It's Christmas Eve.
I blog now, but in
social networking of Christmas Past, I remember that after days of diligently
Googling, I mastered the art of cutting and pasting HTML code into the
"About Me" box of MySpace. I can write some simple HTML
unassisted by any major search engines. For example, I know that body's
must be followed by /body's and that the command "font face ="
works much better at making your webpage prettier than does sacrificing an old
typewriter to the computer gods. Still, there are great volumes of HTML
that doesn't look a whole lot like English to me.
Take for instance,
"navbar hover." Is that actual code? Probably not, but I
found it in the About Me box, so I'm running with it. For some reason,
the phrase fascinated me. Why? Well, let me put it this way:
Some of the certifiably oddball things that pop into my head and fall out of my
mouth often make my wife turn to me and say, "Are you all right? I
mean, really, I think you should be on some sort of maximum strength
anti-goober medication, or something." Hmm.
Where was I? Oh
yes, "navbar hover." Okay, so I began to wonder that if it could
hover, what would happen if you typed in:
Navbar sit
Or . . .
Navbar play dead
My wife wanted to type in "navbar
bite me" but that one made me nervous, especially since the webcam
spontaneously activated and started looking around the living room.
Anyway, it's Christmas Eve. I'm a little worried. Not so much
recently, but in Christmas Past my son was terrified of Santa Claus. We
have a picture of him sitting on Santa's knee, red faced, and screaming as if
the old man had just told him, "Now, this won't hurt a bit." My wife and I have elected not to tell him
that tonight is the annual night that The Claus inevitably prowls around the
neighborhoods of the entire planet.
My wife said,
"No, you can't tell our son that an old man with supernatural powers will
get inside the house while we are sleeping."
I said, "How
about --."
"No," she
answered.
"Just that
--."
"No."
I smiled and donned
my best humble look of innocence. "I just want to explain to him
that Santa Claus will leave behind things -- things that no one knows what they
are. And, that no one will know until the crack of dawn."
My wife crossed her
arms and explained to me politely and calmly how my idea needed a little work,
and that we should concentrate on heightening the enjoyment of the Yuletide
traditions.
I mean . . . that's
not her exact words. Her exact words were more like, "I know where
you sleep."
But I knew what she
meant.
