A few days ago I was walking home. I met a young couple on the street. The man didn't get much of my attention -- not an obvious threat, therefore effectively a traffic cone. The woman was a brunette in a nice blue dress that somehow rang a bell in my mind.
I knew I'd seen one like it before, in the media, but I couldn't place it, or recall who had worn it. I cudgeled my brain for a minute or so, but couldn't place it. I puzzled and puzzed 'til my puzzler was sore but no luck. And then I thought "What would e2 do?".
So I imagined a writeup called "little blue dress" and I thought to myself "What are the soft links?" And myself said "intern" Aha! Mentally following intern takes us to a new imaginary writeup. And "What are the soft links there?" Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Eureka! (And then an unfortunate mental image of Bill Clinton running naked down the street, a cigar in his teeth. Bad brain! Bad!)
Ah, helpful yet pernicious web site, how you both tangle and untangle my thoughts.
The Toronto Transit Commission has a safety program that allows women traveling on its bus lines during late hours to ask the driver to let them off between stops. This program is regularly announced on the subway system. Unfortunately the recorded announcement has a slight irregularity in it. It goes something like this:
The TTC "Request Stop" program
<beat>
offers women travelling alone on buses between 9:00pm and 5:00am
<two beats>
the option to ask the driver ...
.. and so on. The strange part is that the
<two beats> in the recording are just long enough for the brain to assume the sentence has ended, and parse it thus:
The TTC "Request Stop" program offers women travelling alone on buses between 9:00pm and 5:00am.
which sounds like some sort of
escort delivery service. And having parsed it this way once, I hear it like this every time. At least once every single work day. That can't be healthy.