Friday, February 3, 2012

Search This!

"U" is for this?
This week, I seem to be in self-search mode.  So, I took a look at my search history, to see what deep insights Google might shed.  To be honest, I'm shocked, not to mention, appalled, by the weird sh*t I've been investigating.  Let's start with this:  "Seal's face."  Well.  This says so much about me.  Shallow SJG that I am, I've often wondered what caused those scars on his face, but I've never taken the time to Google it.  Finally, I had to know!  These days, Seal's face is everywhere.  On TV, on magazine covers.  When your well-advertised euphoric marriage implodes, enquiring minds want to know what up with that?   But no amount of Googling will reveal why Heidi Klum ended their super-glam, globe-trotting life.  At this stage of media blitz, it's all just speculation.  We won't really know what happened till Heidi spills it to Barbara Walters, or that perky up-and-comer, Katie Couric.  I figured, the least I could do was find out what's going on with Seal's face.  And I did.  It's a form of Lupus.  That sucks!  Moving on.

My next search, I promise you, says very little about me, other than I need to refresh my vocabulary: "Urial."  I have to tell you, this is a word I've never come across, not once in my 54 years.  "What the hey is this?" I asked Kelly, my writing partner.  Instead of writing, we were playing with her gorgeous daughter Kate, not quite two.  (Note how I said "hey" instead of something more colorful?  I try not to swear around Kate.  She's a little sponge.  Thanks to her mommies, she's already picked up a few words that will get her booted from pre-school.  I don't want to be responsible for her picking up any more.)

Now then.  Where was I?  Urial.  Right.  Kate owns some impressive alphabetical farm acreage, both educational and fun.  When you pick up an animal, a Godlike voice tells you its name.  "Cow!" "Rooster!"  Pick up the animal that resides over the letter U and you get Urial.  "It's a sheep," Kelly said.  "Then why isn't it under S for sheep?" I asked. "They needed an animal that starts with U."  "There must be an animal other than Urial," I said.  "Name one," Kelly said.  I couldn't.  All I could come up with was Unicorn.  But something tells me Fisher Price didn't want to launch a national debate -- "Unicorns:  Mythical or Real?"-- so they settled on the obscure, yet provocative Urial.  No doubt, Kate's early exposure to Urial will give her the upper hand in life.  She'll win spelling bees and scholastic awards, go to Harvard and earn three or four advanced degrees.  The SJG, on the other hand, will probably forget what the @#$% Urial means by the time I'm done writing this and have to Google it again.

3 comments:

  1. Fun Fact of the Day: In the 1970s Ringling Brothers got into a lot of trouble with the animal rights folks for advertising a real life Unicorn at the Circus. Turned out to be a goat who from childhood had both it's horns painfully forced into a braided single unihorn. Now if Ringling had just used a Urial they'd have had something..,

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  2. And all these years I thought a urial was a plumbing fixture in a men's restroom.

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