Working at home is great– pants are optional, snacks are bountiful, and wake-up time is negotiable. Sometimes, though, the Old Scratch comes to collect his dues for this indolent lifestyle, and he brings us trials in the form of late-night negotiations with Asian manufacturers.
Sample convo with Asian mfrs:
“Ethel” Xua Po: Please sign this 42 page contract without looking and return us your soonest.
Peter: Thanks for the contract. We are unable to agree to clause 4, which requires us to eat babies. We suggest rewording to say, “Ten One will deliver the Product within 30 days and will not eat babies.”
EXP: Because to company policies, our legal office requires no changes. Plz sign to us sooner. Thanks you.
Peter: I’m afraid we must insist on removing the baby-eating language. This agreement is for the prompt delivery of our Product and should not extend to nutritional matters. Thanks for your understanding.
EXP: Suppose we can agree to delete babies. But we ask you reconsider 30 days. We require Product tomorrow.
Peter: As mentioned in last month’s correspondence, it takes 30 days to manufacture and deliver the Product. We regret that the lead time can not be shortened.
EXP: Then we suggest you assign intellectual property to us for purposes counterfeit in cheaper Chinese sweatshop.
Peter: We do enjoy your sense of humor. We shall not transfer the IP; this is merely a purchase agreement for the delivery of our Products.
EXP: Thanks. We can allow you keep your copyright only if compromise to eat babies. Our legal say it might cause too much troublesome for future business. It’s not to be seen that we are sank into this argument & ignore the foreseen opportunity.
1. Rice Bowl! Myanmar decides to overlook their law forbidding more than 5 people to gather in one place in order to support their first professional soccer league. While organized teams once had names like “Central Supply and Transport Depot” and “Forestry,” the new league teams now have proper club titles ending with “United.” The Man of the Match wins $500. WSJ piece and vid here.
2. Speaking of Myanmar, it has a new capital city, Naypyitaw, under which North Korea is building secret tunnels to smuggle leftover SCUD missiles. No worries, the Pentagon is “just watching.”
See this? It’s a jockstrap font. It reminds me of when my best friend and I got in trouble junior year for doodling condom designs in our government notebooks.
From a “Knickerbocker Sturgell”: Too Pooped to Pop? And then some sort of misspelled pitch for little blue pills. “Too pooped to pop” is a phrase my mother uses, and it’s the only time you’ll ever hear the word poop cross her lips.
It still irks me that saying “crap” in her household got you an earful of admonition and a mouthful of soap. Didn’t she know that everyone else was out drinking Zima behind the barn IN MIXED COMPANY? Heck if I ever turned up pregnant or drunk after youth group Bible study.
Anylegalism, here is a list of things that suck, lest we let all this Grace in Small Things get out of hand:
1. Our tax bill. Before The Biz and joint filing entered my life, I viewed tax season as a sort of fun event where you do a few math problems, and then the government gives you a check. This year, there were way too many zeros on the check we gave the government. At least there was an accountant to do the math.
2. It has been raining for days, with no end in sight.
3. Due to my over-eagerness to bond with obscure branches of my family-in-law, I rsvp’ed to a stranger’s wedding instead of to The Dirty Thirty Cougar Coming Out Party of one Flashmistress Gogodancer. It’ll be calico jumpers and fruit punch instead of animal prints and cocktails.
As has been expected, Carol Ann Duffy was named the UK’s poet laureate, the first woman to hold the position in 341 years. Along with a small stipend, the honor comes with a “butt of sack” — 600 bottles of sherry to stoke the muse — which the Guardian says she asked for upfront after hearing the previous laureate Andrew Motion never received his due.
Thank goodness for British English, which gives us these treasures of language from time to time. A butt of sack is a wooden cask for storing wine and will hold about 126 gallons of such beverage. Shakespeare uses the term in The Tempest, wherein the shipwrecked Stephano explains his means of survival:
I escaped upon a butt of sack, which the sailors heaved overboard…(Act II, Scene II)
I think I may have a butt of sack of my own in out in the living room. It’s a wooden box with Portuguese wine branding, nailed shut, big enough for about 8 bottles. I keep my plants on it.
And that closes out today’s butt of sack post. Unless the 7-year-old boy in me wants to say “butt of sack” once more….why yes, he does. Butt of sack. I think it’s my new funniest word, supplanting “crapbag.”
You’ve got to admire the Japanese for their committment to keeping a clean undercarriage. Even public bathrooms and fast food restaurants have a shiny, automatic toilet equipped with a multi-function bidet. I tend to think of the bidet as a sort of nifty relic you’d find in a really old house, not a high-tech gadget you find in a high-tech country. Maybe your granny has one in her bathroom and keeps it covered with a crocheted potty cozy.
But this-
-this is a NASA potty.
