On Monday, Indigenous People’s Day, we went to the science museum. We went via rail, which was a big hit with the kids. Maybe more than the museum, which was a big hit too. On the way back home, we stopped for lunch. There was quite a bit of walking involved.
As seen advertised on TV, YouTube TV that is, I give you the Stove Shield™. As the end of the month approaches and all of my streaming offering dry up, I frequently fallback on YouTube. I think that this month I might have lost my soul to YouTube. This polytetrafluoroethylene or more commonly known as Teflon™ coated fiberglass mat is designed to protect your stove from grease, gravy and other food spills that may occur while stovetop cooking. Able to withstand temperatures of 500 °F, it is supposed to make cleanup a breeze. Wash it in your sink. Each mat is individually tailored to the make and model of your stove. Which makes me wonder why the vendor offers a buy two get one free deal? Holiday cooking season is just around the corner, a great opportunity to test it out. I had to clean the stove in order to install the mat, which kind of defeated the whole idea of getting it. Anyway, it looks nice. It comes with a warning. Use of this shield may produce harmful fumes. Do not place birds near this product when in use. No canaries in the coal mine, thank you very much.
A snowclone is a phrasal template based on a well-known cliché, idiom, catchphrase, or pop culture quote, substituting words to express a similar idea in a different context, often to humorous or sarcastic effect. For example, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s widely publicized phrase “the mother of all battles” in 1991 spawned such variations as “the mother of all traffic jams” or “mother of all bombs”. Coined in 2004 by economics professor Glen Whitman—following an appeal by linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum—the term is a playful pun on “snow cones” and the famous journalistic cliché that “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X must have Y words for Z”. Pullum famously criticized them as “some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists”.
Snowclones have a linguistic cousin, eggcorn. An eggcorn is a misheard or misinterpreted word or phrase that is replaced with a similar-sounding, plausible alternative that still makes logical sense. Common examples include:
I find these wordplay subjects both interesting and amusing. That they have names is even better.
“Oh, it’s perfectly safe—we put a kill switch behind the upper incisors.”—New Yorker cartoon
Killer robots! Killer AI! Killer Trump! Is it just a question of which horror will get us first? It seems to now be a daily occurrence that some Silicon Valley tech company has announced that one of their AIs has been caught going rogue. Add to this one tech titan after another has confessed that their industry is out of control, and they do not know how to regain it. As devout supplicants they crawl towards government praying for Trump’s deliverance from themselves. Talk about false idols, he now has a pretty young assistant posting for him, because he is now such a doddering old fool that he cannot type for himself. Don’t! Stop! Don’t Stop! They claim to know what they are doing is wrong. Yet they persist. Me thinks that they protest too much. Why their duplicity then? Legal cover. We didn’t annihilate humanity. Our chatbot did it. Not us. We tried to warn you. You didn’t listen. It’s all your fault. You should have stopped us.