Blogging Into My Pillow
I hiked over to that health club near my hotel that I mentioned below, and it turns out they’ll let me pay $12 per night instead of making me buy some kind of membership package. I was delighted, as it’s a really nice facility, with a squadron of bikes and treadthings, a pool, and enough weight machines that I can replicate my Seattle Nautilus workout.
I started with 20 minutes on a bike, riding hell-for-leather into a horizon of 5 TV screens, each with a different station and subtitles going. There was ESPN milking the NBA draft lottery into a 2-hour program, an episode of Seinfeld, SportsCenter and (hiss!) Faux News. I’ve never spent a lot of time watching subtitled TV, and I found it sort of hilarious. They must use a software program to translate (I can’t imagine a basement full of cloned Archie and Mehitabels somewhere offshore, typing away as the program drones on). At one point in the SportsCenter show, the anchor was talking about a quarterback who had transferred to USC, and the text on the TV said, “and he’ll have three years of jibbletts left.”
I’m working here with a woman who does the manufacturing scheduling for my client, and she starts work at 6:30 am. That’s 4:30 am for me, for those of you keeping score at home. I’m a stay-up-til-midnight person at home, and it’s nearly impossible for me to be in bed by midnight when I’m in eastern climes. I was shooting for 10 pm tonight, looks like I’ll overshoot by an hour. Good thing I’m not real fussy about how I look for work anymore, I can get outta here pretty fast in the morning.
As I worked with this woman today, I realized that she was one of those people with so much accumulated knowledge capital that you want to hire a Hummer and a driver to transport her around town, with an armed guard to escort her between the building and the vehicle. I quietly called the state AG’s office and invoked Article XLVIII, wherein an employer can override an employee’s living will and require extraordinary means of prolonging her life, agony or no. Didn’t know we could do that, didja?
11:02 - Nailed it!
Yeah, closed-captioning can be very entertaining. Especially political jibber-jabber. Sometimes I wonder what the transcriptionists think about what they type out.
“Giblets? What the heck do they *feed* those athletes, anyway?!”
Imp - that’s exactly how it was spelled on the screen. The NCAA only allows a certain quota of jibbletts to a student-athlete during his career. Some schools try to skirt these rules by providing large quantities of stuffing and mashed potatoes, which are not regulated. The Jibblett Rule is a result of lobbying by Nike, which was concerned that Tyson would surpass them as the prime provider of athletic swag.
Well, I heard the training table at SC was good, but a three-year-supply of jibbletts?
Ah yes, accumulated knowledge capital. It’s the thing that sometimes can get overlooked. We called it historical memory at the university. Once you had it, you were worth way more than anyone could ever pay you.
Three years of jibblets? What could that possibly have meant in the real world of english?
Robin & Kathy - what the anchor actually said was “eligibility”.
You could have just packed a yoga mat. Yoga: the heart, liver, and gizzard of meditation and exercise.