So. In a splendid case of “verbing weirds language,” what does it mean to “Bob Watterlond {someone}.”?
Bob Watterlond was an unassuming man. Somewhat stringy brown hair. Large glasses, with thick, square frames. Perhaps a little thick around the middle. A mustache much in favor today, but not in the late ‘80s/early ’90s when I knew him.
Which was at the LA distributorship of Gallo Wine.
Bob was the Credit Manager. Among his duties, he would collect delinquent accounts.
His method was charmingly simple. Bob would call the liquor store (or restaurant) and go, “Hello, Mrs. Kim. How are things today? The children are doing well? Great, great, glad to hear it. I was calling to remind you you owe Gallo Wine $167.47, and we’re not going to ship new product to you until you pay. OK, Mrs.Kim, hope you have a nice day.”
And then he’d call the next day, sweet as could be.
And the next.
And the next.
I guess things went to a formal collection agency after 28 days. But he’d remind you if you didn’t pay before then, his hands were tied when it came to what happened afterwards.
I’m reminded of all this because I’m Bob Watterlond-ing someone right now, trying to get them to produce a document to me.
Before Alfred Kinsey took up human sexuality, he studied wasps — thousands and thousands of them, whose bodies he minutely examined. Yet when asked what he could say about The Wasp, he replied that he hadn’t really seen enough specimens to generalize.
This song is on my extensive “Mysterious Café” playlist. “The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships.” I’ve joked for a while that with its combination of an ethnic Chinese singer, lounge-like sound, and moderately smoky vocals, it evoked Shanghai in the art deco 1920s and ‘30s. Now I’m paying more attention to this official video, and… It’s shot in Shanghai! And those lyrics!
I like looking at data. One thing I like is trends of names over time. Why? Because if you’re writing something, it makes sense the name of your character should match their age.
I like the Babynames.com site. It shows trends since 1910. (Though be careful. Enter names in the gray field right by the graph, not the darker one higher up the page — that way you’ll get results.) Here’s an example, using Jennifer, made famous for this kind of thing by the book Beyond Jennifer and Jason.
All right, but that’s not the only source. What about Social Security’s web site? (Go down to the “Popularity of a Name” box, and fill it in.) They’re using actual birth records as they come in.
The Social Security site shows a decline, just like Baby Names… but it’s much less sharp. What’s going on?
I had to think a while, and squint at the graphs, but I figured it out. In 1985, when the Social Security site tells us Jennifer was the 5th most popular name, the US birth rate (yes, it’s there, although not on the easiest site) was 15.461 births per 1000 people. In 2021, the most recent year listed, Jennifer was the 493rd most popular name, and the birth rate fell to 12.001 per thousand people — a drop of 22.4%.
Why is this important? Well, the Babynames chart is showing how many kids get a name. The Social Security chart shows the rank of the name among all others.
So while Jennifer was becoming less popular among names, people were having fewer babies in the first place.
Double-whammy. And that’s why the graph looks so much more spiky.
Yes, probably few people care. But it was a fun puzzle for me.
This comes from a sub-section of the original BBC Radio version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a bit intricate, so here’s the whole thing:
“May (or may not)…” pops up all over in my lexicon.
“Some of you may (or may not) remember the story I told…”
Although on re-hearing it, I admit a fondness for “Representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons.” Let alone, “(W)e demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
Lexicon. You’d think it wouldn’t come up much, but there I was, watching an episode of Property Brothers on HGTV, and after the reveal they were talking about how they had so much more “space…”
Taco Bell used to have a whole series of commercials featuring a talking Chihuahua. This was my favorite, a movie tie-in with a US Godzilla:
I like this particular one because of the ‘tude. “I can take him… I just need a bigger box.”
This reminds me of a prank pulled by Harvey Mudd College against CalTech. The two colleges have a longstanding rivalry, both being engineering schools. (A rivalry Tech’ers insist doesn’t exist — even as they think up their next prank.)
There’s a large cannon in the middle of CalTech’s campus. A group of enterprising Mudders decided it would be fun to steal it. They consulted a recent alum on how to do this. He reportedly got a faraway look and said:
“You guys are going to need a big crane.”
Not, “No, that would be wrong.” Not, “Have you considered what the jail terms might be?” No… You guys can take ‘em. You just need a big enough box. Er, um, crane.
