Hack Attacks

What You Can Do With Your Noodle

Nov 18, 2025

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR DOG EATS SWEET POTATOES!

REMOVE MONTHS OF FILTH FROM YOUR OVEN!

HOW LONG DOES $1.5 MILLION LAST IN RETIREMENT?

STICK A BROOM INTO A POOL NOODLE!

I doubt I could come up with a “hack” like that. I don’t have a dog or a pool -- what are pool noodles, anyway, maybe a mistake for “nude poodles”? Furthermore, I don’t like the tone of “hacks”:

“So what are you going to do about what your dog did in our pool?”

“Ahh, whaddya expect, after you slipped him a sweet potato! Go stick a broom into a pool noodle!”

I love dogs and sweet potatoes. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a given dog of mine has gotten ahold of a bit of leftover sweet potato. Maybe that’s why Bobby, a childhood dog of mine, got so sick one time. Talk about “hacks”! Long drawn-out aaaks. He got rid of whatever it was, though. A dog knows when, eventually, to give up on something nasty. A dog may persist in struggling to keep something down, however, just because it has come from a filthy oven.

What filth?. Do people try to bake their shoes clean after they’ve stepped into something? I doubt very much that my mother’s oven was ever filthy. I come from dog-loving people, who were also sweet-potato-loving people, but that doesn’t mean we had filth in our oven. The truth is, if sweet potatoes were a threat to dogs, people would know about it already.

But making a provocative connection between dogs and sweet potatoes is a way to go viral, no doubt. Sometimes I toy with that notion, myself. Go viral, and you can have a lasting $1.5 million in retirement. So you could hire somebody to clean the so-called filth from your oven.

My core interests, however, lie elsewhere. I like to share unusual choices of words. Some of these, I make up myself. Others, I literally rip from actual newspapers. For instance this one, from the Berkshire Eagle, which I’ve saved since 2014. When a basketball player suffered a grotesquely broken leg on the court, reported the Eagle, his teammates were:

“looking visibly upset.”

Eleven years, I have saved that clipping. I have others. But just now I must have hit a grotesquely wrong key on my complex electronic keyboard, because this has come up on my screen:

“Automator could not run the workflow because one or more actions were not loaded.”

Unusual word-choice, all right, and with a hackish ring to it. So it has a place here. But I don’t know what it means. Not even what workflow means, nor Automater, and I don’t want to find out. So the time has come to close with a limerick: