As I’ve written elsewhere, my sister is a baker. Yesterday, to fulfill some Church-charity-auction-related obligation, she was baking a couple loaves of Challah (not to be confused with Ciabatta, as I eventually found out). Dutifully typing away at the terrific kitchen counter where I do all my work when I’m at my parents’ house, I paused to bug her a bit about this bread (whose name, as you probably know, is pronounced like the repeated word in the first line of John Legend’s “Used to Love U“) and get a feel for what things must be like at her school.
Kyle: So are people as obnoxious about Challah as I would be?
Rachel: What do you mean?
Kyle: Holla!
Rachel: Oh, yeah, totally.
Kyle: Good. I mean, that’s not a word I usually use, but how do you turn that down?
Rachel: My friend has a shirt that has a picture of one and says Holla, spelled the other way. She says she only wears it at school because nobody gets it.
I’m so glad people are nerdily goofy whatever their discipline. For our part, we nuclear engineers tend to hang a lot of Onion science stories on our office walls. “Caltech Physicists Successfully Split The Bill” is my all-time favorite (except, of course, for this bit of non-science genius). More recently, “Scientists Ask Congress To Fund $50 Billion Science Thing” included a hilarious illustration that used drawings of a “science thing” many people in my group actually work on (the unwisely named and recently defunded International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor).
I think I found that t-shirt
here.