essentially, because (curses etc, su-lin) i started going through old mails: is this the kind of thing we did in our ignorant and idle youth? why don't we do more of it nowadays?

su-lin:

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of the birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.-- Song of Solomon 2:11-12. Regard the punctuation: the birds and the turtle are obviously part of the same sentence-part therefore. Besides which more modern editions say turtledove. I prove conclusively my point. Coo roo.

von:

i could, however, just as plausibly say: the time of the cows has come and the voice of the creamer is heard in the land. i'm fairly certain your first thought wouldn't be of a wedgwood cow shaped cream carrying object

yen:

or that the cow is a species of creamer.

von:

or, for that matter, that the creamer was a species of cow

and remember this one?

Mindy: I think it would be really cool to sleep on an air mattress.
Von: But what if you wear your watch to bed and puncture a hole in it? That's what my [some relative] did, you know.
Mindy: Well, what about the kind paraplegics have, which costs billions of dollars and is made up of glass beads which blow air, so you're literally sleeping on air?
Von: What if there's a blackout?
Choonping: Well, since they are paraplegics and can't really move about, the blackout will save them the trouble of getting up to switch off the light when they want to go to bed.

and now i have to go look for that old series of mails when we were talking about sex as an antidote to colds, the premise as i recall being that one's body only produced a given amount of fluids and that the sex act would divert the fluid-manufacturing capacity away from one's nose, thereby prompting someone else to say that in this case one should never lend a shoulder to another for crying upon, since we could simply reverse this and say that crying was a sex-substitute, and then i think it was choonping who said, well it might work the other way, might it not? your nose is all stuffed up and thus you can't breathe, thereby inducing an auto-erotic asphyxiatic effect, and then people might start liking colds, and so on.

i wonder if i can find that email where von accused me of using a gratituous future perfect.