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"depends on what's caught in the zipper..."
A long time ago, a girlfriend's dad told me about an incident in the thirties when he went into a movie to kill time waiting for a meeting to start.
He was the first person to enter. The second was a fat man who unzipped his trousers because they were too tight when he sat down.
As the theatre began to fill up, a woman tried to pass in front of the fat man. He had to get up to let her past him, and as he did so, his trousers started to fall down. He tried to zip up, but got the rear of her skirt caught in the zipper. The woman, thinking he was assaulting her sexually, began to scream. It was a very long minute before an usher with a flashlight was able to solve the problem.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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A story related to me by a receptionist:
A particularly pesky salesman was bothering her with magic tricks and things of that sort while waiting for the person he had come to see. Getting a little perturbed by my friends apparent reluctance to succumb to his obvious charms and her seeming insistence on doing real work he pressed harder and said, "This is going to blow your mind!" My friend replied, "This is going to blow your mind. Your fly is open." The salesman immediately fumbled for his fly, which *was open, and tried to zip it up. His shirt was poking out through the fly and got caught in the zipper. He never did quite recover and he never bothered my friend again.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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got the rear of her skirt caught in the zipper.
shirt was poking out through the fly and got caught in the zipper.
Oh, yes--I remembered I'd read some time ago where an author was at that movie theater. 'Never Give a Sucker an
Even Break' was showing. The incident between the portly man and the lady gave him the germ of an idea, but he couldn't flesh it out until he had his own experience with the second phenomenon described above. And thus was the inauspicious beginnings of P.D.Q. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Fly".
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Carpal Tunnel
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Long minutes:
Teenager: "I'll clean my room in a minute."
Nurse: "The doctor will be with you in a minute."
Boring person : "Have you got a minute?"
Doctor: "This will only hurt for a minute."
Short Minutes:
Mother: "Come here this minute, Charles Ignatius Jones." (It's using the three names that gets them.)
Then there are the minutes which change length depending on who is saying : "Be with you in a minute." or "Back in a minute." (gave up on PC for those two!)
wow
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"Back in a minute."
I like the signs on business establishments that say, "Back in 15 minutes" with no indication of when they were put up.
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Carpal Tunnel
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"Back in 15 minutes"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
To indicate the max time you will have to wait?
To discourage opportunistic vandals and thieves?
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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i remember my mum's wonderful story of teasing her little sister by telling her that time was also going metric: so there would be 10 hours in a day, 10 minutes in an hour and so on.
what i always wondered was, why 60 with time. why 60 seconds and 60 minutes? is it a natural division or did someone decide on that number?
i could be a cynic and say that a minute is the time it takes you to smoke 1/5 of a cigarette, or really enjoy the first hoppy mouthful of a beer.
or i could say that a minute is the only time we have real control over. a second can be too fast to take aything in. an hour tends to find you (sorry, me) asleep. but if you don't have an answer inside a minute, you don't have an answer. also, you need a minute to take in good or bad news.
and minutes to me mean train times: 10:57, 8:46, 9:08. i set my watch a minute ahead of time to fool myself - the cleverest thing a person ever thought of. but it works! i'm always on time at work - 11:10. 9:02, or 9:23!
but minutes are about love, as someone already said. seconds click by on the dashboard clock. who can act in a second?! you need a minute to take a hand, to marvel at its warmth or its coolth. and you need a minute to understand that kisses are measured by the time it takes for a curfew to pass, or the time it takes for a resolve to grow weak.
and finally, minutes are how we remember things. no one memory lasts a second or an hour. maybe because minutes are flexible, we can remember within them. or we have enough time to fabricate our excuses by using them. who wants the honesty of a second? the lugubriousness of an hour? minutes are the only period we can measure emotions by.
hope you're all well.
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Carpal Tunnel
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minutes are the only period we can measure emotions by. My Sweet William, how utterly lovely to have you here again! I think we had about 97 minutes... 
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Carpal Tunnel
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William, I've missed you and am glad you've returned. And I like your thinking: minutes aren't so minute, really. They're the flexible ones.
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
what i always wondered was, why 60 with time. why 60 seconds and 60 minutes? is it a natural division or did someone decide on that number?
The answer seems to be the Babylonians were the first to divide the day into hours and minutes and they happened to count in base 60 instead of base 10 as we do. People recognised a nifty idea (so much easier than saying when the sun just touches that hill over there when seen from my front door) and took over the same way of doing it, just as the Greeks kept the Semitic arbitrary alphabetical order (which was discussed in another thread recently).
As for why the Bablyonians counted in base 60 (no, they were not aliens with 15 digits on their hands and feet), this is discussed at: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Babylonian_numerals.html
Bingley
Bingley
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