waste of money

One of the arcade games at the Tennessee Valley Fair gave me an "oh yeah" moment on Friday. During our recent road trip I saw what I thought of as an "Arkansas Slot Machine." I knew I had seen it someplace before but couldn't place it until I saw a bunch of them at the Fair. We had stopped to get gas in the Natural State. A female sales clerk in the convenience store was urging a male customer to keep trying to win a Razorback keytag for her. The device ate quarters just as fast as a slot machine in Vegas. If the quarters landed just right, they would push prizes and other quarters off the ledge into a drawer. The winnings encouraged the guy to keep playing. He won the keytag and some two-dollar bills, which the sales clerk bought from him.



I think that same store was making an effort to reach out to its Spanish speaking customers but with a Southern twang. A sign directed them to the banyo instead of el baño. Or maybe it was telling us all to go find a bathroom in Banyo, Australia.



At a convenience store in Corbin, Kentucky, I took a picture of some huge cans of energy drinks. Somebody told me that each of those large cans had more caffeine than any one person should consume but that the manufacturers get around it by printing on the label that each can contains two or three servings. As I snapped the photo, a local man pointed to one of the drinks and said "that'll crank your tractor!"

did you mean lookalike?

Before writing Thursday's post, I Googled the word hookalike and got only nine results, most of which were typos for "lookalike." There was only one tiny reference that was similar to mine. As of today, there are ten results. My site is listed second!

When I saw myself in the list, I tried clicking on "similar pages" to see what Google thought was related to my site. Here are the highlights of what they came up with:

• By Ken Levine - fair enough, his site is on my blogroll.
• AllAccess.com - the site of record for radio professionals
• Blogger.com - owned by Google, used by me
  
• FW Murphy - manufacturer in Oklahoma
• rosie.com - huh? can't figure that one out
• New York Post Online Edition Gossip - or just say Page Six
  
• Blog Flux - where I see how many (or how few) hits I received
• Paley Center for Media - a favorite place in N.Y. and L.A.
• Tournament of Roses - I've mentioned their parade a few times
• Frank Murphy Real Estate - I often get his email by mistake
• Access Hollywood - a show I watch every day
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers - used to have a Frank Murphy
• I'm Just Sayin' - for fans of Kevin & Bean
• jack.fm - a bit of an insult since it's an anti-deejay format
• Jefferson Bass - should be higher on the list, don't you think?
  
• Life In The Office - fan site for the best comedy on TV
• Metro Pulse - Knoxville's alt weekly
• Starlight Bowl - one of my favorite places in Burbank

There's one site on their list that I won't include here. It's got a bunch of Asian characters and the words "Credit Card." Why is it in my results? Because it has the same URL that my friend Bean used for his first blog. He posted every day for ten months and then deleted his blog, which is too bad because it was quite good and it would have been fun to re-read. Somebody swooped in and grabbed his user name and Blogspot address. After a year-long hiatus, Bean resumed blogging at his new site, Strongly Worded Letter.

pretty woman

Here's one for the Urban Dictionary. A young lady attended a recent church ceremony wearing a dress that was more appropriate for a nightclub. At least I think it was a dress. It was closer to a teddy. I've seen swimsuits that were less revealing. My daughter's friends have a funny word to describe a girl dressed that way. They called her a "hookalike."

I had a couple of possible blog topics rattling around in my brain during my son's swim meet tonight. I settled on this one (and assembled the first paragraph in my head) as we sat in a restaurant afterwards. My wife and I were having a fun conversation with another couple about our experiences at different parishes. They laughed when we told them about the hookalike. In a cool coincidence, when I got home I discovered a comment on yesterday's post from the author of a blog called Wordlustitude. It's full of funny made-up words similar to hookalike. Forget the Urban Dictionary. Now I want to see hookalike on Wordlustitude.

special guest star

There was no time for a nap because of the mini-makeover I received today. I'll fill you in over the next few days as the story appears in the News Sentinel and as my wife and I walk the runway at the Women Today Expo on Sunday afternoon. As it turns out, I do not get to keep the clothes, which makes sense since they are dressing me in an $800 suit. I could buy it at 25% off though. Fat chance of that happening.

I can get by tonight with a little blogging help from my friend Bean. If he had a blog, he would have posted the poem that he found online and emailed to me. It contains several examples of capitonyms, words that change meaning when capitalized.

A herb store owner, name of Herb,
Moved to a rainier Mount Rainier.
It would have been so nice in Nice,
And even tangier in Tangier.

Blog critics may correctly feel that my posting could use some polish but at least I didn't completely slough off tonight.