A brand new year means a brand new “Forgotten English” desk calendar, and the delightfully archaic word for today is “scurryfunge,” which reportedly means:
A hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor and the time she knocks on the door.
Overall, today was enough like yesterday, and many of the other days before it, frankly, to make me think this whole “new year” thing is perhaps just some kind of arbitrary social construction. Last night, I had dinner out with my parents, then spent some time watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode The Final Sacrifice. I don’t know that it actually is, as they claimed, “the worst thing to ever come out of Canada,” but it was a terrible, terrible movie. Yet they were in fine form riffing on it, and it’s easily one of the funniest episodes of the show I’ve seen. Canada takes a lot of good-natured ribbing throughout — “Bobo ate a bad can of Canadian bacon and he came down with hockey hair…” — but in the DVD extras, Zap Rowsdower himself, Bruce J. Mitchell, comes across as a really likable guy with no hard feelings towards Mike and the bots.
Today, I spent a little time writing and a little time reading — not as much as I’d have liked to of either, but enough to get hopefully get me back into the swing of things. I did precious little of either — of anything, now that I think about it — over this two-week vacation.
And then this evening, I watched the 1985 horror movie Fright Night, which I guess was okay. I think if I’d seen it in the ’80s or shortly thereafter, when I was younger (and effects were not perhaps significantly better), I might have liked it more. Roddy MacDowall’s quite good in it, though, and it has its moments.
And that was Saturday. Tomorrow’s the last day of my vacation before I head back to work. Yay?