After consistently receiving ominous warnings from my mobile phone to the effect of, “MEMORY 95% FULL,” and “SELF-DESTRUCT MODE WILL ACTIVATE” and so on, I was cleaning up my text/pict messages a little. A few messages prompted a chuckle, several were so cryptic I wouldn’t dare hazard a guess as to their context or meaning, and then I found this doozy:

How about NAKED RATS NAKED RATS – THREE FOR A BUCK!

Documentation indicates that I sent this message to Charles on September 30, 2005 at 9:01 p.m. Yes, I said it. I do know that he had sent me a picture of a naked mole rat at some point, but what prompted me to try and come up with an all-you-can-eat-restaurant-type advertising slogan for said rats is beyond me. Ten days earlier I also evidently said:

Might come in handy at a wine tasting…

This seems fairly innocuous, unless you consider that day we were discussing his animal science class – “just another day in animal science class” – to be specific, from which these quotes resulted. Come on – as if there was any doubt that Charles had given me those quotes.