E G O S P E W

Every time I decide to bite the bullet and pull the trigger, I end up shooting myself in the foot.

Homo Sapiens Elgoog & Aidepikiw

Life, Myth, and Naming Conventions

During some recent exhaustive research for an entirely unrelated subject, after hours illicitly spent with my secret nighttime lovers Elgoog & Aidepikiw [the names were changed to protect Carl & Linda], I discovered there are now SIX kingdoms of life! Not two! It’s all been reorganized out from under me, while I was busy mastering my own life’s kingdom. Back when I was in high school, it was so simple: Animalia and Plantorum, or whatever. There were some uncomfortable rumblings about viruses and people still argued over whether they possessed 48 or 46 chromosomes but generally, I walked around erect, proud to be a vertebrate.

Ah, those were the good old days . . . nine planets, no plutoids. Evolution was a science, not an optional myth. And Jupiter had an impressive but manageable twelve moons.  Pop quiz: name them! “Yeah, okay, sure . . . Europa, Io, Ego, Id . . . you know, all those Jupiter/Zeus lovers and descendants. Freud must have dreamed about getting into those heads.”

Nice try.

Well, science never sleeps.  In the past few years our giant friend, under intense government agency probing, has revealed many more secret moons — 63 total, as of today.  Yikes, where was I?

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I was most excited about my wife’s and my recent decision to purchase a fancy new sewing machine. This has been an item of her desire for a long time and I fully support acquiring the tools to make her happy. (Though I am not so dim as to buy her, say,  a vacuum cleaner for her birthday.  We tend to both get excited over Dysons and I realize I would be getting it as much for me as her.)

She is incredibly artistic and handy and can knit or crochet absolutely anything in about two episodes of Dexter. (Offered into evidence: Teddy bears Campbell Brown and Lynley, knit from scratch.)  When we lived in Brooklyn she used to actually knit bullet-proof vests for the officers in the local precinct. (That kevlar yarn was a beast to work with. She had to special-order 9-millimeter teflon-coated armor-piercing needles.)  It’s impossible to calculate how many lives she must have saved over those harsh winters.

It became a friendly game that whenever I brought up the concept of acquiring a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle, she would idly and codependently mention the fancy sewing machine. She apparently equated both items expensewise, and indeed I had no problem spending an equivalent amount on a Super-Duper Sewing Computer that she would coax to weave colorful rugs and darn life-size presidential portraits and such. But the model she wanted was much more modest. In reality the Ninja (itself a very modest 250cc) would cost about 10 times the Singer. Talk about a guilt trip.

Anyway, now the Singer has arrived, and I assume I have the Ninja green light, which coincidentally, is the desired color! Yay!

(Important Note to Wife and Sister and Concerned Readers: Relax. The above paragraph employed poetic license purely for entertainment purposes. There is no money for silly dangerous toys. I am not running out to buy a motorcycle anytime soon. Likely never.) Unyay. 

The Big Day

We opened the carton together, with equal anticipation. Oh-boy, oh-boy, oh-boy! You know, it’s programmable with little patterns, and that’s a big turn-on.

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My coining of Nyertoon [pronounced NYE-er-toon, pretty much the way it's spelled] leads me to put this post under Llewellynguistics. It means New Yorker Cartoon, get it?

I was trying to come up with a blend of “cartoon” and some animal, preferably doggie hybrid style (whoa, that doesn’t sound right).

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Pseudointellectual Language Discussion #73
More Questions Than Answers

How is it that “honeycomb” became the authoritative nomenclature when describing a hexagonal pattern?

Bee’s Honeycomb	Cow’s Reticulum

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