How Do You Pronounce the Year "2010"?

Debate about how to pronounce the upcoming years is heating up. I mean, we've been chugging along since the new millenium with "Two Thousand, Two Thousand One, etc." and all of a sudden some people out there will be changing this pattern in January with "Twenty Ten". The International Olympics Committee and Vancouver 2010  are officially referring to this winter's Olympics in Vancouver as the "Twenty Ten Olympics". And then there are those who feel the pronounciation will not convert to "twenty-something" until 2011.

How did we get into such a mess? Last century we were pretty consistent with, for example, 1909 and 1910 as "Nineteen Oh Nine" and "Nineteen Ten". So why the problem this century?

Two words: Stanley Kubrick.

Say "2001: A Space Odyssey". Go ahead, say it. You're saying "Two Thousand One", aren't you...AREN'T YOU????

So we can blame the marketing wizards behind this Hollywood production for mucking us up now. We were brainwashed into saying "Two Thousand One" since 1968, which is pronounced, by the way, as "nineteen sixty-eight". As opposed to "One Thousand Nine Hundred Sixty-Eight" (and don't get me started on whether or not there is an "and" before the "sixty-eight" - you should have learned all that in Consumer Ed. class when you learned how to write checks - oh, I should point out that checks are little pieces of paper that you sometimes see little old ladies slowly pulling out of their pocketbooks in front of you at the grocery check-out line about 5 minutes AFTER the checker has told her how much her total is.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, 2010. And while the Hollywood do-as-I-sayers would have you believe that you pronounce it as "Two Thousand Ten", the Olympic Committee will have no more of this crap and have worked tirelessly to promote the "Twenty Ten" Olympics. These are the same language nazis who forgave us our "Two Thousand" transgressions when Y2K first appeared, but who now refuse to understand why we didn't next follow suit with "Twenty Ought One", "Twenty Ought Two",...etc.

Well, Mr. Olympic Committee Chairperson Snobby McSnobberson, I don't think you "ought" to tell us how to pronounce our own language. I think you "ought" to mind your own beeswax. In fact, you "ought" to feel lucky we will even watch your stupid two-week long TV show, or miniseries, or whatever that overly-sponsored global sporting event thing that you have is.

And while I have you on the line, Mr. McSnobberson, what the heck is the Skeleton event? And can you use "skeleton" like a verb? Can you go skeletoning? And while you're at it, maybe you "ought" to tell us how to pronounce it.





Hey, I forgot to tell you guys last week that I met Gladys from Gladys Tells All when she blew through Sacramento. I love meeting fellow bloggers. I realize I risk my life meeting them in person, and I probably shouldn't agree to being dropped off blind-folded in a dark cat-pee-stained alley, but I'm kind of desperate for friends and lucky for me, Gladys was awesome!

Goat Thing of the Day: Baby Goats Hop on Bus

Last week, two baby goats hopped on a bus in Vancouver, Washington. They broke out of their pen and followed two woman to the bus stop. And tried to board a bus with the two women. And knowing how frugal goats can be, you can bet they didn't have a bus pass.

Initially, I couldn't find a way to embed the video here, and had planned for you to click on the picture below to take to you the Fox 12 Oregon News video. Or have you read the baby goat bus story on their website.

Yoda and Yates. (Thanks, Sue!)

But then, Owen from the Magic Lantern Show happened to send me a link to where CNN picked it up and is therefore embeddable, so you can press play on this one:




Now, for the benefit of my many many thousands of Kindle subscribers who are unable to view video (unless you have the Amazon Super Massive Turbo Kindle Master 2012X), allow me to describe to you the contents of said video:  Two baby goats try to board a bus.

Have You Ever Faked It?

Today I am celebrating my 503rd post. Why? Because everyone else celebrates on multiples of a hundred and I'm a rebel, man.

Also? What if you announce and make a big deal out of the fact that this is a milestone post, sending whoopie all over cyberspace and then the post itself sucks? Like, a lot. Then what?

Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Neil from Citizen of the Month was talking on his Twitter feed about fake tweeting and I thought, 'Now why didn't I ever think of that?' Nothing that brilliant ever occurs to me. I'm completely incapable of thinking outside of the box.

Even when I was a kid, I had no imagination. For example, I never thought to bring a gun to school or disobey my parents and drive into a tree just to see what would happen. It's as if I'm on some honesty bullet train and I'm too scared to jump off and possibly scrape my knee.

Other people can lie without even thinking twice about it, but my face turns red if I try to deny guilt. And this is precisely why fake tweeting, or "fweeting", if I may coin a term (unless someone else already did), would be a perfect launching pad into a life of crime testing those boundaries.

I could say things like:

or:

or:

or even:

and no one would ever be the wiser. Buwha-ha-HAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!!!!!


So... have you ever "fweeted"? Wait, forget I asked that, because if you're the kind of big fat stinkin' liar who would do such a thing, why would you confess to fake tweeting?

I'm hoping that by now you've forgotten that this is my 503rd post so that you won't get all Judgmental Jackenheimer on me. I mean, I don't want to have made a big fuss over this only to have you publish your big fancy review over on your big fancy blog that this post was just screamingly mediocre.

Dang, I probably shouldn't even have said anything.

Goat Thing of the Day: It's a Sign

I don't know if any of you remember when I showed you the Billy Goat Tavern when I was in Chicago this last summer.

The Cheezeborger Cheezeborger! place.

I understand if you don't. You were probably drunk. It was the Goat Thing of the Day for a post I entitled Chivalrouslessness in Thieves. Back when someone stole my notebook and-- GAH!!! I still can't talk about it, it upsets me so.

Anyway, I didn't call this meeting to complain about how lame society is. Not today, anyway. No, I brought all of you here today to tell you that I thought it was odd that people would name their business after a goat. Little did I know there were all kinds of places named after goats, as several alert NGIP readers have enthusiastically pointed out to me.

For example, my friend Warren showed me the Stumbling Goat Bistro in Seattle.

And then Mike of Mike's Mixed Memories, told me about this store called the Goat and Pencil, an unusual store on the Channel Isles, which made me look up where the Channel Isles were, because I had no idea. Do you? No? Well, look it up.

And then Helen of Pengelly Pastimes had an NGIP moment (I love that! Eat your heart out, Oprah!). She told her readers about it: "I had my first NGIP moment in Olympia...".

Dancing Goats Espresso

You know what an NGIP moment is, don't you? It's what makes up most of these Goat Things of the Day. You see a goat somewhere, say, on a farm, but a cat is hosting a tea party for all his friends on it. You think, "OMG, this would be perfect for Nanny Goats in Panties!"

That, dear friends, is an NGIP moment. And if you ever have one, just remember to breathe and then bust out your camera and send me a picture!

The Berlin Wall? Yeah, I Tapped That

It was the summer of 1990. Backpacks and youth hostels and Eurail passes. I'd just graduated college at the age of 24 (I know, I know, what took me so long -- that's another story). Anyway, my friend Drew and I found out about college kids who did Europe this way and decided to flop over to the other side of the pond ourselves.

At some point during July we found ourselves in Berlin, Germany, where one wall was coming down and another was going up. The one coming down was being marketed in pieces on the street for something that must have seemed outrageous at the time relative to our twenty-five dollar-per-day travel budget.

That's my friend, Drew, on the left. He's kind of tall.

We stumbled onto a different wall going up that day. This turned out to be part of the stage set up for a Pink Floyd concert, you know, as in Pink Floyd's The Wall? Did anyone NOT own that album?

The Wall at the Pink Floyd concert in Berlin, 1990

I didn't think to take a picture at the time because I didn't realize what it was, so I lifted this from A Fleeting Glimpse

I'm no walking scruple, but as we walked the streets of Berlin, something struck me as wrong that they were selling pieces of the wall. I think I figured it was such a fundamentally huge event, you know, freedom from oppression and whatnot, that I sort of felt I was witnessing history and was awed by it.

Wait, I'm not that principled. More likely, it was because it didn't feel meaningful to buy what could have been some random hunk of cement from someone who should not have been benefiting from it. Also, because I'm skeptical as all get out, how did I know that these pieces of cement actually came from the wall? I mean, you could pretty much hack at any sidewalk that year, toss the crumbs on a blanket in a Platz and sell your concrete snake oil: Steppen zee right up, meine Freunde!


So we walked until we found the real wall: The Berlin Wall. You know, Checkpoint Charlie and all that.

The Berlin Wall in 1990

As I saw a few people chiseling away, I wished I could participate in what they were doing. Just then, a boy of about seven or eight came up to me with a hammer and chisel held out toward me.

"Ein Mark", he said.

One lousy Mark. What was that, 20 cents to me? And it pretty much guaranteed that I would be getting an actual piece of the Berlin Wall, since I was standing right in front of it and all.

Perhaps the kid was just another huckster, but I decided he was a child who needed to provide for his newly freed East German family who would starve otherwise. He was a boy, and he wasn't so greedy, asking for a fraction of a dollar, so I preferred to get a piece of the wall this way. It was akin to a neighborhood kid and a huge wall that once divided his country and his people now served as his personal lemonade stand. Also? It seemed a heck of a lot more poignant if I helped bring down the Berlin Wall myself. I wouldn't just be witnessing history, I'd be a part of it.

I think that's the little boy in the lower right. Doesn't he look tiny and oppressed?

 

The Berlin Wall? Yeah, I tapped that.

 

Drew takes a crack at it.

* * *

P.S.  I mention this story because I recently walked past a magazine stand where the cover of The Economist says, "Twenty years after the Wall".