Hello, everyone. First and foremost, the beard is getting bushier, and my hair is getting harder to contain. When I brush it out, it’s getting more and more Garfunkelish by the day. With no end to this quarantine in sight, I still plan on letting both continue to grow and see what happens. Who said this isn’t fun?
Way back in July of 2007, I wrote on my old blog site about Dr. Evil’s monologue in the first Austin Powers movie: https://peterklein.blogspot.com/2007/07/fuf-22.html. The thing I really focused on was his use of “meat helmets” and how my friends and family pictured that phrase quite differently. (Mine was ground beef formed into the shape of a helmet, which still sounds right to me.) I thought it was super rare for one phrase to elicit such different mental pictures, and something like that probably wouldn’t happen again.
But oh, my friends, I was quite wrong. (Here’s a good time to mention that this post is rated M/I for Mature/Immature. Things will get inappropriate quickly.) In November of 2017, I flew to Utah to interview some final candidates for a manager position in our call center. All of them had good credentials, and naturally the conversations were largely about their experience and how they’d apply it to this role. One gentleman’s resume made it look like he worked at many different companies within a relatively short time, so I asked him about it. He said something to the effect of, “Well, my role was to move around and help different subsidiaries of the same parent company. So it looks like different companies, but it was all under the giant umbrella of Cox.” Sure enough, he had worked for Cox Communications for many years, but that’s not what I heard. All I got was “the giant umbrella of cocks,” and yet I managed to calmly nod and look back to the resume and scribble something down.
For the rest of the interview, I did my best to refrain from picturing “the giant umbrella of cocks,” but it was tough. Thankfully, once the interview ended and I was alone in the conference room with my co-worker, she turned to me and said, “I almost lost it when he said ‘the giant umbrella of Cox.'” “Thank you!” I said, probably too excitedly. (Yes, my colleagues and I have that kind of work relationship.) We joked for a bit about how hard it was to keep a straight face, and then I mentioned I kept picturing said umbrella. So did she, and our versions varied.
I’ll ask you to pause here, gentle readers, to please close your eyes and think about the mental image you conjure up when you picture a giant umbrella of cocks, because we’re definitely in “meat helmet” territory here. Got it? Ok, let’s proceed.
For me, it’s mostly a regular umbrella, except the metal “skeleton” that holds the umbrella fabric in place is comprised of penises going from the center to the outside instead of metal rods. The handle is the same as normal. Can you picture that? Is it anything like yours? (Your mental image, that is.)
My co-worker had a different take. For her, the entire part that opens up in comprised of fused-together Cox Communications instead of just replacing the metal radii, and – get this – the handle…is a penis shaft. What an inspired addition!
I naturally emailed a few of my friends to ask their opinions. One unnamed friend wrote back immediately: “I see one giant penis head umbrella. No shaft, just a metal rod with the curved handle attached to the mushroom head.” Wow. He completely ignored the inherent plural nature of the phrase and totally changed the game. Another friend wrote back saying that his mental version was like my co-workers but with one difference: “No penis handle though. That would be weird.” He then wrote a long email explaining that in order to keep the umbrella together, we would need multiple caulks. Oh, and how Courtney Cox would probably need to buy one of these. So yeah, they’re my friends for a reason.
There you have it, folks. Meat helmets and the giant umbrella of Cox. I can only hope that someday I’ll come across another of these magical phrases. Did any of you picture something different, like little dicks hanging like fringe from the ends of the open umbrella? Well that’s a sentence I never expected to write in a somewhat public forum. Think that’s my cue to sign off. Take care, everyone.