Commuterrant

McCullough and the Bee

The surging popularity of all things related to spelling bees has forced me to revisit a painful episode in my past, when I came in a shameful 16th place in the Philadelphia city-wide spelling bee of 1978.

The annual Bee was sponsored by the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, which proudly carried the tagline, "Nearly Everyone Reads the Bulletin." But not everyone read the Bulletin, as the newspaper went out of business four years later, leaving nearly everyone to read the Philadelphia Inquirer. This may have been due in part to the fact that they blew a lot of money sponsoring spelling bees for pimple-addled junior high schoolers.

But I digress.

So I was thinking about all of the bee-craziness in our culture today: books and movies such as Akeelah and the Bee, Spellbound, Bee Season, The Secret Life of Bees... oh wait; that one wasn't about spelling bees. And I remembered that I was all about the Bee before anyone ever thought to make a movie or write a book about it.

So I dug this out of the vault:

Some faces have been obscured to protect the innocent. The man on the left, however was  the moderator who tripped me up with the word "planxty,"  so he gets to have his picture posted on my blog.

It was a big day. I washed my hair three times, with Herbal Essence Shampoo (or was it Faberge Organic? Or Earth Born?) and put on Maybelline mascara. I wore a skirt, for God's sake. I wore my fabulous, reversible blue/silver baseball jacket. And since this was a special occasion, I wore it silver side out. And I went on to shame my school, by mispelling planxty [\Planx"ty\, n. [Cf. L. plangere to mourn aloud.] (Mus.) An Irish or Welsh melody for the harp, sometimes of a mournful character.] I have not had occasion to use the word planxty in the 28 years since.

All I got to show for my humiliation that day was a copy of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary, a silly enamel pin with a bee on it, and this photo. I still have all three, although I don't know exactly where that enamel pin is.

Disclaimer: I don't look anything like that anymore

Bush's All-New Dumbest Statement Ever

I spotted this gem of a headline on Yahoo News yesterday:

"Bush says U.S. safer, but not yet safe." What the hell does that mean? How can something be a greater degree of something that it is not?

That's like saying "Bush is smarter, but not yet smart." What a moron. I hereby dub him the "Mad-Lib President" for all the sense he makes. I think he gets his inspiration from poorly-arranged refrigerator magnets.

A Hostile Workout Environment

I'm back in Blogland!

Last month, I was at the gym where I work out three times a week - except when I work out two times, or once, a week. I was lying on bench, ready to start lifting eight WHOLE pounds of dumbbells, and these two musclebound gym guys were standing a little too close to me; in fact, they were right above me, and they were talking instead of working out.

One said f*** this, f*** that, every other word. He also said f***ing this, f***ing that. He used f***ing to modify words that don't even need modifiers: "Then I went to the f***ing store and I f***ing saw they didn't have any f***ing Gatorade left, and I was like, f*** this."

Then they moved onto to a more interesting topic, women. The f***ing guy was telling the other guy, who looked a lot like Fred Flintstone, about a woman he met at a party. "Yeah," he said. "She had nice titties."

Titties. Titties. He said "titties." In 2006, in Arlington, Massachusetts. And then he said it again and again. I tried my usual, direct method for dealing with rude behavior; I glared at them. They ignored me. Finally, I stopped lifting weights and just sat up and glared at them. Thankfully, they moved a little farther away, not as a result of my glaring, and continued their scintillating conversation about titties.

Through the din of grunts and clanging weights, I heard Fred Flintstone say, "She's 36..." and I thought "Oh my God; now they are discussing bra size," and I had to restrain myself from going over and banging him on the head with my eight-pound dumbbell. Thank God I didn't, because it turned out the Fred's mind was not in the gutter and he was talking about someone's age.

The whole episode disgusted me so much that I just had to go on a little hiatus from the gym. Besides, I was feeling lazy. I finally went back after a couple of weeks, resolving that, if I ever hear the word "titties" again at the gym, I will have to scream, "Penis, penis, penis!" at them until they shut up.