daily prompt

Retailizations, Part Deux: Be Nice

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A coffeehouse in France (okay, that right there may be one of the greatest four-word phrases I have ever typed; one almost does not need to continue. Please return from your daydream when you feel up to it) …

A coffeehouse in Nice, France (oh, come on, does this anecdote just keep getting sweeter? The setting may as well be, “A coffeehouse located in Sweet Kisses in Everyone Is Always Smiling Land”) … and, yes, I certainly know that the city’s name is pronounced “neese,’ and not the easy way to a punny joke, but a pun is a pun. 

Three years ago, a coffeehouse in Nice, France, posted a new price board, seen above and explained in “This Coffeehouse Will Charge You Less if You’re Nice.”
Read More

Fly the W

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

When I moved to the Midwest in the summer of 2000, I learned that Phil Rizzuto was not the baseball announcer who had coined the phrase, “Holy cow!” I also learned that there was a controversy about this, and that, as a fan of the New York Yankees and a native New Yorker—and worse, someone unaware of any controversy—I was on the wrong side of said dispute. Born wrong.

No, I was informed, the recently departed Harry Caray was the first to use the phrase on-air and was the announcer with whom “Holy Cow!” should always be associated. Not the beloved Yankees announcer.
Read More

Four Is the Loneliest Number

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Wikipedia disambiguation page for the commonplace partial phrase “rule of three” lists nine items. Actually it lists 10, the tenth not being an example of the concept of the rule of three in day-to-day life but the title of a play; it may have been added by an editor simply to amuse himself or herself. (It was not me.)

It would be amusing if there were nine, because it would be a perfect example of the “rule of three” to have three sets of three things in a list of the possible definitions of that very phrase; it is comic to have 10 instead. (Nerds Unite!)
Read More