five things tagged “random stuff”
The Master of Plastic Chairs
Bryan Ropar is a plastic chair connoisseur and expert. Here’s his ranking of the Top 100 Plastic Chairs (couldn’t find the ranking criteria.)
Mondegreen
A mondegreen /ˈmɒndɪɡriːn/ is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.
Never been able to follow the lyrics to most songs and have done this for as long as I can remember. Things can be misheard but there are intentional mondegreens as well:
A similar effect was created in Hindi in the 2011 Bollywood movie Delhi Belly in the song “Bhaag D.K. Bose”. While “D.K. Bose” appears to be a person’s name, it is sung repeatedly in the chorus to form the deliberate mondegreen “bhosadi ke” (Hindi: भोसडी के), a Hindi expletive.
11th Hour Panic
Shturmovshchina was a common Soviet work practice of frantic and overtime work at the end of a planning period in order to fulfill the planned production target. The practice usually gave rise to products of poor quality at the end of a planning cycle.
It has three very, very familiar stages
- Spiachka (hibernation) – this is the first third of the planned period. Nobody’s doing anything, mostly because there are no orders to do anything
- Raskachka (buildup) – at this stage it is more or less known what should be done, but there is too much time ahead, and during that time the requirements may change, as well as the management;
- Goriachka (fever) – this is the last stage of the planned period; by the end of this stage the product is supposed to be ready, or the management may be reprimanded; everybody works like crazy, with the bright future being so near.
Unposted FTW
'Posting’ in the pen world refers to what you do with your pen cap while you write [. . .] when you put the cap on the back of the pen while you write, regardless of whether it pushes on or screws on with threads.
and
[. . .] what do you do with the cap? Do you put it on the desk? Hold it in your hand? Both of these would be ‘non-posting’ or ‘unposted’ writing methods.
I write unposted, have done so my whole life, and think that people who post are weird, pitiable, and simply wrong.