Tenser, said the Tensor

It's Like Christmas in X

A couple of days ago I said, "It's like Christmas in September," then later in the same day a friend who wasn't around when I said it said the same thing.  Today, I read "It's like Christmas in October" somewhere (that's a blog citation, BTW).  Synchronicity gets me curious, and curiosity leads to blog posting, so I fired up snowclone.pl (even though this isn't really a snowclone) to find out how frequently each month occurs as a filler in it's like Christmas in X.

This I Believe #34

...that in David Bowie's song "Dance Magic Dance" from the film Labyrinth, the part of the chorus that goes:

Dance magic, dance
...
Jump magic, jump

...should instead go:

Pants, magic pants
...
Junk, magic junk

Note the commas.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I can only suggest that you probably didn't see the movie on the big screen.  Boy, that was a lot of information about David Bowie.

(For those of you keeping track, yes, this the second "The I Believe" post in a row that's about the lyrics to David Bowie songs.  Will this trend continue?  No man can say...)

Biden's Throbbing Network

"So Senator Biden's neural network for America wasn't just activated, it was throbbing."

(From this Language Log post.)

It's a measure of how much more dignified a writer Mark Liberman is than I that he did not follow this sentence up with, "Hell, it was more than throbbing, it was downright engorged.  It was turgid with activation, I tell you what."  I think this calls for a CafePress bumper sticker that says "Joe Biden's Network for America"—it's what all the fashionable linguists are displaying on their cars this election season.

Laid Plans

Let's see, at the moment, I have:

• 15 books in my "to blog about" stack—that is, books I've already read but not written about, not books I have yet to read
• 36 entries in my "notes" file outlining additional posts, some quite detailed, and some of which are nearly as old as this blog
• 134 lists of phrasal pattern variants produced by running snowclone.pl on those patterns

Hmm.  I really ought to post something.  Wonder how I'd go about doing that?  Maybe there's a button or something.

This I Believe #33

...that in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust", the phrase "making love with his ego" was intended to have an instrumental, rather than comitative or reciprocal, reading.

This I Believe #32

It should be considered false advertising to claim that a car is propelled by a "Hybrid Synergy Drive" if that car is incapable of exceeding the speed of light, or, at least, of achieving high-γ sublight speeds.  Here's a rule of thumb: if you didn't have to adjust your watch when you arrived at your destination, no hybrid synergy occurred.

So Smooth

"It's so smooth.  It's like a future machine, but it's not."   - Actress Laura Harris, plugging Honda's new hydrogen fuel cell car, after having been flown to Japan for the rollout ceremony.  Well said, Actress Laura Harris, well said indeed—I'm sure Honda's not regretting the price of your plane ticket now.

LOLDARMOK

If you enjoyed the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok", you should check out this strip from the webcomic chainsawsuit.  [Thanks to Matt Treyvaud of No-sword for pointing it out to me.]

The Cats Did What-now?

Another reason to love Wikipedia: there I was, minding my own business, reading an article about Olive Oyl (whose name, I learned, is a pun on "olive oil"—it's true!), when I stumbled upon somebody's creepy foot-fetish interpolation:

Unlike most modern damsels in distress, Olive Oyl has short hair, is tall, skinny, with enormous feet that have been tickled on several occasions.  Once tied up on a ship and having her shoes taken off, milk was spread on her feet and licked of by cat's she was laughing very much.

OK, now I know way too much about Olive Oyl's feet.  What's more, that's a run-on sentence with a dangling modifier, a misspelling of off, and a greengrocers' apostrophe in cat's.  Oh, and [citation needed], I think.

This I Believe #31

Eye cannon shall obey.