Off the Top

Truth: The wonderful thing about long-sleeved shirts is…you can roll up the sleeves.

Seen at the ghetto coffee shop down the block: A magazine from 1968 with an article entitled “COMPUTER DATA BANKS: Do they know too much about you?”

Some congressman had started a committee to investigate the all of these “data banks” with airlines and hotels and so forth and discover how nothing was stopping anyone from connecting them all with phone lines and making all of that information easy to retrieve…Interesting enough.

CM reacts, “What makes more sense the word databank or database, personally I would say databank.”

So it seems we have a new (dead) word on our hands that must be used. Database, henceforth you shall only answer to “databank”!

It’s that time of year again. Yes boys and girls, It’s time to remind everyone that I will not be using the ever more popular “Happy Holidays!” or “Have a great Holiday!” greetings. No sir, you may rest easy tonight as I’ll be using the tried and true “Merry Christmas!” again this year.

Pet peeves:

1. “[blank]-esque” This is a disturbing trend. It started with music reviewers writing “Beatle-esque” (wouldn’t it be “The Beatles-esque” anyway?) and now you can regularly hear a baseball broadcaster bellow “Barry Bonds-esque” or a political pundit proffer “Bill Clinton-esque”.

2. “the whole [blank] thing” Yet another of the wearisome phrases we use to give the lazy automatic rythym to our speech. Recently, this one has achieved ubiquity. Example: “I don’t do the whole coffee thing”.