biting the wax tadpole

I have no idea if there's going to be an FFOT tomorrow today (last night stupid Blogger.com went down like a binge-drinking fratboy after his skateboard wheel hit a crack in the pavement); it seems that "It Comes in Pints" may be disabled a while longer (if not permanently).

So I have my list here. Because it's been one of those weeks, folks.

Because I try to keep the language on here mostly PG-13, or at least no worse than you'd hear on the most strongly-cautioned episode of The Simpsons, I decided I needed a good euphemism for that action that the FFOT alludes to.

It hit me today, as I was pulling out of my drive this yesterday morning (and luckily it hit me, instead of my hitting my pecan tree, which is once again hard to avoid because you can't SEE at 6:45 am now). Anyway: my euphemism for that particular anatomical impossibility is related to a (supposed) literal translation of the brand name Coca Cola in Mandarin.

Mandarin is a tonal language. As far as I understand that, it means that the inflection of your voice when you speak changes the meaning of a phrase or word - sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly.

So anyway, depending on how you pronounce it (supposedly; as I said, this is an apocryphal story), Coca-cola translates to either "bite the wax tadpole" or "Female horse stuffed with wax."

Well, "bite the wax tadpole" sounds unpleasant enough, and it's close enough in spirit (at least, in my twisted psyche), for it to substitute.

So, with no further ado, here is the list of fornicating fornicators (thanks, Val!) who can bite the wax tadpole this week:

Daylight saving time can bite the wax tadpole. Because I do not like driving to work in the dark. Driving to work in the dark feels wrong. It feels like going on a nice date with a guy you met just recently and at the end of the evening, finding out that the "nice guy" was actually Courtney Love, in a suit, with her boobs duct-taped to her chest and burnt cork rubbed on her chin to simulate 5:00 shadow. And that there's an MTV film crew hiding behind a potted palm at the restaurant to tape your reaction. (Shudder. I apologize for that mental image to all the hetero ladies out there. Heck, to all the gay ladies, for that matter - my guess is Courtney Love is probably none of y'alls dream girl, especially not Courtney Love in drag).

And Congress, for extending the horror that is DST, can bite the wax tadpole. I am guessing that many of their days do not start before 9 am, so they are totally unaware of how flipping miserable it is to truck out of your house and feel like it's still midnight, because the sun won't be up for almost another hour.

And anyone who claims it "saves energy" - you may also have a bite of that wax tadpole, because I honestly cannot see HOW. I still am awake from 5 am until about 7:50 am when the sun comes up. Last week I could turn the lights off at, say, 7:15 am. This week I must wait until 8:15 am for it to be bright enough to do that. Yes, when I come home at the end of the day, instead of switching the lights on at 7 pm, I switch them on at 8 pm...but I do not see any net savings. And there actually was a study - I think in Indiana? - showing that it had no effect on heating and a/c, because when you get up early in the cold winter (which is SUPPOSED to be Standard Time), you turn up the heat, and when you come home in the summer, and it's still blazing hot because the sun's still out, you turn up the a/c.

Oh, I also remember reading somewhere that the oil companies liked DST and pushed for it because they thought that extra hour of light would get people out tooling around in their cars in the evening. (Maybe not so much now, in the era of $3.25 a gallon gas). But there's not much energy saved there!

Other things that have been a burr under my saddle this week:

Time bandits can bite the wax tadpole. Look, I don't care that you're retired and have nowhere to go, and so this supposedly 4 pm to 5 pm meeting is your social time and you'd love to stretch it out until 6 - some of us are dead tired from our days and we don't care about your discussion of the arcane members of the town's leading families. We don't want to hear about your other volunteer work. Yes, yes, you get a nice gold star for it, now can we move on?

People who change the rules without notifying the people likely to be affected can take a big hard munch of that tadpole. This happened on campus this week - someone changed something important, something that affects me and several of the other faculty in my department, and I only heard about it second-hand. The claim has been made that the change was made in January, but NONE OF US WERE TOLD. So now we have to scramble to fix things that we could have easily fixed if the power-mad individual in charge of this particular decision could have been non-passive-aggressive for two minutes and actually e-mailed us a heads up. And for that, not only does the person get a bite of that petrolatum tadpole for screwing us over, they also get a second mouthful of wax for being a Time Bandit. Because several of us had to go into emergency find-a-fix mode, which none of us could really afford to do today.

Assessment can bite the tadpole, big-time. Look, isn't it enough that our students graduate, that they get into professional schools (including some pretty damn good professional schools), that they get good jobs in their field, that we have some pretty highly places graduates in various state agencies? Why do we have to keep writing BS "pre test post tests" where we're testing the poor kids to death, and where we now have subtle pressure to "teach to the test" instead of teaching what is really the right thing to teach. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can't spell "assessment" without A-S-S.

People who drive slowly, and wavering all over the street, because they are talking on a cell phone can chomp down on the paraffin polliwog. Just because you are in a RESIDENTIAL area and are not out in the DANGEROUS TRAFFIC of a main thoroughfare, does not give you the right to weave all over the road and be a dangerous block to the people coming up behind you (and for that matter - be a hazard to the kids walking home from school in the neighborhood). If you can't walk and chew gum at the same time, hang up and drive.

So that's been my week. Thanks be to all that is good that next week is my Spring Break.