(This grainy image serves as the only evidence of our adventure. Notice how Beckie has a Lara Croft thing going with her hair.)
We did this the night we went to the Hunger Games sequel’s midnight premiere. We finished dinner at it was still hours before the movie, so we ended up at a bowling alley downtown that had laser skirmish in the back. Let’s give it a go!
How was it? Continue reading
This one takes some time to get used to both phrasings in order to be able to take a step back and provide the sort of objective evaluation we insist upon here at BAJTOTW. At first, “how are you going?” just sounds more like a mistake than an alternative, like somebody got the phrases “how are you doing?” and “how’s it going?” confused.
Really, though, a phrase like “I’m doing fine” is supposed to reflect the inner-state of a person, but the wording gets this wrong. That you can say “I act like everything is okay but really I’m not doing very well at all” should be, semantically, a contradiction in terms.
Jeremy’s winner: Continue reading
OK, so, following up on my “Would I? Would I?” post, here’s an example:
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Where? At a local street festival here, on one of the upper floors of a parking garage.
How’d it go? I used to be a decent roller-skater when I was a kid. I was about as good as one can be without never quite getting the hang of skating backwards, and was regularly one of the last to go at roller limbo until some girls started being able to do the splits.
I thought maybe roller skating was like riding a bicycle, so that once I got the skates on it would all come back. Turns out: not true! Worse, roller-disco security wouldn’t let you figure out your skate-legs off to the side, but instead if you were standing up on skates you were supposed to be inside a mostly-drunk throng.
Would you do it again? Not unless we had a chance to practice.
No suspense here. “tater” is a more fun, and quintessentially American, way of referring to a potato than just saying “potato.” And “tot” conveys that what we have here is a rootin’-tootin’ little offspring of a tater. “Gem” gets at the same thing, I suppose, but less obviously. Plus, since we’re talking about a fried-food, any name that sounds like it should be said with a drawl gets a bonus point.
Jeremy’s winner: Continue reading
I’d heard this joke before, but Daniel Handler tells it well enough in The Basic Eight that Beckie has had to deal with me regularly saying “Would I? Would I?” and trying to devise joke-variants ever since we finished reading it:
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I’m playing in a Fantasy Tennis League in 2014, even though I don’t follow tennis. Long story, and this blog is all about short posts. But, before the league kicks off, there is a preseason contest to come up with a tennis haiku that will be engraved on the plaque that goes to the league winner. My less profane entries so far: Continue reading
This one is generally confusing, as in the US you’d usually put the adjective green/red in front of “pepper,” unless you were talking about the “salt and”-type of pepper. Because capsicum is an extra syllable and feels more than 50% longer even with the extra syllable, an adjective is added less often, and instead folks usually just say “capsicum” and rely on your eyes to figure out what color they are talking about. (In Australia, they cull the color blind.)
“Capsicum” is an exotic word to my American ear, the sort of thing that seems like it should be like the name of a flying unicorn or other exotic beast rather than something you can get for free on your sandwich at Subway. “Pepper” is zippy to say and spunky in its own right, like you can imagine it being the name of a detective heroine in a young adult novel.
Jeremy’s winner: Continue reading
Why did you read this book? We were looking for something to read during a long-car trip. We liked his novel Adverbs, and crime/thriller books work well while driving. This is the same guy who writes the Lemony Snicket books, but I haven’t read any of those.
Has Beckie read it? She read it to me while I drove! You wouldn’t believe what a difference it makes for passing the time. Since we weren’t done when we got back, she kept reading it to me while walking around to yoga and restaurants for the next couple days, and then finally a marathon session in the apartment to the end.
42 word review: Knocks off The Secret History, only with artsy high-schoolers instead of classics-obsessed undergrads. Reader knows from beginning that protagonist murders friend, but why? how? Absolutely hilarious given that a homicide looms. Great voice of girl protagonist. Downside: big twist tipped too early.
Rating: 4 potoroos (out of 5). Plus a bonus potoroo for what a fun read it was on a trip.
Not to be an Eleanor Catton groupie, but I said I thought there were some good bits of prose in The Rehearsal. Let me look at my highlights and pluck out three favorites. Continue reading