In the fall of 1978, the penultimate speaker of Kalounik and wife of Birto Nourrak, died. Without being able to speak any other languages and with no one else who could speak his own language, Mr. Nourrak, was left starkly alone in his hometown of Condowie, Australia. He was soon moved to a small nursing home a few towns away, where he was despondent and melancholy. At the same time, the nursing home bought a new vending machine, which it installed next to the old one, which they discontinued stocking.
Over the next few months, Mr. Nourrak made a habit of visiting the old, empty vending machine, and slowly feeding it, over the course of the day, all of the coins that he had. At night, the nurses would empty the machine and place the coins back on Mr. Nourrak’s nightstand. Until the end of his life in 1982, Mr. Nourrak didn’t make a sound, and was dissociative with all other people, but continued his numismatic communication with the vending machine.
Popular Usage
•President Bill Clinton is said to have called his meetings with President George W. Bush “comfortable chair-ishable experiences”.
•In an episode on the third season of the television show Boston Legal, the characters Denny Crane and Alan Shore sat smoking cigars and calling each other comfortable chairs.
•The online art criticism site, Mattisian Blog, made the argument that every painting (or work of art) should be a comfortable chair in as much as it should be an elegant expression of the inability to communicate.
•In the second season of Arrested Devopment, Michael says to Gob "...let's not spin in the comfy chair", in reference to the lonliness and dysfunction inherent in their family.
•William Safire wrote an etymology of the word in his New York Times Sunday Magazine, in which he compared the differences between a comfortable chair and the last fax machine.
•Mos Def has a song titled “Tha Comfy Chair” |
