We asked how the staff did with their New Year's resolutions. And wouldn't you know it, almost no one made any. Sometimes that was intentional, as in Craig's "I resolved not to make any, and by Jove I stuck to it!" Other times, it was all we could do to make it through the new year, as Tina puts it: "Between a crippling fear of failure and an equally paralytic fear of success, I thought it best not to tempt fate. My New Year's resolution for next year, however, is to get back into therapy. Quickly."
Names that came up in response to a question about favorite scandals: Alec Baldwin (the paparazzi pugilist), Newt Gingrich (can't quite seem to draw those lines), CERT (something about security holes; we got that one from the hardware guy), Franklin Roosevelt (Roosevelt? It's a smoker thing...)
"My favorite scandal would have to be the Roosevelt tobacco scandal. In Roosevelt's New York hometown, there are a number of statues and monuments erected to the former president. It seems that the City Council (apparently because they had nothing better to do) got together to designate one of these monuments the "official" city monument to their favorite son. And they actually chose one, but on that condition that (get this) the cigarette was removed from Roosevelt's mouth.
"Now I sat still when the malls went smoke free. I stayed quiet when the non-smoking population treated me like I was a social leper for sullying the air outside when I ducked out to sneak a puff. I even remained calm when they took the cigar out of Manny's mouth on the Pep Boys sign. But this is tampering with history. This time, they've gone too far."
Asked about the randomest thought they had had this year, staff members came up with the following. Put together, it could be a sort of free-verse poem (though perhaps not a particularly good one):
"'...and under her own power too.' The groomsmen at a certain wedding will know what I mean, but they'll deny it for sure."
"The reason why I had never seen so many trucks in my life in one period of time before I moved to Pennsylvania is that I've always lived near the ocean, and where would they be going?"
"How odd it would be if there was more iron oxide in the atmosphere and it snowed red.
"As a secretary, I was taught to type all addresses on outgoing mail in capital letters, with no punctuation, (e.g., MR JOHN SMITH) so as to make it easier for the postal equipment to bar-code the envelopes. So, if a piece of mail were addressed 'properly' to e.e. cummings, would it be returned marked 'addressee unknown'?"
"I had a conversation a while ago about whether it was linguistically plausible to tell a bridle. The context doesn't really bear going into right now, but it involved jingle-horses."
"Plastics."
