My parents were going camping with a bunch of my dad’s colleagues, and they were getting their stuff together. They were bringing a handful of plastic bags and wanted to make sure they stayed dry, so they put the plastic bags in a plastic bag. I wasn’t there for the conversation, but from what I was told, it went something like this:
“What do you call a plastic bag that is made to hold plastic bags?”
“?”
“A plastic-plastic bag-bag”
“What about the box you just put the plastic bag full of plastic bags into?”
“Well, that would be a cardboard-plastic-plastic bag-bag-box.”
My parents told this story at the dinner table and, when you add in a bunch of teenage Rossis, we had to take it to the level of absurdity.
Plastic bags, in a plastic bag, in a box, in a car sitting in the garage would be (dun-duh-dun)
A wood-metal-cardboard-plastic-plastic bag-bag-box-car-garage.
For the next 20 years, when a discussion got to the point of absurdity, someone would just say “bag-bag-box-car-garage” and we’d all burst out laughing. Sometimes, we’d just blurt it out for no reason at all.
I thought of this because of something I stumbled upon while roaming the internet. It’s an island in a lake, in an island in a lake, in an island in the ocean. I looked on Google maps to make sure it wasn’t just a photoshopped joke, and it does exist. Just search for Tanauan City in the Philippines, it’s just west of there.
