2/19: What I Accomplished Today

1. Finished The Namesake. At book group last Friday, we watched the movie and discussed them both. Now I'm reading The Last Temptation of Christ. It's a slow read for at least two reasons: a) I've read several religious books recently, and I may be about done with them for a few months; b) this will seem strange, but I've borrowed the book from a friend in book group. It's an old paperback, and it smells musty. I don't like reading this book because it smells funny.

2. Prepped, taught, and graded the requisite number of classes.

3. Earned all timely Pogo badges.

4. Had Presidents' Day off. Hurray! Hurray for Presidents' Day!

5. Read some magazines.

6. I've gotten the Night Elf Priest to 45; she was the last character to get there. I've got the Night Elf Hunter (and her little owl friend) to 49.

7. We had an ongoing mystery get solved this week very anticlimactically. About seven or eight years ago, we were watching an episode of The Bob Newhart Show. It was an episode in the third season in which Emily has redecorated the apartment and Bob hates the new look (which is the name of the episode, "The New Look"). When Bob first comes into the apartment, we see a collection of items on the wall; it's hard to tell if it's one item consisting of a number of other miscellaneous objects fastened together or a number of small objects placed close enough together that they look fastened. I don't know if I particularly like the aesthetics of the piece, but it's interesting to look at. Emily references the wall and says, "It took Ellen three days to find that..." and then she seems to say the word "accio" (which I believe was a spell in Harry Potter). Or maybe it's ochsio. Co-Vivant was watching on Tivo, and we went back to that point and listened carefully dozens of times. Sure did sound like accio.

I looked up the various spellings we could think of in every dictionary I could find, every dictionary that I owned, every dictionary that I could access in a library. I spent hours in the Oxford English Dictionary. No go. We kept the episode on the Tivo, and every now and then, we'd listen again and try to come up with new possible spellings. ("Auchzio?") Then I'd try to look up the new variants. I've looked in visual dictionaries.I've looked in dictionaries for other languages. While I myself am not a furniture person, I've had friends who enjoyed antiquing; I spoke to some of them about what this word that seems to refer to a hodgepodge of items attached to each other and then to the wall might be. No go.

A few years ago, Co-Vivant discovered the captioning button. Back to the episode of Bob Newhart; at that point, the show had not be captioned, so we didn't have that option.

I have searched eBay for the script to that episode. No go.

I have asked at Bob Newhart's website. No response.

For Christmas, Co-Vivant got the third season of Bob Newhart on DVD. We realized it was captioned, so earlier this week, we played the DVD with the captioning on to learn what this elusive, mysterious word could be.

"It took Ellen three days to find that ox yoke."

And sure enough, up above the miscellaneous hodgepodge of items hung an ox yoke. The ox yoke was the only item on the wall which did not physically belong to the clump of stuff we thought was this mysterious "accio," which we have now learned is a word we made up to name an item that doesn't seem to have a name; we had simply misheard the name of the one item on that wall we could have identified had we taken the time.

All together now: D'oh.