In which a nascent blog is named and nominally explicated.
The summer of the year after I (Patrick) returned from Barcelona, having spent nine months with the incomparable Alvarez family, we hosted a 15 year-year old friend of theirs, Nicky. Nicky’s English was spotty, but he learned a lot in just 6 weeks and, along the way, coined a few terms which have stuck with us. In no particular order:
Food for dogs – A generic judgment of dislike, as in: “I like FC Barcelona, all other soccer teams are food for dogs.”
You will be dust – A generic threat, containing equal parts affection and creepiness. Often used alone, in sotto voce. Pronounced: “You weel be doost”. Sample dialogue:
Me: Hey Nicky, can you help me take out the garbage?
Nicky: Ok. You weel be doost.
And finally,
Everything else, plastic bag – A statement of extreme contrast and worthlessness. Plastic bags, apparently, were one of the most despicable objects in Nicky’s world. When properly employed, this term followed the naming of something, in fact the only thing, which was not judged worthless, as in: “I like olive oil. Everything else, plastic bag.”
For whatever reason, Nicky popped into my mind when Morgan and I were trying to name this blog¹. Morgan being half-asleep, I nominated, seconded, and unanimously approved that it should be our masthead. Morgan tried a last-minute filibuster, but I caucused with Gita and got a veto-proof majority. The name is not intended to mean that we think that all other blogs are plastic bag, nor that other bloggers are. It is a name full of hydrocarbon-based polymers and fury, signifying nothing. Which may or may not be apt.
¹ The only other thing that was occurring to me was to use the awesome powers of the Random Video Game Name Generator: http://norefuge.net/vgng/vgng.html which was giving me suggestions like:
Sensual Helicopter Overlords
Go Go Lowrider in the Salad Kingdom
Blazing Penguin Experience
Nihilistic Octopus Insanity
and the must-have game of the year: Frankenstein’s Cheese Hop-A-Bout
All of which should be considered as worthy substitutes for EEPB, if that phrase really isn’t doing it for you.
The question is, has Nicky approved this blog? And, while I distinctly remember those first two phrases of his, the third must be something you picked up during a later visit.
But I like the name and I’m glad to be the first to comment (go Greenwich Mean Time!) and I’m sending this link to all the people I know who’d want to track your wacky thoughts.
In the future, can you make your blog entries shorter and funnier? Maybe, just call me and give me a quick summary. Then you can tell me when to laugh by saying “this cracks me up…”
If you insist on continuing to write these time consuming blogs that are ruining my life, please follow these directions:
1. Write heh, lol, or haha in parenthesis whenever you are trying to be funny. Heh can be for when you are attempting snide.
2. Anytime you could put a picture of Jessica Alba in that people would enjoy more than your drivel, do that. You can try out other angelic avatars of God, but that one works for me. Tom Brady is a close second.
3. You need to up the cynical nature of this blog substantially. We can’t really buy in until you are telling us who to hate. Once you direct our hate and unify it, we can accomplish anything. My suggestion here: our single friends. They are ruining my life.
This is all I could think of for now. Please don’t disappoint me. I am prone to massive bouts of cyber-rage that have, in the past, cost the lives of my ugliest neighbors (and nearly my Playstation 2).
Morgan and Patrick,
Good to hear you are (sort of) alive. We miss our trail buddies who make pancakes a 15 minute hike away form their campsite.
Cheers,
Cassie and Chase in California
Is there any chance/danger that at some point, this blog itself may become plastic bag? What if someone if referring to this blog and says, Everything Else, Plastic Bag is plastic bag. I mean, I see no risk of that happening, but gosh, it could get confusing.
Wheee! Another for the blogroll! So much better than work. Plus, now I know where to go with all my blog etiquette questions. Thanks, Mr. Colin JT Woods!
This will be the first blog to which I have subscribed. I am very noncommittal about such things. I don’t like other peoples’ ideas filling up my head. Tacky things ideas, they stick. But I approve of Morgan’s vocabulary and Patrick’s nonsense. Also, I am looking forward to telling on people. By telling I mean tattling. For example, Colin kicked the Playstation 2.
http://www.newser.com/story/42031/bloomberg-calls-for-plastic-bag-fee-in-nyc.html
Note the comments of the sighing East Harlem resident. “We’re paying taxes on EVERYTHING ELSE. Why not PLASTIC BAGS, right?”
Are you working for Bloomberg now??? Is this blog a not so clever ruse for perpetrating evil government plans? (I hope so.)
I love this whole plastic bag concept…it is really catching for instance I just saw a commercial by Arnold Swartzenegar and instead of using his catch phrase “i’ll be back” he said “Come to California…everything else, plastic bag.”
Yes, yes, my reporting is way behind schedule. Blame my feckless husband and our nonstop sojourns to New York, where he flies and I take the bus. The bus which alleges to have internet but doesn’t. Anyway…
Blogfans, I hope you backtrack to the blog’s early days to read this comment, because it contains shocking information which will forever change the way you see Patrick, this blog, and, most importantly, bovine anatomy.
Newsflash: Patrick slapped more spin on the origins of this blog than Sarah Palin did on Turkeygate.
Nicky (and his plastic bag comments) popped into Patrick’s head while Patrick was talking to ME. Morgan was upstairs napping on the couch, and Patrick and I were outside doing something legal, non-sexual, and yet unmentionable on this blog. Something we’ve both vowed to stop doing when the year strikes 2009. The twist.
But don’t you see, my bloggy friends, Patrick TWISTED the truth. I don’t even appear in this post. And that, obviously, is the real problem. Why would I want to read something if I’m not in it? Especially since I bothered to be there in real life.
How can we ever trust him again?
Oh, and for those of you actually demanding something about bovine anatomy, I give you this:
http://www.vetmed.lsu.edu/eiltslotus/theriogenology-5361/bull.htm
i was drunk when i joined this blog…it’s kinda cool that we’ve never met and kinda tragic…alas, this is “david’s wife”, the chimera living at the bottom of laughing brook (it’s a real brook! really! right behind our house….it flows and flows and dumps out romantically in a yellowish fizz at the saxton’s river bridge AND if you cock your head musingly to the left one can hear laughing?) now that you are gone, well, i miss you….i’m going to click on “submit comment” and have no idea where this ends up because you are my first blog…so in the spirit of keeping me even more mysterious because at this moment i’m a mythical monster sleeping off a date with a vodka bottle in a cold ass brook who doesn’t have the foggiest iota of a grasp on the ideals of strunk and white, i must leave and interact with children whose parents say things like, “i wouldtna’ thrown her out th’ winda’ in i’d known she was pregnant!”