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Off comparing mammoth sizes with the other boys.
Actually it was worse - he was betting on the size of the next mammoth he would kill. This could have evolved into something innocuous, like Las Vegas (which was invented separately, later), but the idea of betting upon the future eventually became that bane of modern existence - the stock market - only loved by wide boys and Porsche salesmen...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Would it perhaps be simpler to say "I am part Cherokee"?
Yes, it would. If I had been addressing only people whom I knew would get the reference, I would have said that. I was thinking that perhaps some readers of this board might not.
Speaking of getting references, would you be so kind as to explain, shanks, what you meant by irony being too subtle for Americans?
Speaking of getting references, the following post reminded me of what happens when I read Shakespeare: I can read every word, but have NO CLUE as to what was said.
Definitely the way it really happened! All very impressive being Magister Ludi, but when did he last get a ball in the back of the net, eh?
D-Bhurg-ash wasn't really a coward, by the way. It had just occurred to her that there wasn't room in the pantry cave for yet another mammoth leg. She'd been on at A-Wod-lah for ages to finish the cave extension, but where was he yet again? Off comparing mammoth sizes with the other boys.
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veteran
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Hey! All three of you must be related, then. 
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Glass Bead Game/Magister LudiSorry, Jackie, that was a bit of an obscure reference. The Glass Bead Game is a book by Herman Hesse. Arguably consists of a lot of intellectual idealism, where The Game is a sort of abstract model for life, and the master of the game (Magister Ludi) rules the land. Some people see it as referring to the Kaballah, but I won't get into that here. Unless specifically requested. 
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>joys of Goa sausage, the beach, and beer with ice in it!
Goan Fish curry goes just as well with the beach and the beer.
No, I live down south - in Bangalore.
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Jackie
Peace?
1. The Jeep Cherokee is the favoured drive of the Surrey stockbroking classes. The word, therefore, is familiar. Besides, what with the ubiquity of the 'Western', I simply assumed that most English speaking people would be able to tell that Cherokee, Apache, Commanche, Arapaho, Navajo et al were tribes of Native Americans. Your approach, however, was more cautious, and is to be lauded.
2. I posted about my forebears perhaps swinging the 'other' way (knowing full well that that is not-too-subtle code for homosexuality), but using it, in this case, to refer to the possible penchant some of my foremothers may have had for a 'bit of white on the side' (if you'll pardon the crude phraseology). Followed a sweet post explaining to me the code for gay which I thought, therefore, had missed out on the 'subtlety' of my post. (Irony, if explained, loses all its humour - I'm not going any further with this one...)
3. Magister Ludi, also called The Glass Bead Game is a book by Herman Hesse (perhaps more famously the author of Siddhartha, a university favourite in the '60s and '70s), considered by some of his fans to be his best. Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature early in the 20th Century, and is a relatively well-regarded German, mildly mystical, author. (Or was he Swiss? Damn these dying neurons...) The other names etc refer purely to the invention that Shona and I were swapping regarding possible 'just so stories' as to the origins of games (and the common origin theory, that Shona expounded). For the full flavour of meaning that 'just so stories' now has, you have to be familiar not just with Kipling's originals ("How the camel got his hump", "How the elephant got his trunk" etc) but with Stephen Jay Gould's castigation of the 'adaptationist programme' in evolutionary biology as just so many 'just so stories': Gould, SJ & Lewontin RC, 1979. 'The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian program: A critique of the adaptationist programme.' Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 205, 281-288, and various Gould books thereafter.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
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My dear shanks-- Pax? Most certainly! 'Twould take a lot more than that to get me upset with you! But thank you! 1. Thank you for the laud. I do have a "lead foot", I guess I AM part car!!!  I love it! 2. Oh, dear--that's what I was afraid of. 3. Thanks for all the explanation, but that's something I'm going to choose to stay out of. My poor neurons are overloaded as it is, right, mav, darlin'?
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neurons are overloaded as it isNah! But do our neurons get exercised or merely overworked the more thay use this shona treadmill, I wonder with some alarm, looking at the centurions of stultiloquence marked down against me - and has it advanced the tide of human wit or imagination one iota....? Again, nah! But it's been fun joining with y'all, in the diverse pursuits of these many threads. And BTW, tsuwm, I am sure you will be delighted to know I am a (sufferer from?) mancinism, just to tuck in another I have just realised that an English expression for left-handers, which I will render as 'cacky-whiffy', is a phrase I have never seen on paper. Can someone elucidate?
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Vice President Gore at the Smith dinner, an annual charity event sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York:
"Another thing that bugs me is when people say I'm just a wonk, obsessed with policy details. Well, like so many Americans, I like to just kick back and relax and watch television. ... One of my favorite shows is Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Well, it should really be called Who Wants To Be After Taxes a $651,237.07 Person? Of course, that's
under my plan. Under the governor's plan, it would be Who Wants To Be After Taxes a $701,452 ...?''
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Can someone elucidate?
Nah!
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