Cephalogenic

or, stuff that I dragged out of my head

Name:
Location: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

Friday, February 01, 2008

What Could Happen

Salvador Dali once said, "So little of what could happen does happen." He also said, along the same lines, "Why, then, when I order a lobster, does the waiter not bring me a flaming phone book?"

Have you seen this?



It's one of the things that could happen: a video of a half-dozen seemingly normal passengers on the London tube who all of a sudden perform a perfectly choreographed version of the zombie dance from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. And the passengers just sit there like a bunch of bourgeois Marcel Duchamp stiffs! And then they applaud as if they were at Covent Garden with kid gloves on!

I don't say "Whoo!" but I would so be saying "Whoo!" because how could you possibly just sit there and not be reacting to that little jolt of surrealist joy?

+

What could happen if you can't tell one part of speech from another?

We sell a lot of things in the store in which I work, including a bunch of metal signs, some vintage-looking, some just decorative. Some of them are just kind of cute, kitcheny things:

Some of them are things that I can't imagine anybody without some sort of mental defect wanting to own, but hey, it's a big world:



And then there's this.


Can you read the text? No? It says this:

friends: 'frendz: n 1: people who like each other and/or are helpful to one another. 2: Lucy & Ethel 3: supporters or sympathizers - friend li ness adj - friend ly adj - friend ship n.

Well. According to whichever dictionary it was that the production company got its definition from, "friendliness" is an adjective. And here I thought everything ending in "-ness" was a noun!

Grammar is not an idle pastime. It's work, dammit!

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That is a cool video! At least one woman was laughing behind her hand, though, so not everyone was being stiff & bourgeois.

My mom had an encounter where she came out of a subway in Vienna right into the middle of a huge chorus performing the Carmina Burana. She remembers that to this day as a piece of delightful serendipity.

Friday, February 01, 2008 1:18:00 AM  

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