This is not quite how it happened, but an unreasonable facsimile thereof.
One day I was driving my kids around town (as I am apt to do), and a traffic scenario required deft reflexes. The kids enjoy being slung around in their car seats, so they laughed. When they asked what happened, I told them it was an “evasive maneuver”. They weren’t familiar with that term and were being silly, so they interpreted that as “invasive manure” and started saying that. It was funny. That’s one of those word combinations that I’ve never heard before. It might’ve been said at some point in history by someone*, but I’m not aware (and I’m not putting that in my Google search because I don’t want news articles about manure, nor do I want to know anything about such things — some rabbit holes aren’t worth going down, particularly ones filled with invasive manure). 🙂
* It’s amusing (to me, at least) when I hear a phrase that has possibly never been said before. Such events are rare, but with kids they do happen sometimes if you’re paying attention.
There are quite a few Christmas carols with unusual lyrics, which many people seem to ignore because it’s tradition to sing them. One of them is “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”, where in later verses, singers demand hearers to “bring me some figgy pudding” and then exclaim, “We won’t go until we get some”. I’m not sure how I’d react to carolers on my front porch demanding me to feed them some obscure food. (I recommend watching the Phineas & Ferb Christmas special, where the wanna-be evil scientist Heinz Doofenshmirtz finds himself in that exact situation. It’s funny.)
I can’t recall ever eating figgy pudding, nor do I know much about it, so I looked it up. There’s more to the story than you probably care about, so here’s a summary:
1) It’s not pudding, and it may not even include figs. 2) Sometimes it includes meat. Or a hard animal fat called suet. 3) Sometimes it is served ON FIRE! 4) It has more in common with a fruitcake than pudding. 5) One historic recipe used 13 ingredients to represent Jesus Christ and the 12 disciples. It included a sprig of holly on top to symbolize the crown of thorns. 6) When people sang that they wanted some and wouldn’t leave, it was likely poor people having fun at the doorsteps of the wealthy. Sometimes wealthy families did hand out money or treats to carolers (although demanding it still seems weird). 7) It sometimes contains alcohol, and can remain edible for a year without refrigeration. 8) It was mentioned in the 1843 book “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens: “Mrs. Cratchit entered — flushed, but smiling proudly — with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quarter of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” (Do any of the movies show this scene with it on fire?) 9) Ingredients can include figs, plums, raisins, currants, oranges, cherries, cranberries, citrus zest and juice, along with notes of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and allspice. 10) It dates back to the 14th century. Initially it was a meal of subsistence, not a dessert. It was made of meat, root vegetables, and dried fruit, stuffed into a sheep stomach and boiled for hours if not days. So basically a pottage, but boiled until firm. It was held together by the flour and dried fruit.
The recipe has changed a lot over the years. Initially it was made with whatever ingredients you had available (which was much less then).
So when you sing, “Bring me some figgy pudding… we won’t go until we get some”, now you know. Personally, I’ll pass. Maybe we need a modernized version of that verse… A modern take could be hot chocolate. If carolers are going to demand some food or beverage in exchange for singing carols outside someone’s house in the cold, hot chocolate makes sense.
It’s that time again… So here’s more funny / innovative / impressive Halloween costumes.
Sure, you can make your own cosplay costume. Making it look realistic is a lot harder than you might think.When you create your own costume, it’s good to get a second opinion. It shouldn’t look like you’re wearing a diaper…Even Sauron gets sweet cravings… Just don’t mess up his order!I don’t know what happened here…Some things shouldn’t be supersized… this is scary!This is high quality! The attention to detail is impressive. This took either a lot of time or money. It’s almost too good for trick-or-treating — this should be at a comic-con cosplay contest.
Car horns are very one-dimensional. We might use it for multiple purposes, but it always sounds the same. So what if you had different buttons for different types of car horns to serve various purposes? For example, if the car in front of you at the traffic light fails to notice the light turned green because their phone is interesting, you can let them know. Or maybe you want to get someone’s attention but it’s not an angry or dangerous situation. Mark Rober has designed an upgrade for the standard car horn that I really like.
It looks doable for even novice engineers and not very expensive, so it would be a good DIY project. But why stop where he did? His is built for functionality, which is good, but what about fun?
Notice that he said you can load any wave file you want. (A wave file is like an MP3, just uncompressed. It’s just a file that contains music or sound effects.) Wouldn’t it be nice if you had some buttons in your car that played certain sound effects or music clips on-demand within the car? There’s much potential for fun here. A couple of ideas:
1) The obvious idea is fart sounds. Your passengers would be amused (or maybe annoyed in an amusing way), and you could use it to punctuate your conversation. A few people have “Active Gas On Command”, but most of us don’t, so if you haven’t experienced that, just imagine someone saying, “Every time Donald Trump speaks it makes me feel like” [pushes button] PHVRRRT! (Yes, some people actually have the ability to do that.)
2) Dramatic music — This could be clips from movie soundtracks to set the general tone for a few seconds, like if you wanted to activate stealth mode (e.g., the Mission Impossible theme), or you need to speed up to pass someone, or if you’re in a hurry.
3) Sound effects — Back to the idea of adding emphasis to your conversation, you could have the losing sound from the TV game show The Price Is Right, or the buzzer from Family Feud, or the pseudo-sad sound of a trombone going wah-wah-wah-wah (with the pitch going lower each time). I’d have a clasp of thunder for dramatic emphasis. (That would be so cool!) You could also have a thunder clasp followed by The Count from Sesame Street laughing, for anytime you say a number. You could have the transforming sound from the original (G1) Transformers cartoon. Maybe you’d want different car engine sounds — like a muscle car revving up or broke-down-barely-running sounds.
4) Vocal clips from movies and TV shows and YouTube videos:
“We’re in hot pursuit!” by Buford T. Justice in Smokey and the Bandit
“YEE-HAW!” by Bo Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard
“Ain’t nobody got time for that!” from the classic meme
“Wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world?” from Dumb & Dumber
“Crazy Taxi!” from the arcade game Crazy Taxi (story in the comments)
“MUWAHAHAHA” — an evil laugh from a mad scientist or evil genius
various sayings by KITT from Knight Rider
“Inconceivable!” from The Princess Bride
5) Prank sounds — If you have friends who strongly dislike certain sounds or songs, you could have it queued up for the right moment. Regular blog visitor Mango-Man would certainly hear the Sanford & Son soundtrack — I don’t know why it bothers him, but it’s a good time to play it around him. You could also have general-purpose clips, like to Rick-roll someone with that Rick Astley song. Or play part of the Macarena.
This would be the audio equivalent of an animated gif in a text message. It needs to happen…
Buffet o' Blog 