September 14, 2003:
Voters:The winner of the Quote of the Summer award was "If I'm just watching you, do I have to wear pants anyway?" -Daniel, to Joanna. (For the record, Joanna was blowing glass, an activity that requires long pants.) Last week's winner was "Auntie Em! Auntie Em! There's a cornfield! Let's have a civilization!" -Mr. Young, on early agriculture and the birth of civilization.
Last week, the planets aligned and the result was that QOTW received 54 quotes, the most in its storied history. Consequently, this week's batch of Honorable Mentions contains more wit and genius than the last six years of Saturday Night Live combined. Sign up for the Honorable Mentions email, if you know what's good for you.
How to vote: list the nominees below in order from favorite to least favorite. List just the names of the nominees, not the quotes themselves. You can list as many or as few of them as you wish.
And now, THE NOMINEES:
"Llamas produce fertilizer, which is important but not something one wants to spend all that much time thinking about." -Mr. Young
"Is it okay if I eat him?" -One Ipswich mother to another, on the latter's child. She meant to say "feed".
"I learned there's more to Mongolia then yaks. In fact, there aren't any yaks in Mongolia." -Eric the freshman, on meeting someone from Mongolia
"If the name Jean Shaheen is not enough to dissuade you from voting her, her spinach souffle recipe surely is." -Becca, on the governor of New Hampshire
"Remember: [caring for] a freshman is a big commitment." -Julian, on getting a pet freshman
"They use honey, though, which is bee exploitation." -Max Cohen, on a Belmont restaurant that claims to be all-natural and extra-healthy
"I love 17th century perverts. They are so much more clever than the present day ones." -Nora
"Latin is the stepping stone to necrophilia." -Roz
"So, what do you say, do you want to audition for Beauty and the Beast? No, no, seriously, it's bad if you start talking to the clay." -Jean, ceramics teacher, to a pot that looked like it had a face
"Even androgynous aliens can come to [Gay-Straight] alliance." -Max Palmer
Quote of the Week now has merchandise! Check out http://www.cafeshops.com/qotw for QOTW lunchboxes and more.
Voting closes Friday at 5:00 pm, so be sure to vote by then.
-Ben "six feet below five hundred" Orlin
September 14, 2003: Honorable Mentions
For those of you who haven't heard, the Quote of the Week web site is up at www.qotw.net (and, unlike previous incarnations, this version has content).A correction: last week's honorable mentions ran the following misprint:
"I don't want to talk about God, I want to talk about drugs." -Some kid at Sunday school. This quote is supposed to read, "I don't want to talk about God, I want to talk about trucks." -Some four-year-old kid at Sunday school
And now this week's historic batch of honorable mentions:
"Now batting for the Random Incongruities, number forty-six, Mahatma Gandhi!" -Becca
"I think U.S. History just went up a notch in Joanna's book. 'Yes! They assigned the Columbus-was-an-idiot-article! Up a notch!'" -Mr. Young
"Is it possible that the words 'dubious' and 'Dubya' come from the same root?" -Orlin
"They don't even give off that satisfying clang! after coming in contact with a skull or two." -Becca, on wooden baseball bats as the inferiors of aluminum ones
"He turns the sun into some sort of big fiery bureaucrat." -Julian, on a John Donne poem
"No, no, Ben, that's completely stupid." -Ms. Bluestein, to Ben Miller
"The glass is unbreakable. But..." -Lucky, squash coach, to the somewhat rowdy Commonwealth squash team
"Does it bother anyone that the glazed donuts are hexagonal?" -Alex, at snack
"This should be the gay guy, because he's got hips." -Joanna, on a Ken doll
"We have TONS of time. We don't need a whole 15 minutes to do trig." -Mr. Sherry
"Three carbons in a square is not stable." -Jeff, on molecular chemistry
"I am finally the alpha wolf. I have succeeded Al Gore in alpha wolfness." -Mr. Young
"Who gives a crap about the college students who write grammatically incomplete web logs about Howard Dean?" -Becca
"We must exercise peaceful resistance, the way that Gandhi fought Britain without ever raising a hand, and the way the Red Sox fight the Yankees without ever winning a game." -Orlin, on the Etymology Revolution
"And then we will have to move on to nasty Spanish conquests and other entertainments." -Mr. Young
"Julian! Stop your newfangledness!" -Becca
"If I ever buy a house on the top of a mountain, will I be the fool on the hill?" -Miller
"People are thinking: hmm... it's worth the time to start early, to get the extra day... but in order to do that I have to start early..." -Mr. Young, on his proposition to allow people to have an extra day
"Wait, can you read that again? I missed the poem." -Fiona, in U.S. History class, after Mr. Young had only finished the subtitles of the poem
"'What did you learn in U.S. History today?' 'We learned about the mean things people do to llamas.'" -Mr. Young, speculating on what students would tell their parents when they got home
"I suppose Niagara Fallers would not lead to very good team morale." -Miller, on renaming the NFL team the Buffalo Bills
"The textbook really glosses over what a horrible, horrible person he was. And how incompetent he was." -Mr. Harsanyi, on Christopher Columbus
"You have no idea how many poodles there were in the fifties." -Ms. Folkman
"That's a lot of stimulation in one little mall-box thingy." -Becca, on the Watertown Mall
"This is like some bad William fantasy from last year." -Mr. Young, trying to end a long conversation about why Asia didn't colonize California and fight Columbus and Pizarro
"The reason we want money is that our entire budget right now is based on stealing." -Rhett, on the Leek
"This has become the greatest Joanna-bashing class." -Mariah, on U.S. History
"Girls turn into women, so thanks for the guitar." -Sam Thomas
"What's so funny about being a freshman?" -Eric, after he introduced himself at assembly as a freshman and received laughs
"You'd twitch too if your father was castrated and your mother entered a nunnery!" -Kate
"Oh, Juliet! Would that I could love you gropily!" -Becca, on Jeff and Micheline as a Shakespearean couple
"Has my evil twin gotten loose again, and used the opportunity to take the PSATs?" -Alex George, on receiving identical pieces of mail from the same college on the same day
"Now that we've exhausted all possibilities of what mean people in Panama can do to you and your llama..." -Mr. Young, after a long discussion about the difficulties of the transfer of agricultural technology
"Allow me to suddenly morph into a shallow and ditzy person... you should wear jeans tomorrow!" -Nora
"We're social creatures, but we're pretentious social creatures..." -Joanna Rifkin, on leadership roles in primitive societies
"Potatoes and tomatoes and all those nice things were in the Americas, which means the Native Americans have better food--and better songs, because they have that nice 'tomato-potato' rhyme." -Mr. Young, on agricultural differences between Eurasia and the Americas
"The Spanish cavalry was met by the war buffalo cavalry..." -Mr. Young, hypothesizing on the use of buffalo in the Americas to replace horses
"I like to pretend I'm a troll, so I photograph under bridges a lot." -Rusty, photography teacher
"The etymology is always the first to go in a time of dictatorship." -Becca
"Much like William Collis making your dance tape, you don't know what we're going to do, but you know you don't want it to be that long." -Erin, on her, Rhett, and Max Cohen hosting the talent show
"The emperor of Japan was a God up until 1945, when the Americans decided he wasn't." -Mr. Harsanyi
"We're already thinking about commandeering a Duck Tour." -Grace, on being a pirate
"To add to your drinking and dining pleasure... this is the Columbus-thought-the-world-was-shaped-like-a-breast article." -Mr. Young
"Ugh! The bees are really attracted to me today... as in I think they have posters of me on their walls, with matching screensavers for their laptops." -Laura Brodin
"Maybe the drug use was less on the part of the characters and more on the part of the writers." -Roz, on the movie Donnie Darko being rated R for "drug use"
That's a wrap. Next email--the Hancock edition of QOTW!--will come out on Monday.
-QOTW Management
