Most people forget to do this every once in a while, I'm sure, and I know I've forgotten it at least once or twice myself; Boyfriend, purely by virtue of being the more accomplished conversationalist out of the pair of us, forgets to do this more often than I; and that is: segue.
We'll be having a conversation; there will be a lull; and, as near as I can figure, during that lull he continues developing the conversational thread as an internal monologue, making a few tangental connections; and then he continues the conversation aloud, halfway through another topic, as if I've been privy to it all along. Or, without preamble, he'll pick up in the middle a conversational thread we'd started a day or two ago. I'm fond of him, so I'm certain it's evidence of absent~minded genius.
And I think that's what happened when, during the morning drive to work, Boyfriend suddenly mused aloud:
They must have updated the language by now; I wonder... what IS the Klingon word for "Menswear"?
... which, of course, got us discussing how Are You Being Served? would translate into Klingon...
Mrs. Slocombe, for instance, might be heard to utter puj SuvwI'vetlh; bIQ rur, or, That warrior is as weak as water!
...and I am unanimous in that! would undoubtedly gain another nuance in translation...
... and as for her ~ well, you know, her thingy ~ hm. I am doubtful as to whether it's possible to make that pun, or, for that matter, any pun, in Klingon... perhaps someone might enlighten me on that. Would a Klingon enjoy a good pun?
Obviously, the crossover audience to which a Klingon AYBS? might appeal would be rather limited... but, on the other hand, if they can have Hamlet and the Bible... I'm impressed, but I'd be even more impressed if they'd had their site set up to Google in Klingon.
Now that I think of it, they should have Klingon language radio. Has anybody heard of any such thing?
.
~ ~ ~
Ran across several interesting & amusing websites while looking for language and phrase links:
I can see how these would come in useful... now, if only they could come out with PDAs that looked like Klingon Gadgets then I wouldn't have to break into fits of giggles at the thought of Klingons at Cons consulting their Palms...
And of course the first thing you learn in any language are the expletives...
FYI, here's a handy FAQ.
ooo ~ I'd fogotten about this one...
Oldies, but goodies: 10 things and another 12 things. Who am I not to pass on a venerable meme?
Boyfriend missed his exit and took a different route home, whereupon he discovered this little ruin on Gouin St., up in Ahuntsic.
So on the weekend, he surprised me with a little impromptu sightseeing jaunt down Gouin.
Gouin runs along the top edge of the island of Montreal; many of the lots on the north side of the street are waterfront properties, and the lots on the south side* have commanding views. Consequently, quite a few of the houses along Gouin are very old, very stately & very expensive.
Boyfriend had told me he was taking me somewhere interesting, but he didn't specify any further; and I thought he'd meant to show me all these upscale homes. So we had fun pointing out this, that & the other house, saying what we liked & didn't like, garnering architectural ideas, guesstimating property values.
And then he pulled in by the Loisirs (L'École?) Sophie~Barat, and there it was.
Some reconstruction company had clearly made a go at it; whether the renovation had been abandoned or intended only as stopgap structural stabilization, it was impossible to tell. Some bits were obviously done to keep people out, people who just as obviously wanted to get in.
We snagged a few photos & promised ourselves we'd come back with more memory, more daylight, fully charged digitals, mechanical cameras, tripods, etc.
Continued on Gouin until it became a one~way~the~wrong~way street; so we stopped to get a bite to eat. And, quite by accident, we discovered this little jewel of a spot. Touristy~ish, purely by virtue of being a site of historical interest; but not at all tourist trap.
Most visitors usually go to downtown Montreal and the Vieux~Port where the main tourist attractions are within reasonable proximity of each other, and visitors can get the most bang out of their buck; they might even venture as far up the island to Mont~Royal and the Oratory, or even as far afield as the Casino. But here, at the "top" of the island, the visitors at the Site des Moulins seemed to be native Quebecers who had come not for the thrill of being in a foreign country but for learning a little more about their own history.
There were quite a few locals enjoying the spot as well, which is a good indication that the rest of the park {Parc~nature de l'Île~de~la Visitation} is worth exploring.
You see, most other historical sites are usually subject to strict physical & narrative controls & protocols; and I inevitably feel like I'm a part of that unpredictable, living element which they're trying to keep at bay, which leaves me with the impression that I'm fundamentally unwelcome. And I get the sense of being dismembered from history rather than being a member of it.
But this historical site seems integrated into the social sphere of the neighborhood; while it's certainly no longer used the way it once was, it's still lived in. And that helps puts things in historical perspective for me ~ I can see that era as contiguous with my era, as opposed to seeing it preserved in a sort of chronological vacuum under a bell jar.
I think that's why I'm so delighted that we discovered it. Well, that, and it provides one with the opportunity for a lovely romantic {yet inexpensive} light dinner in a casual {yet cultured} atmosphere, with optional {photographic} promenade. Just in time for the Autumn colours, too.
Wonder what it will be like in the winter?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
* Including Bordeaux prison {picture courtesy of this lovely historical album from the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec}.
This is practically my job description ~~ I especially like to bit at the end, about shirking.
When I was first hired, it was important to me to do a good job for the personal satisfaction of doing a good job. But now I'm fed up, and I no longer see the point of going above and beyond the call of duty.
Our business is set up to screw over customers for the company's benefit; clients call up to complain about being treated unethically, and there's nothing I can do.
It's a bit how I imagine it must have felt like to have been a civil servant in British Empire India ~~ you're ostensibly there to serve the people, but your hands are tied by policy; and you can see the policies are clearly unfair, but at best you'll be fired and at worst you'll be in front of a firing squad should you betray your orders.
Thank heavens our company is not a country, and I only have be in denial about being a cog in a machine that shafts over clients, not citizens, who need our help.
So far, I've been able to handle that; it only reaches the just~grit~your~teeth~and~live~with~it level of guilt that seems to be the plimsoll mark of corporate culture...
The living room has been painted a lovely greeny~gray.
For some reason Boyfriend insisted on doing it all himself, and he finished most of the priming & painting while I was at work. He said since I chose the colour, he gets to paint...
I'm beginning to think that home renovation is really an exercise in problem solving between couples... either you bond together over it ~ or it breaks you.
It's very important to Boyfriend to own a house of some kind; I think that's why he's so keen on watching those home renovation shows, and why he was perfectly happy to paint the entire livingroom himself. I'm not keen on owning a house; I see it as a big, expensive pet which I will be expected to clean up after, and then pay huge bills on when it gets old & sick... I'm happy to commit to the pets I have, but it would have to be one heck of a house to warrant that kind of devotion {I know, I'm supposed to look at a house as an investment, but I've never been able to perceive the world in terms of the money it can make for me}.
And I've never been entirely swept off my feet by home makeover shows, either; the results almost always end up reminding me of interior design/home~improvement articles from vintage magazines ~~ remember the home remodeling for handymen issues of Popular Mechanics?* It just aggrieves me to think how dated those made~over rooms will look in a few years...
There are now so many home renovation shows out there that I'm beginning to wonder if there's some sociological significance to this trend. Why are these shows so bloody popular?
Could it be one of those mass consumption things? Perhaps it is simply that the nature of the medium of TV is better suited to programs whose raison d'être is "out with the old, in with the new."
Could it be influenced in part by the home centers who derive benefit from sponsoring them {being that they are essentially half~hour commercials extolling the joys of home remodelling with little 60~second commericals for home centres stuck in~between}? It must be lucrative.
Could they have tapped in to a common thread that runs though all of our psyches? Most of us have a place we call home; shelter is one of the basic needs. I can just imagine some producer blithering on about "cocooning", or some dramaturg blathering on about man vs. environment, or some grad student blustering through a Master's thesis on "Home Renovator as Protagonist"...
We are so defined by our homes that homeless people have next to no status in our society. Think of the degrees of respectability between living in a vehicle, a bachelor apartment, a duplex, an uptown loft, or a split~level bugalow with two~car garage and yards to mow...
Paranoid Moment Sidebar:
Sometimes I feel {that's feel, as opposed to think ~ I'm not trying to claim I have brilliant flashes of insight, and I doubt this paranoid feeling would stand up to a good think~through} that this is how a culture's standard of living is maintained: if you don't meet the standard, then you simply don't count; so you are compelled to reach those minimum standards in order to participate in whatever society you're in.
That weird little feeling creeps up on me every time I'm asked to provide my driver's license as identification, and I have to tell them I don't have one because I've never learned to drive, which nets me disbelief, exasperation and sometimes outright suspicion. I've run into circumstances where a driver's license was considered the only acceptable form of photo ID, and in those circumstances I'm unable to prove my identity until I get at least a learner's permit.
I can't help but feel it's odd that in order to receive what is considered a fundamental piece of identification I am required to pay money to learn a skill, pay money to pass a test of this skill, pay money for a vehicle & its insurance, pay money to be granted the ID, and then pay money for the rest of my {driving} life to have it renewed.
Perhaps, deep down, I feel the same way about having a home. Who knows?
Paranoid Sidebar Over, Relative Sanity Recommences Here:
I'm thinking we could paint the hallway off the livingroom a Pale Hound...
Hm...
Maybe renovation programs are escapist. For those of us who long for home...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
* First published in 1902, it was "written so you can understand it" since 1903 until that tagline was dropped in 1960. What changed, I wonder?
{Further to this post.}
I've suspected this...
My cat food provider equates one cup of dry food to two cans of wet food, a cup being defined as 100 grams, and the can as 170 grams. So ~ at least, in terms of Medi-Cal's Reducing Formula ~ 100 grams of dry cat food is the nutritional & caloric equivalent of 340 grams of wet cat food.
My other kitties disdain the kibble, surviving with monastic discipline on only their own portion of paté plus whatever they dare filch from each other; once in a while, they may eat dry food that has wet food sticking to it, but more like as not they'll just lick the wet food off it...
And my zaftig feline beauty scarfs all their leftover kibble.
{forehead smack}
No wonder there's so much of her to love ~~ she's getting three times as many calories out of the same bellyful.
~
I've been garnering reference material on the care of kitties; and, as in human nutrition, there seem to be two schools of thought on feeding practices.
On the one hand, one ought to carefully controll the amount of food to which kitties have access, and feed two or three small meals a day. The idea is, cats in the wild "catch when catch can"; so, in order to best accomodate the feline metabolism, one should strive to mimic their natural feeding habits. According to proponents of this approach, kitties with unlimited access to food are likely to consume unlimited amounts of food.
On the other hand, one ought to have food available at all times so kitties can graze at their own leisure. The idea is, cats with restricted food intake are unnaturally dependant on you for nourishment, which gives them a famine mentality; they will bolt their food, they will compete with each other at feeding time, and they will try to eat things just to find out if it's edible. According to proponents of this approach, kitties with unlimited access to food are likely to self~limit their consumption of food.
And the middle way, of course, is to leave out dry food for snacking, and put out wet food for meals, which infuriates both the no~snacking~between~meals! crowd and the no~tempting~with~desert! crowd.
If only somebody could contrive a dispenser that provided kitties with access to fresh wet food at their behest...
I remember those, says a ghostly and wistful feline voice from a much earlier generation, we used to call them house mice...
Just ploughed through an online copy of Neverwhere during the last two days at work. It's been slow lately, slow enough to read a novel, but not slow enough that I feel I have the time to read a novel leisurely...
Mind you, that's no excuse for having also ploughed through a copy of Robertson Davies' What's Bred In The Bone* last weekend. In my defense, I must say that lately I've ingested nothing but TV, movies, radio, and internet news; and I hadn't realised how famished I was for books; and that's why I've gulped them down without chewing.
Fortunately, both Gaiman & Davies {& while we're at it, add Pratchett} lend themselves very well to being ruminated* over; they all make a point of drawing from a variety of other sources, and it's enjoyable to search out & read the references & then go back to re~read the books themselves.
~ ~ ~
* While looking for a link for Bred/Bone, I found this... wonder if Davies read it?
** ... as if my brain has three or four stomachs...
Dreamt last night I was in Bride class.
It was a dress rehearsal for the final project, wherein five of us would actually go through the process of getting married. I was one of the five, chosen by lot.
Since we only had enough class time to marry five students, the rest of the women were to function as Bridesmaids. Thus, each Bridal Party comprised one Study Group.
As everybody in the class was, in theory, a Bride, everyone was in their own special wedding dress.
Looking at all the Wedding~Dress~clad Bridesmaids attending to their Wedding~Dress~clad Brides, I felt something was off...
It suddenly occured me that bridesmaids normally don't wear white; even wedding guests avoid wearing white, so as not to draw attention away from the real bride.
So I made some flippant remark to the Bride in the study group next to mine; I don't remember exactly what, but it was an observation that, technically, it was inappropriate for all of us to be wearing white. It may have even been a joke about how we're all essentially wearing the same dress.*
The emotional temperature in the room dropped. The other Bride to whom I'd spoken barely acknowledged the remark with a tight~lipped little glare, and then ignored me. The other study groups went about their preparations a little more quietly.
We had all entered into this mutual fiction of being Brides, and I had transgressed the suspension of disbelief; it was inexcusably bad~mannered of me, to have pointed out the truth.
~ ~ ~
* I may have paraphrased this quote from Rita Rudner:
A while back, I happened to mention to someone that I have a fat cat who has to lose weight.
And I got an unexpected reaction; it was as if I had said "all fatness is an abomination; all existing fat throughout the span of time and space should be mercilessly hunted down and destroyed".
So I need to emphasize here that I am not proclaiming any aesthetic or moral judgments on fatness. The only reason I even bloody noticed kitty was quote fat unquote in the first place was because my vet told me she was. And he made a point of impressing this information upon me:
Look at her genital area, he said, holding her out rump~first. It's soiled because she can't reach around her belly and clean herself. If it's not clean, she will be vulnerable to urinary tract, vaginal and rectal infections. Cats who can't keep themselves clean will lose interest in general grooming, and that will cause skin problems. Furthermore, overweight cats run a very high risk of developing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, liver failure and joint problems; so they are more likely suffer a lower quality of life and then die young.
But right now, he said, the bottom line is, if she can't clean her own bum, then you will have to buy a special cleanser and do it for her.
And that's when we started feeding her the diet cat food.
Now that the vet has told me she's overweight, I can see what he saw: she's really quite a delicately~boned small cat who is able to fool you into thinking she's a big~boned brawny cat because she carries herself so well.
But I still never bothered to keep tabs on her weight; I just figured she'd do fine so long as she was fed only the diet food. Okay, so we let her eat as much as she wanted. Okay, so ocaaaasionally we ran out of the diet food and we ran down to the corner store to pick up a can, or two, to tide her over. But that shouldn't affect whether or not she's at a healthy weight...
Last month I decided to start taking her outside for more exercise. And the walking harness could not encompass her girth.
So I weighed her on our bathroom scale; and she weighed as much as she did two years ago when the vet told me she was fat. Fourteen pounds.
It had been in the back of my mind for those two years that a cat forced to lose weight too quickly would suffer hepatic lipidosis ~~ so, on the bright side, while she wasn't any better, at least she wasn't significantly worse.
But I'll now have to properly monitor her weight loss. And because the increments will have to be measured by the ounce {or gram}, I will need a special scale.
Vets usually use baby scales, and that's what I would prefer to buy; the problem is, they're expensive. Boyfriend has argued that kitchen scales are cheaper and more versatile; but I have trouble believing that there's a domestic kitchen scale out there with a fourteen pound capacity...
We may compromise on shipping/postal scales; perhaps one of the pulley~type hook~on hanging scales would be most convenient. You know how cats never like to stay where they're told to stay, and so sometimes it's hard to make them stay on the scales... so, imagine a kitty bed with straps on to which one could hook the pulley scales and lift. I could weigh her in her sleep and she'd never have to know.
Still, I like the lines of this little item; and if I had the cash, I'd buy one. *grumble* You'd think that the market would be flooded with used baby scales that have been outgrown; but my preliminary research seems to indicate that new mums are being encouraged to rent rather than buy nowadays...
I'd be happy even with the low~tech baby scale my mum had {i.e., non~digital ~ mostly all the modern scales are digital, with rare exceptions}. My mum's baby scale looked rather like an old~fashioned candy scale {though much plainer, of course}. But I can't even find any of those.
Where do new mums go to buy used baby stuff?
The trouble we have here, you see, is that you and I have no way of knowing whether I've got my facts straight.
I can only hope that I remember it correctly after so many years, and that the caller I heard on the radio had her information right. The closest thing I can find to a formal dictionary definition is this {and you will have to either use the "find" function on your toolbar or scroll through the whole darn page to get to it}. The irritating thing is that someday this link may no longer exist and you'll just have to take my word for it that such a thing existed.
Oh, well... I remember hearing about it on CBC Radio, so it must be true...
CBC Radio has a number you can call to leave a voice message containing your two cents on the articles they air; they always play a few clips of these messages the next day. For some reason, way back when, there was an article about opening jars using elastic bands.
And a nice little old lady called in to say that when she was a youngster, there used to be a disc of thin rubber that was sold specifically as a grip for opening jars. In fact, she said, it was in such common use that companies used to put their logos on them and give them away free, much like pens or cereal~box prizes are given away nowadays.
And do you know what we used to call it? she said. We used to call it a Rubber Husband.
I find it tremendously significant that a Rubber Husband opens jars, whereas a Rubber Woman serves quite a different purpose entirely. Pretty much sums up traditional gender roles, don't you think?
Oh, that inflatable sex toy in the kitchen? That's for the jars I can't open by myself...
