Kinda Funny

Late this afternoon I was walking into Office Max in Midland when I saw a Blue Lakes Charters & Tours bus drive past. There was a man riding ON TOP of the bus. Just sitting there and holding on. I'm not kidding. I wish I had jumped back in my truck and followed the bus. I think it was going to the fairgrounds nearby. It was very strange. In other news, today was opening day for Little League baseball, so Elliot played in his first game. I'll post more on that later.

This video of the traffic pattern at an intersection (purportedly in India) is kinda funny:

via Boing Boing, the web site for the simplified spelling society has a bunch of cute poetry illustrating the goofy-ness of English spelling rules. For example,

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

From the April 15 installment of The Writer's Almanac, "Headlines" by Robert Phillips from Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems, The Johns Hopkins University Press:

Headlines War Dims Hope for Peace. Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead. Miners Refuse to Work after Death. Include Your Children When Baking Cookies. War Dims Hope for Peace. Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Experts Say Prostitutes Appeal to Pope. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead. Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half. Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide. War Dims Hope for Peace. Stolen Painting Found by Tree. Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead. Iraqi Head Seeks Arms. Police Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers. War Dims Hope for Peace. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead

Click here to watch The Daily Show's take on the study (see previous blog posts here and here) that showed prayer didn't help the recovery of heart patients.

Jon Stewart: "So, a stunning result that shows no matter what anybody does, over half the people that go in for heart surgery in this country develop significant complications. Hey, know what we should be praying for: Better heart surgeons."

and

Jon Stewart: "But a study that shows prayer actually does more harm than good. Come on! I'm hard pressed to imagine that's got any real world application. Or wait." [Bush speaking January 23, 2006, at Kansas State University] "I am, uh, sustained mightily by the fact that, uh, million of citizens, for whom I'll never get to thank personally, pray for me." Jon Stewart: "So that's what went wrong!"