squirrels just wanna have fun

Several months ago I started having problems with my right ear, and now I can’t hear out of it very well. As a result, when I watch TV I was turning the volume way up to the point it was disturbing my neighbors. So I enabled the "closed caption" function on my TV so I can keep the volume down. For the most part, the captions follow the dialog very well, but some things get lost in translation. For example, one night on the entertainment news, the topic of the story was Halle Berry, and the captions stated "the 410 year old new mom is doing just fine..." Wow, Ms Berry looks great for her age! Must be all that free makeup she gets from Revlon. Anyway, there was an interesting story on the news tonight about the 11 sets of multiples at the North Crowley High School. In the captions, every time the word "multiples" came up, it would print out "mullet tims" or "muscle tims." I don’t know if it’s possibly the reporter’s annunciation of certain words, or if the closed caption device just does not recognize certain words. Anyway, I do really like the closed captioning function, in that sometimes when I can’t understand what’s being said, I can look down at the bottom of the screen and there it is.

Does anyone else out there in blogland use this function on their TV and have you noticed any words that aren’t translating?

So I was driving back from Harvard on the Highway this afternoon, and as I was getting closer to home, I could see that huge mass of metal known as the new Cowboys stadium. I understand it’s more than halfway complete. I suddenly had a flashback to 14 years ago, when me and my friend Morgan were driving on I-30 back from a trip to the Infomart in Dallas, when there in the horizon, I saw it, in all its spectacular glory, the new Rangers Ballpark! Ah, what a beautiful site it was. My soul filled with a strong sense of pride, and with the hope that all true blue Rangers fans have: that someday, in this cathedral of a ballpark, My Boys will finally win it all. I don’t know why I just can’t get excited about the new stadium.

I was thinking about my grandmother today. She passed away when I was a teenager, and I am thankful that I have so many sweet precious memories of her. I remember that I never once heard her call my mom by her first name, she always called her "Sister." She even called me sister ("Now sister, stop playing with the fire or you’ll wet the bed"), and still I’d throw more newspaper in the fireplace and poke at it, nope, never wet the bed. Old wives tale, just as I suspected. And I also knew of a girl who always called her brother "Bubba," even though his name was Brian. I never called my brother bubba, but the names I did call him—well, they just aren’t fit to print here (nor are the ones he called me, Lordy be!). Just kidding, I never called him any naughty names since I wasn’t allowed to swear at all. And then there’s the grandparents names. We simply called ours Grandmother and Granddad. My friend Tiffany called hers Mamaw and Pawpaw. I always liked them, and I’d call them Mamaw and Pawpaw, too, and they didn’t seem to mind.

Anyway, does anyone else in blogland have any special nicknames they remember, from way back when, or any you’ve heard or used recently?