Two random thoughts which occurred to me while watching Excite’s Search Ticker scroll by during a fit of boredom:

1. Why isn’t “Tucson” pronounced the way it looks like it should be? I mean, I could very easily understand if it were pronounced “TUCK-sun”, and it’s not that much more difficult to see how it might be pronounced “TUKE-sahn”. But what caused the “c” to drop out of the pronunciation entirely? Granted, there’s probably an answer out there on the Internet waiting for me to stumble across it, but I’m feeling rather lazy right this moment, and besides, the computer on which I’m typing this is somewhat of a dinosaur.
2. Though in my opinion they’re both rather stupid names for telephone companies, “Cingular” just marginally beats out “Verizon” as being the more inane of the two. I mean, at least Verizon, in all its meaninglessness, doesn’t also manage to look like a careless, idiotic typographical error. But regardless, the two names do have one thing in common: as Dave Barry pointed out in one of his columns recently, neither sounds like it might actually be the name of a phone company. Heh.