September 20, 2015

This week's Square Pig was delayed by a quick road trip to Cheney to deliver one of the resident young people to school, and also by a shattering change to my process.This blog has its roots in my old practice of perusing the club listings in the Friday Seattle Times and reading the band names aloud at the dinner table. To this habit, I added the step of circling with pencil the names I wanted to write about. When we stopped subscribing to the print edition and went online only, I collected band names by going to the online print replica and printing out only the club listings, so I could continue my analog method of marking names with pencil. The print was small and poor quality, but good enough for my purposes. Until this week -- they changed their viewer so that the print on those pages is larger but distorted and unreadable. This forced me, after 5 years, to convert to an entirely digital process of copy and paste. It's not as warm and satisfying to me as the writer as marking the names in pencil, but I suspect the experience for the reader will be exactly the same. Enough backstory and exposition! Here are this week's picks:

Enormodome
I like this as a generic name for any oversized stadium. A quick listen convinces me that this duo could produce enough sound to fill such a place, too.

The Oregon Trailers
I like how this could refer to the history of westward expansion, or to contemporary drivers hauling loads in our neighboring state. When my kids were little, we played Oregon Trail A LOT, so it's not surprising this would jump out at me. To this day, family conversations are peppered with references to things learned, both practical and ridiculous. A 2008 visit to the Oregon Trail museum in Baker City, OR was one of the most successful educational stops we ever made on a road trip.
 
Shootdang
What you might say when you're in the kitchen with small children and drop something heavy on your foot. Not as satisfying as real expletives, but better than nothing. I like the rural twang, too.

Sister Crayon
This could have been me! My given name, Karen, doesn't lend itself readily to nicknames. "Crayon" was the closest I had as a child. It was bestowed by my older siblings, and probably not used all that often, but enough that it was a long time before I could associate my name with anything but childish things. At least they were colorful!

Turquoise Jeep
Speaking of colorful things, utilitarian objects deserve bright colors, too.