Chi Rho: Christ Never Left Christmas

I've been a fan of symbols, logos, pictograms, and sundry glyphs throughout history. It's hard for me to say just when that fascination set in. Perhaps it was how quickly I learned to recognize and write my alphabet. Or maybe it was the realization that some symbols have fixed meanings and some are a bit more fluid. We are surrounded by them. Everywhere. And I think I recognized that early on. I certainly wanted to know, much to the frustration of my poor exhausted dad, what it all meant. What really cemented the intrigue, I think, was my sixth grade religion class. I think so because I have been working on logos for the holiday.

In truth, I am kinda peeved that so many "Put Christ back in Christmas" Christians have no idea that he never really left. So as I was preparing the counterpoints to the bouts of "It's Merry Christmas not Happy Holidays" garbage that are about to schmear my facebook page. Being peeved led to a retort. In the process of the retort I realized that the origins of my glyph glee had to have been my religion class. Specifically the discussion about THIS particular glyph.

This is the Chi Rho. It is one of the earliest symbols associated with Christ. It is as significant as the ichthys fish as it was also a sign meant to +protect early Christians from Roman persecution. The glyph is composed of two Greek letters which are superimposed over one another. The Chi, the X, and the P looking letter Rho. They are the first two letters in the Greek word KHRistos. Which is the word Christ.

I read somewhere long, long ago that the Eastern Orthodox churches prefer this reference of Christ as it resembles, somewhat, the caduceus, the symbol of medicine. The Greek Orthodox church and the Byzantines tended to view Christ almost exclusively as a Healer and a Shepard rather than the King of Kings that so many Western churches envision. To them, this would have been the most natural expression of Christ in the written form. And for a long while, the CHI RHO +mas was the preferred decorative form. Imagine how striking this symbol would have been an illuminated manuscript. So much addition symbolism can be assigned this form. The X very literally is a cross. The P very well might be seen as Christ on that cross. The P shares the shape of a shepard's crook, which if the loop is left open a bit on the bottom then the case is made.

The Chi Rho is beautiful as it is rich in heritage. Handwritten manuscripts lend themselves well to such a dramatic, non alphabetical glyph. And this symbol was used well into the Victorian era in what printers would call the display; a headline, the larger advert writing across the top of whole pages or ads. As print media became more cost conscious and the spacing restrictions for large volume printing became something of an issue, there needed to be a way to modify the symbol.

I could bore you with a lot of jargon but I won't. Just look at this line of print. The r,i,n,o and w are a standard height. This is called the x-height. the letters with stems that rise above are called ascenders and the letters with stems and bowls that dip below the writing line are called descenders. The Rho is most definitely ascending. And it gets in the way of making print in newspapers and magazines standard. So, having used the chi rho initially to save type (when it was all made from cast iron on teeny tiny little woodblocks) every time one printed Christmas, the chi rho was used. And then, to make things even easier the chi rho was simplified so that Xmas could be written easier.

And of course, because poster makers and typographers, printers and graphic designers love LOVE love anything new, avante garde or just a bit quirky X-mas became the norm in packaging and Greeting cards. For a very long time in America everyone knew what this meant. I don't know when and I don't know why people got the idea that there was a war on Christmas and the various greetings used through out the year became targets. All I can say is that public school kids don't get taught religious history and Catholic school kids have short memories.

This is SIXTH GRADE stuff!!!!!! This is stuff that we should all know about growing up. This is stuff that we should know so that we don't sound like uneducated asshats. I don't know who decided that there was a war on Christmas. I will guess, most likely correctly, that it was some Christian zealot with a lot of time and a little brain power. Now every fool that goes about with "Merry Xmas" on his greeting card is a candidate for a lynching. How very sad. No one is attacking the holiday. No one took Christ out of Christmas. But, someone did take the brains out of most of the people who have been caught up in the fever of this non-issue.

Altschmerz, Same Shit Different Day

Boy have I had this bad!!!!!!!!!! When I was living in a hotel and a lot of the people that I trusted as friends turned out to be anything but friends, when sleeping on the floors in churches felt like a Hobbit Adventure gone wrong and no matter what choices I made the outcome was only a big stinky pile of poop I felt this.

Nothing changed. The same arguments, the same defense, the same professions of incompetence the same staunch stiff upper lip: it always ended in weeks if not months of wallowing in this quagmire of flaws and anxieties.

There is in truth factual evidence that some of my issues will not go away. Some of my issues are personality traits. Some of my issues are fiscal. And there is no way on what I make that the debts are going to be cleared in my lifetime. These thing are true.

What is not true is that I will and should always be depressed about them.

The personality traits that plague me don't really plague me. They plague people who do not like me. And in an attempt to get them to like me enough to leave off with the abuse I try to mould myself into the preferred shape. That trick never works. As soon as I am restored to my own personality and free myself of the influence of manipulative people I am free of the malaise that comes of being stuck being me.

I have yet to discover a trick to dealing with the same old money issues. They will plague me forever. And the Altschmerz is ever present in those musings. But at least the condition is decreased by half.

I really need to figure out if this is a real German word or just totally made up.

There is a Word for That!

Ben Shott published a book not that long ago that I referenced and announced a desire to have. And since then the subject of subjective words has come up on a website that I frequent. I've had all of these words rattling around in my head for a while. I keep forgetting to ask my pen pall if they are real, like Speckshild. What I have decided is that I don't care if they are real or not. Someone actually took the time to identify feelings universally felt but not universally understood.

We all know this feeling. I've been in the mauerbauer mode for quite some time. And in trying to understand this mode I have realized two things: I feel this way because I am overwhelmed with everyone else's emotions, intentions, energies and needs. I am overwhelmed with the persistent belief both actively stated and passively asserted that I do not get to have time to myself. And I feel this way because right now I just don't really like too many people because of all the pain that has been ever present these last few months since I got dumped.

What a surprise... that is going to take a while longer to get over.

I have always been a solitary individual. I have always been easily overwhelmed with life when everyone around me is in panic mode and expects weeks worth of work to be done in days if not hours. My standard post holiday response is a barf fest of epic proportions. But when it comes to the daily grind of being around others I usually need hours of alone time daily. Now that I am in management and have to think for so many people.... well I barely find the strength to eat.

It really is no surprise that I want everyone to go away. Even the people that I like a lot. Even our mysterious returning figure. I want him. But I want to be left alone. I am glad he is back, I am glad that life has not kept us apart. But I really hope that when he said "Late fall", he meant the end of November. Because I can not fathom trying to move, do this job and settle into a different routine in this mood. This word, perfectly captures what I feel. Though admittedly, it offers no solution.

The solution I think I can figure out for myself.

As for the authenticity of mauerbauertraurigkeit....

mauer is wall. And that is exactly what I am trying to erect, one of those impressive fortress walls that Sting would write about.

bauer is peasant or farmer. I'm not sure how this fits into the word construction. On the surface it seems to make no sense. Unless this specifically refers to those farmers who are in desperate need of a neighbors help for breaking ground or harveting but turn the help away. The stubborn independence might be a farmer's trait.

traurigkeit is sadness.

Essentially a wall of sadness. But it specifically is attached to the idea of keeping people at a distance.

Geez, I will have to ask her if this is a real word.

Love Latin

This is not a Cottonwood. No one mentioned that
trees age with wrinkles in the identification part
of the descriptions. The smooth bark is at the top
of the tree, about 6 years of growth. The fissures
are at the base. I will make a new botanical later
when I am less mad at the internet. 

I'm not sure why I love Latin so much. It isn't the conjugating and the pronunciation because that stuff just kills me. What I love about Latin is that it makes things clear from an identification perspective. All of the world's organic bits are ordered and cataloged with Latin names to make sense of how things beget, or are related to, other things. When I started working in the rubber stamp industry, I fell in love with Personal Stamp Exchange's images. They incorporated Latin identification in the portraits of flowers and animals. And I think that is where I fell in love with the aesthetic. They took that aesthetic from Victorian botanical prints and illustrations such as this  that I found on Pintrest. I also found this gem which shares a similar aesthetic in my stamp collection.

I don't really stamp anymore. Not in the last few years because of all the things that we have already covered in the blog. But my collection is calling me. I miss the weight of the wood printing blocks in my hand, the squishy tap of the ink as it lands on the rubber and the smell of hot embossing powder. But I digress. I wanted to talk about the Latin. I am a language geek. I am a glyph geek. I love to see how people communicate and I like to play with what we know.  So it is little wonder to me that I am beginning to incorporate what I loved about my work in the past with the work that I am doing now. Part of me wonders why it is taking so long to incorporate the elements... but that is for another post.

One of my goals is to build a library of stock images that I have taken. It will give me a purpose for the images I collect while I am improving my photography skills. And it will give us something interesting to look at while perusing this little ole blog. That is what I am doing today while the sun is still not cooperating. I want to make botanical cards with the pictures that I am taking. But to do that, I need to know the common names of the things that I am taking pictures of. That should be easy. But it isn't.

For a long time now, I thought that the tree that was outside of the house was an Aspen. That is what the homeowner said. But it isn't. Aspens and Birches have smooth papery bark. The tree that is outside of the house has fissures in it, like a maple. So it can not be an aspen. How do you confuse the two? Turns out is is pretty easy. Thank you Latin ID! But no thanks to everyone who's opinions on the subject differ. It would seem that taxonomy is not the exacting science that we would wish it was.

Aspens, Birches and Cottonwoods are very similar. They all have catkins, rhomboid leaves and belong to the same sub-kingdom of angiosperms (flowering plants). It gets a little messy for me in the phylum and class because no one speaks the language of botany that I grew up with. And no one agrees what the distinctions are. Aspens and birches look a lot alike in the bark department. Silvery white, smooth and papery with similar leaves. But they are of different orders. Aspens are Malpighiales and Birches are Fagales. I don't know why the two should look so much alike if they belong to two different orders. It is weird and makes me question if Rivinus knew what he was talking about since they aren't even in the same Family! But the main difference that I can see is that the Malpighiale needs a male and a female tree to reproduce and the Fagale has both sexes on the same tree.

Aspens and Cottonwoods belong to the order of Malpighiales and the Family of Salicaceae. They are dioecious, meaning that the male and female reproductive organs are on two different trees. The catkins (flower clusters) are red for males and green for females. The cottonwood differs from the Aspen in that it has a shallowly fissured bark like maples and oaks and not the smooth papery bark of the Aspen. The leaves are nearly identical which I think is what throws everyone off. Our park is mixed with smooth barked Aspen leaves and rough barked Aspen leaves. Which if I weren't looking so intently at the birds I wouldn't have noticed the trees that they were living in.

There are a lot of details to consider in deciding a plant's taxonomy. And I am glad it is not my job. It is hard enough trying to figure these things out with a field guide and clear pictures. I am fairly confident I know what this tree is. It leaks nectar which is also another trait of the Malpighiales; they require bees to pollinate.This also explains why there are so many wasps that like to nest on the house. And why does all of this even matter?

Because I love the aesthetic of old botanical prints and I want to make a bunch of digital versions now that I am getting used to how my camera really works. All of this research and agony for art that started with an observation. Ugh.... life was so much simpler when I was distracting myself with fishing and outdoor pursuits with the BF. Now that I am outdoors on my own I do not really want to venture too far afield.

More Random Thoughts

Tomorrow is Desolation of Smaug with my fellow Richard Armitage fans. Then Tuesday is Festival of Trains with a look at the replica Traverse City, my hometown. And somewhere in all the action I am going to be taking lots of photos and writing lots of blog posts across both blogger and wordpress. I had a tough we with MidWinter Depression sitting on my chest like a 500 pound cat. And it isn't even MidWinter. Hell.... technically Winter hasn't even started!

And if we have learned anything from Uncle Wil and Aunt Jenny it is that depression lies. It lies like a Politian. Fortunately I only had one really bad day where I actually believed its shit and was able to recover with the celebration of a life passed & "kibbutz" with my pen pal. Which reminds me:

I found the book I want for Christmas. It's Ben Schott's new book Schottenfreude. I saw a snippet in USA today yesterday and thought it was perfect since my pen pal and I just had this conversation about awesome German words for things that the English language is too afraid to admit to.

For some reason, the Germans are much more honest about the human condition than we are in America. Oh, make no mistake, we will show off with the use of big fancy psychology words that we learned from any number of TV quacks experts. And we will pretend we know exactly what it means and that we are correctly applying the terms. We will go to a therapist to learn these terms and feel smarter about both ourselves and mental issues because we can throw a big word or complicated concept at it as if we were Hermione Granger waving a wand over Ron's head and shouting "Expeliarmus!" (Because that trick always works.)

I think that my Grampa would probably have rolled his eyes right out of his head by now at my need or desire for regular therapy sessions. He could always tell me what was wrong and why. And he didn't need to have a fancy degree (which he did. In engineering.) or an office (which he did. The garage.) to be able to pronounce the diagnosis & cure. He just had to do what Germans do best: observe, plan & execute the plan. We Americans are very good at pretending that nothing is wrong with us while we cry about every little thing on facebook. We distract ourselves so much on the outside that we can never really be honest about anything on the inside. I think we might be the least authentic people on the planet... collectively. There are some stunning examples of honesty and compassion that most of the world will never know.

The Germans have words for things that most of the word won't admit to doing: looking up dirty words first when learning a language, weight gain from grief eating, the feeling you get from a cold pillow.... yep. Pay attention to your sleeping habits and you will know what I mean. You haven't paid attention. Your face on a cold pillow feels so happy that your skin could dance. You feel the feel and ignore it not thinking to acknowledge it. Much. And the Germans have a word for that!

I love that language. Mark Twain and every other language bigot can hate on it all they want to but it is truly expressive if somewhat blunt while doing its best to eliminate ambiguity that the American English loves. And it encourages one to be aware. Of course you can take awareness a little too far and singlehandedly be considered the father of mass suicides or suicide bumps.

I still want Speckschild to be a word. (Eating for protection from elements, economic scarcity or violence.)

But really I want Schottenfreude for Christmas.
We'll see how the finances go.

Spread the Love

Hey folks,
It would seem that there are enough of you real people reading this to keep the spam stats lower than average. Yay you! Could you do me a favor and spread the love on the blog around a little? Google is sending people my way from the Eurozone and Google+ is helping a bit more than I thought. But I still have vampires, zombies and fake adsense topping the stats charts.

I know. I know. I know..... upgrade the security software. I have to make an appointment for that and for the next two weeks work has me running all over the place. I have to write a lot today and schedule posts to keep things fresh and fun.

Well fresh.

No. Fun too.

My pen pal sent me a package of goodies from Germany. I guess the cats had fun sitting on it while waiting for me to get home from work to open it. They played King of the Mountain. And it was not an easy mountain for two hefty cats to claim. Kudos to them for even trying. Funny thing is, once it was open and they saw there was nothing in it for them they left it alone. Didn't even dig around in the cookies. Of course if they were dogs that would have been a holenutther episode.

Anyway... pics to come. I am excited as I now have a complete Matthias Reim music collection and a DVD. Swooning commences in a few minutes. Lots of time translating ahead as there are two cooking magazines with the most delicious looking dishes in them. Oh..... wow. I hate that I will be so busy at work. I want to listen to new music, cook, bake and work on my German!!!! But I still have to pay the bills.

In the meantime keep coming back, share some posts, +1 some posts... your clicks are like garlic to spammy vampires. Um.... Spampires? Did I just make a new word? Yep. I did. Add that to your lexicons!!

Look Out Blog-O-Sphere!!!!!!!!

I have learned how to do something new.

Not that long ago in normal time, but eons ago in cyber time, Blogger rolled out its new gadgets, tweaks, layouts, and dashboard that were supposed to make the writing life a wonderful life. And I couldn't see a huge improvement in anything but the photo uploader. Thank you IE8 auto spell check, I know "uploader" isn't a word per se. HOWEVER, since this is 3013 and Google makes whatever rules and fake words it wants to when it wants to it would be nice for you to recognize that and not make me have to manually add Googleisms to the dictionary.... though I see that one will have to of course. Where was I?

Oh right... so while I've been on the other site adding pictures and writing about my art and the adventures inherent in long term storage of said works there have been tons TONS of pictures. And every once in a while I will totally overload the system and give it such conniptions that a musical Scrooge would be embarrassed by the shenanigans. The drop down tool bar for editing photos in the post editor will disappear so that I can not resize anything. Or it will make the picture all blue with its highlights and then the menu for text editing will light up like the Mother Ship in Close Encounters. The underline button turns blue. The Link button turns blue. And I don't know what all it means.

Panic. "OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG I can't loose this photo what the hell did you just do!" New Kirk Me says to New Checkov Me. And I say in theeeeeeeeeeee worst Russian accent ever (no disrespect to Yelchin. I suck. He does not.) "I don know Keptin." And then the feeling of inescapable doom sets in. There will be Romulans at the back door. WU-HAT. THEE. HELL?

The last new thing that I learned how to do made me so giddy with excitement that I almost peed. But I put on the grown up pants and went to tell my room mate only to find that she had been gone for hours. So I was forced to extoll my virtues to the three disinterested cats in the house. I believe at least one is the reincarnated Queen Victoria. She is NEVER amused. But this.... oh this thing that I have learned how to do...

Without having to learn to do HTML coding I now can make any word link to any site that I wish it to link to. Just. Like. Wil. And new to the Google task bar in this editor there is a strike out function, you know, for when I really fuck mess something up but kinda want to own it anyway.

Google has taken a lot of crap lately. And with the whole Snowden NSA thing (I know NSA, silence. From ME! Astounding is it not? Don't worry your pretty little loafers over this one though. I'll get to you people eventually) Google is taking a lot of crap for selling out and shafting those of us who use their products. But really.... you have to take the good with the bad. There's a time you have to go and show you're growing up. Being able to object to a principle while using a product as it was intended, to promote YOURSELF and the hard work that you put into things that you got excited about and made, is a grown up thing to do. Little kids get mad and take their toys home. Adults realize all systems are corrupt and learn to live within the system.

If you conscientiously object to everything then you will not participate in the commerce that is the world we live in. If you do that, if you fail to avail yourself of all the tools possible to make your life easier then you have donned the frock of sub-servitude, agreed to be the butler to Mr. Boddy without a means to be better than you ever were just because you don't like how cozy Google or anyone else is with the Powers That Be.

And that is where the PTB want you. If you don't participate they win. They win because they have beaten you and killed your spirit. They've chased you off of a grid that, if you and people who think like you would stay on and ride like a bronco buster, can be reclaimed in true Matrix fashion. You have to be in the Matrix to beat the Matrix. At least that is what I got out of three movies and a couple of over-buttered-popcorn gut aches.

Google give me great tools. And I love them for that. Google is in bed with the sneaky cheeky bastards in our Government and I'd bury it with a stake of Holly in its heart if it had one. But again... take the good take the bad take them both and those are the facts of our modern life.

Until we change it.

I should be asleep but instead I am rattling sabers at things with sharp teeth. Ah the joys of sleep dep.

add to the Lexicon....

Gnart: the contraction of the two words Gnome and Fart. I was dreaming of a conversation with Danie at work in the laundry room. The dream was just like any other day @work. And whatever Danie said to me I responded. But I only woke up with the second half of the sentence in my head... and laughing hysterically "..... crapping Gnart!"

Having told Danie this when I got to work today she decided that we would definately use Gnart for some such covert name calling.

Wallet Worm: the jobless, car or gas money-less, just got out of jail or dumped man or woman that expects you to support their "broke ass" with your minimum wage less than 40 hour a week job. When millions are at stake this is known as a gold digger. But since you haven't any gold it is a wallet worm. They get in through your heart and eat their way to the next target.

My boss invented that term to describe the one that is giving a co-worker fits. Everyone of us has had one and some of us have had more than one. We need a pesticide for this.

Favorite slang word uncovered

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

Now that we have cast the "no gremlins in the gears" spell for the month, let me tell you what I found out today. From Professor Mike Sheehan on "Words to the Wise", our local program for geeks and word smiths, someone asked where the word Fuck really comes from. Hey, it's my blog. I can say what I want and you don't have to like it or read it. Oh.. sure I could have warned you. Oops.

As Jodi is fond of reminding people at work, fuck used to be all caps. It was an acronym used by the judiciary to describe the crime of adultery without getting all gross and technical... you know, because nobody really knows what goes on behind closed doors [innocently whistling]. It stands for For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge which is a bit ungainly when you are writing in uncial script... by hand... with ink you made yourself because using your own blood is gross and wrong... unless you are a serial killer and then its somewhere in the SK handbook. But I digress. The term goes way back to about the 1400s. In fact, according to the Professor, it goes back even earlier and means something entirely different. What a surprise.

Under the heading of The Best Things Come from Germany is the term fuck. It shares its roots with Scandinavian farming terminology. I'm not certain of the spelling of the original word. The Scandinavian word probably is riddled with Umlauts or the goofy crossed out O. But most likely the Middle German word was spelled, simply, fuk and pronounced "fook". It is a verb that means to plant as with a dibble; to leave a seed in fertile soil. Commence with the metaphors.

A dibble, for you horticulturally challenged, is a stick marked at various intervals which helps a farmer/gardener determine the ideal depth at which to plant bulbs and seeds. Nowadays you can find fancy dibbles in most garden goods stores with nice cross handles and maybe a metal tip to preserve the point. It is short and a bit on the chubby side, tapered. Shove it in the ground, pull it out and there is a perfect hole for the kind of bulb you are planting. Innocent enough. *That is until our earlier wordsmith predecessors boozed up and tried to talk over some one's head which just put the whole conversation into the gutter... or more appropriately the compost heap.* So how does a simple word for planting in a specific method become one of the 7 words you can't say on TV? Interpretation, my friends.



*...* that little bit of editorializing was entirely mine. Well, so was the bit about the uncial script. Really, if you think writing long hand is a pain in the ass now, even though we have cool ball point pens and gel writers, imagine if you had to dip a pen nib in ink every few letters. And had to make your own ink. Now imagine you worked for a pansy-assed king that had to have everything done better or prettier than another pansy-assed king he didn't like which meant all the documents he signed had to have a consistent colouring to his liking or your head on a spike. Wanna borrow my Bic?

Do you know Victor Riley?

I found a blog that has been around for a while. It is well written and very entertaining. Victor is a fellow geek with all the questions and angst that comes with that territory. It is well worth a look. If you need more entertainment or you just want to feel like you are part of a bigger community of people who feel like you do then stop by.

In a lot of ways he reminds me of Wil. It takes conscientious focus for me to keep up with the references because of his various interests. But he writes very unselfconsciously. He also evokes the kind of stream of conscious/top-of-mind/lack-of-internal-editor that Rick Castle has. Fun and youthful in heart.

Victor doesn't post frequently so he'll be an easy follow. And the story of how he got his name is awesome. I think on some level those infectious private in jokes that spread beyond a group must be another hallmark of geekdom. We haven't had that kind of notoriety in our group. But we did manage a kind of generationality to the Denny's cup prank that warms my heart to no end.


BTW: I know generationality is not a real word. But we are wordsmiths... we can do what we want.

easy reference guide

This totally is not my invention. It belongs to the gang at Big Bang Theory. I am putting it here so that I always know how this silly thing works. My niece and I bond on yet another level that puts my brother somewhere outside of space-time.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that RPS opponents familiar with each other will tie 75-80% of the time due to a limited number of outcomes. So Sheldon suggests the following modification to the traditional RPS rules of engagement, henceforth known as the RPSLS Resolution.

scizzors cuts paper
paper covers rock
rock crushes lizzard
lizzard poisons spock
spock smashes scizzors
scizzors decapitates lizzard
lizzard eats paper
paper disproves spock
spock vaporizes rock
and as always... rock crushes scizzors.

lexicon

spatchcock

doesn't mean what you think it does. It is a term that refers to meat preparation thatprobably originated in Ireland. To spatchcock a chicken or a hen, use kitchen shears to cut out the backbone. Flatten the bird and tuck the wings in front of the fleshy part of the breast that has just been exposed. Spatchcock.

Who comes up with these terms?
And how old am I that I think this a funny word?

Bite my gizzard

and other geek idioms.

Bite my gizzard is the Wheaton's expression of kiss my ass/chewed my ass and in general is a great non specific, totally geek expression of frustration that can be spoken to the non-geek source of your frustration. Non geeks know it means something but are not sure what it is. And, as my sister and I found while playing Mad Libs, gizzard is a great funny word rarely used outside of poultry husbandry.

While cruising through my dashboard of blogs I follow I found another phrase:
to crunch a marmoset.

I have no idea for what it could be a stand in. It is vivid. It is the wrong species to rewrite "to kill a mockingbird". I don't think that there would be anything of a social commentary behind the marmoset like there was with TKAMockingbird.

When I think of marmosets with those big watery eyes I think of little kids in anticipation of forgiveness or presents. So maybe "to crunch a marmoset" will now mean "Way to kill my hopes and dreams you big stupid neanderthal of a human being". I think. I don't know. But I'll use it at work and see how it flies.

This new phrase has been brought to you via http://www.meinekleinefabrik.blogspot.com/ if you want to check out her stuff. And will someone tell me why the bookstore scene in her post looks so familiar?

Geek lexicon expanded

I love the fact that a geek always knows another geek not by the mismatched clothes, the load of technogadgets and/or piles of books they tote around but by the geek speak. Geek speak also tells you what kind of geek you are speaking to. The lexicon is vast and ever expanding. The following entries are courtesy of Castle:

Bam! said the lady: like Eureka but less succinct

Feed the Birds: An invitation or encouragement to support someone's cause

Shut the Front Door: the safe for everything version of STFU