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Sunday, October 02, 2005

White Crayon

~ Matt Baldwin scores ~

Strictly speaking, this title should be font-colored="white", and I should know the HTML for a suitable background or cursor trick that'd reveal all.

This wholly unpersonal attack on the beatification of St. Matthew is the result of my beginning to spot the types who'll go gah-gah when I tell them I once shared the same payroll as the saintèdly cool one.

"Oh my gahd, you actually know Defective Yeti?" (Disbelieving expressions and sceptical glares)

"I wouldn't say I know him, but one day I came in the kitchen and he was doing his Deaf Dumb & Blind Kid number at an arcade machine. He even spoke to me. Told me that, while some folks relaxed over drink or exotic cheroots or women, his weakness was electric games."

"Oh my gahd, that is so totally awesome, dude."

Or I tell them how the finest Help Desk minds had failed to diagnose how I had managed to close my station down. The call went out for the maestro who appeared, blue-bandanna'd, slid into my cubicle and within 3o seconds had spotted my goofed alias creation using an &.

Actually, I try to stay clear of members of the Church of Baldwin because he himself must find it so excruciating. I even sometimes deny knowledge of the prohibitive Edgeworth, although this is easier because he, unlike DefYi, has not yet been canonized.

I'm trying not to listen to too many celebrations of MB's "cleverness" because he *is* a clever lad in his way and I shouldn't confuse him with his excited disciples.

For instance, when even the excellent Good Experience carries a "Matthew Baldwin scores again" item, I avert my gaze and resist clicking.

The best way is to let the Yeti blog speak for itself, and just let the hints of wit and humor twinkle through:

He proposes "a term that popped into my head this morning while coloring with The Squirrelly:

White crayon ('hwIt 'krA-"än), n: A useless person or thing you are nonetheless required to have for the sake of completeness or tradition.

With his approval ratings in the 30s and members of his own party turning against him, the Bush presidency is rapidly becoming a white crayon.

I can see that one coming in useful in the office environment."

And so can I. Clever Matthew.

I once coined a neologisms - at least, it was to my parents and, eventually, to the Hong Kong Colonial Secretariat.

Waper basket ('wA-p&r- 'bas-kit'; also. British 'bäs-kit'), n: Contraction of 'waste paper basket', of course.

It went into the family vocabulary, thence to be transported circa 1951 by my father down Garden Road to the seat of government, where one day it appeared in one of those quaint pidgin-English handbooks they put out from time to time to maintain their budgets and justify the previous year's expenditure.


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