Scene of the Crime Leads To Surprising Conclusion

It's pretty quiet on the home front just now.

Pookie and Son-in-Grace are on a Harley motorcycle somewhere in Big Sur, Stu is back at work, and Emily Blue and Third Child are out shopping for a replacement radio for his car.

It appears that some time in the night, the Anti-Santa and his orcs helped themselves to the original. They also relieved TC of his short-wave radio from his emergency "Go" bag, his iPod, and an uber-cool teeny Bluetooth headset from the glove compartment.

Oddly enough, they left behind the brand new hiking GPS we bought him for Christmas and a year-old Bluetooth headset. We're guessing they were more "urban opportunist" hooligans than your back country, "Rocky Mountain Man" outdoorsy types. This character assessment was further developed by our crime assessment/grief counseling crew over some sympathy dim-sum.

Fact: they had also left behind a low-end sleeping bag, a pair of almost new rock-climbing shoes, and an ultra-light portable cooking stove.

Fact: also rejected from the thieves jolly red sack of stolen goods was a fetching straw cowboy hat left over from this year's Halloween festivities.

Fact: they also passed on a really urban-hip-cool Navy pea coat, one of TC's favorite garments. (Hey, not all facts fall neatly into place in any crime scene. We're still trying to figure out the pea coat and second Bluetooth headset....)

As the heat of the violation began to subside (somewhere around the second sticky rice), TC mused that thieves really should be more polite. "If I were a thief, I'd at least take the time to leave the connector wires behind so the original owner could hook up a new radio without having to rip the dashboard apart. Also, I'd leave a little note thanking them for all their stuff, and a list of the most compatible replacement radios for that brand of car. Also, a nice note wishing the car owners a Happier New Year, perhaps with a P.S. reminding that it is better to give than to receive." If it were me, I'd even consider bring a dust-buster along to tidy up all the mess that ripping a radio out of a dashboard creates. Anyway, he was right. Thieves don't have be rude. They're just choosing to be rude."

I love my kids.

Lypp, Utterz, and Gaboogie: Sounds Like A Drinking Game, Right?

Commenting on the ridiculous nomenclature that has emerged in the Web 2.0 start-up-a-thon, John Murrell crafts this doozy of a sentence: "Gaboogie has refocused its business and is now called Lypp. It could face competition from Foonz, with its new offering, Utterz."

Indeed.

It's comforting (and oddly up-puffing) that as odd a title as I chose for my own foray into Web 2.0 with my blog this year, at least they were all real English words, guaranteed to conjure recognizable physical realities in Anglo-oriented brains, pink, fluffy and otherwise. And I didn't succumb to the temptation to futz with them, either, even though I could have without losing the connection to real "you can stick your finger in this!" meaning. For example, I could have called this little rag, "Pink Fluffy iCing 4 Brainz" and been really iN WiTH THE hiP MARKETiNG CROWD. Or with just a little tweaking that would have emphasized the erudite literary content of the blog of my dreams, I could have opted for "p_Ink Fluffy" and just left y'all wondering...

Of course, in the wild and wacky world of Web 2.0, it's always good practice to google*, well, everything, but especially potential names for newly hatched web sites (and a blog is sort of that.) And what, you ask, lands at the top o' the list in a Google search for "pink fluffy"?

Pink Fluffy Corset Gallery and On-line Corset Shop: the worlds largest corset emporium. Now stocking latex!

Indeed.

It might have made for an interesting business opportunity as a pass-through portal to a classy burlesque troupe. But in the end (ha! sorry), it would have not been worth the risk. One can only imagine the untold hours I would have spent deleting spicy comments and crafting letters of explanation/apology to the children and in-laws.

Snigger as we might at the "Lypps" and "Utterzs"** and "Gaboogies" of the world. You can bet your bottom Bux.com they did their Google "what shall we call ourselves?" homework.

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*When Oxford says "google" is the word (verb) of the year for 1998, and its somewhat shaggy cousin, Merriam Webster concurs, who are ANY of the 20 of us to quibble? Not me, that's for sure. (I actually did quibble once with someone on a different and unrelated topic but found it far too delicate an undertaking for my liking: no contact. I far prefer gently flicking my opponent on the forehead until they cede the point.)

**Not at all sure that would be the correct spelling of the plural "Utterz," but that edgy uncertainty is part of what makes being a linguaphile such an exciting and annoying to others experience.

Merry Christmas To All!