ivman's blague

Recently I saw a word on a website that sent me searching for its definition — aibohphobia. I knew it was a fear of something, but of what? I learned that aibohphobia is "the irrational fear of palindromes." I then remembered a list of palindromes my readers and I had compiled a while back. The date on that file was actually about 10 years ago, and I can find no evidence of ever having published the list, until today.

In case you don't know, a palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of units that reads the same forwards as it does backwards, and, amazingly, has nothing to do with Sarah Palin! According to Wikipedia, palindromes date back at least to 79 AD. The palindromic Latin word square "Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas" was found in Pompeii, buried by ash. Not all the words in the square are palindromes, but the overall effect is palindromic. The word palindrome itself was coined by English writer Ben Jonson in the 1600s.

I also learned that the word aibohphobia is a made-up joke phobia. Just stare at the word for a few seconds and you'll see why it's only a joke. With that in mind, I wonder why palindrome isn't spelled palindromemordnilap?

Anyway, here are the palindromes submitted so long ago by my readers.

One-word, letter-by-letter palindromes:

Bob
civic
level
solos
rotor
radar
kayak
redder
deified
reviver
racecar
rotator
Hannah
Ogopogo (a mythical water monster)
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Life is busy right now, playing catch-up after last week. So for today's "instant vacation" I'm posting three short jokes about what people know and don't know.

A man went to see his doctor because he was suffering from a miserable cold. His doctor prescribed some pills, but they didn't help.

On his next visit the doctor gave him a shot, but that didn't do any good.

On his third visit the doctor told the man to go home and take a hot bath. As soon as he was finished bathing he was to throw open all the windows and stand in the draft.

"But doc," protested the patient, "if I do that, I'll get pneumonia."

"I know," said his physician. "I can cure pneumonia."
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A family member called recently to ask my help in converting a measurement for some flooring they were getting ready to do. On the packaging the manufacturer had put the measurement in inches, rather than metric. That would have been helpful, had it not read 11.42 inches! Over the phone and through websites with conversion tables, we tried to figure out the closest fraction of an inch, rather than decimal of an inch. Crazy, huh?!

A reader sent me a picture of a sign that struck him funny in a grocery store:

I wrote him back to say I wasn't able to read everything on the sign and so I wasn't sure what he was amused by. He wrote back to say that he found it amusing to say that they had 16 oz. pound cakes. If you live in a country that uses metric measurements, you might not get the humor in that (16 ounces = 1 pound).

Recently I came across a map of how Americans seem to view the world:

I also saw this map that shows how most of the world sees America:

With all of the preceding in mind, I remembered a classic iv that really should be part of my blog archives.

Useful Conversion Units:

2000 mockingbirds = two kilomockingbirds

Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = Eskimo Pi

2000 pounds of Chinese soup = Won ton
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After reading the title of this blog post, some may be asking how anyone can disturb a headline. Of course, it's the headlines that are disturbing us. Between natural disasters (earthquakes, snow storms, rock slides, etc.) and man-made disasters (you can supply your own...), many newspaper and magazine headlines are so disturbing right now that I thought I would try to cheer my readers up with some headlines that they could laugh about. The humor in some of the headlines below results from nouns being mistaken as verbs, and vice versa. In others it comes from misplaced modifiers or just unfortunate wordings.

Reagan Wins on Budget, But More Lies Ahead (With that being old news, something more up-to-date would be Obama Wins on Health Care, But More Lies Ahead)

Blind Woman Gets New Kidney from Dad She Hasn't Seen in Years

Fund Set Up for Beating Victim's Kin
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Many people are careful about what they eat, striving to eat a balanced diet each day. When my dear wife Becka used to teach nutrition, she covered the USDA's Food Pyramid with her students. If you click on the thumbnail picture of the food pyramid on the right, you can see a larger version of it. If you would like to read more about it, you can go to the official USDA site or to another site that has several optional food pyramids.

You may be wondering what all that has to do with Pringles. Let me explain. Our grandson Drew, who just turned 3 on March 9, loves Pringles. I've never been crazy about Pringles, especially if "real potato chips" were available. (My wife and I grew up on Ballreich potato chips in northwestern Ohio, and so we judge all other potato chips by them.)

Recently I ran across a picture online that was a little disturbing — three flavors of Pringles that I had a hard time believing really existed. It started me on some online searching whereby I discovered not only that they do indeed exist, but they are among many other surprising flavors of Pringles — I found over 80 in all! This post is much longer than usual, but it's almost entirely pictures that I think you will enjoy looking at.

The Pringles brand of potato crisps was first sold in the United States in October 1968, originally known as "Pringle's Newfangled Potato Chips." Procter & Gamble chose the "Pringles" name from a Cincinnati telephone book, having been inspired by the street name of Pringle Drive, simply due to "its pleasing sound." According to the patent, Pringles were invented by Alexander Liepa of Montgomery, Ohio, and Gene Wolfe developed the machine that cooks them. Other snack manufacturers objected, saying that Pringles failed to meet the definition of a potato "chip" — Pringles have less than 50% potato content. Pringles eventually opted to rename their product "potato crisps" instead of chips. This led to other issues in the United Kingdom, though, where the term "potato crisp" refers to the product that Americans call "potato chips" and where "chips" are French fries. (Complicated, isn't it?)

Below are pictures of the kinds of Pringles I found online.
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