Juan, who was famous for buying only cheap, used tools, found that when it came to chainsaws, he just couldn’t bring himself to use another man’s saw.
OK, Lily thought, the last of the annuals are installed in the garden, the patio pots are all filled and set in their places...it’s time to raindance, baby!
Juan noted wistfully the tools he’d acquired over the years at the flea market bore a cheerful rainbow of different colored neon paint marks signifying the contractors they’d been stolen from.
I close the blinds, but can still make out the shapes of the cars as they drive by the house, my paranoia growing with each passing blur.
the one comment you should never hear at mime school is “Now you’re talkin’!”
After inventing his decimal system, Melvil Dewey, the womanizer, was pleasantly surprised to find that his system also worked well for rating the women he seduced.
“Two years after her death in 1922, he married Mrs. Emily McKay Beal.” (Melvil Dewey entry)
While his friends Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were busy changing the worlds of industry and engineering, Melville Dewey was busy revolutionalizing librarianship and simplifying English Language spelling.
See from: Melvil Dui
See also: Adirondak Loj
For years Marian yearned to give her profession a name with a little more flair than that of “librarian”, a title which, woefully, locates her in the building in which she works.
Secretly, at the end of the day, she shelved all the 620s upside down and backwards, so that the next day she could tut tut and put them all right.
“Go,” said the head librarian to the misguided patrons with a wave of benediction, “and shelve no more.”
Having placed the nation under Librarian Law, the LSA could now be openly seen around the neighborhood, forcing in doors to “Dewetize” innocent citizens’ book collections, moving from home to home in what witnesses often described as “an unnatural, eerie silence, void of electronic beeps or rings, the soldiers’ sensible shoes leaving no sound, as if the sounds of the world itself had suddenly been swallowed by a sea of well-padded carpet.”
As a degree-carrying librarian, Lillian takes umbrage at the fact that people think she took classes in Shushing 101, Advanced Desk Monitoring, and had happy hours entitled “Hey! Check me out!”
For years now the sun has tried to kill me, and while I know I’ve started to lose ground, I haven’t given up the fight.
As inspired by: boot's smell
There is the perfume that has been your signature scent since your first encounter with it in Edinburgh, the one made by bright young whoosits in England, the one that smells of orange, pine, and patchouli and makes you smell of ginger ale when you put it on; there is the eau de toilette that you bought at a famous designer’s shop in New York, the one with packaging that made you wonder if the fragrance inside would be cloying and obnoxious, the one that turned out to be peppery and charming; there is the fragrance you bought at a spa in Arkansas, scented with essential oils of nectarine and basil, a scent that knocks you back to your suite at the writer’s colony with Proustian nostalgia; all of these fragrances are wonderful, and all have their place, but somehow there’s nothing like the French perfume that your sweet friend brought you back from Paris to remind you that there’s a reason that French perfume has the reputation that it has: namely, it’s beautiful stuff, and you cannot possibly help but feel pretty as soon as you put it on.
“The expression on your face just screams, ‘Beverage, please.’”
And the good Lord gave us extra facial hair as a 40th birthday present.
On long, night flights when the lights will be dimmed during sleeping hours, many seasoned women travelers make themselves comfortable in the following manner: 1) In the dressing room or lavatory (sometimes there are both), they quickly get into dark dressings gowns after putting their outer wear on hangers the hostesses will provide, or collapsible ones they have had the foresight to take with them; 2) They remove make-up and possibly add a hair net, but don’t go to the lengths of putting their hair up in curlers of any kind; 3) Girdles are often removed, and with them, stockings.
As he ran his hands over the smooth and dusty surface, he could, for a moment, feel the other’s hands and imagine the life once lived.
Even though the image in his hands was blurred, he still remembered every detail, every line.
Every fibre of his body was overloaded by the scent, and as he breathed it in, so he breathed in the memory of her.
As the sounds died away, he could hear her laughter echoing through time.
The sharp tang of lemons on his tongue stopped him mid-sentence and he suddenly felt a connection to someone he had long thought he had forgotten.
Joelle’s friends tell her she has to take charge of her life and live in the now, but Joelle just wants to curl up on her couch reading one presidential biography after another and live in the then.
As the Autumn leaf thwacked her sharply in the back, she was reminded that nothing stays the same anyway.
Good music originates somewhere in the spine.
Sometimes, even a duck can’t cheer you up.
The countdown begins…
I knew a man with hair so big that for years the sun never struck certain parts of his nose.
we know how to do it… as we danced away to this stuff the first time, had we any inkling that it would be used as the soundtrack for our own retirement parties, celebrated now among colleagues the approximate age of the children we had been so concerned to prevent, to whom it must seem as far away as big band music did then?
In one beautiful movement, the gentleman bowed and the woman swooned.
He must modify to modern usage the courtly, sweeping bow of the knight-errant, and the only way he can master it is to practice it in front of a mirror until he know how he looks.
As the gentleman in front of him removed his hat fully, Mr. Entwhistle knew that matters were about to be ‘on’.
If a man gives up his seat to a woman accompanied by another man, both men should touch their hats without actually removing them.
If a woman leaves her seat in a hotel lobby and forgets her fur piece, a gentleman picks it up and goes after her with it, then as he catches up with her, touches her arm lightly, hands her the forgotten scarf, tips his hat, and turns away immediately, as she thanks him.
As inspired by: Keith's Guest Scriner: Amy Vanderbilt, 1962 ~ Kissing In Public
There will come a time again, a time of valour, a time of gentleness, a time of panache, a time of love and of romance.
Of course, if a man does greet a woman in public with a kiss, he must remove his hat entirely.
The more the merr er I s y.
I am indivisible and in my prime.
My brand new home computer is twice as fast and powerful as any computer I’ve ever owned, yet it boots and runs half as fast because of the new and completely useless Operating-System-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.
As the world slowly turned plastic, Cletis had faith more and more would want to visit his brainchild, The Museum of Rust and Rot.
Her Scriner’s block was the size and shape of a small but potent rusty metal bird.
When her father spoke to him of the good book, Danny assumed he meant ‘of law’ and thus dating his daughter would always be a bone of contention between them.
When he was three, Joshua Siegel leaped off a pier into the ocean believing (until gravity and a nasty belly flop in the cold sea proved otherwise) that his last name was “Seagull.”
It turns out my father used to offer to take the dog on a walk every night so he could go over to his mistress’s house; and here I’d thought he was heroically selfless.
It turns out my mother used to offer to do the dishes every night because that was her way of carving some alone time out of her hectic day; and here I’d thought she was heroically selfless.
Lisa knew that even though she was nominally a professor in the computer science department, she was a de facto administrator in the school of hard knocks.
Sure, you can get bananas for a dime a bunch and mangoes fall off the trees juicy and sweet, but tell me where I can get a bottle of maple syrup cheaper than $50.
It’s true, no matter where you are in the world, people enjoy inflicting immovable song lyrics into your head.
“Hey, Tammy, you know that thing you were so keen about - you know the thing, we mocked you about it for days - yeah, can you present something to the staff about it?”
*You* stand back politely and don’t barrel onto the train before allowing the debarking passengers to leave first; *I* will not repel your pushing by pushing back.
*I* will wait for the walk light and walk between the lines in the cross-walk; *you* will sit there patiently in your fat-ass SUV for as long as it takes.
You can make my phone ring, but you can’t make me answer it.
You probably get this all the time, but you look just like Ugly Betty… only, you’re really, really pretty.
“There are certain clients,” Juan lamented to Patrick, staring bleakly into his Guinness, “who you can’t seem to ever get rid of and who suck the life right out of you.”
“I’m a foreign tourist who racked up $50,000 in hospital bills, should I pay or skip town?”
Clouds are a pretty neat invention, but people are a much better water transportation system.
O little butterfly from hither or whither have you flown?
It’s easier to work yourself to death than it is to train an employee to do it.
On the occasion of his wife’s 50th birthday (which he had completely forgotten, again) Julie’s husband sat on the couch watching the finals of “American Idol” eating Doritos, wondering vaguely where the hell Julie was and feeling a bit annoyed that no one was making him dinner.
On her 50th birthday Julie celebrated by having an affair from which she discovered (with joy and astonishment) she was orgasmic, she was multi-orgasmic, and her husband of 25 years was a complete and utter putz.
Not for the first time, Dick Peters rued the day he was born
With rising sea levels due to glacial run off everyone will be moving to higher ground.
“Without meaninglessness, how are we to recognize or appreciate true meaning?”
I can’t help but worry about what will happen to me ever since my Laz-E-Boy started licking its lips and staring at me with its intense blue eyes.
The president was speachless after his chief of staff reminded him that even dog scat floats
The drill seargent glared at me, his intense hatred pierced my flesh like a laser, as I tried, red faced, to suppress the giggle that threatened to ruin my life everytime he shouted at me to do my duty.
A long lost diary kept by the late French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre reveals that the only purpose in life is a pint of Guiness and a plate of hot wings.
On this day in 1973 underwear mogul Victor De Pantilones invented the thong following an unfortunate hunting accident involving his sling shot.
Half way around the world, the inhabitants snoozed fitfully under their blankets while ducks lurked and the mysterious lady plotted.
“You can go home today.”
“Dinner is ready.”
I’d shoot some craps with the grandkids, but damn it, they ain’t got any money.
Turns out that your total blogged words are added up at the end of your life and if you win, you’re given a brand new car.
Little did my shirt know that after being worn first to business meetings, then on weekends, then for painting, it would someday end up being bought at a secondhand store by a round old grandmother with a beautiful set of teeth and a ring through her nose.
we useta have some corkers: skyte? centerfold? coyote? even carrot is mia! sound off, scriners, wazzup??
tomorrow is the last day of regular classes, thursday being an “early release” day for the kids (“school’s out for summer!”) to allow us all of half a day to pack all our stuff and vamoose before they take away the keys; but tomorrow is also the date of my scheduled professional teaching “observation” and in my professional (in)capacity i just want to say: what’s wrong with this picture?
i have these spiffy tabs in my firefox viewer but i just looked up there and noticed that at least three of them are at present viewing scrine—gmail, scrine, googlereader, scrine, flickr, scrine, scrine…
but this is serious now: would somebody please tell me what happened to zappos, formerly the best shoe deal (and we all know how important are the shoe deals, or we should) on the web which, in 2006, sold nearly everything for 39 bucks but ever since 2007 doesn’t budge below 95?
“From now on, Jen, if [Customer X] ever talks to you like that again, or makes this kind of demand on you, you say ‘no.’”
“The order is affirmed in full.”
It’s not every day you need to locate an attorney in Manaus, Brazil, thank god.
I’m sure that Boot completely trusts sheep who admire each others’ three full bags of wool.
Steve, you and your wife may want to look into this.
Slowly but surely, I begin to better understand* Boot’s Grudknow’s distrust of ducks.
1. The reader should note that the phrase “begin to better understand” is often misused by this particular author.
Bah, who needs ‘em.
I won’t go so far as to speak for the others, because Lord knows I am having trouble enough already trying to find the words to express my own feelings on the matter, but for me, the realization that the man who’d stood before us all these past months, the man who’d joined our ranks with one of the strongest letters of recognition most of us had had the good fortune to ever look upon, who’d shown up for every meeting with a promptness that had impressed even the group’s oldest and most respected member, old starched-neck Sir Williams, the man who’d presented himself before us simply as Mr. Scrivens, was simply not there.
As inspired by:
‘mouse’s commentary on public weeing
Ms Tsk tsked and tutted her way down the street with such force that innocent bystanders were pushed sideways onto the busy road.
This just might be the best thing I have ever seen on television in my life.
It was only when Muriel got a look at the petition that she realized she’d been protesting at the wrong rally.
“Mr. Alonzo, sir,” called the boatman’s daughter, dropping anchor at the bottom of page 88, “it sounds like they’re making room for your soliloquy in Chapter 11.”
Meredith could not have cared less about Alonzo’s stupid soliloquy, because it was her missing gloves, after all, that the murderer would slip into somewhere around chapter 15 when he killed poor, unsuspecting Blanche.
This sentence, my 888th, is dedicated to Boot.
Yoga goes better with a six-pack, and I don’t mean good abdominal muscles.
After several chapters filled with what he thought was nothing more than unnecessary scenery description and second-rate character development, Alonzo finally found himself alone on the page and was just about to launch into his soliloquy—in his opinion, the book’s defining moment—when Meredith cut him short, bursting onto the page with some overly dramatic nonsense about a pair of misplaced gloves.
As I stand staring at all of the options for brownie mix, I am reminded that heresy means “choice” in Greek.
Today we rocked.
This is gonna be a real weekend - you know, the kind with nothing much to do, and two whole days to do it in.
They aren’t ‘just things’, they are physical, tangible collections of memory.
If I could be any building, I would be the Taj Mahal - still beautiful after all these years, admired by tourists, and looking forward to an all-over mud pack.
“I don’t mean to alarm you,” said the neurologist as Bronwyn stared in wonder at the blurry orbs on the film, “but the MRI never lies: Years of exposure to the packaging industry have given you the world’s first documented case of Badonkadonk Brain.”
The high retreated and she was merely left with shaking hands and a fading can-do attitude.
Every molecule in her body vibrated at super speed after the second cup of the miraculously super-caffeinated coffee.
By their very nature—round shoulders, leaning incline, etc.—the bird is in a constant, albeit fluid, state of stoop, making it unnecessary for the casual observer to use the word stoop when recording a description of the bird in their field journal, unless, of course, the bird happens to be standing on a stoop, although even then the bird enthusiast should never write stooped on stoop.
The kids are not “witnesses,” they are kids.
Next move?
All we need is one more good swift kick.
As inspired by: 'mouse's list of catchy Marjoram slogans
As inspired by: 'mouse's list of catchy Marjoram slogans
Marjoram - it’s the oregano wanna-be.
A tree highly recommended for its fruitage.
The world was changed for the good with the invention of the banana clock, though the time between ripe to brown wasn’t always entirely the same.
The secret agents who bug your car urge you to resist the fad of “going green” and exploring your public transportation options, because it’s so much harder for them to record your conversations on the subway.
”Which leaves us right here, in this murky no-man’s-land of vague dis-ease, this foul, anesthetized place where our brutal-war-that-isn’t-really-a-war has become the norm, a time when it feels like we as a country should be getting stronger and should be leading the world in everything from peacekeeping to environmentalism to medicine to technology, and yet we have this giant, bloodstained monkey on our backs, violent and ugly and still shockingly strong, and he is laughing, cackling at our feeble attempts to shake ourselves free, even as he eats at our soul.”
Though her heart was worn down and broken, as she turned in her seat she caught sight of something uplifting, something that shined.
I’m with him.
it must be nigh, right? the end?
1) Not your average aromatic Eurasian perennial.
The contractor smiled, his true feelings hid,
While the customers bemoaned the price on the bid;
“If they could they would whip me,” the contractor thought,
“Bind me in chains as if I’d been bought;
Then they’d let me out mornings to dig in their yard,
And do all the work they thought was too hard.”
And the raspberries are lucious ripe nipples!
I think that I have never seen
a fruit as lovely as a strawberry.
Life could be worse; it might not be cherry season.
It is in laughter that we glimpse the divine.
I have lost my ability to convince strangers of outlandish things.
Every morning Henry carefully rewound his sanity rubberband.
The government’s new evacuation plan for the city includes an enormous phone tree and your neighbor’s truck.
Today I’ll be climbing into a creek to install an irrigation pump, knowing full well that the creek is the water supply for the nearby small town, and even though I know the town has a good filtration system, I can’t help but wonder if someone, somewhere, won’t be putting down their glass and saying, “Hey, this water tastes like shins.”
Today we will have another ultrasound and I will ask the technician, “Is the baby sound?” and if the answer is anything other than, “Dude, this baby’s ultra sound!” I will be sorely disappointed.
If the birds don’t quit stealing all of the cat hair off of my back porch, I’m afraid it’s going to lose that charming Southern backwoods feel I’ve worked so hard at attaining; what are they going to do next, carry off the recliner and washtub?
Many mistakenly believe in two types of men’s blue jeans—clean and dirty—which completely ignores one of the most overlooked kinds of all—clean enough.
Scrine - it’s like a post-it-note for the creative brain.
as i perused the various titles on the shelves of the local movie rental outlet, i saw it - a wild Scrine!
Sometimes, on a Monday, I come to Scrine for some cheer-me-up or weird-me-out entertainment and then, sadly, I realise it’s still Sunday night for most of you.
I hadn’t realised I was feeling “worn and broken down by hard use” until I looked up this word.
I am raging fire sometimes, warm enveloping sun, or soft water over stones; I am always your mother, and I will always love you.
I’ve grown tired of searching for unused name combinations for my stories, so I’m sorry, but some of you out there in the world are just going to have to put up with whatever I decide to do with you.
Mitch Langley’s women troubles didn’t start until the day he turned nine, unless of course you included his mother, which Mitch didn’t, because as any guy with any sense at all can tell you, mothers aren’t women, they’re mothers, for God’s sake, and mother troubles are not women troubles, no matter how you shake it.
Julio said a quick prayer to the god of natural gas, made the sign of the cross, and then began to cut the old gas line with his Sawzall.
“Well that play had more laughs than the Marquis de Sade.”
The Encyclopedia of Life sounds awful exciting, growing larger and larger as information about every known specie on Earth is made available to everyone, but I can’t help but already feel sad, knowing that thanks to one specie in particular, it won’t take very many years before the Encyclopedia is riddled with dead links.
The singular of Moses is Mose
Not something that everyone knows
Who added the S
Is anyone’s guess
But probably God, I suppose.
Thanks to The Limerick Edition, Carl had a much easier time with God.
Thou shalt not spend beautiful Spring days indoors.
Rich people don’t necessarily have better junk.
The primordial puddle of words lurked at the pond’s edge awaiting its chance to transform.
My local bank is offering a free toaster with each new account—really and truly—so what will it take to de-lurk Scrine’s lurkers?
Apparently, the German equivalent for pish-posh is papperlapapp, so ‘mouse is right again; Germans get all the good words.
They’re not just for wearing, they’re also lightning rods for conversations with strangers.
Brevity have I not.
Bronwyn surveyed the wreckage of her desk, contemplated the fifteen emails she received in the last 20 minutes of her day, and announced to no one in particular, “I’m thinking of a word, three syllables, first two syllables: ‘cluster.’”
“Thish isn’t very heavy,” slurred the Nyquil-intoxicated surgeon as he wielded the laser-scapel.
Henry’s defense to the charges—which would result in death by decapitation if he was found guilty—were primarily a plea for clemency because he would have no place to hang his many hats in the afterlife and besides, he had recently gotten a haircut that he liked very much.
The world is a duller place without Keith.