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Show A6 Castle Valley Review, February 2009 The LIGHTER SIDE Dazed ‘Hullo there, you Dork’ James L. Davis My daughter recently provided me with a revelation about myself. I usually am not particularly fond of any revelations about myself explained by my daughter because they are invariably bad and almost always embarrassing. This occasion was no different. We were walking through a department store together when I had stopped to say hello to someone. As we continued on through the store my daughter looked at me and rolled her eyes. “You’re a dork,” she said. That was not the revelation. I already know I am a dork because my children begin calling me a dork within minutes of becoming a teenager. I just wasn’t sure why I was a dork this time. “Why am I a dork?” “Because of the way you say hello to people,” my daughter replied. “I just say hello, just like a normal person.” “No. You don’t,” my daughter stopped in the aisle and faced me with the same look of patient understanding and the same tone of voice you would have if you were speaking to a small child, or perhaps a puppy. It did help me understand a little better, I have to admit. “You always lower your voice and say ‘Hullo there.’ What’s ‘hullo there?’” “Well, that’s just insane. I don’t do that at all,” I objected. Just about then someone else walked by that I knew and so I turned to them and said “Hullo there.” It was then that I realized that yes indeed, I am a dork. Because I did in fact say ‘hullo there,’ as if News of the Weird Chuck Shepherd Lead Story Saudi Arabia is host to several camel beauty pageants each year (condemned as religiously fatuous by Muslim clerics), but the country's first goat beauty pageant was held in September in Riyadh, with the distinctive Najdi breed, featuring high nose bridges and silky, shaggy hair, taking top prizes. In fact, most of the goats in the competition had the same father, Burgan, whose progeny typically fetch the equivalent of $25,000 and up. Still, prize-winning show camels can bring 10 times that amount for the greater status they convey to their owners. Burgan himself did not appear at the pageant, according to a Reuters dispatch, because his owner feared that a jealous competitor would have an "evil eye" cast upon him. Cultural Diversity -- The Rental Society: Among the services available by the clock in Japan (according to a January BBC dispatch) are (1) quality time with a pet (about $10 an hour at the Ja La La Cafe in Toyko, usually with dogs or cats but with rabbits, ferrets and beetles available); (2) no-sex quality time with a college coed (flattering conversation by the hour at the Campus Cafe, less expensive than the geisha-type houses); (3) and actors from the I Want To Cheer Up agency in Tokyo, to portray "relatives" for weddings and funerals when actual family members cannot attend, or to portray fathers to help single women with their parenting duties, or to portray husbands to help women practice for the routine of married life (except for sex). -- In January, a federal judge dismissed the last lawsuit standing in the way of a new Indian casino for California's Amador I were trying to imitate James Earl Jones. I have no idea how long I have been greeting people this way, but it does help explain why people invariably have a nervous look about them when they are greeted by me. I had always assumed they were afraid my daughter might say something mean, like “you’re a dork.” Realizing that my simple greeting in public places made me sound like an idiot, I endeavored to try and come up with a better way to say hello. It’s far more difficult than it sounds. If you just say “hello” in a normal tone of voice it sounds like you really aren’t giving a greeting at all, so I experimented with different ways of saying hello that let people know I did indeed recognize them and was putting forth an effort to greet them. I thought I would try coming up with a great greeting by emphasizing different parts of the word hello. First I tried ‘helLOOOWWW there,’ which I rather liked but didn’t seem to erase that panicked look in people’s eyes when they realized I was speaking to them. So I tried “HELL-oh,” which I thought was pretty much perfect and could be used as a greeting for both people I was happy to see and for people I wasn’t particularly happy to see. But this greeting came across as a little confrontational, so I knew I had to come up with something different. Besides that, both of these greetings did absolutely nothing to alleviate my Dork Factor to my daughter, so I tried different greetings, such as “hey there,” “long time no see,” “looking good,” “good afternoon,” and “greetings,” all of which resulted in a pathetic shaking of my daughter’s head. It was then that I came up with the solution. Years ago I worked at a magnesium plant and it was my assignment to transport molten magnesium from the cells where it was created to the foundry on a large machine called a vacuum wagon. Because it was a large and complicated piece of heavy equipment and because you were transporting liquid magnesium that would cease to continue being liquid magnesium if you didn’t get it to the foundry quickly, us operators did not have time to stop and say hello to each other. Since it took both hands to operate this piece of equipment, we started waving to each other by using our head. Waving with your head is much like nodding with your head, but with added emphasis so that those you are waving to don’t think you are nodding at them, but that you are actually sending them a greeting. It involves lifting the head quickly and then tilting your neck to the left or right while raising your chin. It is a wave that has been perfected by heavy equipment operators, assembly line workers and those too lazy to actually lift their arms the world over. I decided to try the head wave instead of using a verbal greeting. So the next person I passed I gave a nice, friendly head wave to and then I turned to ask my daughter what she thought of this latest greeting. “Just pretend you don’t know me,” she said. So I shrugged and stuck out my hand in greeting. “Hullo there,” I said. County, where the federally recognized Me-Wuk tribe of the Buena Vista Rancheria has its 67-acre reservation. The tribe consists of Rhonda Morningstar Pope and her five children, none of whom lives on the tribal land. -- Parental Responsibility: (1) A father took his 20-year-old son to an Islamic court in Bauchi, Nigeria, in October, demanding that he be jailed for idleness, which he said has shamed the family. (The court immediately sentenced the son to 30 lashes and six months in prison.) (2) In December, a court in Seoul, South Korea, fined the parents of a teenage rapist the equivalent of about $60,000 for their negligence in raising the boy badly. (The 18-year-old himself is serving a 10-year sentence for the crime.) -- Twenty million Chinese have their residences in caves, but that is often not a bad deal, according to a December McClatchy Newspapers dispatch from Miaogou Village. In addition to the obvious advantages (e.g., no mortgage), some caves have been in the family for generations and have electrical wiring, plumbing and cable television, and some are part of communities of connected caves. Researchers said that earthen insulation keeps the inside temperature from dropping below about 55 degrees Fahrenheit even in the dead of winter. trapezium, alliteration and incisor but eliminating, for example, bishop, chapel, christen, minister, monk, nun, parish, psalm and saint. The publisher said the changes reflect Britain's "multicultural, multifaith" society. Questionable Judgments -- Political Correctness Update: (1) In November, the student association at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, voted to eliminate a cystic fibrosis organization from the list of charities it supports, explaining that since the condition almost exclusively afflicts white people, it was not "inclusive" enough to merit student funding. (2) In December, Britain's Oxford University Press announced the latest changes in its highly selective Junior Dictionary, finding room to add dozens of words, including -- Photographer Yeon Lee's exhibit in a London gallery in December featured a burqa-clad model, fully robed from head to toe except for a tiny opening, but that opening was not the typical one, for the woman's eyes. Ms. Lee's openings exposed only the model's nipples, highlighting, she said, "the ways women are categorized in male-dominated societies." -- Family Knows Best: (1) Evelyn Poynter, 86, had refused for months to leave her apartment in Pittsburgh and move in with her sister, Laura Stewart, 72, who had offered to take care of her. In December, according to police, a fed-up Stewart forcibly wrapped Poynter's arms, legs, neck and body in duct tape, tossed her in the back seat, and drove her home to Shaker Heights, Ohio. "There was nothing sinister," said Stewart's daughter, but still, Stewart was arrested. (2) In October, police in Elgin, Ill., said they were investigating an accusation that after a 13-year-old boy and girl broke off their relationship, the girl's mother ordered the boy to reconcile with her daughter by threatening to release nude photos of him that her daughter had taken. Creme de la Weird Among the medical oddities mentioned in a December Wall Street Journal roundup was "Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder," in which a person, when startled, would "jump, twitch, flail their limbs and obey commands given suddenly, even if it means hurting themselves or a loved one." It was first observed in 1878 among lumberjacks in Maine but has been reported also Continued on Next Page. |
