Valve shim

Now, I don't know a lot about valves, but after reading about the valve shim, it seems as though he's trying a bit too hard to make himself sound fun. I mean, this entry is barely three sentences long, but valve shim managed to cram in about five instances of fakery here. To the well-informed, a valve shim is merely a run-of-the-mill metal disc used to make the valves in car engines and the like work more precisely.

Luckily for valve shim, the uninformed see it a little differently. According to Wikipedia, valve shims not only get the good fortune of being associated with one of the more commonly non-fuck-up-able dance moves, the shimmy, they also have some sort of relation to the following terms:

• Rocker arms: Sounds badass, yes? Well, it's not. It's literally an armlike extension that rocks back & forth. Like a grandma.
• Top-hats: Yeah, I know. What's with the valve shim getting all musical & dancey on us? I don't know, but there's a top-hat shim. Is this the classy shim that goes in Rolls Royces and wears a monocle? Nope. It's just another weirdo-lookin' version of the plain ol' shim. Snooze.
• Cam-lobe: Well, I don't know what most people think of here, but I most certainly think about earlobes and piercings and cameras and scandals. But that's just me. And a cam-lobe is just a boring part of an engine or some junk.

Let's recap: A valve shim is not a dance we do when we're at a Def Leppard concert and get tired of doing the rocker arm (sorry, I didn't realize I was about to make an arm joke when I thought about using Def Leppard as my example here). It's not a show-stopping number that's only made more intriguing with the addition of a top hat. And it has nothing to do with the guy at the tattoo parlor that pierces your tongue then takes you in back and videotapes you hooking up on the hood of his souped up Nissan XTerra.

It's just a metal disc. But hey, at least it's metal and not easy listening.

PS: "Shim" totally reminds me of "Chim," which is a name Ron Burgundy uses as an alias in "Anchorman" and which my friends and I have adopted as sort of a euphemism for "douchebag." Learn it, love it, use it. This is Dr. Chim Richalds, signing off.