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Rogers Cadenhead
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Poker? I Barely Know Her I'm not much of a Texas Holdem poker player, which I blame on my obsession with the slang terms for different hands. I'd rather draw a well-named hand than a winning one.
Yesterday I was trying to explain to my wife why a six and nine of the same suit, "6-9 suited," is called a prom night. She wasn't getting it at all, even when I offered to draw a picture.
 While playing last week with a poker fanatic brother-in-law, we began discussing athletes on my junior high basketball team who quit to become cheerleaders.
When I told him their reason -- they did it to spend more time around female cheerleaders -- the look on his face matched the one Ross got on Friends when he repeated his parents' claim that the family dog had been sent off to a farm.
My in-law's skepticism led to the coining of a new poker term for a hand that's not-quite-straight, with four cards in sequence.
I hope this doesn't get back to my old teammates at Pauline G. Hughes Middle School in Burleson, Texas, but we're calling it a male cheerleader.
The online magazine Slate, now a part of the Washington Post Company, has developed an anal fixation.
A line from David Edelstein's Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith review:
With his lisp and his clammy little leer, he looks like an old queen keen on trading an aging butt-boy (Count Dooku) for fresh meat -- which leaves Anakin looking more and more like a 15-watt bulb.
Jack Shafer:
I've been called many ugly things in my life -- neo-con, without decency, Michael Kinsley's butt boy -- but school monitor, never.
Dana Stevens:
Things quickly escalated into a full-scale food-fight. Carlson accused Stewart of being John Kerry's "butt boy" and "sniffing his throne."
I'm Totally Straight, But ... A few weeks ago I invented a new game dubbed googlemilking -- looking for a phrase in search engines that lends itself to hilarious, off-color, or unintentionally self-revealing results.
The game was covered by the Scotsman newspaper yesterday, and you can find players by searching for the first googlemilk: "I'm totally straight, but ...":
Just as you know that any sentence beginning with the words "I'm not one of those racialists but ..." will end in a diatribe about immigration, it is obvious that the closing part of a statement beginning "I'm totally straight but" will be something along the lines of "I'm not totally straight". Some of them are hilarious. Some are shocking. All are entertaining.
The phrase turns up a lot of interesting (and obscene) results, the greatest of which is the totally straight guy struggling with his attraction to Aragorn from Lord of the Rings:
I'm totally straight, but even I admitted the [blank]ability of Aragorn. Seriously, check the guy out. What a total badass. Doesn't mean I'd actually [blank] him, but if I were the type to [blank] guys, he'd be on my list.
My favorite googlemilk so far is so I decided to do something about it, which catches people right as they turn a long repressed desire into action, getting the hair, breasts, insemination, or teddy bear manufacturing business they've always wanted.
As a side effect of the game, I'm now the top result on Google for "totally straight," which ought to finally put to rest those rumors back in college.
I Blog For Short New York Times:
On the Web log, or blog, he chronicles his daily life, his small victories, his disappointments, his liberal views on politics and the health of his pets.
Washington Post:
Mosteller's supervisors and co-workers at the Durham, N.C., Herald-Sun were well aware of her Weblog, or blog.
ABC News (Australia):
The lanky, sandy-haired writer composes a frequently updated Internet journal -- weblog, or blog for short ...
Maine Today:
Hands-on science experiments, creating an online Weblog -- or "blog" -- and learning how to project video images onto oneself to create living art are just some of the offerings.
ChulGoo:
What is a weblog or blog? A weblog, or "blog" for short, is a kind of website or a part of a website.
I was reading his site in 1999 when Peter Merholz coined the term blog, putting a harsh German sound to a new publishing practice he described as "information upchucking."
Six years and 7.7 million blogs later, our web sites (or sites for short) are still being explained to the public on first reference. How many Senate Majority Leaders, network news anchors, and gay Republican reporter hookers do we have to bring down before the press realizes that weblog is a four-letter word?
Departing Anchorman is Rather Odd When Dan Rather leaves CBS Evening News in March, America will lose our best chance to see an anchorman completely blow his top on live television, Howard Beale style.
During the Jennings-Brokaw-Rather era of network news, there has never been question who the weirdest anchor was. Wikipedia runs down a few rather odd moments, from the disturbing "what's the frequency, Kenneth?" mugging to his telling people "Courage" at the end of broadcasts for one week in September 1986, at which point he chickened out in the face of widespread mockery.
As a Texan myself, I will most miss Rather's clumsy attempts at folksy metaphors, especially when he's vamping during a live broadcast. He says so many odd things that they've come to be known as ratherisms. One from Election Night 2000 turned out to be a pretty good description of the broadcast media's performance that evening:
Frankly we don't know whether to wind the watch or to bark at the moon.
Many ratherisms lose some of their homespun wisdom by virtue of being completely made up, rather than something that Texans have been saying to each other for decades as we talk between spittoon shots at the local saloon at the end of a cattle drive before bedding a comely schoolmarm. Lately, Rather's been trying to invent a new double-adverb, tee-totally, me-mortally.
A 2003 appearance on Larry King Live:
King: Time magazine is reporting that some Arab leaders are encouraging a scene whereby Saddam Hussein is overthrown, exiled or possibly taken out. What are you hearing about that over there, Dan?
Rather: Larry, I've seen absolutely tee-totally, me-mortally no indication of that in traveling around Iraq, principally in and around Baghdad.
On Election Night 2004:
Lawyers are swarming over Ohio like locusts. And there are going to be more of 'em there tomorrow, and more of 'em the day after ... [Bush's people are] absolutely tee-totally, me-mortally convinced they’re going to carry Ohio.
A Google search shows this adverb to be completely original to the anchorman. No English speakers appear to have ever used it in a sentence unless they were quoting him.
So to Dan Rather I say, you will tee-totally, me-mortally be missed. Courage.
My Favorite Coke is Pepsi Alan McConchie has created the Pop vs. Soda page, an Internet database that maps the regional differences in how Americans refer to soft drinks.
Looking at the large number of people in the south who call all sodas "coke," regardless of brand, doesn't that suggest one of the world's most lucrative trademarks has become a generic term and should lose its protected status?
Aspirin, cellophane, escalator, nylon, and thermos all were once trademarks lost by their companies through generic use.
On BusinessPundit, a southern cokehead named Alan Ruff writes:
... when I first moved to Iowa from North Carolina, people looked at me with the weirdest face when I would say, "I'll have a Coke, make it a Dr. Pepper."
Jargon: Kidding on the Square At the first press conference since he won a broad nationwide overwhelming landslide mandate, President Bush gave reporters a hard time for asking multi-part questions:
Question: Mr. President -- thank you. As you look at your second term, how much is the war in Iraq going to cost? Do you intend to send more troops, or bring troops home? And in the Middle East, more broadly, do you agree with Tony Blair that revitalizing the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political issue facing the world?
President Bush: Now that I've got the will of the people at my back, I'm going to start enforcing the one-question rule. That was three questions. ...
Question: Thank you, Mr. President. How will you go about bringing people together? Will you seek a consensus candidate for the Supreme Court if there's an opening? Will you bring some Democrats into your Cabinet?
Bush: Again, he violated the one-question rule right off the bat. Obviously, you didn't listen to the will of the people.
I thought it was funny for the president to throw around "will of the people" like an elderly Mickey Rooney constantly reminding people he was the "number one star in the world" from 1938 to 1940.
On Air America Radio this morning, Al Franken called Bush's joke an example of kidding on the square, an old expression he has been trying to popularize that means "kidding, but also really meaning it." He wrote this in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them:
If this book does two things, I want it to get "kidding on the square" into the lexicon, and I want it to get Bush out of the White House.
So I guess we'll have to settle for making "kidding on the square" popular.
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