To get away from all the emo, may I present something light....

or, at least, lighter....     

                                                                               ...than the stress of the past few days.


Just now, I looked down at the rollybally-kinda thin-tipped marker I've been using for the past several days, swiped from one government office or another, and saw that the logo on the side of it said

PRECISE V5

My instant series of responses to this visual stimulus was to wonder: (a) what pharmaceutical company makes this new drug; (b) what it cures; and (c) how long Lindsay Lohan has been abusing it.

In recent days, I've also been adding to my running list of stupidly-named SUVs. It's a tougher feat nowadays since there seem to be fewer of them on the road, but here are some of my recent finds to go with some previous naming idiocies. None of the new ones quite tops the infamy of the Nissan Armada, a name which evoked the ultimate in manly-manliness: death in the worst naval defeat in recorded history.  Still and all, to the ranks of the badly-named tanks, we now add:

--The Buick Rainier- I know, it's supposed to evoke the mountain near Seattle and all the phallicism that implies, but my first thought on seeing one of these monstrosities was, "Why would you want to name an SUV for a prince whose wife died in a rollover accident?"

--The Dodge Nitro- I saw my first of these deathtraps a few days ago, before getting around to watching Goldfinger last night, which began with a scene in which Sean Connery blowed up half a city block by igniting two nitroglycerin tanks. Even before that, though, I had the same thought: "Why are you marketing a vehicle based on false perceptions of safety and then naming it for a high-explosive?"

-- The Saturn Outlook- Yeah, yeah, you Saturn-worshippers think that Spring Hill plant can't do anything wrong. But here, it MIGHT not have been the best idea to word-associate your entry into the urban-assault-vehicle market with a computer program that's practically synonymous with the word "crash."

The 2008s will be here soon. Be on the lookout for the GMC Glaciermelter, The Ford Overcompensator, and the biggest one of all, naturally built by the Germans at Mercedes, the Enormous Schwanzstucker.

----

On a brighter note, I started my day just now with a compliment of sorts. I don't stray from my Friendspage all that often, since most of the other blogs I read are either on LJ (for now, anyway grrrrrrr) or I've added them through pickups of their syndication feeds. One of my favorite Met journals, the one which inspired me to begin my own last year, had a trivia question on it this morning, and in going to their actual site to answer it, I discovered they'd reorganized their blog roll....

and put my own little exercise in futility at the very top of it.

Now to go make sure that the Fundies don't interpret Metphistopheles as some sort of illegal Satanism and petition to delete the whole thing;) 

Next!

Emily's school year is beginning to wind down. Though we're not on the schedule of some of you/allyall, who start in August and finish around Memorial Day, June does usher in proms and finals and a reduced schedule that will have her completely done by the Solstice and then not due back again until after Labor Day.

For teachers who finished with their curriculum a bit early, days like this wind up being Fundays, and so it was in English class, where her teacher showed a video of the stage play The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). Eleanor and I almost went to this last time we were in London, but in hearing Em tell about it, I was reminded that we have an even more abridgier version of the Bard's complete dramatic works.  It's a 1989 Aardman animation, directed by Barry Purves, which fits all 34 plays into a roughly five-minute window. And while our duly purchased copy is hiding somewhere in the useless VHS vaults of this house, someone done gone and YouTubed it:

If you click the embedded video whilst it is playing, you'll be directed to the YouTube location for the thing, where the description lists all 34 plays in the order they appear here. How many did you recognize?

( Me? Barely half, and I majored in this shizzle )