It’s from Colossal Cave Adventure, by Crother and Woods, the original adventure game.
Forgot a Dope-related one. It’s been over ten years, so I can’t remember the specifics of who said what or, for that matter, what the heck it was related to. Holy cow, now that I think of it, I can barely remember what it was. Yeah, this is going to be a good contribution. :rolleyes:
Anyway, there was a thread in GD about some legal choice. The outcome of the case/controversy pretty much depended on a bit of arbitrary perspective. It was analogous to a case a Property Law (?) professor used to illustrate the concept. The conflict rose from one set of trees blighting the other (or something). Anyway, the type of choice became “Apples or Cedars” as a reference to the situation. So I–or Doper Gadarene–dropped the expression into the thread. A couple posts and PMs later, and it turned out we (strangers at the time) were in the same section at law school. Pretty awesome. Google’s not helping me find the thread, maybe he remembers…
That’s it!
I think the exchange was lost to the Winter of Missed Content–I’d tried searching on a variety of terms (with intitle:straightdope.com) but got nothing. Even with “Schoene” in there I’m not seeing it. The timing of WoMC is right too. Oh well, would have been nice to find. If there was any way to search the Wayback machine for threads, that might help.
Ah, Apples and Cedars … which are you going to protect? What does the state choose? Are you in/been to law school or are you just really good at searching for cases?
Just last month, I was teaching a class on the indigenous peoples of Mexico. I mentioned how Nahuatl speakers are in the Uto-Aztecan language family, which implies that the Aztecs originally came from further north (the American desert west), because Utah was named after the tribe which spoke a language called UTE…
…and I repeated that last word with a bit more of a Joe Pesci accent, and half the class laughed (though only a few of them are old enough to have seen My Cousin Vinny when it was first released).
Whenever anyone knocks on the door at my work, someone HAS to drawl “Who is it?” in that stoned way, and it’s usually the young (30!!) bloke who has only ever heard the skit, and has no idea who it is.
I once stood up trying to corral some rowdy band’s soundcheck, and said “Are we ready clocks?”
Most people stood and gawped at me, but quck as a flash, one lad ran over, grabbed a piece of paper off my desk, flicked me the Vs, and said “Finders keepers, losers weepers”.
We were the only ones laughing. Bloody kids.
The worst thing is when strangers don’t get references.
Being in Pro-Audio, I was buying stock from a supplier and he was trying to flog me some piece of kit. I looked at it, said “Oh great, it’s got Dobly on it!”
There was a brief, embarrassed pause, before he quietly said “Erm, yes, it has Dolby”
“Yeah, we ought to do it in Dobly”.
Silence. Tumbleweed blows through the room. Then, to my eternal chagrin, I changed the subject without trying to explain the reference. I now have to live with the fact that he thinks I’m under the impression that Dolby is Dobly…
I’ve never been to law school. I just googled as follows and it came up on the first link:
Not involving a stranger, but:
One day at work, someone had brought in a couple of boxes of doughnuts and jelly busters.
A colleague walked past, saying as he munched, “Mmmmm. Ich bin ein Berliner!” I cracked up, then he did, too.
Question marks floated over the heads of the others within earshot.
Just this morning, and a really off-beat reference to boot.
I was in a meeting discussing how much time and attention we needed to pay to a particular issue. I was arguing it needed to be addressed; others were suggesting we would do better to ignore it because of other more pressing needs.
As it became clear I was being outnumbered and my view was the minority one, I let it drop, but kind of jokingly-bitterly I said, “Great - fine, it’s a disaster but never mind; we’ve got somewhere to get to and have to sail calmly on.”
At the end of the meeting the admin assistant who had set up the A/V and the recorder for the minutes came up to me and said, “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.”
And I looked at her absolutely amazed, and she kind of grinned and said, “Hey, I did a thesis paper on W. H. Auden.”
I have two. One that began a lasting and wonderful friendship, and the other that was just fun.
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Was working on client site and had a high school kid doing some intern database programming. He’d created some amazing stuff and I said to him in my deepest voice… “Impressive! Most impressive!” Imagine my surprise when he looked up at me and responded, “But you are not a Jedi yet!” He’s the only one who ever got that reference.
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Was working as a contractor and was sent to work at the main office helping another writer. As I sat at my desk, I threw out a Monty Python line, sort of as a “anyone out there?” line. To my amazement, the other writer I was to work with pipes up with the next line. So I threw the third back at her. By the time we’d done the whole scene, it’d cemented our friendship. That person is Morgyn from this list! We’ve been friends more than 17 years now thanks to Monty Python! We still run scenes from just about every cool movie imaginable.