'Bred Crumbs

07:57 AM The death of Douglas Adams of a heart attack at 49 saddens and frightens me, but in the end I guess all there is to do is to heed the large-friendly-lettered advice of "that wholly remarkable book" itself, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

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Saturday on the 24 Divisadero were a couple of high-schoolers who gave off a gay-boy-straight-girl vibe. They were very appealing to me, reading aloud from a children's book on the universe, taking the parts of the two characters, Planetron and an awe-struck child. They were amused by the book exactly as I would be.

When they tired of the book and chatted of other things, their speech was punctuated by "like"s as is the speech of many sub-40s in the Bay Area, including myself. And in casual discourse this should not generally be frowned upon; everyone understandably uses some kind of verbal place-holder for moments of thought, be that "like" or "you know" or my usual, "uh." It's only when this kind of lapse becomes absurd that it becomes, like, laughable, and even with these two bright youngsters, it got to that point, as follows:

He: "I stayed up late playing like Mario Brothers. I couldn't like get past like the third level."

She: "I am so like tired. I couldn't like go to sleep. I was up like really late."

He: "You mean like 2 or like 3?"

On the other hand, I think the ongoing replacement of "[he/she/they] said" with "[he's/she's/they're] all" is fantastic. I don't know why.

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