some slightly amusing locutions-

My sister has quite the menagerie in the library - tonight, she said, "The crickets are escaping all over the library. Alvin (an intruding chipmunk) must be delighted."

"Yeah, Alvin would eat those critics," I answered. "Crickets, I mean!"

"I wouldn't want to be a cricket," my sister continued.

"No, everyone is always after critics," I responded.

"It's no wonder they have such long legs," she said. "They have to leap all over the place."

Oh, the perils of being a critic! I mean cricket! I must have been more tired than I knew.


Slightly later, I was discussing the very odd behavior of one of the older macs at work, which seems to want to give up the ghost. I began talking about clean reinstalls, etc, and my sister responded, "Technobabble! Do you know, there's someone who actually wrote all that technobabble for Star Trek?"

"Is there, really?" said I.

"I don't know. 'The Transponders are all offline, captain,'" she answered. "Transponder - that's ridiculous. It sounds like a British Air flight. "

That is does! I must now go and hunt up system disks before I fall asleep - I need to attempt that clean reinstall tomorrow, if possible.