It’s All Those Fancy Gadgets

Greg Horbachevsky of Glendale asked a clerk at an electronics store, “What’s the dumbest computer complaint you’ve ever had?” The worker recalled the time a guy called to complain that his computer’s “cup-holder was broken.” The puzzled clerk asked the caller to describe it. The caller said, “You know--the tray that slides out.” The clerk realized he was referring to the CD-ROM drive.

CIVIC INSULTS: Adding to the cavalcade of last week’s list of misspelled city names, Val Rodriguez of Signal Hill shared a purposely bungled reply he received from mischievous author Dave Barry a while back (see accompanying).

SOMEONE’S ALL WET: I guess things can’t be too bad in Cypress when this item makes the police log in the Los Alamitos News-Enterprise:

“June 17, 7:49 p.m.: A woman watering her grass also got water on a parked car, whose owner, her neighbor, became upset and started insulting her. So she sprayed her with the hose.”

ALMOST AS FUNNY AS DAVE BARRY: The MTA’s 236-page “Dictionary of Terminology” defines more than 2,500 terms, including one familiar to many bus riders:

CRUSH (STANDING) LOAD: “The maximum passenger capacity of a vehicle in which there is little or no space between customers, and more customers can’t enter without causing discomfort to others.”

Critics of the MTA subway might be surprised to find this entry:

RESPONSIBLE BIDDER/PROPOSER: “A bidder/proposer determined by the MTA to have the financial resources, trustworthiness, judgment, skill, integrity, experience and ability to successfully fulfill . . .”

Oh, where’s that hose?

REVISIONIST HISTORY? No, Cleveland High is aware that Abe’s birthday is really Feb. 12, not June 29. It was just a postponed observance of the holiday (the explanation I received sort of crush-loaded my brain). (see accompanying).

SONGWRITER ADVISORY: A while back, I quoted a high-IQ columnist who found a word that “orange” rhymes with: “sporange.” But I’ve since heard otherwise from Curtis Clark of the biological sciences department of Cal Poly Pomona.

“Marilyn vos Savant may be smart,” Clark began, “but she’s no botanist. In old botany texts, you can find ‘sporanges,’ but it is pronounced ‘spor-AN-jeez,’ not ‘SPOR-an-ges.’ And it is the plural of the Latin word ‘sporangis.’ It is understandable that someone (even a botanist) might look at ‘sporanges’ and come up with ‘sporange,’ but it is not a word.”

Guess we’re back to the only other possibility: orange/door hinge.

TAKE THE BUS: The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety surveyed law enforcement agencies around the nation and found that incidents of road rage occurred with this frequency during the week:

Friday: 26.1%

Wednesday: 17.4%

Tuesday: 15.9%

Thursday: 15.9%

Saturday: 10.1%

Sunday: 7.3%

Monday: 7.3%

As for weather, incidentally, the study also found that the highest percentage of raging--68.3%--occurred when it was sunny.

miscelLAny:

So, happy Wednesday. Pray for rain.