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Terrycolon dot com, your holiday home for pointless animation. The gift that keeps on giving. Batteries not included. And no splash page included either. One less click, our gift to you.
Filed 12/23/16
Winter arrived for its annual visit at about 5:00 this morning. Did you feel it? If not, try going outside. Without a coat. Which might not help depending where you live. At any rate the holidays are fast approaching and we all know what that means: Lists.
Shopping lists, wish lists, naughty lists, nice lists, best of the year lists, worst of the year lists, New Year’s resolution lists, prediction lists, lists of lists. And coming soon to a web device near you, our annual “Not Done” list.
Without lists modern life would not be possible. We mean lists like indexes, tables of contents, appendixes, directories, menus, sub-menus, sub-sub-menus, and so on. We simply couldn’t manage modernity without lists. We at terry colon dot com have a hard time managing with them.
By the way, that “Ah-h-h-h-h” in the headline is not said the same as an “Ah-h-h-h-h” we say for summer. More like an “Ah-h-h-h-h” we’d say if our computer crashed. But not so much like an “Ah-h-h-h-h” we’d say if we crashed our car into a Mack truck. It’s all in the inflection as “Ah-h-h-h-h” doesn’t have a definite meaning. Interjections just sort-of work that way.
Filed under Odds & Ends 12/21/16
More Infrequently Answered Questions We Cannot Answer
Just as before, the staff here at terry colon dot com have no good answers for these questions. Perhaps they are not even good questions, which might account for it. On question seven, we don’t mean to imply women are to be likened to apes and chimps. If you thought that, that’s on you.
Filed under Infrequently Answered Questions 12/19/16
Offissa Pup chasing Flatop who’s just committed an intellectual property theft. The irony is they are copyrighted characters and this is art taken from Suck.com and so maybe I’m guilty of the same.
OK, some people will say that’s not really what ironic means. Well, that’s the way most folks use the word and I’m not going to swim upstream against the tide half a billion English speakers, to mix a metafor. Besides which, what is the word that means what it is I’m using ironic to mean in that case? I dunno. If nobody else can tell me it’ll just have to do.
Filed under Snippets from the Archives 12/17/16
Our latest and greatest feature is just a click away. Here’s a nibble:
Just like regular matter you find laying around the house, dark matter also comes in varieties, which we call elements. And like run-of-the-mill matter found locally, exotic dark matter comes in handy table form because it looks more sciency that way.…
Read it all: The Emperor’s New Fabric of Space
Filed under Humor 12/15/16
Odd how the seven day week came from the Bible while the names of the days are all pagan. It does make us wonder, when did non Jewish/ Christian/Muslim countries fall in with this seven day week business? Was there a seven day week in the Han Dynasty? Did ancient Hindus or Aztecs have a seven day week? Or a week of any length, for that matter? Did pre-Christian Romans only divide months in halves, were the Ides their version of a weekend?
Anyway, the day names are not even consistently anything. Four Norse gods, one Roman god and the sun and the moon. Maybe they should all be modernized to be more relavent for today. Wednesday could be Humpday for instance. Saturday might be called Funday. Sunday, which starts the week, could be dubbed Oneday. Which turns Monday into Twoday. Though if one day Oneday were today, Twoday would be tomorrow. That won’t work.
Maybe we could go Alphabetical. Aday, Bday, Cday, etc. That’s pretty bland, so maybe we could use the Greek alphabet, Alphaday, Betaday… uh… who knows the Greek alphabet besides the Greeks? Perhaps the days shouldn’t be named after anything or anyone but be totally contrived, like modern brand names that vaguely sound like something meaningful. Beginning on Sunday the week might become Rilaxday, Bactwirkday, Blazzāday… Hm-m, reckon we can forget about that lucrative career concocting novel names for the Big Three.
On the other hand, if we were radical about separation of church and state we should get rid of the seven day week altogether. It’s from the Bible after all. People shouldn’t be paid extra for working Sunday, that’s a Christian Sabbath thing, right? We could possibly decimalize the week, ten days. But that makes an eight day work week. Too long.
Perhaps we could take our cue from the calendar, base twelve, a twelve day week. Nah, a ten day work week sucks more than an eight day one. What if we divide a month by twelve? That renders a 2.5 day week, which is ridiculous. Let’s try base six instead. A five day week with a two day weekend. Other than national production sinking like a stone from working only three days a week, we can go for that. Plus, we only need five day names. Rilaxday, Betaday, Humpday, Enday, Funday. There, problem solved. You’ll thank us Oneday.
Filed under Words, Phrases, Sayings & Quotes 12/13/16
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Been quite a while since we added one of these numbers and the time just seems ripe to do so. Or is that the time seems right, being December and all? Either way, here it is. Only, in keeping with our new pointless animation theme, it has an added extra. In fact, all the old charts have been updated to include such bits. See them all:
Connecting the Dots – Uncharted Waters Charted
Filed under Humor 12/12/16
Fauxcabulary Word #9
futilize (fū′ tĭl īz) verb. To inadvertently do, or start to do, something with the wrong implement or item; i.e., picking up the wrong tool and starting using it before noticing it’s the wrong tool. [As per Clyde Crashcup, that’s futi as in futile plus lize as in utilize: futilize]
In my case, futilize is like trying to draw with the X-acto knife I grabbed instead of the pencil. Or flicking my cigarette ashes in the coffee cup instead of the ashtray. In the movies this would be someone trying to light something they stuck in their mouth thinking it were a cigar, but it wasn’t. (Hilarity ensues.)
For Curly Howard that would be making pancakes out of plaster instead of flour then pouring glue instead of syrup over them. Though why anyone would keep plaster and glue with the foodstuffs is something of a mystery. But then, thinking and watching the Stooges don’t really go together.
Futilize is basically a typo for everything else in life away from the keyboard. You simply hit the wrong button, grabbed the wrong thing, or whatnot. It’s an un-d’oh moment. Hey, we’ve all done it. Now you have a word to describe it.
Filed under Words, Phrases, Sayings & Quotes 12/9/16
Perhaps the splash page animation is still pointless, but it’s something completely different, as per a Monty Python segue. Though it does have a spinning globe, a square globe to be sure but still a globe. So maybe it’s not so completely different after all. This intro breaks from the usual Terry visual formula of no straight lines, no square corners, no parallel edges and whatnot. Which explains the old reprised square peg in a round hole illustration spot from… uh I forget what magazine.
If you’re too young to really remember Monty Python’s Flying Circus on TV, it was from the early 1970s after all, you can see it all over the place on YouTube. Parts, whole shows, stage versions of favorite skits from the Secret Policeman’s Ball. However the stage versions won’t have any animation from that other Terry, Gilliam by surname. And we know how much you love goofy animation. Well, we do at any rate.
Filed under Snippets from the Archives 12/7/16
Before the English started England, the Greeks had the Olympic games. The sports of which were somewhat basic and martial in nature. Running, jumping, wrestling, boxing, throwing weapons around, chariot racing. Yet the ancient Greeks didn’t leave us a legacy of any great team sport that we’re aware of. Did they even have any team sports? Tug-of-war maybe?
These contests were primitive, even primal. Who can go fastest? Who can throw or jump farthest? Who can beat the snot out of whom? Cavemen probably competed in fisticuffs, foot races and spear chucking. One might imagine the only team game Cro-Magnons had was warfare, which isn’t very sporting really.
Motor sports is thought to have started in France. But then that’s simply chariot racing with motorized chariots. Le Tour de France is more of the same on bicycles. Bobsledding is chariot racing down a slippery slope. Speed skating is foot racing on ice. A whole lot of sports are simply races, about the simplest type of contest you could imagine. How inventive is any of that?
It seems most popular sports around the world these days that aren’t races or folks fighting came out of Britain. Soccer, rugby, cricket, golf, snooker, and curling are all well known to be British concoctions. The familiar modern versions of darts and tennis, also devised by the Brits.
You could argue American football and baseball are derived from English rugby and cricket respectively. Both North American sports made the scene when America was largely British by heritage. Ice hockey fits that bill, too. As might basketball and volleyball. You could take a page out of the Winston Churchill book and credit it all to the English Speaking Peoples.
Even in boxing you have the English Marquess of Queensberry rules. So there is that. Wrestling and other martial arts on the other hand, not so British. As for fighting among the spectators, the Brits have a reputation for that, but we’re not so sure they started it.
In the end one wonders why so many sports from the British Isles conquered the world. Something to do with the British Empire maybe? Do Brits just know how to have more fun than other folks? We dunno, but the Industrial Revolution and the sports revolution seem to have started in the same place by our reckoning.
Filed under The Casual Sportsman 12/5/16
Top Ten Will Get You Twenty Tips
It’s our year-end clearance of overstocked weak gags. Dredged from the bottom of the barrel and foisted on the unsuspecting public. Let that be a lesson to you not to be so easily taken in. Beware, fake news and fake jokes are everywhere.
But then, don’t we all have some half-baked ideas floating around in the back of the head, on the back burner, filed under “this might come in handy someday”? You know, like that loose-armed task chair with the missing caster in the attic. At some point you just duck tape thing and use it or toss it and be done with it.
We’re sort-of doing both. Consider the new toon opener the duck tape and the Internet the dumping ground. There, that’s that then. We feel relieved anyway.
Filed under Money Matters & Musings 12/1/16
The clock on my range (stove if you will) reads: “17:=U” Huh? There’s one bugaboo with digital readout clocks of the LCD variety. When the some of the liquid crystals, or whatever, start to fail it makes for a pretty lousy clock.
I say for a lot of things analog dials and nobs (or pots as some call them) are just better. Old fashioned clocks with hands are one case. The display has meaning without having to read it or say in your head, “ten forty-five.” The minute hand pointing straight left tells you it’s fifteen to the hour at a glance. This is very handy because many times you know what hour it is so you really only need to know the minutes.
Things like analog tachometers have a similar advantage. You don’t really need to read the numbers to see the engine is revving at the redline. With a digital readout you have to remember what the redline number is to make sense of what a numerical readout is indicating. Plus, a needle on a dial isn’t quantized at number points, you get zero to whatever and everything in between.
Thing is, a dial shows you relationships, where the needle is along the entire spectrum. Heck, an illiterate can make sense of that sort of indicator. If the needle is pegged one way or the other you know there ain’t no more of whatever-it-is to give. You don’t always get that with a digital readout. It’s sort-of like a map where X marks the spot so you can tell where you are related to the surroundings, whereas a couple of coordinate readings might leave you baffled.
Volume controls are much better as knobs. OK, much quicker, at any rate. You can turn the volume up or down fully in a fraction of a second, no delay in waiting for that up or down button to cycle through the levels. On the other hand a digital button might be more precise, or at least easier to hit the exact level you want. In the same vein, a digital readout timer is a better option, being easier to set with precision. A digital readout stopwatch also makes the grade for similar reasons. As does a thermostat.
Be that as it may, a lot of analog clocks don’t even have numbers on them and we can still tell the time. Anyway, dials just simply look better, they have an esthetic appeal those clunky, blocky digital readouts invariably lack. I mean, how many different typefaces do you get with an LCD readout clock? I rest my case.
The last challenge, what time was 17:=U ? 10:30, 10:50, 10:28? Who knows?
Filed under Odds & Ends 11/29/16
Do we really need so many adjectives for size? On the one hand we have big, colossal, enormous, gargantuan, giant, gigantic, ginormous, great, huge, humongous, immense, jumbo, large, mammoth, mega, monumental, massive, titanic, and whopping. Not to mention economy-sized, family-sized, king-sized, man-sized, and Brobdingnagian.
On the other hand we have half-pint, itsy-bitsy, itty-bitty, little, little-bitty, micro, mini, miniature, minuscule, minute, nano, peewee, pint-sized, small, teensy-weensy, teeny-tiny, teeny-weeny, tiny, and wee. Not to mention dwarfish, midget, pygmy, puny, and Lilliputian.
Note how we double up words to make things even smaller or bigger. Itty-bitty, teeny-tiny, or, going the other way, great big, big huge, or even great big huge jumbo jet.
Still, we don’t seem to have a specific word for something that’s not big or little. Words like average, medium, middling, moderate, normal, and standard don’t specifically refer to size. All we get are hyphenated terms, average-sized, medium-sized, and middle-sized. Hm-m-m.
In clothing we have small, medium, large, extra large, extra-extra large, and extra-extra-extra large. With all the words we have for big couldn’t we do better than extra-extra-extra large? We could take a page out of the olive sellers book and go with small, medium, large, jumbo, giant, and colossal.
For cars we get full-sized, mid-sized, compact, and sub-compact. There just doesn’t seem to be any big cars. At least not that they admit to. Have you seen the size of some of the SUVs on the road? They seem to be something more than full-sized to us. Compact means close-packed, tightly packed, condensed. Maybe these trucks masquerading as cars could be called the antonym of compact. How about expansive or sprawling? Or our choice, call them bloats. Just a thought.
Filed under Words, Phrases, Sayings & Quotes 11/25/16
Thanksgiving is upon us and we all know what that means. Besides the usual gluttony and sloth there’s the deadly sin of football on TV, to overstate things. Pillar to post football on wall-to-wall TVs wasn’t always the case on T-Day. Besides TV screens being smaller, so were the number of games broadcast.
Back in the day the traditional Detroit Lions vs. whoever every Thanksgiving was the only game in town. Literally in town as I grew up a stone’s through from the Motor City, not that we threw stones in that direction as a habit. Though being a home game we didn’t get it on the tube since all NFL home games were blacked out back then, sold out or not.
Not to worry, not that you can worry about the past, our family had a work-around, a sort-of byproduct, if you will, since we invariably spent the day at our grandma’s house some miles north in Saginaw. Though that was in the blackout zone on a good day we might get a snowy broadcast out of Bay City. For the kiddies out there who only know digital TV and never heard of horizontal or vertical control knobs, we don’t mean weather snow that falls on the ground, but TV snow. How to explain… you had to be there. Or be then.
The Casual Sportsman recalls one particular game against the Green Bay Packers where… actually we don’t have any specific memories, just thought we needed to mention something about football this being the Casual Sportsman and all. Anyway, perhaps our personal reminiscing of holidays past isn’t that interesting. But we contend it fits the day, warm and fuzzy, family, that sort of thing. We’ll not weary you any longer except to say…
Happy Thanksgiving, and please pass the cranberries.
Filed under The Casual Sportsman 11/23/16
From our vantage point the political rancor and vitriol gets progressively more hyperbolic year by year. Have people gone over the deep ends of the political spectrum? Do the chattering classes and the many-headed all violently agree to violently disagree?
If you concur that’s the case these days we have the simple, foolproof solution: reduce the size and scope of government by ninety percent. The less the authorities stick their officious noses in everybody’s business, the less officialdom messes about in our lives, the more they stick to basic functions like delivering the mail the less folks would get their knickers in a twist over who’s in charge and how badly they’re screwing up. After all, hot-headed mobs don’t go on a rampage to lynch the Postmaster General, do they?
If you don’t agree… Up yours, you friggin’ pinko-fascist loser!
Filed under Odds & Ends 11/21/16
Once again another good old “Brickbats” spot from Reason magazine.
A report by the charity Age U.K. found that many elderly patients are left to starve in National Health Service hospitals. The study found that nurses often place trays out of patients’ reach or do not give them needed help cutting food or opening covered plates and other containers.
Register nurses, not firearms. Oh wait…
Filed under Snippets from the Archives 11/18/16
Infrequently Answered Question #103: Why is a big rig truck called a semi? It looks like an entire truck to me.
A: The whole rig is a tractor-trailer with the tractor being something like a railroad locomotive, which actually carries no cargo but provides motive power. As a locomotive isn’t a train unless it’s towing cars one might ask, is the big rig tractor without a trailer even a truck?
So, without a trailer perhaps the tractor is only half a truck, a semi truck. Actually, the term semi comes from the trailer part rather than the tractor part. Normally a trailer is towed and stands on its own front and rear wheels. That would be a full trailer. A trailer that’s supported in back on its own wheels and in front on the tractor is a semi trailer.
Put the bits together and you have a tractor-semi trailer. Which is easier simply to call a semi. Or a big rig. Or call it a truck, we don’t imagine truckers really care what the public calls them.
Big rigs can also tow full trailers behind the semi trailer. They call this a road train, appropriately enough. The biggest and baddest of these run in Australian, called a body and six. That’s a tractor, one semi trailer and five fully towed trailers. They pretty much only traipse through the outback on long, flat, straight roads with scant traffic. After all, you wouldn’t want to try maneuvering one of these beasties through city streets. Or even backing up for that matter.
The World’s Longest Truck - Road Train in Australia
What you didn’t ask is why truck drivers are called Teamsters. This goes back to the days when the motive power for pulling trailers was a team of horses. We reckon you can figure it out from there.
Filed under Infrequently Answered Questions 11/15/16
Film fans as a rule have favorite memorable movie lines. A goodly number of these scripted quips enter pop culture generally to be repeated ad nauseam, become clichés or punchlines. Going back through film history we have: “Life is like a box of chocolates.” “I’ll be back.” “What we have here is failure to communicate.” “Round up the usual suspects.”
The last one is so well ensconced in the American vernacular it lent itself to becoming a movie title, The Usual Suspects. This film in turn renders us a memorable line spoken by the Keyser Söze character…
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
This is not a truly original line from the pen of screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, but a rehash of one from Jim Carroll…
“The Devil’s greatest accomplishment was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
Even so, that’s not the original original line. For that you have to go back to French writer Charles Baudelaire…
“My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.”
For my money M. Baudelaire’s original version is the best. It’s often the way with quotes that get altered over the years, they lose something. For instance, unlike the rehashes, Baudelaire personalized it. It’s not the world that is tricked, it is you, the individual. Couched that way offers more of a punch.
Plus, Baudelaire’s caution is present tense, trick is rather than trick was. It didn’t just happen in the past which you can’t do anything about, it can happen today. Again, more punch.
It’s like how the passive voice is weaker than the active voice. The world was fooled by the devil, passive. The devil fooled the world, active. It’s just better dialog. Imagine Inspector Renault’s line from Casablanca in passive voice, “The usual suspects are to be rounded up.” How memorable is that?
Filed under Words, Phrases, Sayings & Quotes 11/12/16
The terry colon dot com reader might think we’re getting carried away with these frivolous splash pages, what with their being about a minute of pointless animation and all. Especially considering the work it takes. Around 400 lines of code. No mean amount for something that runs a couple days and is never heard from again.
Until now. We decided we didn’t want to eighty-six all that hard work, if sitting at a desk typing keys is hard work, so we’ve decided to archive them so they live forever in a new section under the FUN button called “Splash Zone.” The first is a prequel to the splash page you just enjoyed. Now that they’re saved you can enjoy them to no end.
Filed 11/10/16
Admit it. When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy you might have suspected it was a publicity stunt for some reality TV show he had in the pipeline. Well, we now have the ultimate reality show, Extreme Makeover, West Wing Edition or Survivor: Washington. Wonder who will get fired or voted off the island.
Speaking of TV, now that the election is over with we can tune into our favorite shows without fear of being bombarded with those annoying political ads. Back to our regular annoying product ads. Still, there’s that good old mute button on the remote. Which is why modern TV ads like having lots of supers, you know, text on screen. So even when you mute their paid shill they still imprint their message on your eyeballs.
In which case you can simply look away or shut your eyes. Or go get a snack. Possibly the brand they just flashed you with. Hey, just ‘cause the ad sucks doesn’t mean the product does.
Filed under Odds & Ends 11/9/16
Here’s some cover art from Reason magazine back in the day. Slightly updated for the times. It may not fit the column, but it fits the day. And don’t pay any attention to the man, or woman, behind the curtain. Lord knows the powers that be don’t.
Filed under Snippets from the Archives 11/8/16
