A few weeks ago I considered the ugly brutality that is non-parallelism in lists. Just days later, Dylan brought this worksheet home from school:

Aaargh! I pulled him out of that kindergarten immediately, of course. The better to homeschool him on important grammatical pet peeves of mine like the shameful spread of “I could care less” and the difference between “infer” and “imply.”

Mindy pointed out another funny example of bad parallelism to me the other day. An Asian grocery near our house has big signs in the window that read

BEEF

CHICKEN

TERIYAKI

PORK

The only problem is that PORK has been crossed out and “DVD” carefully written above it. DVD?

Finally, reader Eric Williams sent me this photo of a sign he spied last week in L.A. Its bullet list has a little problem as well, though it has nothing to do with parallelism:

You know what they say: “It’s nice not to be impotent, but it’s more impotent not to be nice.”

Obviously, the Emmys sucked, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out a pretty cool part of the show’s ad campaign: a big-ass collage!

In fact, the show’s website refers to this as the anniversary show’s “historic collage.” Historic? If you got all these people to actually pose together, from Bart Simpson to Tony Soprano to black-and-white early-1960s Johnny Carson, that would be “historic.” Any ad that looks like the inside of the locker of a handier-than-average-with-scissors high school sophomore probably isn’t “historic.”

But it is sort of cool. A disclaimer below the ad in my copy of Entertainment Weekly says, “The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences thanks all collage participants and apologizes to those who, regretfully, could not be featured.” So apparently the “participants” or their estates had to sign off on their inclusion. Which probably explains some of the odd omissions. No less than four cast members from Full House (sorry, Kimmy Gibbler) but no Steve Carell or Mr. Spock or George Costanza? Who else is oddly absent? You tell me.

The ad is also a treasure trove for potential trivia questions. Here, I’ll go first. Who’s the only pair of real-life siblings in the shot? (I think…I wouldn’t be surprised if I were missing others though.) What TV show has the most cast members depicted? (I haven’t done a full count, but I think it’s Cheers. Though Friends and Lost look like they’re close.) Suggest your own questions over on the message boards.

1995 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions victor Fritz Holznagel, who interviewed me at Google a couple years back, has posted an cool current events quiz to determine if you’re ready to run for the presidency.

(In theory. If you watched Sarah Palin with Katie Couric yesterday, you know the bar is, in practice, considerably lower than Fritz might think.)

Warning, before you click over: this is a hard quiz. No matter how much NPR you listen to, this is a hard quiz. I thought this was the sort of thing that I’d be good at, and I only got a 24/38. (But I did grade myself pretty tough; I was agonizingly close on a few things, like the schedule of Mexican presidential elections and the U.S. price of a Snickers bar. Bush 41 out of touch alert!)

Dylan, as we piled out of the car in our darkened garage last night: “It is pitch black. We are likely to be eaten by a grue.”

That’s my boy!

After yesterday’s book review post, I’ve been thinking a lot about the weird surge of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-mania in 1999-2000.

As trivia writer Ray Hamel points out in Brainiac, trivia fads have always, in this country, indicated economic peaks. If trivia is booming, sell sell sell. The market’s about to tank. It’s not like escapist movies, which do better in lousy times. You might think trivia would too, but nope–trivia only works when people are living high on the hog. Nobody played trivia in the Depression…but it was huge in 1927.

But never was a trivia fad more symptomatic of fragile prosperity than the Year of Millionaire. It wasn’t just the most popular show on television at the time–it was the three most popular shows, airing Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. The Tuesday show alone was pulling an 18.6. Other turn-of-the-millennium hits like The West Wing and Will & Grace never beat a 12.

Remember, this was the height of the Internet bubble. Computer programmers were our financial heroes then. Every other tech nerd I knew back then was a “millionaire on paper” (i.e. illusory stock options from their can’t-miss startups) or getting close thereto. It’s definitely no coincidence that the biggest TV hit of the year was also pulling in young, geeky white males from all over America and rewarding them with outrageous sums of money for their arcane knowledge. We didn’t realize it back then, but TV was just reflecting what the market was doing.

Then it all caught up with us, and the bubble popped, and the “holiday from history” ended in tragic fashion in September 2001, and that was it for Millionaire. When there’s real suffering and peril going on, economic and sociopolitical, trivia questions about the name of the Brady Bunch’s dog just don’t play anymore.

But now we can see Millionaire for what it was–the ultimate decadence, bread and circuses on the edge of the cliff. Final answer.

A while back, Ray Hamel sent me a copy of a book I’d never heard of: J. E. Matzer’s Millionaire Boy: The Adventures of a Game Show Contestant. The game-show-memoir category isn’t a big one, and Ray thought I’d be interested. I planned on reviewing it here for the occasional/dormant series of nerd memoir book reviews I was running. Dormant no longer! I finished the book last night; here’s a quick review.

The first thing you have to know about Millionaire Boy is this: it’s self-published. By the author’s own account, a voice woke him in the middle of the night insisting that he write a book about his game show adventures, so he did, and printed 5,000 copies on his own dime. You have to admire that kind of gusto. If the voices in your head tell you to do something, and it involves literature instead of fire or firearms, why not?

And why is that important? Because it means you have to cut the book some slack. Matzer’s not a writer. He’s a guy who obviously had a blast on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in May 2000, and dined out on his Regis story for months thereafter. And at some point he thought, hey, my TV anecdotes are a big hit at the Missoula Applebee’s–why not write them up?

So the important question isn’t: is Millionaire Boy a good book for my book club? It isn’t. It needs an editor (Matzer spent maybe forty minutes in Hot Seat but manages to wring 261 closely-typeset pages out of his experience!) and a copy editor (to get rid of the semi-random italicized, bolded, CAPITALIZED, and underlined words on every page) badly. If you like Millionaire enough to want to read Millionaire Boy, you need to treat it like a lengthy, rambling entry on a random, genial blog. And on that level, it might be worth your time.

If you’re wondering what makes Matzer’s experience unique or noteworthy or life-changing, the way that Bob Harris’s Prisoner of Trebekistan Jeopardy! experience was–well, nothing, really. He was one of the millions who was calling the Millionaire phone lines every afternoon in the late ’90s. He was one of the thousands who made it to New York, and the hundreds who made it to the Hot Seat. Maybe he could have given us more insight into where he came from or what the quiz show spotlight meant to him specifically. Instead, all we can really gather is that when Regis asked America who wanted a million dollars, Matzer decided that would be great.

“Me, Regis!” he tells the TV. “I want to be a millionaire!” (Punctuation and capitalization standardized for your health.)

But by painting himself so earnestly as a generic, unremarkable fan, Matzer unintentionally makes himself into a kind of larger-than-life Everyman. Didn’t every American suddenly, and with little self-examination, want a quick million dollars from Regis Philbin in 1999? Didn’t this “Hey, I’m an average Joe, but I’m entitled to my fifteen minutes of fame!” ethos unleash the reality boom that reinvented TV for the next decade? Maybe it did. We are all Jody Matzer.

And there’s something sweet and guileless about the way Matzer tells our story–his conviction that every single detail should go into the historic record. When you’ve only got forty minutes of Hot Seat time and 261 pages to fill, you need to go deep. A whole chapter on finding a good pizza place near his midtown hotel. (“My belly was full. I rubbed it and made happy little purring sounds. If I had thumped it with my finger, I’m sure my belly would have sounded like a ripe watermelon.” Hemingwayesque!) A whole chapter on a potty break from the backstage greenroom. A chapter on how his collar was sort of sticking up on his second show. A chapter on the time months later when a McDonald’s cashier told him he should have known the “final answer” that defeated him.

This only gets annoying when Matzer explores a possible alternate career as a Catskills comic, launching into long routines (there’s no other word) on just what is up with luggage carousels at airports, and can you believe the way New York cabbies drive? Plus, they’re all wearing turbans! What is up with that?!

But when he’s not being too jokey, Matzer is a perfectly pleasant, readable writer, good with an anecdote. He’s not overly thoughful, but he’s chatty. He’d be a decent blogger.

Really, you should only read Millionaire Boy if you were a Millionaire diehard in the waning days of the Clinton era, and you’re still nostalgic for it. It’s an instant curio, this book set at the very crest of a wild national fad, with no idea those carefree days are about to end. Don’t expect anything a little more ambitious, like Trebekistan, or (hopefully) Brainiac. But if you ever wondered how the third round of the call-in contest worked, or what Regis was saying to the Hot Seat contestant as they went to break, this is the minute-by-minute game show procedural for you.

We took Caitlin to the playground this morning. A car in the parking lot had its trunk open and, for some reason, a big selection of mini-barbells and other fitness equipment scattered on the asphalt round about.

I told Mindy there should be a sign saying “FREE WEIGHTS.”

A minute later, when Caitlin was on the tire swing, Mindy pointed out that the tire had a maximum speed rating on it. We wondered if it still applied to the tire now in its new life as a swing. (And they say there are no second acts in American lives!) We were careful to observe posted limits as we pushed Katie on the swing.

I took a closer look at the tire. It said, “DO NOT EXCEED 25MPH.” Apparently it was a spare tire swing.

Hmm.

Obviously “whimsy” is the word you use when you realize your “funny” stories aren’t really that funny.

Every so often there’s a big media blow-up because of bad etymology. You might want to stay away from “squaw” and “niggardly,” for example.

Up next on that list, apparently: “fecund.”

A couple weeks ago, my Tuesday Trivia e-mail quiz asked, “What bay, for whom a recent newsmaker was named, is the easternmost arm of the Bering Sea?” The answer was eventually given as “Young, fecund Bristol Palin is named for the salmon fisheries of Bristol Bay.”

Yesterday, in reply, I got this angry email. Does it make me a classist a-hole snob if I point out that it came from an AOL address? Well, it did.

FECUND?

That was a really unnecessary and ugly description of Bristol Palin.

Please unsubscribe my name.

Ugly? I was offended. I think my attitude toward Bristol Palin’s extreme non-ugliness is a matter of public record. Why, if I were a little younger and more mulleted, oh, the “Meet Me at the Pole” gatherings we two could have shared. If you know what I mean.

So I replied:

From Merriam-Webster’s:
“fecund: capable of producing offspring in abundance; fruitful; fertile.”

Don’t Republicans have dictionaries?

Worry not, AOL users! “Fecund” is a-ok. It just sounds like a combination of “fecal” and, um, something even worse. But it’s not. Honest.

It’s our eighth anniversary today. (I cleverly arranged to get married on September 16, on the theory that I’d never forget 9/16, two consecutive perfect squares. So far so good!) So what is the eighth anniversary again? Clocks? Pewter? Hemp? IKEA? I need to go shopping.

So here’s a quick trivia question. Only foreign film nerds like me need apply…but it can also be solved via Google if you’re more of a Steven Seagal fan. It’s about famous directors of world cinema.

Eric Rohmer did it. Ingmar Bergman did it, but only in translation. Yasujiro Ozu very nearly did it. Korean director Kim Ki-Duk did it all at once.

What is it? Qu’est ce que c’est, as we pretentious movie snobs might say?

Since the world’s financial markets are apparently melting down at the moment or something, here’s some good economic news.

We just last night ran out of Desitin last night, as I was diapering Caitlin.

How is this good news, you wonder? Because this was the six-pack of Desitin we bought when Dylan was born. (He turns six this fall.)

Let’s hear it for Costco-sized packaging!

Another quick picture puzzle I’ve been meaning to post for a while. Can you divide these fourteen pictures into seven logical pairs?

Google research may help, but bonus points for getting it off the top of your head.

Edited to add: Solved quickly here.

Mindy says I can tell this story if I promise not to make fun of her. I don’t know if that means “in this post” or “ever.” I’m going with the first one.

Last week, we were with Caitlin grabbing some lunch at a little diner we like. When the server came over to fill our waters and take our orders, Mindy thought she knew her.

“I bought a doll from you last week!”

“You…uh, no, you didn’t…”

“You don’t sell dolls? Do you have a twin sister? Then where do I know you from?”

“I get that a lot, because I used to sell shoes at (nearby shoe store).”

“No, I wasn’t in there…”

So why was I wincing and shrinking down in my seat like a ninth grader spotted by his friends at Appleby’s with his parents? Why, during this friendly, innocent conversation, did I want to be anywhere else on earth?

Because the waitress happened to be black.

Read it over again with an African-American server in mind. It’s pretty terrible, right? Suddenly it goes from a boring everyday chat to a cringe-inducing Curb Your Enthusiasm moment. Mindy knew it too.

“What are you doing?” I hissed when the waitress left.

“I don’t know! I was so sure she was that lady at the doll stand at the farmer’s market…”

“When she brings the food, tell her she also looks like Michelle Obama and your fourth-grade music teacher.”

“Shut up!”

So it turned out that the waitress did look familiar to Mindy. When she told us where she waited tables nights, we realized we’d been into that restaurant just a couple weeks before, and sat at one of her tables. The case is sol-vid.

The server couldn’t have been nicer–she recognized us, or pretended to, and chatted with Mindy on the way out about the other restaurant where she works. She didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the awkward way the conversation had started. But the fact that Mindy really did remember her face doesn’t change the fact that she appeared to have then immediately thought, “Well, looky here! It must be the only young African-American woman I’ve met lately! As a privileged white person, I’m blinded by race to all other markers of appearance!” Doll seller, Belltown waitress, whatever…anyway, she was black.

I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t so awful. But I still feel bad about it, especially from the waitress’s point of view. It can’t always be easy, being a brown face in lily-white Seattle, full of good, smiling liberals like us who still say and do boneheaded things like this all the time. Maybe in a world full of real racism, you get to where you can shrug off the meaningless stuff like this, and you don’t have to mutter “Stupid white people!” to yourself every time. Or maybe you don’t even notice it anymore after a while.

Maybe it helps if it’s that way. Maybe Mindy and I should have toughened up too, and not wrung our hands so much over our little hate crime. These awkward little collisions are going to happen sometimes no matter what, and maybe just laughing them off is, in the alleged dawn of a new post-racial world, the right thing to do.

But boy, I wish that one doll seller had been white or Korean or something.

If you’re reading this, I assume the Large Hadron Collider didn’t kill us all in a “miniature black hole.” Dammit. I guess I need to pay this phone bill after all.

Random movie aside. I have long wondered if there were a name for the phenomenon of viewers and critics giving a pass to clunky elements in foreign-language movies that they’d never put up with if the movie was in English. Plot contrivances, awkward dialogue, clichés, technical shortcomings, whatever.

I was thinking about this on Saturday night when we went to Tell No One, a hit French thriller. It’s been wildly praised as layered, challenging, Hitchcockian, etc. Really, though, it’s a fairly conventional crime movie–based on a fairly conventional U.S. crime novel, actually. As we were walking out, I said to Mindy, “If that were made in the U.S., it would have Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman in it.” That’s a little unfair, though. It’s an upscale potboiler, a Gone Baby Gone maybe. But a potboiler nonetheless. Maybe it just feels okay to like this kind of genre exercise a little bit more when everyone’s speaking French and driving Citroens.

This Jeff Wells post says that Andrew Sarris called this free-pass mentality “Russian Tea Room syndrome”–no explanation, no citation. I can’t find any other use of this phrase in this context on-line. Anyone ever heard this before?

A district court judge ruled in favor of J. K. Rowling yesterday in her action against RDR Books, which was going to press with a print version of a popular on-line Harry Potter “lexicon.” I stood up for the lexicon a few months ago, as an impartial observer, but a big fan of useful reference books and a not-so-big fan of copyright creep. And got a bunch of angry “Howlers” via owl from Harry Potter diehards, who are fiercely loyal to their Scottish Billionaire Warrior Queen.

I haven’t read the ruling yet, but I gather that the judge did at least rule that reference works based on fictional worlds are “transformative” in a legal sense. In other words, this particular reference work lost out only because it borrowed too heavily from Rowling’s actual language in a few cases. Based on discussion here, I gather those were the rephrased entries from Rowling’s own mini-reference books (the Quidditch one, the magical beasts one…I can’t remember the exact titles) and possibly some lines of Rowling verse used verbatim in the lexicon.

I can’t really fault the decision if verbatim copying was the issue, but I still think it spells bad news in the long run. Nothing to do with Rowling and Steven Vander Ark, the out-of-work librarian who spent countless hours compiling the now-quashed lexicon. (Despite Rowling’s ominous-sounding statement that she mostly needed to win the case so that no one could ever again “divert some Harry Potter profits into their own pockets.” “Divert?”)

I just suspect the lexicon ruling will have a chilling effect on future scholars and publishers wanting to produce any reference work about copyrighted fiction, whether it’s James Joyce or Douglas Adams. In the past, these guides have typically been published by small publishers without deep pockets or high-powered lawyers. If this high-profile case is all they know about the legal issues involved, are they going to say, “Sure, we’ll publish this! But let’s make sure it passes all the requirements of the common legal fair use tests first!”? Or are they just going to say, “Wait, is this like that Harry Potter encyclopedia? We can’t do that! What if some big publisher comes after us?”

Stay tuned for my stirring defense of the Hari Puttar movie.

It was a big sports weekend for the Jennings. (Of course, anything more than Dylan and I playing H-O-R-S-E for fifteen minutes qualifies as a big sports weekend around here.) On Friday night, some friends had two extra tickets, so Dylan and I went to see the opener of the Mariners-Yankees series. And it was quite a game! The M’s’ Brandon Morrow, making his first major-league start ever, threw no-hit ball for 7 2/3 innings. Homeboy was four outs away from a no-hitter! So everybody wins: I got to see a historic near-no-hitter, and no hits means a nice short game so the kids get home earlier. Dylan got Dippin’ Dots. America got to see the Yankees lose on SportsCenter. Mariners got a 3-1 win. Mariners fans got to lustily boo A-Rod every time he came up. (They don’t throw money anymore.)

Then Saturday we had BYU-UW tickets, thank you Craigslist. My loyalties were sort of divided here, having attended both schools, wanting to see BYU get a shot at a BSC bid, not wanting to see Ty Willingham fired. And it was quite a game! A 28-27 squeaker decided in bizarre fashion: an excessive celebration penalty resulting in a blocked PAT with two seconds to play. No Dippin’ Dots at Husky Stadium, but our friends who came to the game with us had brought a favorite football snack with them: Fritos covered with corn syrup, caramel, peanut butter, and chocolate, which is about as gross as it sounds. It was all I could do to eat half the bag.

As we walked up the aisle leaving the stadium, alongside tens of thousands of dejected Husky fans in purple, Caitlin waved back to the field and said, “Bye bye Mariners!”

Big sports weekend.

Mindy pointed out yesterday, apropos of nothing, that the Sarah Palin nomination–a screwy, possibly brilliant political gambit if I’ve ever seen one–is straight out of the Breakin’ playbook. Yes, the 1984 breakdancing classic.

In that movie, you see, Ozone and Turbo’s evil breakdancing rivals, “Electro Rock,” are getting their butts kicked, so they pull from their crowd their secret weapon: a girl! No one’s ever seen her before, but the crowd goes nuts. She proceeds to dance Ozone and Turbo off the stage. (Just to seal the obvious political analogy, check this out: in the movie, Turbo is African-American…and Ozone is the senior U.S. senator from Delaware!)

At this point in Mindy’s theory, I had two thoughts. The first: is comparing presidential politics to Breakin’ legal grounds for divorce in Washington State? And second: desperate third-act gimmicks aren’t just a breakdancing thing. They’re a reality TV thing.

We’re in the second presidential campaign of the reality show era, and it’s only taken a few years for professional politicians and their strategists to have absorbed the lessons of American Idol producers and Survivor contestants. If you’re going to outwit/outplay/outpoll, you need storylines. You need gimmicks. You need heroes and villains and twists.

Previous election campaigns have had their minor scandals and October surprises, but hoo boy! nothing like this. Right from the season premiere, you’ve got the two most promising candidates scrapping in the same half of the bracket, tussling over every Immunity Challenge of a primary. And tacitly making alliances based on race and gender, like it’s Survivor: Cook Islands all over again.

Pick up the remote. Over on FOX, Sarah Palin is the surprise week 10 game-changer: “Contestants, we’re shaking up the rules!” Cut to shocked-looking faces in the firelight. And the scandalous bombshells, straight out of a Real World hot tub! The narcissistic guy cheated on his terminally ill wife! The Evangelical super-mom’s daughter got knocked up by her mulleted boyfriend! Actually, neither of those seem all that surprising in hindsight, but you get the idea.

I can’t stress enough how dangerous this is. Once you’ve gone here, you can’t go back. People are going to assume, from now on, that this is how you win campaigns. After all this craziness, voters are going to be disappointed if 2012 is an off-year, a Jordin Sparks snoozefest, and turnout will be low. We can’t have that. But look out, because reality shows didn’t get more tasteful as time went on. They got trashier and added midgets.

Whoever wins the election, I just hope they’re sworn in with “the most dramatic Rose Garden ceremony…ever!”

(To complete the Breakin’ analogy: it doesn’t bode well for Ozone. I mean Obama. In the movie (SPOILER WARNING!) to get back in the game, his crew is forced to recruit a woman of their own. Hillary in 2012! This story’s through–but wait for part two! Breakin’ 2: Pantsuited Boogaloo!)

It’s all Scott McCloud’s fault that I’m typing this on Google Chrome right now! Whiiiiich I’ve only had installed for eight hours and has already crashed on me once. Plus context-switching is painfully slow sometimes, as slow as my kids at bedtime. So maybe it’s not quite there yet. But boy do I love that “New Tab” landing page. Can’t believe no one’s ever thought of that.

It’s still in beta. I’m sure they’ll nail down the loose boards before too long.

So we finally saw Into the Wild the other night, and I really liked it. But do you know what I didn’t like? Do you know what annoyed me even more than the naive, flaky stupidity of central character Chris McCandless? This text on the DVD cover:

“Screenplay and Directed by.” Probably you didn’t cringe at that. But do you sort of see it now that I mention it? How those two words aren’t really parallel? Sean Penn, though very talented, can never say “For this movie, I did the ‘Screenplay’ and the ‘Directed.’” Similarly, he can’t say “I ‘Directed’ this movie, and I ‘Screenplay’ this movie.” See the problem now? The two words are paired but they don’t really work well together. Maybe Sean Penn just has a higher tolerance for annoyance than I do. After all, he was married to Madonna. But “Written for the Screen and Directed by” would have been less awkward.

I see this kind of non-parallelism all the time, and it does sort of grate a little. I have a new assignment at church to be the “employment specialist” for the congregation–helping people find better jobs and so on. I asked, “Isn’t it more traditional to give this assignment to someone who’s actually, you know, employed?” No dice. Anyway, it’s not part of the official job description, but my main task so far has been making the bullet points in people’s resumes parallel. So it’s not like:

• Design our applications
• Project management
• Updated our documentation

See how one is a noun, one is a past-tense verb, and one is a present-tense verb? Well, that’s why you’re out of work. No, that’s not really what I tell people.

This is a signboard I see often, because it’s right next to a nearby freeway exit.

Maybe by now you’ve been well enough trained by my grammatical OCD that you can see the problem. The right-hand column is okay. This chiropractor may indeed provide “relief,” “healing,” and “wellness.” But I guarantee he doesn’t provide “gentle” or “family.” “Atlas” seems to be some style of therapy, or maybe an insurance provider he accepts, or a book you can read in his waiting room. No clue. There’s no other pair of words here that works in parallel!

And that’s why I don’t go to this chiropractor. If someone can’t handle their bullet points, they don’t get to handle my pressure points.

Still sick as a dog; luckily, I had a couple of these all ready to go–about consumer products this time.

1. Name an American vehicle, currently being produced, whose make and model names are, in a sense, opposites.
2. Take a once-novel 1906 invention, now so familiar to consumers that its trade name has been genericized. Move the fifth letter so that it “covers up” the eighth letter. (In other words, the eighth letter is now replaced, and a space remains in the gap where the fifth letter was.) The result is a once-novel 1978 invention, now so familiar to consumers that everyone has one. What are the two inventions?

I didn’t realize that the woman who won a million dollars on Deal or No Deal night before last was LDS. Does this make her the second highest winning Mormon in game show history? I think it might. Is she coming for me next?

Dylan starts kindergarten (aka germ factory) today, and yet somehow I’m already sick. How is that possible? The viruses in kindergarten classes are now so powerful they can travel through time and infect people in the past!

Anyway, I feel awful. I couldn’t get to sleep last night–had to choose between a sore throat and gagging on a gross-tasting lozenge. Then my sleepy, confused brain somehow seized on the idea that the brand name on the lozenges I was sucking on was “Chloroseptic.” Wait, really? “Chloro-”, a Greek root for “yellowish-green,” and “-septic,” another root meaning “putrefied”? I’m sucking on a cough drop whose name means “yellow-green and putrefied”?

Well, by morning light it turned out that the brand name is “Chloraseptic” with an ‘a’–that is, chlor- + aseptic. Yellowish-green and fresh as a daisy. What a difference one letter makes.

Sleep and bad etymology don’t mix.

I just happened to see, hidden in our bedroom closet, some U.S. map sticker album that Mindy bought Dylan for his upcoming birthday. (He’s a bit of a nerd, and likes maps and stuff.) Great gift idea, Mindy. But the cover! The cover of the sticker album! I was offended as a Seattleite. Check this out:

Okay, so let’s see here. Statue of Liberty clip art on New York City, check. Big wonking arch on St. Louis, check. And over in Seattle…sweet jumping Mary and Joseph! What’s going on with Seattle?

Dear discount-priced children’s sticker map: I’ve seen the Space Needle. I’ve been dragged by innumerable children and out-of-town visitors to the top of the Space Needle. I feel I know the Space Needle. And you, odd gray Cylon-looking phallus, are no Space Needle. You’re not even close.

It’s like someone heard that Seattle had a big, retro-futuristic tower, and just told the design team, “Here, take a look at these photos of the Toronto and Las Vegas skylines. Give me something like that.” Or maybe just, “I need something space-y and needle-y, and I need it by five!!!”

And Mindy bought this at Costco! Seattle-based Costco! I urge a national boycott of this lazy, Seattle-ignorant sticker album. Tell them with your wallets, America! The Space Needle isn’t purple!

Edited to add: Whoa, I just looked inside. That was a mistake. Here’s one of the stickers from the Indiana section. For Notre Dame, you know, the university in South Bend?

Notre-Dame de Paris! I kid you not. Go Fighting Irish.