Category: Quickthoughts

The Fog of Worf would have been a stellar name for an episode of Star Trek Next Generation.

While on FaceTime with my parents, their land line phone rings.

Mom D to Dad D: Will you check the caller ID?
Dad D: It says it’s from Billerica
Mom D: Don’t answer.
Jen: Who is Bill Rica?

Heh

(joke explained for foreigners: Billerica is a town in Massachusetts)

You know what’s a strange word?

Grown-ups

It’s almost exclusively used around kids. You never hear adults referring to each other as grown-ups.

According to Grammar-girl (one of my favorite resources for strange grammar questions), ‘Grow up’ is a phrasal verb and ‘Grown up’ is the past participle* When it’s used as a noun, it needs a hyphen.

*fun fact: present and past participles confused the heck out of me when I learned about them in Spanish class because I didn’t remember ever learning about them in English class first.

You’re probably familiar with the Downy Woodpecker. It’s a little black and white bird that frequents pretty much the entire United States year round. It’s about the same size as a tufted titmouse.

The Downy Woodpecker has a lesser known doppelgänger: The Hairy Woodpecker. These birds look virtually identical, except the Hairy Woodpecker is bigger. How much bigger?

Well, we happened to have both land on our feeder the other day. Here’s a photograph. Downy on the right, Hairy on the left.

Fun fact for the bird ignorant: The Male of both the Downy and Hairy varieties has a little tuft of red feathers on the back of its head.