Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Damn You, Farrago!

It seems I've been tagged. Again. I don't know if you're familiar with the process, but once tagged, you are required by law to divulge five previously unknown facts about yourself that will inform and frighten anyone foolish enough to stumble onto them. So let's get started...

1. I read a quote in the sports section of the Metro this morning that I haven't been able to figure out all day. The quote belonged to a park ranger, who was commenting on three survivors of a plane crash. He said, "If these guys were a cat with nine lives, they just used up three of them." I know he was trying to convey that they were lucky, but if the three guys were one cat? What does that mean? Why do you need three guys to make a cat? Are they forming Voltron? Could he have meant if each of the three guys were individual cats, each would have used up three of their nine lives, as if to say surviving a plane crash is so harrowing it uses up extra lives? If it was only two guys, at least you could imagine them in a two-person cat costume, like the cow costumes they make where one person is the front and one makes up the back. But three? I don't get the analogy.

2. If you go back to the beginning of this blog, it would appear that I've been blogging since November 2003. Lies! All lies! It's true that I signed up for a Blogger account on November 29, 2003, but I didn't start writing in it until nearly a year later. I think the first real post was the Arafat one the following November. And all those posts before that? Well, I wanted readers to stick around after reading the current post, so I added a whole bunch before it so they'd have something else to read, as well as give the appearance of being an established blog. So I took some of my favorite topics from threads that I'd created on a message board I used to go to, and spread them around the previous year. The dates weren't necessarily arbitrary; if I wrote something on the message board on July 24, 2004, I gave it that date on the blog.

This was dumb for any number of reasons, but two that come to mind are that when I first started blogging, the only people who read my stuff were from that message board, and had already seen all those stories. There's a 68-page thread about Joe there, but the same Joe story here barely got any comments. The second reason it was dumb is the fact that here I had the perfect opportunity to store about thirty posts for times when I either couldn't think of anything to write, or didn't have any time. And as I would later find out, those times came fairly often. Oh, If only I hadn't prematurely blown my wad!

3. I actually deliberated for about fifteen minutes as to whether or not to write that last sentence. And believe me, I'm just as disappointed with my final decision as you are.

4.The night after writing about the corpse dream, I dreamed that all my teeth fell out. Not even gradually; they just all fell out at once. I could feel my tongue going over the tender gums where my teeth used to be, and since I couldn't fly and didn't live n a castle, I was sure it couldn't be a dream. It was horrifying. But then I woke up and everything was okay. Dooped again. I hate my brain.

I'm a little afraid to go to sleep now. who knows what's in store for me tonight?

Remember the recurring dream about my grandfather? It always starts with a party at my grandparents' house, and I'd walk by the den and see him sitting in his chair. He'd start to get up to go into the next room to see what everyone is doing, but someone comes in and tells him that he can't sit with us because he's dead. He gets this really sad, disappointed look on his face and fades away. Seriously, that's like the saddest thing imaginable. Why can't I have nice, pleasant dreams? The really creepy thing is I was talking to my brother the other day and he mentioned having nearly the same dream. What the heck is that?!!

5. I never owned the original Nintendo Entertainment System. I had a friend that lived down the street that had one, so I'd go over there a lot. Most of the time, we'd play Ice Hockey. I didn't know much about the controls, and even less about hockey, but it was nonetheless really fun. One time we were going to camp out in his back yard. We had a tent and everything. Then, a little after it got dark, we heard this noise, like...mooing.

Moooooo!
Moooooooo!
MOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

We must have been around twelve years old. Certainly old enough to know that there were no cows around. But we were a little worried. We figured some neighborhood teenagers were out causing trouble, and we didn't want any part of it. You know those rowdy teenagers, always running around town mooing at everyone. So we went inside and told his parent that we heard mooing.

"Mooing?"
"Yes. Mooing."
"Are you afraid of cows?"
"No, it's just...I think we should seep inside tonight."

So we went back and got our stuff, and went up to his room. We played some more NES, then he got tired and said he was going to sleep, but I could keep playing if I wanted. I was playing Super Mario Bros. 3. I wasn't as quite as good at it as Fred Savage or his mute brother, but I was getting the hang of it. But eventually I got tired and wanted to go to sleep. Just one problem. This was the first time I'd used a Nintendo by myself, so I wasn't sure how to turn it off. I didn't want to press the wrong button and wreck the kid's Nintendo. And since I didn't really know much about them, I really thought one wrong move could erase the game or short circuit the whole thing. So I just kept playing. I think I stayed up all night, too nervous to try and shut the thing off.

Oh, and the mooing? He had two younger sisters that were twins. One of them opened up her bedroom window and started mooing into a microphone. I guess she was actually saying "OOOoooOOOO..." like she was trying to be a ghost, but it sounded like moo to us.

Anyway there's your five things. You read them. You can't unread them.

15 comments:

fakies said...

Hey, cows can be pretty scary. Like when you're milking them, and they swish their tail in your face, and momentarily you can't see anything and you start screaming that you're blind... terrifying.

I still have the original Nintendo and all the cool games. Like Pong and Q-Bert.

NYPinTA said...

That's so funny that you would prefer to stay up all night playing the game rather than try and shut it off for fear of breaking it. True story about me: the first time I got into the car Henry bought while in the Navy the seatbelt made a funny crunch noise when I tried to click it shut. He gave me a look and said something about breaking it. (Turns out they had a recall on the seat belts so it wasn't me.) But from then on I I wouldn't buckle the belt because I didn't want it making that noise again and getting 'that look' again. So, I put my life at risk just to avoid embarassment. Yep. I'm that stupid.

mr. schprock said...

"Dooped." And this guy beats me at Scrabble.

Number 2 reminds me it's time for another Joe story.

How about:

"Hey, chicky-baby!"

"Gilly. Gilly Sans."

"Charlie says, love my Good 'n' Plenty!"

Discuss.

John said...

Ah, I see you're unfamiliar with the etymology of "dooped." See, in ancient Greece, when someone was put-upon by the local confidence man, it was said that he was "shat upon," or "poopus adsterno" in Latin. In fact, the great scholars of the time looked down on those who were victims of these pranksters as fools, and where brought into the public square and literally defecated on, as a reminder of their folly.

The term was adapted by Germanic tribes in the 6th century as "doodookaka auf die fassade," though thankfully by now was strictly metaphorical, and was eventually brought to America by German immigrants.

"Dooped" became popular during the Gold rush era, when unsuspecting would-be miners were tricked into buying up scores of yellow painted rocks.

True story.

Also, I thought that if I was "duped," there'd be two of me.

fermicat said...

I've had dreams about my teeth falling out. It's a horrible feeling and makes me totally paranoid the next day.

I never had the original Nintendo. We had that Atari thing with Pong and two other really lame games on it. But we thought it was the coolest thing ever at the time.

fakies said...

Oh yeah, on the teeth falling out thing. I used to dream that all my teeth were breaking off and I was spitting them out. The doctor says that's actually a sign you may be grinding your teeth at night. That's caused by stress, probably from not knowing how to shut off a Nintendo or that cow ghosts only haunt other bovines.

John said...

See, this is how rumors get started. I wasn't afraid of a cow, or a ghost cow. And even if I was, we don't have any cows wandering around near here. Although oddly enough, there is a guy that used to have llamas for some reason. I didn't know if he still does.

Anyway, I knew it wasn't a cow, and was fairly certain it wasn't a llama. I thought it was teenagers. Rowdy, mooing teenagers!

Tony Gasbarro said...

Wow! I made the title of your post!

And now I've been damned. Byt the Random Squeegee. Damn.

So, what you're saying then is that, though you AREN'tWeren't afraid of cows, and it turned out that it wasn't teenagers after all, that you were actually afraid of your friends sister?

John said...

It would seem that way, yeah.

LL said...

What a coincidence...

I woke up this morning to a cow mooing too!

And fermi, that would be the Magnavox Omnisomthingorother, not the Nintendo. And it had 4 games, all high tech, let's see... there was practice, tennis, squash, and hockey. Ahhh... good times.

NYPinTA said...

I've read somewhere that having dreams of your teeth falling out is a sign you don't feel in control of somethingl. Like of ghost cows. Who controls them?
So... insecure or anything?

John said...

I don't think so. Maybe it's just guilt from not going to the dentist.

I had an Atari 2600. At least I think it was the 2600; it didn't have any markings on it other than "Atari". When I was very young, I'd play a game called Sneak 'n Peek, which was just a video game version of hide and seek. And of course we had Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Berzerk, Combat Haunted House, and the paddle-controlled Circus Atari and Dodge 'Em. I remember for one of my birthdays I got four Activision games: Stampede, Crackpot, Frostbite, and Plaque Attack. I played Plaque Attack a lot. It had the best graphics for an Atari game that I'd ever seen. I know that's not saying much, but at least everything on the screen actually looked like what it was supposed to be. The object was to shoot food items with toothpaste before they reach the teach. It a tooth gets touched it rots and falls out.

Hey, waitaminute...

fakies said...

So, you're afraid of llamas? Or is it teenagers pretending to be llamas?

John said...

I suppose you could say I'm cautious when I see llamas, because seeing a llama out of their natural habitat is a pretty good indication that Michael Jackson is nearby.

fakies said...

CMPAL! That's only if the llama is being ridden by a monkey with its face covered.

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