My Musings

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Monday, April 07, 2003

Keyboard Antics

My last blog entry ended with, “Put THAT in your oven and bake it, Mandy!”

To which Cherie writes: “...since Mandy is your best friend's girlfriend you might not want to be telling her to put things from you ‘in her oven.’ If I'm not making sense to you then here's the reason. ‘She's got one in the oven’ is a term that means a woman is pregnant.”

This is something I definitely did not know. What I was going for was a take on the well-known (or possibly not so well-known) phrase, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.” I had never heard of the idiom Cherie points out and, for all I know, she just made it up to make me feel stupid and is cackling gleefully as she reads this. But if that idiom really does exist (which I’m tempted to think it does), and if any of you other than Cherie ever heard of it and were therefore extremely perplexed by what I said at the end of my last blog entry, then rest assured that I was merely making a bad joke off of another idiom, not trying to impregnate Mandy.

In other news: the S on my keyboard broke today. The speed with which it did so astonished me to the fullest; having just successfully typed the word “because” whilst talking to Sarah online, I was peeved to note that the word I was now trying to type (“use” or something) was missing the letter S, and that no amount of pounding on the keyboard would get the S to appear. Frantically informing Sarah that the letter on my keyboard in between the A and the D was broken, I then tried to be all fancy by purposefully avoiding using the letter S in my speech. Have you ever tried this? It’s really hard. A while ago I heard that some people have written entire books without using the letter E, and I even found an E-less version of Poe’s “The Raven” online. (“But wait,” you’re wondering. “How could they do that when the title of the poem itself has two E’s in it?” Well, the guy cheated and changed the title of the poem to “Blackbirds.” It was actually pretty cool, with rhyme and everything.) After my adventures with dodging the letter S while talking to Sarah today, I have officially decided that whoever does this kind of stuff needs to get a life right now. As for me, I went on for a little while without using any S’s, driven by a desire to feel smart and also to impress Sarah with my amazing mastery of the English language in online conversation.

This of course backfired, because to avoid words with S in them I had to rephrase things in ridiculously long ways that made me look, in hindsight, astoundingly dumb. (To avoid “isn’t” I used “ain’t.” Aren’t I slick?) Eventually, though, I broke down and had to give up, when I hit a sentence that was so chock full of superlatives (-est endings) and plurals (which end in S) that I couldn’t find any way to worm around it. So I came up a brilliant idea—why not just use the dollar sign every time I need an S! They look the same! I guess I was still trying to impress Sarah with my creativity, because it wasn’t until much later that I finally realized I could just copy one letter S and paste it with Ctrl + V every time I needed it. Duh!

So is that what I’ve been doing this whole blog entry? Was every S that is on your screen right now at one time painstakingly pasted into Word? Of course not. My incredible powers of elegant problem solving triumphed after all. The answer was not wacky phrasing or dollar signs or paste—the answer was a broken toothpick. Yes indeedy—there’s a piece of toothpick under my S key as we speak. When my dad got home earlier today, he popped the S key off the keyboard and tried to fix it, but to no avail. That’s when I suggested getting a toothpick from the kitchen and breaking off just the right amount of it to stick under the key before putting it back on. My dad was doubtful that this would work, but after a few attempts we managed to snap off the proper size and now the key works just fine. The only problem is that it’s a little too sensitive—you don’t get that satisfying push; you barely tap the thing and it stops. The S’s do appear, though, and that’s good enough for me.

Well, that’s my exciting story for the day. I sure hope you guys all did something useful with yourselves. Once again I extend my apologies to Mandy and Sarah for my extreme stupidity.

.: posted by Boris 12:26 AM

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