Comma Dot Comma

This week we had a friend from upstate New York staying with us. The other night I reported that we had a winter storm moving in and he started to laugh– “What does ‘winter storm’ mean in Phoenix?” he asked. “Oh, a few hours of rain,” I said. He left before the storm hit. When it came were watching a Fellini movie — La Strada– and wandering outside every few minutes to check the progress of the lunar eclipse, which was made decidedly unglamorous by the cloud cover. We could see the uncovered edge of the moon but none of the weird colors of eclipses past. As the clouds thickened, the sky got brighter and turned yellow. It looked like about 6 am instead of 10 pm. I don’t know if all the lightning was diffusing through the clouds or what. The thunder shook the entire house, including the light bulbs in their sockets. Fellini just couldn’t measure up. His movies are just too circusy for real life.

Is it too late to talk about superbowl commercials? I know a blog is supposed to be at least somewhat timely, but what the hey. I liked the clydesdale one, the one about the oboe player that got picked second draft to the rangers, and the giant mouse. And I had a special place in my heart for the animatronic badgers. And yet, it all made me wistful for some of the commercials of superbowls past. Given the years I have put in, in various organizations, as an office minion/professional, I have an especially soft soft spot for Terry Tate, Office Linebacker. I think the year it aired was Dr. G’s and my first superbowl with our new church in DC. There was a chili cookoff, and everybody was hanging out at the pastor’s house. The other day I pulled up the commercial on the internet and started laughing all over again. Then Dr. G pointed out that the whole thing is, unfortunately, a giant black man terrorizing white people. Okay, so he’s right. Well, Terry terrorizes one wimpy black guy. Does that mean I ought not to embed it here? But it’s so funny.

Standing around with friends reeling off best madcap pranks: Caulking drawers shut, freezing all the mechanic’s tools in a five-gallon bucket of water, etc. I didn’t have any of my own so I trotted out my dad’s: putting a bunch of food coloring in the hot water heater, shutting off the electricity and painting the windows black. But this joke is pretty good, too, and Erik, the jokee, is kind for allowing the rest of us to enjoy it, even though he usually gets to be the funny one: e.g.,Living to Be 200. Hm, I forget, is it better to use i.e. or e.g. in that construction? Ah, well. Why am I using latin abbreviations in my blog posts anyway?