That’s utterly adorable! How do you stand it!
One of Canon’s early photocopiers, (the NP-80,) had the nickname “The Toaster.”
It used solvent-based liquid toner and had a tendency to burst into flame during heavy use.
Similarly (well, not really,) the Airco DH-2 (an early British WWI fighter) was called the “Spinning Incinerator.”
It tended to go into uncontrollable spins and, well, burst into flame.
If you don’t want an ignominious nickname, I’d advise against bursting into flame.
Oh, I forgot the “amusing” part.
Uh… “The Marshmallow in Bondage” made me smirk the first ten thousand times I heard it it. (Pic.)
Driving from the ferry one day, we passed the “Deer Creek Fish Hatchery” Some how my brain translated it to “Deer Hatchery” My husband nearly drove off the road laughing, when I quite seriously said “There’s a deer hatchery back there.” Now, all fish hatcheries are deer hatcheries in our family.
The Columbia Tower is the box the Space Needle came in.
And rolls of fat that poke up above low cut jeans are called muffin tops .
I’ve been calling it the graffiti bridge for years. Since nothing had been done about the vadalism from years back. Unfortunatly I know a few people who have some responcability in that.
Dublin statues and their nicknames. Many of these are quite clever, and are much more descriptive than the actual figures or things the represent.
My hometown has a statue of the Blessed Heart of Mary and a bigger one of the Heart of Jesus (however that one is referred to in English), in two different hills.
The Heart of Jesus is known as “Manazas”, which means “big hands” or “sloppy”. You see: its hands are pretty big (normal, considering that the model for the body was a local farmer and some of those have hands like shovels) and the poor guy keeps losing them every time he gets struck by lightning. No lightning has fallen in the town since he was built, it always hits the statue. When the Communist Party tried to start a motion to remove the statue, they were told that no way, it’s a helluva lightning rod so it stays.
We call the Marina Towers in Chicago “The Corn Cobs”.
AKA ‘SLUF’.
There’s a Henry Moore “Reclining Female Nude” sculpture in one of the side courts at MIT. The students call it The Giant Golden Bunny Rabbit because, seen from one angle, that’s exactly what it looks like. Right down to the eye.
Women who chase cops are sometimes called holster sniffers. I find it an amusing term.
CalMeacham, I couldn’t help but wonder if in your sig:
Because you’re Mayan
I Walk the Lion
you might find a way to change “Walk” to “Wok.”
I did see a gag cookbook one time: “101 Ways To Wok Your Dog” and I guess it’s feasible that some industrious inhabitant of lion-infested country might take up Chinese cookware and techniques to whip up some tasty lion stir fry for the gang.
Who knows what the Maya must have thought of in the way of preparing the local feline catch? I wok the jaguar. I wok the puma. I wok the sheriff.
Just a thought. Love the sig – changed or not.
Richard Serra’s installation Tilted Arc was known to New Yorkers as That Ugly Fucking Wall.
Years ago and long since departed the area there was a steak house with a maze-like set of hallways done up in Olde English decor and going by the name of “The Jolly Ox.” Decent food and atmosphere but it went under for some reason I can’t recall. Place has changed hands many times and worn many names since then.
Anyway, we called it the “Pissed Off Jackass” for no really good reason.
Since the OP started with planes…I always liked the nickname for the F-105 Thunderchief, because it was apparently sluggish on takeoff: the “Lead Sled”.
And for buildings: a few years back, my alma mater spent a whole buncha money building an absurdly ornate parking structure. It has become known as the “Garage Mahal”.
When Mayor Ken Livingstone engineered the replacement of London’s beloved Routemaster double-decker buses with so-called bendy buses made by Germany’s MAN AG, the new equipment at first showed a disconcerting tendency to burst into flames, leading to the nickname of “Ken’s chariots of fire.”
Montréal-Mirabel International Airport was built in 1975 ostensibly as the “eastern gateway to Canada.” It is (or was?) the second largest airport in the world, was very advanced for its day and cost tens of millions to build. Its remote location and dearth of connections to useful transport routes however made it extremely unpopular, and thus a colossal failure. Thereafter it became known as “The White Elephant.”
There is also a hospital somewhere in the northern part of Toronto (I can’t recall where exactly) which had a smokestack that was illuminated at night by purple floodlights. My girlfriend of the time pointed them out to me once and referred to the hospital as “The Purple Penis” for this reason.
Alright… I think we’re gonna need a picure of that one!
Can’t remember which fighter plane it was that was called the “Triple Threat”… it could shoot you, it could bomb you, or it could fall on you.
I met an Air Force officer (Security Police) who called the C-5A Galaxy Transports the “C–5 Bomber” because of the plane’s apparant tendency to drop various components (landing gear, engines, wings, etc.) on things it was flying over.
Also, I like the catch-all nickname for very very large airplanes: “Aluminum Overcast”
Supposedly the North Vietnamese called the A-6 Intruder the “Baby B-52”
The school busses with the engine stickign out of the front? “Big Iron Dog” The ones with the flat fronts and the huge windsheild? “Cast Iron Twinkie”
Dunno about the T-33 or T-37 being the Converter, but I have heard the F-4 Phantom called the “Clean Air Converter” (converted clean air to thick black smoke at subsonic speeds)
Around the Texas A&M campus, there are pillar-shaped bulletin boards on various high-traffic sidewalks, where anyone can put up anything they want. The members of the sci-fi club refered to them as “Phallic Symbols”
The Military Sciences building at Texas A&M is refered to as the “Trigon”. It’s shaped kinda like the Pentagon, but with two sections missing (where the hot dog stand would be, there is a small parking lot for the military officers)
Speaking of the Pentagon’s Hot dog stand… located in the middle of the courtyard in the middle of the Pentagon, the stand is known as “Ground Zero”, since any Russian or Chinese ICBMs intended for the Pentagon would most likely land right on top of the hot dog stand.