The associations

I learnt a word today. It was adiabatic which means something like “without passage”, describing a thermodynamic process where there is no heat exchanged between a system and its surroundings (correct me if I am wrong). It would be a nice word for a game a friend once told me about (I am not sure if he ever has played it). Everybody scans through Wikipedia and randomly picks a word or a description and uses it casually during a normal conservation without, that’s the idea, anybody else noticing. Such a game only works if you are in a closed environment, let’s say an adiabatic one (bingo!), like a university, or a ski camp where you bore each other to death. Speaking about. There was this wonderful TV show called Bored to Death where a writer turned private investigator tries to get his texts published in the New Yorker. Sadly, they stopped the show after the third season. I suspect the success of the stupid Hangover sequels to be the main reason behind this crime against me (as noted earlier: mainly writing about TV shows means not knowing what to write about). Zach Galifianakis played one of the main characters in Bored to Death. The Wikipedia game would have been a wonderful episode for the show. What brings me to Curb Your Enthusiasm as Ted Danson, who played George in Bored to Death, is also part of Larry David’s group. And I am sure I could find a possible transition to Breaking Bad or The Wire. Or a book? Maybe a Jonathan Franzen? Or if you prefer music, I could somehow end up with Jacques Brel’s ecstatic Amsterdam, like everybody seems to do when they are in the radio show Musik für einen Gast on Swiss Radio Station or maybe David Bowie or now Lou Reed (or Bob Dylan or Georges Brassens or Mani Matter). And I am sure I would find a way to incorporate the stoning scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brain, and then I might say something like you are a Belieber (a Justin Bieber fan) or you use the word twerk or maybe quote a line from whatever song is airing just to pretend. And everybody has his favorite associations (and sometimes you know your friend’s associations better than yours). And in the end they are what make your conversations interesting as you start somewhere and end somewhere else, hopefully with a season four. Be a #Belieber.