Starting from the bottom:

• I said foreign, you guys. People from North America aren’t frightening, because even if they’re batshit crazy, we know them. All of us know a few Michelle Bachmanns or Glenn Becks or Fred Phelpses,¹ and they look like us. As do Canadians — who, moreover, are simply not threatening.
• Castro hasn’t scared anybody for decades. Plus, he’s now like 99 years old and mostly concerned with his pipeline of black-market Depends undergarments. That brother of his who’s supposedly doing the dictatoring now is a total empty shirt. How empty? If dictators were legendary comedians, it’d be like Groucho Marx handing his role over to Zeppo.
• Daleks, huh? I must admit I hadn’t thought of that, so props for being outside the box. OK, this may be geek heresy to some but I’m going there anyway: Daleks dream about being as badass as Cylons, and then they wake up and apologize.
• OMG — Ahmadinejad, right! How could I forget?! Now I feel stupid. Well, he’s clearly The Man now in the scary crazy-ass foreign despot category.

"Beard still there? …Yep, still there. Phew!"

I feel dumb for having forgotten about him, since only last week our ball accidentally went into his yard and he paraded it on TV like it was a fucking UFO or something.

I was like, “Hey, a little help? Could you toss that back over here?”

And he was all, “Look! Look, everyone! I have captured his ball! The accursed imperialist ball that was menacing the skies over my house is in my hands, wretched and defeated! Victory is mine!”

So I’m like, “DUDE. Keep it in your pants, OK? Just chill. Look, it was a bad throw. Oops! Sorry about that. But… what is your problem? ‘Menacing?!?’ Whatever. And it’s not like it hit your car, or broke a window or something. Muthafucka, what are you celebrating for — you didn’t even catch it! You fished it out of your damn hedge after like, five minutes of rooting around, for shit’s sake.”

But dammit if A-jad doesn’t just keep standing there posing, holding it up over his head. So I go, “You know what? FINE. Keep it if it means so much to you. I hope you and the ball have a beautiful life together. I’ve got a whole box of other ones just like it.”

The guy is a nutjob. And get this: the next day I saw him picking my oranges. Can you believe that shit?

I just noticed that the regular view of my area on Google Maps now shows property lines:

Maybe only map nerds like me get excited about the rollout of this kind of feature. Frankly, I’m not even sure what utility it has for a normal Google Maps user. The nearest thing I can think of at the moment is perhaps for increased specificity in giving directions, as in, “It’s the fifth house on the right.” Or something like this…

“Hey guys, when I was looking for a place a little while ago, there was a really nice room at this lovingly restored craftsman house on McCadden…”

That’s a true story, by the way. Blew your mind, didn’t it? …Yeah, you’re right — not really.

OK, then how about a little vocabulary: googling around to find out if anyone else was taking note of Google Maps’ audacious deployment of property lines, I found a few web forums of other cartographic geeks that were. On one of them, the pedant-in-residence (every web forum has one) imparted that maps showing property lines are properly called cadastral maps.

Cadastral. Did you already know that one? Yeah, me neither. So you’re welcome, dear readers. Surely you’ll have no shortage of opportunities to sprinkle that one into conversation. Go forth and impress the hell out of the sophisticates on the cocktail party circuit, and remember your web-based wingman the next time you’re online.

Now seems as good a time as any to introduce the first of my various geekeries (to coin a term) to C&B. It is, in a word, words.

This may not come as a complete surprise to those who have read a decent amount of my writing, either here or elsewhere. Nevertheless, I might as well be upfront about it. I’m a word person. I love language. Gimme words, not numbers. I’m AP English/B-lane Math. Arts, not Sciences. You know how in Contact, Carl Sagan had the extraterrestrials make their presence known to us by broadcasting pulses of sound in an ascending prime-number pattern, because math is a universal, unchanging science recognizable to any sentient being? What I thought was, “Blech, whatever. If the aliens are so all-fired smart and advanced beyond our comprehension, they could figure out one of our languages and communicate in it without breaking a sweat. The fact that they’re not doing so proves that they are at the very least willful and obtuse, and quite possibly hostile.”

But I digress. My affection for words and language seems to be hereditary, given that my parents are both retired teachers of English language, literature and composition. I try not to emulate my Dad’s habit of correcting one’s conversational grammar or usage, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Thus far I have escaped any serious beatings, but I know that I may be tempting fate. I’ll surely write more of my views on the ever-shifting standards of Correct vs. Incorrect English later. Email all your friends – it’ll be an event that shakes the blogosphere to its very foundation. Or something.

Right now, I’d just like to share a few selections from Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English, the 2006 desktop calendar edition of which I received in my Christmas stocking from my wife Santa. The following are the words that I have liked enough to not discard once their day ended and they were torn off the deck by the inexorable march of time, or as some would call it, my hand.

• scurryfunge. Defined as the sudden tidying that occurs between the time when an occupant of a house sees a neighbor approaching and the time when she knocks on the door. It is not made clear whether the word is a verb, as in, “If you hear her mother’s voice outside, she’s gonna scurryfunge like Martha Stewart on amphetamines,” or a noun, as in “She’s got the place sparkling clean, but when they ring from the intercom downstairs you’re still going to see the scurryfunge of the century.”

• toesmithing. Kacirk: “Dancing; theatre slang.” I was surprised at my total unfamiliarity with this one, given my status as a theatre person, moreover a theatre person trained in dance, and (given the word’s Elizabethan origin) as a bardolator. For my wife, “toesmithing” initially evoked the image of an artisan of some kind hammering people’s toes into shape, or perhaps forging artifical toes out of something. Upon reflection, this makes good sense to me – in fact, I wonder if the word wasn’t at some point linked with classical ballet. Back in college I knew several ballerinas who’d trained long enough in the sadistic art known as “dancing en pointe” that they apparently could have benefited from the replacement of several toes.

• dish up the spurs. Verb phrase said to originate in the English-Scots border region of the 17th-18th centuries; refers to the manner in which a host would inform guests that provisions for consumption at the gathering were running short and a bit of horse-mounted pillaging was necessary for the festivities to continue. Apparently these folks were not yet to the point in party etiquette where guests’ original invitations could include an instruction to Bring Your Own Plunder. Like some others have, this archaic phrase gave me a practical idea to use in the present day: when you’re hosting a party and need to wrap things up, don’t bother serving coffee – it’ll just mean more dishes for you to do. Instead, bring around a lovely platter with everyone’s keys on it. They’re easy to come by – they’ll be on the bed, with all the bags and coats.

• erubescency. Personal shame or abashment at one’s own actions, for fear of loss of reputation. This was the designated word for March 10, indicated as the former “Day of Public Humiliation,” briefly observed during the 1653-1658 reign of the puritan Oliver Cromwell. Exactly what kind of observances took place is not indicated, but Kacirk gives some space to the Puritans’ practice of naming their children after biblical virtues, even in whole-phrase form, e.g. “Trust-in-the-Savior Stephens,” etc. As a genealogy geek (which will be expanded upon in future posts) I can identify with that naming practice, having as I do ancestors with names like Rememberance Lippincott and Silence Hand. I am not making those up. Also, this word’s presenting itself to me last Friday, March 10, the date of my second car wreck in a three-month period, was too big an irony supplement to swallow.