Letter of the Week

I just about pee my pants laughing every time I think about this. I may have even snorted once or twice ...

My favorite comment card this week accused us of having "bad gramor."

Oh, man ... I asked Deb to frame it and hang it up.

'Tis the season for typos

So ... kids write letters to Santa. And most of them in Laramie wind up here at our office. And we get to type them up and put them in the paper.

The trick for us is to type "Santa" and not "Satan," which is trickier than you might think, several letters into it.

Dear Satan,

I want a barbie doll. I love you.

Little Susie may get an exorcism for Christmas instead.

This brings me to the subject of Christmas carols, and how I used get the words mixed up because I didn't know what they meant. I just tried to emulate as best I could what the children's choir director was saying, so I often wound up singing

Hark to Harold, angels sing

Good King Wesses Went to Town

Gloria in egg shell says day-o

Good tidings we bring to you and your kid

It didn't matter that the words, strung together, made no logical sense. Our parents weren't listening -- they were hoping we'd get through the pageant without picking our noses or flinging our dresses over our heads. And if they were reading lips, it all looked the same from the back of the church sanctuary, like "olive juice" looks like "I love you" to someone reading lips.

On that note, Merry Christmas to all.

Sarah-isms 101

Woot!: A bursting word of encouragment, usually shouted with hands cupped around the mouth to help it carry obnoxiously far over large crowds of people who may or may not be cheering along with you. Most entertaining when done by a parent who has never "woot"-ed anything before and suddenly bursts forth with it at a show in Branson.

Woo!: Not to be mistaken with "woot." It is an expression or response of joy, cheer, excitement. In written/text format, it must always be accompanied by an exclamation mark.

Cuddle whore: A person who enjoys cuddling, with or without an accompanying relationship. This term can encompass everything from innocent cuddling while watching a movie on a sofa to things that are a bit less innocent. (Get your mind out of the gutter, perv - not THAT much less innocent!)

Text whore: A person who is maintaining text conversations with more than one person at a time. The term, however, is most appropriately applied when each of the text recipients is a potential significant other, and neither/none know(s) about the other(s).

**NOTE** Aside from the two above instances, I can think of very few instances when it's even remotely appropriate to call someone a whore. Unless, of course, they are, in fact ... a whore.

Friend dumped: The position of finding that one of your social networking "friends" has decided that you are no longer worth associating with in the cyber world. Because no matter how old we are in real life or how mature we pretend to be, once we're on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc., we revert back to junior high school social tactics. You're not my BFF anymore.

Disgustipating: Something that is so disgusting to look at/think about, it hurts somewhere in the gut area, similar to a feeling of constipation.

Ginormous: Alright, I ripped this one off of "Elf," but I still love it and use it frequently. I should see whether the folks at Merriam-Webster are as in love with it as I am ... (update: they are!) Use this word when describing anything that is both gigantic AND enormous -- it's so big, it needs a combination of the two words.

Seriously: In the absence of anything else worthwhile to say, this fits many occasions. Adjust the tone of voice to fit the appropriate reaction. Can also be used as a precursor to most other phrases, such as: "Seriously, Sarah, don't let anyone tell you that you're missing out on something by not being married." Or: "Seriously! That jackass just totally cut me off!" Or: "Seriously. We're all adults. Let's act like it." Or just: "Seriously ... (!)(?)" It's possible that my overuse of this word was influenced by a brief infatuation with "Grey's Anatomy."

Hallucination

One final note before I take my full, two-day weekend (woo!):

I sometimes think that the little hand icon that is my mouse on the screen is flipping me off.

Usually after I've done something particularly stupid.

It just seems like the kind of thing our IT guy might program it to do ... since he can't do it to our faces. Even though we may deserve it sometimes.

The evening snooze ...

Mexico City is set to begin handing out free Viagra to elderly men there, citing that sexuality is too important a contributor to citizens' happiness to allow it to sag. Ohhh, that was a bad pun ...

In related news, our sports editor has decided to vacation in Mexico City. As soon as possible.

*-*-*-*

Nearly 30 children, some of them nearly adults, have been abandoned at Nebraska hospitals under the state's "Safe Haven" law. It gives a whole new depth to the threat parents give their kids that they're going to "take them to Nebraska."

In what is perhaps an ironic twist, Nebraskans have debated abandoning their state legislators in neighboring Iowa for penning and passing such a ridiculously undefined law in the first place.

*-*-*-*

And two orb-weaving spiders taken to space during the current Endeavour mission are having difficulty weaving symmetrical webs in the zero-gravity conditions aboard the shuttle. In fact they're having difficulty weaving anything that remotely resembles a web. But assymetrical globs of sticky spider silk still might have been handy for catching the tools an astronaut lost today while performing repairs on the shuttle. Even tangled webs could serve a purpose ...

But why would you need one?

So I was browsing the sporting goods section of Wal-Mart in the (vain) hope that they might have a telescope.

Camping/hunting aisle (hope is growing fainter).

Pocket knives. Sporks. Cast-iron skillets. Waterproof matches. Tin plates/cups/bowls. Axes for chopping fire wood.

Machetes.

Yeah. Machetes.

They weren't locked in a case. And though I didn't check, it didn't seem that they were even locked on their display hooks (like electronics stores do for high-priced things like memory cards or iPod accessories and such). They were just there, in the aisle, scaring the bejebers out of me. Seriously - if there's an axe available, why the bloody heck do you need a freaking machete?!? There is no jungle here in wide-open Wyoming through which you need to hack your way. And prairie grass doesn't count.

It brings to mind jungle warfare; Dian Fossey; and people who kidnap little kids in Uganda and do horrific things to them to turn them into child soldiers.

When I think "camping," I don't think "machete," and I'm rather scared of the people who do.

the details

I haven't yet decided who won the debate, but I'm pretty certain that Tom Brokaw and his clock very definitely lost.

And speaking of Tom Brokaw:

The distinguished moderator was standing near his podium several minutes after the debate had ended and the subsequent hand-shaking had begun. Unfortunately, his mic hadn't been turned off yet, and the bits that were picked up went something like this:

"Well, you could see what I was dealing with." (laughing.)

And then something about how it should have been a two-minute, two-minute format.

And then ...

"I wished I'd had a trap door ..." and it faded from there.

If nothing else during the debate gave me a chuckle, at least that little bit afterward did ...

Overheard today ...

"Yeah, ( ), the next time you need help on your roof, I'll get up there with ( ) ... and push him off."

I think there's a waiting list to do that, actually ...

Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.

If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1. The sixth would pay $3. The seventh would pay $7. The eighth would pay $12. The ninth would pay $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve ...

"Since you are all such good customers, he said, I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20."

Drinks for the ten now cost just $80. Like that idea.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his "fair share?"

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100 percent savings). The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33 percent savings). The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28 percent savings). The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25 percent savings). The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22 percent savings). The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16 percent savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

"I only got a dollar out of the $20," declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, "but he got $10!"

"Yeah, that's right!" exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!"

"That's true!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"

"Wait a minute!" yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night, the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill.

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

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(Contrary to what the e-mail forward said, this was not written by Professor David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, University of Georgia -- he doesn't know who wrote it, but I think it's still a good analogy. Thanks to Snopes.com and Dr. Kamerschen's Web site for this additional information.)