Past Participle of Eat.

Have you ever been making a list of thing you recently did and did not eat and suddenly been struck by the desire to know the precise definition of the word “eaten”?

Me too!

Here is the one that comes up on Google and the only reason I am bothering to put it up here is because I really thought that it was dead on. So well-written of a definition that there is really very little I could do but simply shrug and go, “Yep, that’s what that means.”

1.Eaten past participle of eat (Verb)
Verb: 1. Put (food) into the mouth and chew and swallow it: "he was eating a hot dog"; "she watched as he ate".

I like to believe that there is a man out there who is considered to be the greatest living writer of definitions. His coworkers and contemporaries secretly hate him. Women (albeit librarians and Sophomore English teachers) want him, and men (albeit librarians and Sophomore English teachers) want to be him. His reputation proceeds him. His services are unreasonably expensive. He only writes by quill and he always has a monocle in his vest pocket but never puts it on.

Anyway, I bet he is the one who wrote that. That’s just how good it is.

.
.
.
P.S.
It now dawns on me that the definition above does not actually use the word “eaten”, so perhaps he is not as good at his job as we all believed.
.
.
.

Stuff You Have No Reason to Care About.

A list: Things that I am most certainly not, but might have enjoyed being if the circumstances of my life had been different somehow.

A botanist - I find plants fascinating! And weirdly soothing.

Someone who jogs – There is something about jogging that intrigues me. It has something to do with self-discipline and sustained physicality out in the world.

Someone who enjoys getting up early – The morning always seems like such a nice place when I am hauling myself off to bed.

A rock climber – I have known a couple of people who climb stuff for fun and it always seemed cool, sadly my lack of coordination, balance, eye-sight and my small hands have always prevented me from trying.

A gentleman caller – Not sure that this is really something that one can be anymore, or rather, no one would recognize you and call you a gentleman caller. In fact I’m pretty sure that is just means, “Hey this guy came by to see you because he’s trying to romance your clothes off,” but I think that we’re all so post-Post-Modern that we just say, “Hey this guy came by to see you because he’s trying to romance your clothes off.” Also, I realize now, that ‘gentleman caller’ is or was probably a ceremonial position in 1970s gay New York discos.

A glass-blower – I have always though that glass-blowing is badass, but please see above about coordination, balance, eye-sight, small hands. I mean, am I really the guy you know who you want handling molten glass around puppies and children and stuff?

One of those people who goes to Antarctica to extract ice ‘core samples’ – We all saw that one X-Files where the people doing this got some weird spore or something and it made them all want to kill themselves and/or eachother, well despite those dangers, I still think it would be fun to fly down there and land on an icerunway and live in an icelaboratory and sleep on an icebed and eat snowcones all the time while I am doing whatever science it is that I am doing down there.

A travel writer – I still hold out some small hope of getting to do something like this one day.

Someone who can dance – I would love to know how to dance, really dance. No, I do not watch Dancing With the Stars, but I did discover that there is a dance studio around the corner from my apartment. Sadly, I – unlike Steve Martin – do not have rhythm.

A starship captain – Yeah, I think that we all acknowledge that I would rock the socks off of this job.

Power Forward for the Washington Generals – Because why the hell not?

A radio DJ – I have always thought that I would be a perfect overnight DJ somewhere. I would get to say whatever I want (because no one is listening anyway) and play whatever I want (because no one is listening anyway) and I would get to have a cool DJ name like, “The Red Baron” or “The Commissar” or “The Midnight Music Magician”. Come to think of it, those would all be pretty good super-villain names too.

A Super-Villain – I think I have the chops for it.

A gardener – Like someone who has a garden and gardens herbs and tomatoes, not like someone who makes their living working illegally for Lou Dobbs.

Someone who owns and sails a sailboat – I think that this would be called a yachtsman, but that doesn’t seem like a dignified word to me, for some reason. Anyway, I like boats, in so much as I have been on a few, and I LOVE the insides of boats. Everything is so specifically designed and though-out and crammed together, but in an efficient way, it is like that demo 800 sq ft apartment in every IKEA, with the bed fitted into the bulkhead just so, that sort of thing. I occassionally even find myself thinking that the insides of RVs are cool for this reason too (RVs are not actually cool though, sorry).

A cartographer – I think that I like this because of the romance of maps, not so much because I find land surveying particularly interesting (I’m sure it probably is, I just don’t know enough about it, though I do recall liking “An Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain” and thinking that cartography seemed as charming as pre-solicitation-arrest Hugh Grant. Man, what was he thinking? The guy was dating Elizabeth Hurley when she was ELIZABETH HURLEY for christ sake!).

Gay – I would totally be gay except that I’m not attracted to men at all (sorry boys), but I do like theatre, bed and breakfasts, shopping with women, wine more than beer, Super Bowl commercials more than The Super Bowl, nice clothes, Madonna, George Michael, scented candles, and a nice bright scarf (sorry if it seems like I’m just rattling off blatantly and cartoonishly stereotypical qualities of homosexuality, no offense intended, but none of this stuff makes me Chuck Norris, you know what I'm saying?). Also, it should be pointed out, none of this makes me Metro, Metro is a totally different thing that involves a lot of product and looking in the mirror. If you have seen me lately, you know that I neither use product or look in the mirror.

A fencer – I totally want to learn how to fence! I think that it would be pretty fetch.

The guy at the Oxford English Dictionary who gets to decide what new words are included – I know that this is probably not the job of a single person, but fuck it, I want this ‘duck (‘duck’ is going to mean ‘job’ as soon as I get this job, I mean duck).

.
.
.

Oddly Enough.

One of my favorite places on the internet is the Oddly Enough section of the Reuters website. For months they were the only ones covering that mysterious story of a Chinese man who ran into a wall so hard that he killed himself. Then there was the story about Japanese smokers who got so stressed out about all the government-mandated smoking labels on cigarettes that they ended up smoking more. Why are these things not reported on elsewhere?

Here is a new one that only Oddly Enough seems to be concerned about:

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

That’s right! From now on this:

That cry-baby bumble-bee is on my water-bed! What a low-life!

Looks like this:

That crybaby bumblebee is on my water bed! What a lowlife!


So chew on that for a little while.

Or maybe you would rather read about a cat with prosthetic legs. It is up to you.



.
.
.
.