« BOB update | Main | language in conflict »

January 05, 2005

the universe of Bob

filed under characterization

I can't get Bob out of my head. This has only indirectly to do with the Bob Awards mentioned yesterday and more with the fact that I've come to a conclusion: if there is a god, her name is Bob. The devil? Ditto. And everybody knows this, down deep. The evidence is out there.

Remember those car commercials that focused on road and street signs? And you thought it was just a marketing ploy.

When we were getting married oh so long ago and arguing about dish patterns (yes, my husband had an opinion on dish patterns, which (1) shocked and (2) outraged me in the most gender specific and unfair way. Of course he's entitled to an opinion, but it was MY choice. MY dishes. A streak of 1950s housewife in me? Who knew. So at any rate, while we looked at hundreds of dish patterns in the attempt to find one we both liked, Bill came up with an observation: the really ugly dish patterns were all designed by the same person. Once we saw that, we knew who to blame when we came across a particularly egregious crime against the aesthetic greater good.

Then there's this. According to my Italian teacher, a lovely woman from Switzerland who speaks many languages fluently, when she married an American she was told (by who?!) that to be accepted here she couldn't be without a middle name. Her parents had neglected to give her one, but that had to be remedied. She is now known as Sonja-Bob.

You need more evidence? How about the BOB books? By Bobby Lynn Maslen? A whole series of books designed (they tell you) to teach young children to read, but really, the idea is to turn very young children into Disciples of Bob. It almost worked for my daughter. She learned to read from the Bob Books (Not my idea, I tell you. It was her father, it was all him.)

Now that I've exposed the Bob Culture and the Universe of Bob, I expect I'll be terminated quite quickly. But I had to speak up. Enough is enough.

PS writing conflict will be back soon

January 5, 2005 11:02 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.tiedtothetracks.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/302

Comments

I once had friends with a scary-smart dog named... Bob. Or so I thought. As it turned out, his name was actually spelled "Ba'ab," in tribute to the first prophet of the Baha'i religion who called himself the Ba'ab (the "gate" or "doorway")

And, honey, you don't realize the half of this --
in the way less serious Church of the Subgenius, BOB is just... pivotal.

That is all. Watch your back.

Posted by: robyn bender at January 5, 2005 06:29 PM

Posted by: robyn at January 6, 2005 06:40 PM

Post a comment






(you may use HTML tags for style)