Survey question for a long boring day

What are the most innocuous search terms that have brought up links to porn in the first page of hits? e. and I both had experiences like this lately, but neither of us can remember what the actual words were--only that they weren't any of the usual suspects.

You know you're flying back from St. Louis when...

...waiting in line at the gate, I had no choice but to overhear an impromptu reunion of Incarnate Word Academy graduates cum Lincoln Park Trixies. ("I live at Broadway and Grace. What about you?" "I'm at Broadway and Surf." "Surf...where's that? Is that one of the side streets, one of those short little streets?"...."It's near that mall--what's it called? The Century?" "Oh, I've always meant to go there!") First it was one each from the A and B lines, then they spotted a third near the back of the waiting area. ("We were just talking about you and your sister!!!")

...sitting on the plane, someone carries gooey-butter past you. I thought I recognised it, so I asked and the woman said, "My friends up in Chicago don't believe me so I brought one back to prove it to them."

[Note: In searching for hits on "gooey butter", I found that--of all people--Emeril has a recipe for it. Needless to say, I barely recognise it. For instance, I've never heard of anyone anywhere using leftover bakery goods rather than store-bought cake mix to make the crust, though he assures us they "[i]t almost always starts" this way.]

Family Christmas Update

There's just gonna keep comin' this morning, sibs. The long connectivity drought has finally broken and the Dead Week at work means a minimum of supervision/interference.

I really don't have much at all in the way of crazy family stories this year. Everyone was so good it was even a little bizarre. A widely-dreaded Talking To ended up being Just Lunch, my dad and stepmom pulled off probably the most tension-free dinner at their place ever, and Mom actually scaled down her entertainment plans to the realm of the easily attainable.

She's still, despite all her efforts, as hopeless on timing as ever. At 5:15, as we're driving back to her house, I ask what time she was thinking of serving and she says, "Six". Okay. You see, she wanted to give my sister a chance to win at the Scrabble game that they started at 2 p.m. knowing full well that my grandma was arriving "between three and four." The sweet potatoes we agreed to do "in advance" only got pureed at 5:45 and still needed heating. On top of that, everything had to be packed up and taken to my sister's house before it could be served. There were some moments there when I got very terse, but then it all turned out okay and I felt ashamed at my pettiness. We ate at 6:30, everything tasted good, she stuck to recipes instead of getting "creative", and we dispensed with elabourate, annoying froo-fraws like hot appetisers and Mediterranean rice dishes. And after two days of beef, I got my sweet, sweet pork!

Even my older brother was mostly on top of his game. The low points came on the last day when we did the Loop (or what passed for a boho neighbourhood in StL) and I got to observe his macking style up close and repeatedly. If there was ever a time when I wished for a tsunami to wash up and carry me out to sea, it was while buying him a double espresso at Meshuggah and having him tell the barrista "You're slim for your age." ("For future reference, Bill, adding 'for your age' almost never improves a compliment. Why did you do that?" "I was hoping to get her to tell me her age.") She misunderstood it, I tried to dismiss it with a joke, she misunderstood that, and then I just wished the water would come and drown me. At least none of his flubbed compliments to the clerk at the music store, at the antiques shop--really, any female under the age of 60 who waited on us--was as embarrassing has that, though his calling out to passing women came close. ("What were you doing?" "It was a catcall." "I know what it was." "Oh...it's rude." "Yeah, it's incredibly rude!")

Seven thousand legs into Shanghai

While at my parents' place, I got to use a little Chinese. My stepmom had some mooncakes labeled only in Chinese which she set out on the cookie tray and I assured everyone they were only lotus paste and nothing grosser. (I forgot to add that they were yolk-free, which was a relief to me, but I'm not sure the rest of my family has such strong feelings on whole egg yolk in mooncakes. They didn't get touched anyway, not with competition from all that e. brought!)

She also had a really lovely paper cut hanging in the dining room, a street scene of "Old Shanghai". My stepsister's husband's eye was caught by a structure off to one side whose florid, open architectural style seemed out of keeping with the curved tiled roofs of the other structures. I noticed characters on the side of it and tried to read them, but the result seemed to senseless that I doubted myself: 七千脚店 or "Seven thousand leg shop".

Only today did I have a chance to do some web research. The only relevant link that I could make any sense of shows a "ten thousand leg shop" (十千脚店 or "ten" plus "thousand", a pairing I've never seen before, since "ten thousand" is usually expressed with a single character, 萬) and includes the pithy explanation that, in the Northern Song period, "leg shop" was a term for a restaurant that sold wine but did not make it on the premises. (Even today, 酒店 or "wine shop" is a common chinese term for "restaurant".) Because employees had to hoof it to bring back the jugs of wine? They don't elabourate.

Sorry, teapot_farm, but I didn't really learn much more about their pottery tour of China, though my stepmom did have a chance to bring out her celadon, Yixing teapots, basketweave jars, and other objects they'd brought back. (She also insisted on breaking open the Wuliangye to toast Christmas Eve.) One of the workshops they toured was in the middle of a tea plantation and she spoke briefly of ascending a hill surrounded by green tea plants and buying a wall decoration off of her host.

In other family news...

...the Thai island on which my mother's first cousin was to marry his Chinese fiance this New Year's was apparently not in the path of a tsunami and the wedding will proceed as planned. I thought that, when she suggested we attend, my mom told me it was near Phuket, but perhaps it was sheltered from the force of the wave. My great-aunt, who was due to fly in on St. Stephen's Day, arrived safely and now has a story she'll be telling and retelling for months, if not years.

My sister was avidly following the news on the Net, but I've been avoiding it so far. It's one of those tragedies that's just so huge, I can't wrap my mind around it. 50,000 dead and climbing. Entire villages washed away. The geopolitical map could shift because of this. (Already, one parliamentary election has had to be postponed.) The physical map already has.

Edit: And now I've just read that beaches near Penang were struck and I'm trying to remember when Bumiputeri was supposed to return from visiting her family there...

Food line philosophy

In line at Chipotle, a neighbouring customer drew my attention to the particularly skilled way in which one of the staff was rolling a burrito. At first I thought I was just a convenient accesory to his macking attempt, but it turned out learning was his field so I rather ascribed it to innocent geeky enthusiasm. He said his eyes were always open for skills people didn't necessarily recognise that they had.

I had a job in a pizza place one summer and worked myself up to manning the ovens. When he trained me, Tony, the middle-aged veteran, said "I see you got that fear of burnin' in you. When you work the ovens, you gonna get burnt." He was right about that. Once I stopped striving so hard to avoid minor injuries and simply accepted that the occasional burn was part of the routine, I got a lot better at what I was doing.

It strikes me that that's a lesson I need to extend to a lot more domains.