Coke vs Soda vs Pop

Pop vs Soda

This is one of the oddest things I have come across on the web in recent days. The differences in this great country astound me. If you travel from Chicago to Miami, you would start out asking for a pop, then as you travel through the south, you would ask for a Coke (no matter which fizzy drink you wanted), finally you would ask for a soda by the time you arrived in Miami.

I was going to name this entry From the Annals of Needless Research until I realised that the issues that have interested me academically are often described as needless, i.e. philosophy, to about 95% of the world. So, I validate the good researchers at the University of Oklahoma.

A great title

I've was looking up a Simpson's quotation earlier today. I couldn't find it though. It occurs in an episode where Grandpa, for some reason or another, keeps running afoul of these other Latino pensioners. They eventually end up drag racing in an allusion to American Graffiti. Abe and Homer win the race and the car with the elderly Latinos bursts into flames. The leader gets out of the car, his coat in flames, and his comrade says something like "Senor, your coat! She burns!" to which the man replies stoically, "If my coat burns, then I burn with my coat."

In any case, I came across the episode where Lisa has to get braces. It has dentist in the title and I thought of this great name, which I hope to use in my blog at one point or another.

A date with dentistry!

How great is that!

Destiny, dentistry! I kill me sometimes.

I did do a search on Google and if you search for a date with dentistry without any quotation marks, the phrase doesn't appear on the first screen. If you do a search with the quotation marks, there are two pages on the internet in which the phrase appears.

One is on a webpage called FunniGurl Kids Klub and shouldn't really be counted for myriad reasons, all of which have to do with stupid spelling. Funni should be spelled Funny; Gurl should be spelled Girl; and Klub should be spelled Club. That last one is particularly annoying because I believe there is a section of the KKK called the Kids Klub, so I'd steer clear. I'd check but I don't want the vigilant computer people in my office to see me searching out the KKK, especially since I work in an office dedicated to ending social descrimination.

The other is a link to another blog, titled Indecorous. This person apparently had a dentist appointment in July, 2003. As far as I am concerned, his blog hasn't been active for quite a while, so he forfeits his right to exclusive use. There has to be a statute of limitations on these types of things.

Also, I swear to you that it was penned by me without stumbling across it on the internet or by any other means. I may not be original, but I certainly am not a cheat.

So there.

Corrupting the Youth

I used to feel bad walking down the streets of London. With so many people about, it is difficult not to step on someone's foot or cut someone off every once in a while. But having lived here for nearly two years, those feelings have long since subsided. You can only care about someone's aching toe for so long. I'll even run into somebody and barely utter a word. It isn't that I'm a bad guy (in my opinion) but when you are walking down Oxford Street and there are more than a million people within a half mile of you it is a struggle to get down the street in any sort of timely fashion.

I've perfected the art of gliding down an escalator on the Underground and then abruptly stopping right on the back of someone who is standing on the left when they should be standing on the right. You get uncomfortably close and then they move. No need to say anything, but sometimes a well timed cough is a must. A year ago, I would have lingered around a couple of steps behind forever waiting for Joe Pennyloafer to move his tourist ass out of the way. Not any longer. Being on the cusp of rude is not being rude, and it is a cusp on which the English balance very well.

But today I was walking out of the train station and waiting to cross the road. As I approached the crosswalk, I noticed that there was a young boy, maybe six, with his mother, already waiting there. No cars coming, so who has time to wait for the green walking man? I crossed, and when I did, the boy followed me. I could hear his mother yelling at him across the road and when I turned around, there he was, right by my side.

I try my best to not corrupt the youth. I try not to swear around kids, to not speak of bawdy subjects in their presence (on a train, for instance), and I am usually very conscientious of -- you guessed it -- crossing the road near kids. I don't want to be the guy teaching kids a bad lesson, and this bad habit is something they should learn from other friends or their parents later in life. I am convinced that there comes a time in a child's upbringing when waiting at the cross walk with no other cars approaching is just a waste of time. It might be at that moment that parents realise that they can't be perfect parents. From then on out, it is a slow decline from slight social disobedience to destructive social malevolence, from jay-walking to grand theft auto.

The readers write!

Let me thank T for finally writing me a comment. And, I do feel validated. Let me also thank T for his/her wonderfully abstract name. Why bother with superfluous letters or numbers or symbols when all you need is a simple letter? We live in an online age where you can pretend to be somebody you aren't and build an online alter ego that is the antithesis of your real world ego. So, I applaud T for stripping all of that away. Who is T? I don't know, but the name T suggests someone who isn't interested in a moniker or a name plate. T invites you to read what s/he has to say because, brother, you ain't finding out from the name. S/he isn't following the path of, say, sExYjEsS15 who emailed me earlier on Friendster to ask if I wanted to be her friend. For all I know, T might be way sexier than sExYjEsS15, but to find out, you need to know him/her, because just as there is more to a book than its title, there is more to a person that the name.