Let's Play Infantilize the Idiom!

 It's raining kits and pups out there!

My first encounter . . .

 . . . with the sign that announces:

No Shirt!

No Shoes!

No Service!

I said, "Man, they don't have anything here!"

With men like Abolghasem Yaghoubi . . .

Abolghasem Yaghoubi, representative of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the Khorasan Shomali province, said in a recent sermon that Allah has forbidden pork because:

"Pork contains a vitamin - a kind of microbe - that weakens the zeal of people who eat too much pork."

Modern scientists discovered this fact, and I have thereby learned that a vitamin is a microbe. We are indeed fortunate that such scientifically informed men are responsible for Iran's scientific prowess.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go . . .

Heigh-ho, the wick is dead!

Wich old wick?

The wich-ed wick!

Heigh-ho, the wich-ed wick is dead!

Wasn't this song from the animated film "Bloody Lips and the Seven Vertically Challenged Individuals"?

Two Proverbs

Pride goeth before a fall.

Humility goeth before a spring.

New Word: Afterlifeless

To be read as meaning: afterlife less?

Or

 To be read as meaning: after lifeless?

BUILD BACK BETTER BIDEN!

Over at Kevin Kim's blog, Kevin criticizes the Biden campaign's slogan, which he quotes as:

BUILD BACK BETTER!

I tell him that he has misquoted. As one can see from the photo that Kevin provides, the slogan is actually:

BUILD BACK BETTER BIDEN!

The Biden campaign is currently deconstructing Biden. When finished with that, the campaign will build him back better than before. If this works and Biden wins the presidency, Biden's administration will attempt the same with America itself.

New Proverb!

The Devil finds work for idol hands.

Practicing opening lines . . .

Here's a sample: 

The Walker

The day is humid now, and the leaf-filtered light is green on the woodland path. I have been walking a long time, but I don't know how long. I do not recall beginning this walk. I recall becoming aware of myself walking.

Naked go I. I know that I am naked. I know what clothes are. Have I ever worn clothes? I do not know. How can I know so much and know so little? . . .

Enticing? But where do I go (so to speak) from here?Would third-person singular work better? And which gender, masculine or feminine?

The Bottomless Bottle of Beer

Gina Fields, one of my friends from my Baylor years, a woman with whom I worked in Collins Cafeteria those many years ago - over forty years now! - has just finished reading my first novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, and here is her brief but positive review:

Fun and thought-provoking . . . The lovely interweaving of classic fiction writers combined with Mr. Hodges' keen wit and imagination produced a story worth reading. This carefully crafted and entertaining novella can be read and appreciated on several levels. I highly recommend it.

You can go and take a look yourself, if interested (and even if not), but note that only the electronic version is available as yet. I hope to have a paperback edition ready soon.

I should note that lawyers in particular ought to take a special interest in this book, for a central issue concerns law. Perhaps the legal aspect appealed to Gina, for she herself is a lawyer. Maybe she'll add a comment here to let us know.

And all the boards did shrink . . .

Everyone has by now caught on to yesterday's joke and surely realizes that dihydrogen monoxide is really hydric acid.

Names Matter!

I have somewhere exposed the fact that hydrogen hydroxide is really just another name for dihydrogen monoxide, which should be banned!" Why, the very name itself runs chills down my spine!

A Tom Swifty?

"Yours is a biting remark!" she snapped at him for sharply lowering her grade.

Perhaps even a double Tom Swifty?

Great-Grandma Shell

My maternal great-grandma used to say of people who made asses of themselves, and whom she considered entirely worthless in all other respects, that they ought to be kicked so hard (that) birds would make a nest in their rear ends.

I thought it was a folk saying, but I've never found it used by any other folks.

Drunk as the lord

This expression is often misunderstood, especially by those encountering it with the word Lord capitalized, which is not only theologically blasphemous, but even worse, grammatically incorrect!

I recall that the correctly capitalized Lord supplied abundant wine at Cana when the guests were already quite drunk, but He is not reported to have drunk any of it himself.

No, the word lord, in the odd-sounding expression serving as header to this blog entry, is not to be capitalized, for it refers not to the Lord of the universe, but to the lord of a rather smaller abode, namely, the manor, hence an English lord, a man of the manor born, a man not nearly so well to do as God, but still a person of resources sufficient to waste the time and money required for getting drunk. Regularly.

Lawyer's Adage

Whether there's a will, there's a way.

Baby, it's cold inside.

If your heart got broken, it was ice-cold frozen.

When à la mode was all the rage!

When I was a ten-year-old hillbilly in the Arkansas Ozarks, we hillbillies generally didn't know French and thought that à la mode literally meant "with ice cream" because ordering a slice of apple pie à la mode got you a slice of apple pie with ice cream, so when I wanted ice cream alone, I would order, "Just à la mode," and because everybody was as ignorant as I was, I got what I wanted, namely, ice cream.

Until some of us learned, somehow, that à la mode meant "according to the fashion." In other words, whatever is fashionable.

I afterwards had to remind myself of the French expression's true meaning, so I would go around saying: "Remember the à la mode!"

Which sounded somehow vaguely nationalist and even anti-Mexican . . .

A Universe Designed for Intelligent Life

Velociraptors also contemplated the fine-tuning of the universe and argued that the universe seemed designed for the emergence of life, especially intelligent life, and they postulated a designer who cared for his well-designed creation and who cared particularly for velociraptors, the lords of this creation, whose existence he had prepared for by arranging a mass extinction event to open up the global environment for new creatures called dinosaurs, one species of which would eventually evolve into the velociraptor, a creature made in the designer's own carnivorous image.

Sweet dreams of resurrection day. There really will be demons there . . .

Low-Level Linguistics

Dialect: Where locution meets location.

Religious Tolerance?

"Unto me my religion, and unto you your religion . . . for a while."

Vampire Bugs

Don't you just have to love those old-time spray cans armed with insecticide so effective that the marketing experts made this promise: "Kills Bugs Dead"?

I sure prefer those more powerful pesticides of the past than today's environmentally friendly ones, which I suppose can only promise: "Kills Bugs Undead."

Tempting Fate

Confronted with a wishbone, I always like to screw around with fate by making my wish a wish to lose.

Comparing Apples and Oranges

I have just watched a video in which a Muslim-background Christian from Iran talks about her conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, and she speaks of the gift of tongues as an experience of "making love spiritually."

I leave to my readers the task of fleshing out just what those three words meant . . .

Gender Neutral Terms

According to Disrn:

"Royal Canadian Navy to replace 'seaman' rank title with gender-neutral term"

Gender neutral, eh? I'm guessing the new term won't be "ovum."

Postmodern Fairy Tale

Once upon a time they all lived happily ever after deconstructing this remnant of patriarchy eternally giving themselves something endlessly to improve upon but constructing a sentence like this unreadable one that goes on and on promising ever more but giving ever less in part because they never learned about proper punctuation that would . . .

Emna Charqui's so-called "Sardonic Verses"

Jihad Watch reports Emna Charqui, a blogger in Tunisia, sentenced to six months in prison for a satirical post about Covid-19 written in a Koranic style. Below is an imaginative reconstruction, though written more in the biblical style of the King James Version, borrowed from here.

Here are Emna Charqui's so-called "Sardonic Verses": 

A-Lot saith: 

"And if thou disbelieve'st these verses, 

they become viruses versus thee! 

Many disbelieved in the past - 

not that they disbelieved in the past - 

nay, they did not doubt the past, 

the reality of the past, I mean. 

Rather, they disbelieved A-Lot and her Epistle. 

And their disbelief became 

a pandemic of pantheistic pandaemonianism! 

And they all died a death! 

And that death was great! 

No, I do not mean that it was wonderful. 

Pay attention! I mean many! 

In fact, all! They are all dead! 

Or most of them. 

Of the recent past, some are still living. 

So far. 

But Judgement Day is nigh. 

On that day - as I was saying - 

these verses will become viruses versus thee, 

every one of thee! 

And each verse shall stand up 

and proclaim thee a disbeliever 

who must die the second death. 

And great will be that death! 

Yes, great meaning many. I said that before. 

Don't interrupt. I, A-Lot, hate interruptions!" 

That's it. Emna Charqui's full text. Translated, of course. It's on the internet. I'll look for a link. 

Two Different Americans in Conversation:

A Hillbilly Uncle in the Ozarks: "I had a barn to burn."

A Harvard Graduate Visiting the Ozarks: "I never heard of having a barn to burn."

Insult

Question: Is either exult or exalt in some way an antonym to insult?

Answer: No, nobody would insult either of those two terms.

Masters of the World

According to Mohammad Nouh Qudah, Jordanian MP:

"When the Arabs received Islam, it came with the idea that they are the masters of the world . . . Allah created . . . Arabs with thought and guidance and He created the other peoples as students who follow our guidance. They are the ones who should work. This way, our thought and their work complement each other, and this is how the world is built . . . We are the masters of the world . . . [Allah] instilled in the Arabs traits of leadership that He did not bestow upon others."

As reported in MEMRI TV Clip No. 8139.

Petrified!

Rock Candy.