I wanted U
I hoped for U
I waited for U
Time after time
I looked for U
But U passed me by
U went to others
I thought U would never come to me
Then when I had given up all hope
That I would ever be able to hold U
U appeared
U came to me
Finding U fulfilled a need
Because without U
I might well have finished
Forlorn, distressed and clutching
That little tile
Imprinted with
The letter Q
Category: silliness
dances with cheese
Yes, it’s cheese week here at collecting tokens. Because I apparently just can’t get enough cheese.¹
Anyhow, inspired in part by the pants game (wherein a word in a known quotation, expression or title is replaced by the word pants) and in part by a post² I came across on adding the word cheese to movie titles, I offer up my own list of movie titles. (I got all these movie titles, or at least a previous version of them from the AFI’s 100 years 100 movies page. So these are high quality films that I’m making a cheese mockery of.)
Classics of Cheese Cinema
Passion. Betrayal. Cheese.
Partners in crime, partners in cheese.
A dark and dangerous mission of cheese.
Glimpse the cheesy underbelly of New Orleans.
Trouble’s coming. And it’s bringing crackers.
A haunting tale of star-crossed young cheese lovers.
An epic saga of love, war and cheese.
If ever a wonderful wiz there was…wait, would that be the CheeseWiz?
A sentimental film that shows a glimpse of a world without cheese.
The awe and mystery of a cheese unlike any other.
When they find it, they really don’t want to smell it.
Is the cheese quiet now, Clarice?
—————
¹It has occurred to me that I must consider cheese to be a funny word. Much like pants, squid, banana, duck and monkey. However, I don’t see any mention of cheese on the Wikipedia inherently funny word article.
²Really, I promise to stop this daily linking to Words for My Enjoyment. What’s funny is that I first came across the blog via my takehome final, as mentioned previously, but then found it again totally inadvertantly and coincidentally while doing a google search for “cheese” and “movies”. (Did I mention that there’s aren’t too many cheese movies?) It was almost as if it was written in the cheese…Wait, “Written on the Cheese.” I think that’s a movie, too.
extra cheese
You know what really cheeses me off? When I finish a list and realize I’ve forgotten something.
It’s like going to the grocery store to buy bread, eggs and milk, and then remembering I need cheese too as I’m driving on my way there, but I figure I’ll wait to add it to my list, since it would be hazardous to write while driving, even if it is only one word, and then when I get there, going into this trance as I wander the aisles with my shopping cart, and wondering what it means that supermarkets now play music that was actually popular when I was in high school, and feeling up the melons and squeezing the toilet paper, then browsing the cereal aisle and feeling nostalgic for the days of my youth when lucky charms were an exotic unattainable bowl of cereal at the end of the rainbow because my mother insisted on having us eat healthy cereals like wheat chex and when I finally tried them, they really weren’t that thrilling, and resisting the urge to buy cookies and redi-whip and donuts, and before you know it, I’ve filled up the cart and then I head home with my bags of groceries, and after I put away my bread and my milk and my pint of organic blackberry sorbet, which seemed like a healthier choice than the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but screw it, I bought that too, and bananas and maple syrup and zucchini and oatmeal and frozen peas, and then find a crumpled up paper in my pocket, and it’s my grocery list with its three measly items (bread, eggs and milk) scribbled on it, and realize that I’ve forgotten the eggs, and (crap!) I also forgot to get more cheese.
You know what I’m saying?
Anyhow, I realized that I left off some key pieces of cheese from yesterday’s cheeseful bounty. Such as:
- Richard Cheese, a musician who, along with his band Lounge Against the Machine, provides cheesy lounge music reinterpretations of so many your favorite contemporary songs. Also in the music category is the band The String Cheese Incident. Then there’s the apparently sadly now-defunct Cheese Patrol, a
yearly homage to all the songs that people vociferously hate but secretly know all the words to. These are the songs we grew up with; overorchestrated. overwrought, oversynthed, over the top.
- Somehow I also managed to leave off the appearance of the cheese guy in the Buffy episode “Restless“, as well as a few other cheesy references. And in my research I came across this brilliant essay “An Analysis of Cheese as Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Apparently, the layers of cheese in the Buffy series run far deeper than I’d realized.
- For more on cheese philosophy, you can check out this essay “on the non-existence of cheese.” Is there proof of the existence of cheese in the universe? Perhaps not.
- Then there’s the Cheese Burglar. But I’m not really a big fan of the cult of which he is a member. So instead I offer this cartoon mouse classic, The Cheese Burglar (1946). (You can even see it on YouTube. Though I admit to not having watched anything close to the whole 7 minutes.)
- I actually like the animation of this (shorter) shortThe Cheese Trap better, which features a cg version of the board game Mouse Trap, one of my childhood favorites.
- Do you hanker for a hunka cheese? Do you remember this rather creepy cartoon psa from the 70s? You might also be interested in the hunk-hankerers guest appearance on the Family Guy.
- Yesterday’s cheese did not include much in the way of cheese activities for those of you with too much time and not enough cheese on your hands. Options include: a quiz to let you know what kind of cheese you are. (There’s also a similar-veined one-step cheese “comparator,” but the reviews are not stellar.)
- There’s even an experiment with cheese that you can perform at home on your own. (However, the author does recommend exercising caution if you are lactose tolerant.) (And no, my dear seester, this is not the same cheese experiment you tried with me that one time when we were little. I’ll write about that later.)
- Most thrillingly, you can actually watch cheese *live* online. That’s right, you can watch watch cheddar cheese aging. Not only is it just as exciting as it sounds, it is also apparently the cool thing to do. (If you don’t have the months to spare to see the change in progress, you can also check out this time-lapse video encapsulating 3 months of the cheese-aging process.)
- And even though I offered it up yesterday, no cheese list would be complete without The Cheese Shop sketch. This time, I serve it up in its youtubiful glory:
thought I’d share
Sometimes, I make myself laugh. This is what I just wrote:
Examples 17 through 22b were coded as “reconstructed dialog.” However, the dialog was obviously constructed rather than reconstructed as the interlocutors are styrofoam packing peanuts:
17. They’re all “Pauly, don’t you want to try just one of us?”
One of the questions on my takehome final is a brief study of the usage of the quotative be+all, a close relative of the quotative be+like. We’ve been given a small corpus of 50 examples of this quotative, including some from blogs. Such as this excerpt from this one:
People who eat pennies are stupid. I mean, it’s obvious what’s going to happen. Your body isn’t going to be able to digest a damn penny, okay? Same goes for shards of glass or thumbtacks or pieces of errant plastic or even little lego pieces. I’m past that. I’ve moved on. Matured. But when it comes to these damn packing peanuts they call out to me like they know what I’m thinking. They’re all “Pauly, don’t you want to try just one of us?”” and I’m all “No thanks Mr. Packing Peanut, I think you’ll just give me a stomach ache” and they’re all “Oh, c’mon — what’s the worst that could happen?” and I’m all “I could get sick” and they’re all “Sicker than when you got food poisoning from Pizza Hut?” and I’m all “How did you know about that?” and they’re all “We’re packing peanuts, Pauly — we know all.”
Let this be a warning to all of you. Anything you write and publish on the web could turn into data fodder for linguists, or even worse, linguistics students. Bwahahaha.
Oooh. There’s something I could research: the distribution of spellings of evil laughs on the web. There seems to be a bit of variation in the onset (bwahahaha vs muahahaha vs buahahaha vs mwahahaha) not to mention variability in the number of “ha”s. (We can get from two “ha”s, as in bwahaha, all the way up to…I’m not sure how many. I got as far as googling
“bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha”
and was amused to get 7180 hits, and this:
Did you mean: mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Hey, remember how I said I like sleep, and should be in pretty good shape to get some tonight? Not if I keep screwing around like this. So I’m all “I totally need to get back to work.”
I am not an “I am not a plastic bag”
Mind you, this is not to say that I am a plastic bag.
But I have to share some silliness that’s come to my attention regarding the whole shopping bag debate. Since posting a few times about my own battles against plastic shopping bags, my blog has gotten a surprising number of search engine hits for the phrase “I am not a plastic bag.” Seeing as I live under a rock, I’d missed all the public hooha on the topic, and so the phrase seemed more than a little bizarre to me. Were there individuals out there suffering from identity crises whereby they needed to affirm their own non-plastic-bag status? 
As it turns out, a whole bunch of people, though they are not themselves plastic bags, think that they need to buy a high-fashion accessory in order to avoid using wasteful plastic bags.
Designer Anya Hindmarch has designed a bag, the “I am not a plastic bag” bag. This is a bag, which is not a plastic bag, that advertises its non-plastic bagness through the words “I am not a plastic bag,” which are emblazened across the bag, which, as it turns out, is not plastic. They are not only not plastic, but apparently they are all the rage. Check out this bit from the FAQ page:
How can I buy I’m Not A Plastic Bag?
We have been overwhelmed by the success of this project. The UK limited edition brown bags have now completely sold out in the UK.
Apparently, folks are even selling these bags on ebay for oodles of money. There have been scandalous exposés decrying that the bags, though not plastic, are not produced especially ethically, nor are they produced in a particularly environmentally friendly way.
What I find more disturbing is that this buying frenzy not only smacks of unneccessary consumerism, but also smacks of a fad.
I’m not alone in these worries. As supporting evidence that the frenzy is about a fashion fad rather than reflecting conservationist intentions, one commenter on this blog post wrote:
my daughter has one and she loves it she takes it everywhere with her but surprise surprise not one person has commented on it which has really upset her
Ugh. I mean, why avoid using plastic bags if no one is even going to compliment you on your high-fashion anti-plastic-bag accessories?
While I applaud celebrities and other influential figures (who are likely not plastic bags) attempting to spread conscience and consciousness about environmental and social issues, does it really have to boil down to just another product?
just say no pants
I’m afraid that I’ve been letting my pants fall down. It’s been weeks since my last pants post. For shame. But an important pants event has come to my attention. According to some folks, May 4, 2007 is:
That’s this Friday.
No pants day is a holiday (not an official holiday, mind you) where people celebrate by not wearing pants. The holiday has an official website. Supporters have put together a public service announcement. There are promotional materials:
The truth is, I’m not sure I can support No Pants Day. Get behind it, as it were. While No Pants Day does support the saying of “pants,” if not the wearing of pants, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with all this anti-pants propaganda. I mean, just look at this logo:
I’m considering protesting No Pants Day with my own No No Pants Day materials:
Of course, there’s always the risk that others will protest my protest, which I’ll, of course, protest:
However, ultimately, I predict that pants will prevail. Power to the pants!
putting baby to work
We just had a breakthrough moment. I’m sitting on one couch in the living room (doing work, believe it or not) and John is sitting across the room on the other couch. Phoebe was over playing with John. John realized he needed a tissue. The tissues were over next to me. What on earth could we do? Certainly, standing up seemed like too much effort, and it’s very hard to throw a single tissue across the room. So I held out a tissue, and asked Phoebe to come get it. She crawled over and then brought the tissue to John. Yes! (Of course, there were moments when it seemed she would opt to shred the tissue, or wander off in another direction. So the whole process was not terribly expedient.) It’s only a matter of time before we can get her to start mowing the lawn and changing the oil in our cars.
breaking research from the geekology laboratories
I mentioned yesterday that there are tests out there to help you determine how you fit into the geek/nerd/dork paradigm. There are many, many tests out there. I may explore these more, but here are a few (with my own results, when available).
Geek, nerd or dork tests
1. The “original geek test”
I like this one. And I actually like that you get bonus points for being a female geek. (Ha!)
I scored 23.07692%, which puts me at the (unmodified) “Geek” level. (There are, of course, higher levels of geek. You also get to have, should you choose, a button with your test results. Behold mine!
2. The Geek Test: How geeky are you?
This one is a shorter test, and may be derivative of the preceding test. (Or maybe they both are derivative of some previous source. Scientists at the North American Geekology Laboratories are furiously researching this question as we speak.)
Here are my results:
Geek Test Results
You are 47.5% geeky.
OK, not that geeky at all, are you? I’ll bet you even have a girlfriend (or boyfriend).
The current average score is: 31.55%
Fact: 35.45% of people who took this test admit to wearing a costume “just for fun”.
3. A nerd test, called the “nerd purity test“:
Here are a few sample questions:
Do you have a Rubik’s Cube?
Can you solve it?
Without the book?
Without looking?
Do you have acne?
Do you have greasy hair?
Are you unaware of it?
And here are my results:
Your Nerd Purity Test Results
You answered “yes” to 26 of 100 questions, making you 74.0% nerd pure; that is, you are 74.0% pure in the nerd domain (you have 26.0% nerd in you).
Your Weirdness Factor (AKA Uniqueness Factor) is 11%, based on a comparison of your test results with 576688 other submissions for this test.
The average purity for this test is 73.8%.
The first submission for this test was received June 16, 1994.
4. Another nerd test, this one called The Nerdity Test:
THE NERDITY TEST
Version 5.x.cubed.minus.3.x.all.divided.by.2
10 December, 1993
HTML-Version: 7 May, 1996
CGI-Enabled: 13 March, 1998
JavaScript-Enabled: 25 October, 2000
This one looks pretty good, and gets extra points for the version number. However, I didn’t finish taking the test due to time constraints. (Also, when I clicked on the “credits” link for one of the questions, I accidentally cleared out my answers for the test at the point, and didn’t want to go back.)
5. Blogthings had a pretty lame one. I’m not convinced by my results, even though the “nerd” percentage is somewhat similar to the previous test score. But come on. “no one would ever call you a nerd”? Oh, how wrong can they be:
| You Are 24% Nerdy |
 You’re a little nerdy, but no one would ever call you a nerd. You sometimes get into nerdy things, but only after they’ve become a part of mainstream culture. |
6. To balance things out, we have a dork quiz:
This one is not interactive, but the questions do look fun, like:
9. Who do you most closely identify with?
a) Kermit.
b) Gonzo.
c) Scooter.
7. I’m actually most partial to the OKcupid Nerd? Geek? or Dork? test
I like it that this considers nerd, geek and dork to be dimensions, and helps you to place yourself on those axes. This one has some pretty funny questions, like:
When you encounter something you don’t know, do you often try to find out what it is? (Like an unknown word in a dictionary or event in an encyclopedia.)
Wait a second-there are people who would answer “no” to this question? I’ve often wished I had access to imdb while watching movies in a theater…
Do you enjoy quoting books/movies/tv shows, etc. in your conversations/letters/emails?
This test also claims to give a score about how you ranked on the three variable (nerdiness, geekosity and dork points) compared to others of your age and gender. Note that my score shows higher than 99% for all three. Which I thought was interesting. So I was curious about how I’d score if I were a male. Still got the same. So I actually tried retaking the test from a nearly totally different persona, a sort of suave but kinda dumb athletic type. And still, I get over 99% on the three variables. This suggests to me that a) this feature is probably broken, and these levels are probably not actually a reflection of the test-taker demographics b) I am really a nerd, geek and dork to follow up on this and c) I really should be getting back to the work I need to be doing and stop taking these damn tests.
Modern, Cool Nerd 78 % Nerd, 65% Geek, 47% Dork |
For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd. Nerds didn’t use to be cool, but in the 90’s that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn’t quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and “geek is chic.” The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)! Congratulations! Thanks Again! — THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST |
 |
My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test |
more note-writing tips from Ms. Mismanners
Dearest kind readers,
It has been some time since I have offered you my advice in matters of etiquette. I believe that some of you may be shy about seeking advice in so public a forum, and have attempted to make your requests in subtle ways. For example, I recently received the following note:
we have mr barkworth pay or else await instructions
As I have not had the pleasure of being personally aquainted with the Mr. Barkworth referenced in the above communication, I must assume that either this note was sent to me in error, or that more probably, the note-writer was requesting advice about the proper wording of ransom notes. I am happy to oblige.
The first point I would like to address is on a matter of style rather than etiquette. While use of capitalization and punctuation is a often a matter of personal style, I would heartily recommend using at least some punctuation. I would like to point out that in such matters, it is particularly important to avoid ambiguity. In the note above, I presume that as the specifics of payment have not yet been made explicit, the writer is not actually suggesting the choice between the option of paying vs. waiting for instructions. I believe the author intended to communicate the coercive suggestion “Pay, or else” and the explicit directions “await instructions.”
Secondly, while brevity is certainly a trait to be admired, I fear that the intended recipient of your original note may have found your wording to be somewhat impolite. Might I suggest the following rewording:
-
Dear Madam or Sir,
I hope that this day finds you well, and that you are enjoying this fine spring weather. I have recently been admiring the lovely flowers that are now blooming in your garden, and I expect that they bring you much pleasure.
It may have come to your attention that your beloved Mr. Barkworth was not in attendance this morning. Rest assured, he is unharmed, and I am certain you will be reunited with him soon.
I am certain that you will wish avoid any unnecessary unpleasantness, especially out of consideration for the aforementioned Mr. Barkworth, and therefore I must suggest that you refrain from contacting any third parties. I will forward to you additional information about our upcoming transactions shortly. I eagerly anticipate continued communication with you in this matter.
Warmly,
A Friend
I hope that this information has been of some help to you, and I wish the best of luck to you in this endeavor.
Sincerely,
Ms. Mismanners
collecting tokens 