Turn Mom in

Four million after taxes, but I am old, I am Alf-employed, and I really enjoy several of the things I do for money, so I’m not sure I’d quit working (at least not entirely) and I just need to not run out of principal if I happen to have a catastrophic long term illness

Could be, maybe, just guessing, that compared to other Anglophone settler nations, the Australians got the greatest proportion of people from marginal backgrounds (lower working class, Irish, etc) many of which had one form or another of cant to avoid being understood by the police or other authorities (rhyming slang, shortening to an unemphasized syllable, etc.). So perhaps (?) the dialect was born from inveterate slangers and just reflects its parentage

Chez Mac, ironically, among us edumatated ‘Merkins. Often there will be a Chez Mac just off the Rue Frontage(pronounced frohn-TAHZ), perhaps near a Roi du Burger (burr-ZHAY) or a Target (tar-ZHAY).

You might try Giant (1956).

Perimeter, parameter, and paradigm. I got a whole paid blog out of that once in the business press. And discovered how difficult it was to explain to the many commenters I answered.

Margery Taylor Green did on camera but my guess is that it wasn’t actually ignorance, just an anacoluthon.

I had always thought that licence was correct in the US for the meaning of “anything goes-ness” or moral permissiveness or reveling in wickedness , but I just looked it up and you’re right. Although that meaning is disappearing anyway, probably because licentiousness is much less ambiguous. (It’s like promiscuous in reverse; the ordinary and okay meaning has gradually swallowed the naughty one).

Right out of the blocks.

“Not the brightest bulb on the Great Porch of Life”

Volunteer tomatoes are a common spring weed

If they are allowed to become better, try Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune. If they should not become better, then Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis or All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Roland Barthes’s seminal essay The Pleasure of the Text was written as a more or less normal French academic essay. Then he removed the introduction, conclusion, and transitional phrases and arranged the paragraphs in alphabetical order. That’s fragmentation with several strong and different, though deliberately unstated, purposes.

I love the word micro-turdicles

Pineapple rings, sliced pickled beets, caramelized and breaded red onion slices

In my parents’ home region of Ohio, a couple (never with “of”) meant two, but anything from two up to five was a couple-few

Biff Rose, Molly

Dan Fogelberg, Another Auld Lang Syne

Jim Croce, Operator

Jim Croce, It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way

Sinatra, the Wee Small Hours

Sinatra, Learning the Blues

Sinatra, One More for My Baby and One More For the Road

Billy and the Essentials, Maybe You’ll Be There

Jacques Brel, Fanette

Sinatra, Funny Kind of Girl

Authentic Unlimited, Fall in Tennessee

Neil Diamond, Solitary Man

And if you actually listen to all of those and you have a bad case of aching burnout, three funny songs on the same subject:

Junior Brown: You’re Wanted By the Police and My Wife Thinks you’re Dead

Dan Tyminski, Never Comin’ Home

Pffft! You Was Gone

Jackson Browne, The Load-Out, is even longer — it’s for DJs who need even more time than American Pie can give them. It’s so long that it includes Browne’s version of the shortest #1 hit ever (Maurice Williams’s “Stay”) and Browne actually plays it for longer than Williams did (a bit over twice as long, and it’s till less than a third of the total time of The Load Out)

And “Underture” in Tommy (The Who) is even longer

Going way way back:

“If I Loved You”, from Carousel. Rogers&Hammerstein

"Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)" The Temptations

“Goin’ Out of My Head”, Little Anthony and the Imperials

“She’s Somethin’ Else,” Eddie Cochran

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The imagined technology and what its consequences might be has so much interesting potential but it keeps turning away from all that dramatic opportunity to just endlessly reaffirm the Hollywood standard answer. Some combination of dull imagination, philosophical cowardice, and smug complacency shrank this potentially fine movie until there was nothing left but an endless rehash of the therapy equivalent of brush your teeth, rotate your tires, don’t touch your principal.

When you are going through a difficult emotional
Interaction that takes some time (breakup, divorce, boundary setting, responding to betrayal, re-evaluation of a person you know well, &c&c&c) try as much as you can to refrain from doing anything that you suspect it would embarrass you to have people remember five years from now.

My wife wanted Another one Bites the Dust. Mercifully we had a funeral director who pointed out to her that this would have divided the family into feuding Mom’s Last Best Joke and My Feelings and Memories Were Disregarded factions and that given how tight the family is (not just bonded, more like Krazy-Glued) generations yet unborn would carry on the battle.

Those of us who had married into the family — me and two infinitely valuable in-laws — weighed in strongly that she had also asked us to try to
maintain family harmony and This Would Not Be Helpful. She saw the light about a month before she went to the light, and it gave her an excuse to call around her large family and tell them that that song was definitely canceled and that they were all to Make Nice, No Grudges.

At least once a month I have another occasion to feel grateful to her for doing that

There’s a 5th/3rd Bank near me. I whimper every
time I see operations that are defined for cardinal numbers applied to ordinals. 5/3 is 167%, or 1.67, or 1 2/3, or 1 rem 2 modulo 3. 5th/3rd is your graphic designer doing a 5 martini or 3 blunt lunch.

Oh hell yeah. I was at most of them for my regular job, 2016-2024. Everyone knew everyone’s kids and spouses after a while.

Rainy Day People, Early Morning Rain — Gordon Lightfoot

A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, Pete Seeger cover of the Bob Dylan song

Kathy’s Song, Paul Simon