Wow. What was bouncing around in my head last week? This is not to say that I don't still hold the convictions I spastically expressed. I just wish I'd been able to do it without typing at length about poo-ball florets.
This week I'd like to chat about:
As I travel through life, there are times that I'm confronted by something that makes me go "Hunh?" These things tend to accrete on my brain like barnacles on the hull of a boat.
Now making a complete list of the things I don't understand could be like trying to write a googolplex on a four-inch strip of paper: you couldn't stuff it into the known universe. Instead, I've scraped off only a few barnacles.
The bull is sort of sad looking with all its folds of skin and big hump. Yes, the Brahma may be heat- and tick-resistant, but why put one on your truck?
Maybe it's meant to be a personification (or bullification) of the truck. Now this I can almost understand. My truck has been in the family my entire life and looks it. Even though she's in dire need of some love and attention, she's... Notice how I slip into using the female pronoun to refer to my truck. After almost thirty years of road trips, off-roading, and camping, and after having fixed or rebuilt just about everything on the truck at one time or another, she's a she. Now, an ex-girlfriend of mine accused me of being sexist. I am when it comes to my truck. I regard the old beast in a way that prevents me from relegating it to the lowly status of "object". That's one reason it's sitting outside of our house instead of having been sold or towed away years ago. I also regard my truck in a way that is not possible for me to consider males. So I use "she" as a short-hand, affectionate way to refer to my truck. This does not mean that I want to hump my truck. The use of the pronoun "she" does not imply a desire to hump. It means that the referent evinces physical and behavioral characteristics recognized by the speaker as female or the referent evokes thoughts and emotions that the speaker feels most comfortable assigning to a female. So I have prejudices and stereotypes about female creatures that I apply to my truck. How this could be taken as derogatory towards individuals who consider themselves females is yet another thing I don't understand. I use "she" when referring to my cats. Russians use their equivalent of "he" when referring to ships. Can't we all just get over it already?
I then tried to explain to my girlfriend of the day that referring to connectors as "male" and "female" was simply a matter of convenience and was not evidence of patriarchal domination. The relationship didn't last very long.
When my wife and I are traveling, one of the first purchases I make is a big bottle of water. I do this because I dehydrate quickly, the bottle is handy, and the water might be dodgy where we're traveling. I do not buy water because the label has mountains on it. I do not buy it because I believe that Evian has something over the Safeway store brand. Still, zillions of folks are laying down a dollar a 20-oz. bottle for filtered tap water with mountains on the label and names like "Dasani".
It's too bad that the courts have been helping perpetuate this sham. Spring water used to be water that dribbled out of the hole in the ground. Demand for spring water grew. Naturally, some folks wanted to get at their water faster than nature intended, so they drilled boreholes and pumped it out. For a while, the law demanded that, in order to be labeled "spring water", the borehole needed to be within 200 feet of the spring. Recently, the California courts have ruled that boreholes can be drilled as far from the natural spring as needed. Punch a well in Oakland and, if water comes out, you can sell it as water from cool, clean mountain springs.
So don't pay too much for your water.
I just had to sneak this one in. If some stingy bastard of a djinn gave me only one wish, I would wish to selectively understand and respond in every form of communication. Not only would I be able to speak German, I would be able to speak in the accent and idiom of a Bavarian or Austrian. I could respond to the crickets chirping outside my window "It's 69 degrees Fahrenheit and mate with ME!" I could talk machine code with my P3. The soap operas on Univision would still be just as laughable, but at least I'd be able to understand the dialog.
I think that about does it for this first installment of "Things I Don't Understand." Maybe sometime I'll get around to chatting about cats and cable TV for $40 a month.
Pakeha