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06/20/2003 Entry: "Don't throw your cat out the window."

Woody Allen said, (I believe in "Sleeper") "I'm like a cat; I always land on all fours," thus inadvertently altering the meaning of the expression. But it does nonetheless seem to be true that cats can survive really really high falls, according to these readers of New Scientist. That does not, however, mean that you should test it out.

The Visual Thesaurus is ... a thesaurus.
But it employs a crazy tricked-out Flash actionscript-powered navigation remeniscent of . It's sweet.
Thanks to Topher Seezen for the link.

Today on my way to the laundrymat, I saw a streetcar waiting at the light. No, not the 45 meter long one I mentioned last week in class, nor was it one with tinted windows and a wetbar in the press-conference section as I would envision some kind of Dresdnor Cidizen Gääne would have. But along the length of the left side of the tram were these words: "Heartfelt greetings-- You are riding in Dresden's 60th streetcar!"
"You" was capitalized, so you know they meant "you" and not "they".
I am much too small to have a decal of my own as to answer the tram's said greeting, so I just said to the streetcar, "no, I am not". I was, indeed, not riding in any streetcar at the time. I was walking down the sidewalk. Furthermore, I said that the decal was on the left side, where there are no doors. It was as if the train was taunting me. Schadenfreude is the word we use for that kind of thing in English because we don't have a word for that.

I was nevertheless shocked and appalled, so I first tried to find some way to rationalize my way out of the fact that the tram actually enjoyed that I had to schlepp my oversized dufflebag of dirty laundry all the way down to the salon, several hundred meters yonder. So I thought:

Frist, Maybe I really just mistook the capitalization. "Welcome! They are riding Dresden's 60th tram!"
That couldn't be right, though. It doesn't interest me what people inside the streetcar are doing. And it would also underscore my non-inclusion of the privilege of riding along ol' number 60. DVB can be so cruel...

But I should mention that I am loosly translating here, as there is no continuous tense in German. So, "you ride" could mean "you are riding" in some contexts, but it can also mean "you will ride".
That would make sense as to why it was printed on the non-door side. You will ride streetcar number 6-0 when it comes back the other way in about 30 minutes. If it were on the door side, though, it would have to say that you are about to ride the 60th streetcar Dresden has ever known.

That, of course, would make the decal words too long, so then you would have to bring in that 45 meter long streetcar. Then you could put up a decall saying "you would be about to be riding Dresden's 60th streetcar, but this sentence is much too long so we had to put it on me, the only 45 meter long streetcar in the world. Hop in, pardner!" The last sentence would of course would only be added in case of some kind of Karl May Tage tie-in.