour, your lips go numb.

Book repair disco music! Anyone who wants to dance, just break loose.

Oh, it's beautiful. It's like a Maserati. Don't you want to buy it, just to look at it?

Ah! Analog data compression, see?

Next thing you know, Goethe's going to appear and start singing.

You build a case with a drawer on the bottom, and on the top you have the book in the new binding, and down below is husband number one, kicked out in the cold: "I tried to give you shelter..."

Pay no attention to the man behind the thingies here.

You don't appreciate a football field-sized machine until you see people walking around it.

You people with your knowledge. You should go get jobs in technology factories or something.

What's happened to people's curiosity? "Here's a steamer trunk." "Oh, let's use it as a footrest!" How could you not look in it?

Ha ha ha, you didn't get to see the mortuary part.

Song of Myself? Boom, the ego's right there!

If you hate the Civil War, read Grant's memoirs.

Isn't technology kind of insane?

It's like a dinosaur eating a toothpick!

Mommy, what happened to the tree?

Hyah, step aside, I'm comin' though!

Do you have any papermaking videos? No? What kind of store is this?!

Doesn't that sound like a great idea? Go to a whole nother university and get a whole new degree, and never have money for 25 years, but you would know so much!

To me, that's a Frisbee that makes things happen.

Can you trust a Frenchman saying anything? Nothing personal.

The Times lies every day. All the news that's fit to print, heh heh heh.

Just one more thing about paper. Okay, just three more things about paper.

These are scientists. Have you ever hung out with scientists? They just come up with things, they don't know why. "I made paper out of tractor fenders!" "What ya gonna do with that?" "I dunno."

That's it for paper. Don't ask me any questions about paper. Forget about it. It's over. You had your chance.

Books are always talking to each other, you just need to get in on the conversation.

The Modern Classics, bound in deer hide, to display next to your gun rack.

Don't let the little paper that says "reproduction" fool you.

They all know each other, and publish incestuously.

Mobs of book-eating children going into the stacks! Can you see that?

Some rodent will see you and squeal to the press. Archy and Mehitabel will type it up.

It's hard to fine-tune a student early in the morning.

Tonight's exciting concluding episode...

Thursdays with Walter, week 3

This isn't worth anything, I hope. I use it as a Batman cape.

Help me! I'm an old map!

"page 31-34 creased, page 35 has a bullet hole, page 39 was eaten by mice, bloodstain on page 90"

This is a quintessential red state observation.

There is wisdom in the newspaper! You just have to dig deep for it.

There's only one other Rootie Kazootie book; oddly enough, it's called Rootie Kazootie.

We've all read a Little Golden Book. There's no stigma.

You all know the drill if the copyright mafia show up at your house. We live within the rules when it's possible.

It will be interesting to see if by the end of class you have a pound and a half of paper to lug around.

For this class only, I have created the Hindu god of dumpster diving. For those of you who weren't here, we talked about dumpster diving in the context of dumpster diving.

Paper you could take out to lunch, it's so good.

It's spelled "couching," but you don't say "couching" or you reveal your ignorance.

It was sitting there like paper with a match.

You're setting it on fire? It's going to burn, I think.

You try to make something safe, it's not permanent. You try to make something really exciting, it explodes.

It's...it's a horrid mutant waffle.

on burst testing: Why does that Kleenex just make it? Why does that shopping bag get you right up to the front door before the bottom drops out? They test that: it only needs to make it out of the store.

Never get into an armwrestling contest with a bookbinder.

It's a German machine--it makes no mistakes.

Tell 'em to go jump. You won't have a job left, but you'll have said that: that's fun.

"Shall" the vendor silly. You only have to "will."

In the meantime, you have an intermediary who speaks the language of the evil one: the lawyers.

If you start reading the boilerplate, I guarantee your mind will not be with you long.

You can't really do it at home using baking soda and a pair of pliers.

It's amazing: after all these years no one knows this stuff. I guess that's why I teach this class.

If there's anything in this profession that isn't a headache, let me know.

As soon as you buy it it already has shelf age, unless you go to the paper mill and grab it as soon as it comes out and throw it in a cooler like an organ transplant.

Now you can impress your HVAC buddies.

You're breathing last semester's air. Ew!

Whoever said it's not the heat, it's the humidity, they were the philosophers of conservation.

Why do I have that? That's a very good question, and you're never allowed to ask it again. Because if my wife hears it, then there'll be two.

Any kind of HVAC work, you'll need more than is left of Lehman Bros.

I don't know where they hire these people; there must be a lot of circuses going bankrupt.

It's like the baleen of a whale!

Microns are way smaller than peas.

You have once again incurred an expense.

If you have big pockets, get bigger ones.

There may be other people, but he's the guy.

On the scale of difficulty, this is toward impossible.

The image of people reading in sunlight? Might as well put a book in the oven. Here I am, cooking this book.

If you don't know if your building has drainage, you'll find out when you're swimming through your collection.

In the old days, it didn't matter: your carbon footprint could be a hundred miles wide and nobody cared.

You can see the humidity's having a little party down here.

It's very seldom 131F in the stacks.

First of all, the engineer is going to kill you, so you don't have to fire him.

On the web, you can see really snazzy, beautiful pictures; they look like they're in mylar.

Thursdays with Walter, week 2

If you have a pen, they shoot you right at your chair.

For a mere four thousand dollars, you've got a dollar-fifty book all saved!

Money, it means nothing to me: save my book.

Think of microfilm as your friend, not a loathsome piece of curled-up plastic.

Instead of Blackberry thumbs, you had scroll-unrolling thumbs.

on hemp paper: You make nice paper, and you're in a mellow mood all day.

Parchment vs. Vellum, going ten rounds!

You can get pretty wiggy in this subject.

By looking at this, you've all agreed to give me one million dollars. It's an Aztec curse.

on elephant dung paper: If you think about it, the elephant's done the pulping for you.

Taking living hearts out of people? A little detail.

When you shook hands with the ambassador and got smallpox, that's not such a good deal.

Corrugated cardboard! Made into paper that looks strangely like corrugated cardboard!

We went through a whole blender doing this, but at least I have something to show for it. We're people who don't get out a lot.

Paper is used, as we know, for filthy lucre.

People who are stamp collectors...you thought catalogers were strange!

Is that animal glue? I'm glad I didn't use stamps in the 1800s.

They ran out of fonts and had to use circus flier fonts: Terrible! Ha! Shocking! Whee!

History has a way of sneaking around and hiding in the backs of newspapers.

on the history of the Remington company: Eventually they put their plowshares away and went to weapons, so they did the opposite of what the bible says.

It's like a washing machine, except it comes out paper instead of pants.

That's a switch: I get a rebate!

This has more information than you can possibly understand in your lifetime. That's what I like about the internet, too: you no longer feel like an idiot, because there's no way anyone could know everything.

on accelerated aging tests: If you sat in front of a sunlamp next to a nuclear reactor on a hot stove, there's a good chance you'd degrade.

Yeah, I'm That Professional

Me: Some tune with a name too long for me to bother to learn came in.
Component librarian: Do I need to worry about it?
Me: Maybe.
Component librarian: Did I ask you to order it?
Me: Probably.
Component librarian: Well, thanks, then.

Thursdays with Walter, week 1

Here begins a series of posts quoting the instructor of my Thursday night class, LBSC 786. You will understand that I had to adopt a new note-taking technique that would enable me to separate real, functional notes from the kind of garbage I post here.

Driving in the dark when you're almost 60? You don't need acid, man!

That's the one thing you will get in this class: an obscure humor refresher course.

The cruel world awaits you, and this course will help you in no way whatsoever.

Ah, the fall, when college campuses are a-twitter with "like."

The art of bookbinding died centuries ago, but they keep doing it!

If you had to read this, your mind would snap.

This is one of my favorite books, because every time I open it, some of it goes away.

I'm Polish, and in high school I studied German, so I fought World War II in my head.

What are you doing here? Go back to your states! Aren't you in a militia or something?!

To fight the pandemic flu, get your hands drunk.

That's a good article. I'll probably...er...you'll probably find someday someone has made a copy of it and perhaps left it on your desk.

English literature students...I don't know that any of them ever got lives.

Mylar! I imagine sometimes the entire world under mylar! Suffocating, but so cool looking!

I started in the library as a page. Then I became a chapter, and now I'm about five novels.

College Park is hard to understand. It's like a huge yard sale with a university in the middle.

It's like a conservator's asylum.

One of 'em's a recidivist English major.

You don't have to be a member of the international conservation cult.

Why do mice always "scurry about?" Don't they ever just run? I saw a mouse scurrying about! It's like something from Dickens.

Your printing is so quiet! I should make copies for everyone! It's like artwork!

Why does my coffee maker have a clock on it? I don't want it to make coffee by itself! That freaks me out!

She was driving a Disney golf cart, so she was empowered.

The guy who did Goofy's voice figures into this class in conjunction with Bozo the Clown, but that comes up later.

You're a baseball person? You're going to like today's quiz. Oh, there's a quiz today, by the way.

A mission statement! Write that down!

Any good glues? I used to listen to jazz on the radio and assemble model cars, and I wasn't sniffing glue, but man, the jazz sounded awesome.

Static cling! It's better than laundry! I put a thing in mylar inside a plastic sleeve, and you'd need a truck to pull 'em apart.

You've been contaminated by Americana.

Why would you want to drive 200 miles per hour across a salt flat? Doesn't it make you thirsty just thinking about it?

That means everybody's here, plus two strays and a Spaniard.

Good luck with that, that's my advice.

Somebody figured out paper and somebody figured out ink, but they didn't do it on the same day.

Indulge me: I'm old.

The Problem with Compact Fluorescents: Solved

Greg: I’m concerned about the mercury.

Me: We won’t put them near the Wii.

Greg: Okay, good.