Remember the fun we had two years ago with the letters on the marquee at the off-again, off-again running of the Serf Theater?
To review: Some time after the airing of “No Country for Old Men,” the management had a showing of “In Her Shoes,” starring Cameron Diaz. It was a flick my wife Bonnie and I practically slept through. The first rule of movie-watcherdom is to have a person we can admire, whom we can identify with, but in this movie, there were none. But I’m not a movie critic, so back to the marquee.
Certain unnamed people had fun playing marquee “Boggle” with the letters. The rule was to rearrange all the letters of In Her Shoes to create a different message. Someone waited until Easter to come up with “O He’s Risen.” Others were “Heroes Shine,” “Her Hose Sin,” “She’s Heroin” and “Hi, He Snores.”
Through all the letter rearrangements, nobody’s identified the person of letters, the ladder-toting man or woman who would wait till the dark of night to put up a new message. Well, that game lay dormant for months until just recently, with a new message, visible to people heading west. It reads, “Sushi Fridays.” Now that’s an interesting title, and we hope the movie it represents remains for a while.
The Douglas Avenue marquee is equidistant to two restaurants, Charlie’s and Dick’s. Could one of them be using the marquee as a menu? But if it’s a real movie being advertised, we wonder whether Sushi Fridays is anything like the ‘92 movie, “Sushi Sushi,” with a no-name cast. Or it could be of the genre that usually includes a night or day in its title, such as “Boogie Nights,” “Talladega Nights,” “Boulevard Nights, “The Days of Wine and Roses,” “The Longest Day” or “Arabian Nights.”
Even though the prospect of spending Friday nights contemplating sushi has its possibilities, it’s unlikely “Sushi Fridays” will make it big, at least nothing like “The (K)nights of the Round Table.” Now that was a great flick.
By the way, who was the fattest night of the Arthurian round table? You say Sir Lunchalot? Close, but it’s really Sir Cumference. Why? Because he eats too much pi.
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An Internet service provides a new word each day. Some offerings are pedestrian, but occasionally there are strange ones. One that came in this week is “pseudophake.” No matter what, that word just has to be related to something doubly phony. The term “pseudo-intellectual” describes someone who merely thinks he’s smart.
So, in the case of “pseudophake,” well, isn’t that like a double dose of fakery? Doesn’t it describe some classmate who wasn’t even good at being a phony? Far from it. The word describes a person who has had the natural lenses of his/her eyes replaced with artificial ones.
The definition by ArcaMax explains that “pseudo” refers to artificial, and “phake” means lentil or an eye lens that resembles a lentil. Yet, fake/phake and phony certainly imply a double negative.
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If two negatives make a positive, can two positives be manipulated in any way to make a negative? For example, the combination of “don’t” and “dislike” becomes a positive because “don’t” neutralizes “dislike.” So, what about two positives that form a negative?
The answer comes in considering the remarks of 700 Club founder Pat Robertson, who has his own explanation for the Haitian earthquake that has killed hundreds of thousands. Robertson said the country has been “cursed by one thing after another” ever since they “swore a pact to the devil.”
Let’s see if we have this straight: Satan himself appears with documents to be signed and notarized. “So in exchange for my helping you gain more freedom, you agree to let me sponsor a hurricane in the future,” Pat Robertson implies Satan said. “Sign here and it’s a deal. I’ll get to work on that earthquake real soon.”
Robertson’s declaration surely comes from one of several of his off-the-record chats with the Lord. How unmitigatedly helpful and prescient are his insights into natural phenomena! Note that this is the same person who suggested Katrina devastated New Orleans because God was angry over abortion
Now remember the two-positives-equal-a-negative issue above? Here it is, as it applies to Robertson:
Yeah, right!