Don flew in this weekend and on Monday we went to Snowbasin. I only went skiing once last year, and my technique has degraded as a result, but I'm starting to get my second wind. The mountain was mostly blue and black. With the exception of two gondolas and a high speed quad, the lifts are old school triples which zoom around and catch you at breakneck speed -- it reminded me a bit of Pajrito. Snowbasin opened in 1939, and is apparently one of the oldest ski resorts in the United States.

The first time we went up in the gondola there were two young girls (omg) discussing wedding rings and weddings (and nothing but). The second gondola was with three young military men discussing where they had served (all locations were stateside as far as I could tell) and how they had spent their 60 days of leave after they had finished at "the academy." I found the contrast between these two rides both refreshing as well as being disturbingly narrow. I imagined riding up in a gondola with a bunch of IBMers/ex-IBMers and one or two non-IBMers. Actually, minus the gondola, that pretty much describes every party that I attended during my years at New York.

There is a Australian "joke" which goes like this:

Q: What's the difference between a buffalo and a bison?
A: Can't wash your hands in a buffalo.

The "humor" is derived from the fact that the way that Australian's pronounce the word basin can be indistinguishable from the word bison to non-Australians.

We went to Antelope Island last weekend which surprisingly does not have any antelope, but does have a large number of bison. Don (my step father), who likes to repeat silly jokes, has been using every opportunity to tell this "joke" ever since.

Therefore: from now on I am going to refer to Snowbasin as Snowbuffalo.

The fact that I just said "whom" there reminds me. I was looking for grammar jokes on-line today, because I had found someone's profile last night which had a grammar error. Now usually I don't really care about grammar or spelling errors. I try to avoid them with the spell/grammar checker, but if someone mistypes I usually don't think twice about it. This person bitches about people using poor spelling after incorrectly using "your" where she meant "you're" or "you are." So I politely said that what she was saying would be more effective if it um... were spelled right. She wrote me back and rudely told me that it was a joke. I guess that must be one of those nifty post-modern jokes which rely on not being funny to convey its point. So I wrote back and said "funny joke. makes you look ignorant." I deleted her response to that without reading it, because really, I had already wasted too much of my life on this little episode. But I did spend some time searching the Internet for grammar jokes. I thought if I found some funny ones then I might send them to her. I actually had something in mind... a segment from A Prairie Home Companion which I had found quite amusing. I couldn't find the segment from the show that I had in mind, which is a pity I suppose, but probably just as well. One of the other things I found was a list of "jokes" on Dr. Grammar's web site... none of which were funny at all. Maybe I'm just not able to get the whole Grammar Joke genre or something. Anyway one of the things there was on when to use "whom" and when to use "who". I'm never quite sure if I'm using the right one... but after reading what it said I think I pretty much always choose the right one.