Puss-in-boots, as told to my nephew

Once upon a time there was a simple young man who inherited nothing from his father but an old cat and a pair of boots. This young man had fallen in love with the daughter of a wealthy merchant, but although she loved him too, he knew that her father would never consent to her marrying a poor man.
He was sitting in front of his fire one night, bemoaning his fortune, when his cat said, "Do not fear, master. I know how to help you marry the woman you love."
The young man exclaimed, "Aaa! A talking cat!"
The end.

The joy of roommates

"Ah, you're done on the phone. Who was on the phone?"
"Me."
".....I meant the other end of the phone."

The proper use of technology

Tonight I asked a friend to help me prepare for a class presentation. My presentation is on long-distance collaborations. I figured I'd tell them about some of the tools I've used over the years, like blogs and skype, and give a demonstration of a nifty skype add-on called Talk and Write by doing a live skype call with my friend, during which we'd collaborate on drawing a picture.

This is the first picture we drew together.



Perhaps we should draw something different for my class presentation.

A Canadian WASP sings the blues

On a recent flight I was listening to the blues music channel on Air Canada's "personal entertainment system". It cut out right in the middle of a good song when we started descending, and I felt bereft for a moment. "No," I thought, "Blues all gone! ... I'm sad! ... I have...no-blues blues.....heyyyyy...."
I should note that the Frantics sang a rather different song called "The no-blues blues" on CBC radio back in the late eighties.
I should also note that I personally own neither a Prius, an iPod, nor a condo.

Woke up this mornin':
Couldn't sing the blues.
You know 'bout that, baby--
Got them no blues blues.
I got me some money;
My man ain't done me wrong.
I ain't had nothin' to sing about
In oh! so very long.

I ain't got no street cred
cause I never seem to lose
my case of---no blues blues.

Got into my Prius
Drove on downtown:
Gotta see my accountant
'Bout my retirement plan.
He said, "Honey, you're laughin',
Got it made in the shade."
I asked him, "Should I be happy
With my mortgage all paid?

How can I be down and out
With brand new Prada shoes?"
Well, I got them---no blues blues.

So I turned up my iPod
'til I got to the mall.
If it weren't for good luck
I'd have no luck at all.
Got back to my condo
Put my key in the door:
There's my baby, vacuuming,
With piles of clean laundry all over the floor.

He says, "Honey, I missed you,
Now tell me, what's the news?"
Well I gots them low down no good---no blues blues.

I'm crying into my latte
'coz my life story is a snooze.
All us bourgeois bohemians got them---no blues blues.

anniversary poems

So today is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. (I've written about them and their anniversary elsewhere.) 40 years is a big deal. Unfortunately, there's no real way for me and my brother to make a fuss about them right now. Some kids get to send their parents on dream vacations for a big anniversary--but not us. They've been sending themselves on dream vacations for quite some time now, having followed through on their lifelong plan to retire early and travel. (You have to check out Mom's blog--the sidebar calendar alone makes me weary.) And I'm not rich enough to buy them diamond rings, and they're too far away for me to make them fresh chocolate chip cookies (those being the two gifts that Miss Manners says are never unwelcome). So all that's left to be done is to write an anniversary ode.

Unfortunately, when the Muse speaks to me, these are the kinds of things she says....

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You are my dove
Or perhaps cockatoo.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You make me burn hotter
Than beef vindaloo.

Violets are blue
Roses are red
Life without you?
I'd rather be dead.

Roses are red
Daffodils yellow
One look at you
And I turn to jello.

The rose it is red
The leaf it is green
If you'd be my love
That sure would be keen.

Violets are blue
Except when they're indigo
Your rival may woo
But I will tell him to go.

Roses are red
Blue is the violet
I could fly high
With you for co-pilot.

Roses are red
Marigolds orange
I am a door
And you are a door-hinge.

Violets are blue
And so are hydrangea
I would be too
If you were a stranger.

Trees they are wooden
And so is a boomerang
You'll make me puddin'
And I will make you meringue.

Clouds may be grey
But their linings are silver
For you I would steal
--Well, maybe just pilfer.

Roses are red
Sunset is golden
My world is complete
When you I am holdin'.

So. Happy anniversary, my dear parents, wherever you are today.

why I love my parents, reason #329

Scene: driving in the outskirts of York, past a shop with a big sign that says "TYRES BATTERIES CLUTCHES"

me: Hey look! That shop sells ancient Mediterranean seaports.
Dad: And coastal gun emplacements.
Mom: It's a bit ambiguous, though, about whether it also sells evening purses or groups of eggs.
me: Either way, that's quite a diverse product line.

little-known historical fact

During the later years of the Venetian city-state, it slid into corruption and decay. The city leaders became especially notorious for their greed, rapacity, and violence. It got to such a point, in fact, that some citizens put a sign up outside of town saying, "Beware of the Doge."

home dusty home

me: Hey, wow, is this a new vacuum cleaner?
smart-ass flatmate: Well, yes.
me: Does it actually work?
s.a.f.: Well, no.
me: Why not?
s.a.f.: It's buddhist.
me: huh?
s.a.f.: No attachments.

Mondegreen Thursday, hard rock edition

I want to rock and roll all night
and part of every day.
--Kiss

The walls start shakin'
The earth was quakin'
My mind was achin'
And we were bacon.
--AC/DC

What are we feeling that would be better expressed in German?

...was the title of an Onion sidebar, many years ago. I can't remember their specific examples, but Elisa and I came up with several candidates this weekend:

• the chagrin of realizing that you have once again left the house wearing your underwear inside-out.
• the half-smug, half-abashed feeling that comes when you realize that your mother would disapprove of everything that you have eaten in the past twenty-four hours.
• gloating over your secret plans to take revenge on someone by publishing a paper that invalidates an experiment they're doing.

...none of these are entirely hypothetical, as it happens.

Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions about the German equivalents?

conversation in a taxi

"People nowadays give ridiculous names to their children. Why can't they stick with nice, sensible, Old-Testament names?"
"Yeah--like Nebuchadnezzar."
"Or Cain."
"Or Habbakuk."
"Who on earth is Habbakuk?"
"I'm pretty sure he's, like, a prophet, or something."
"Wow, you're, like, a biblical scholar, or something."
"Come on, girls, be serious. What about Samuel?"
"That would be perfect if you had twins."
"Twins?"
"Yeah. You could call them First Samuel and Second Samuel."
"You can't name your kids after books of the bible."
"Why not? You said you wanted Old Testament names. How much more Old Testament do you get than that?"
"Well, there's Genesis..."
"True. You could go in order. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua...actually Joshua's a nice name."
"Wait, you know the books of the bible in order?"
"I'm, like, a biblical scholar, or something, remember?"
"You girls aren't helping at all."
"Sorry, yes. Baby names. Biblical....Well, for girls there's always Jezebel."
"Or Delilah."
"Or, hey--Rachel!"
"Oh, now you're just being silly."
"Sorry."

He wants to pinch

[09:35] Corey: I want to pinch.
[09:35] Rachel: no, no pinching
[09:35] Corey: Maybe little pinch?
[09:35] Rachel: get away from me
[09:35] Corey: I pinch.
[09:36] Corey: *reaching for your ankle
[09:36] Rachel: I'm getting the tongs.
[09:36] Corey: !!!!!
[09:36] Corey: No pinch... no pinch...
[09:36] Rachel: you're just lucky I didn't have to tell your girlfriend
[09:36] Corey: What? That I pinch? She knows I pinch. She lets me pinch her.
[09:37] Rachel: that you pinch other people
[09:38] Corey: We have a very modern relationship. If I occasionally sink my sharp claws into someone else's ankle, she's mature enough to accept that.
[09:38] Corey: If I ever told her, that is.
[09:38] Rachel: I see.
[09:38] Corey: Don't tell her.
[09:38] Corey: Or I pinch you.
[09:38] Rachel: hey, I don't want to get pinched
[09:39] Corey: And yet I want to pinch.
[09:39] Corey: Such is life.
[09:39] Rachel: the perpetual problem:
[09:40] Rachel: how does any given pair of people (or indeed crabs) negotiate pinching frequency, given different levels of interest in pinching or being pinched?
[09:40] Corey: Basically, I don't tell you I intend to pinch. I just pinch.
[09:41] Rachel: ah. the stealth-pinch strategy
[09:41] Rachel: But then see I don't tell you I'm getting the hammer and tongs, and maybe a bit of dipping sauce.
[09:41] Corey: By that time I'm gone, pinching someone else.
[09:41] Rachel: typical.
[09:41] Corey: It's a perfect plan, really.
[09:42] Rachel: except for one thing:
[09:42] Rachel: my lightning-quick tempura skills.
[09:42] Corey: Uh oh.
[09:42] Corey: No pinch... no pinch...
[09:43] Rachel: --are you blogging this or shall I?

(watch this and then read this again. it'll make more sense.)

Mondegreen Saturday

Kate Bush: I'll do it for you...I'll be Isildur or Marian for you...

She'll cut a Ring of Power off the hand of the Dark Lord for you? Aw. How romantic.

the politics of epidemiology

I'm rather anxious about my parents. See, I heard that Bush is planning to take action to prevent the spread of bird flu. Knowing him, though, that means he'll mount a preemptive strike against Turkey.

(some people say he'll hit the Canary Islands first, but this seems more plausible.)

things I never expected to hear from my boss, part N

Alison is my boss. Alison is a month older than me. Alison first met me when we were roommates at a conference, and a senior professor got us all drunk as skunks and I told her my entire life story. Alison has no illusions about me. Alison hired me anyway (go figure).

We were going to go out with another colleague yesterday evening, and since I still hadn't dried off after my wetting and I didn't have time to go all the way home to change, we stopped off at her place so she could lend me some dry clothes. We were walking down the street afterwards and she said, "You look better in my clothes than I do."

The list of things I never expected to hear from a boss just gets longer and longer.

voodoo umbrella

It's raining today and it's all my fault. See, I have this umbrella, and it's small enough that it's easy to carry around in my backpack, but also small enough that it isn't much use for actually, you know, keeping off the rain. It's more a symbolic umbrella--an umbrella security blanket, if you will: it gives me the feeling that I'm Doing Something about the rain, which is comforting even if the thing I'm doing isn't keeping me dry. Anyway, the weather this week has been stunning, so finally on Thursday night I took the umbrella out of my backpack, figuring I'd free up some space for essentials like Hob-Nobs.

Well.

What else did I expect, really? But it was truly amazing: on Friday the thunder-and-hail storm lasted only about half an hour, but it coincided exactly with the only half-hour of the day when I actually had to be outside. (It was kind of fun. I very quickly realized that there was no way to avoid getting drenched--no evasive ducking-under-awnings moves I could make, no speedy sprints that would save me a wetting--and so there was no point in resisting it. I ended up feeling like a kid splashing in mud puddles.) And then this morning it started chucking down again right when I started walking to the bus stop (again sans umbrella) .

I must e-mail my friend who wanted to have a barbecue this afternoon and give him my sincere apologies.

Mondegreen Thursday

Song heard in the car just now:
I could never make you oh so lewdly happy...

Eventually I figured out that it was actually absolutely happy. Ah well.

I screw for a living

So the past couple of days have been busy days at work. We're setting up an experiment, which means I've been running up and down ladders carrying equipment that is some combination of heavy, awkward, expensive, so fragile that it can be broken if you breathe on it, laboriously handmade, or irreplaceable. Oh, or radioactive. (It's somewhat less nerve-wracking carrying these things myself than watching other people carry them.) We've had to make a lot of changes to the set-up, which means I've been putting in and taking out the same twenty or thirty screws over and over again. All of a sudden, in the middle of one of these tasks this afternoon, it hit me: I screw for a living.

...although not perhaps in the way my mother feared I would end up doing back when I was eight and showing a marked preference for barbies and dress-up over trucks and lego.

question

How lazy does one have to be before buying new pants seems like a better idea than doing laundry?

Because however lazy that is, that's how lazy I am.

weekend quiz

So I spent this weekend in London with my dear friend Elisa and her S.O. Alex. We hung out on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon with three of their friends. Among the six of us, we have at least eight advanced degrees (it might be more, not sure) in subjects as diverse as mediaeval french, physics, philosphy, and law, are natives of six different countries, speak six languages (not counting Latin), and have lived in at least two countries besides our native countries. What do you think the chief activity was, while we were eating sushi, drinking wine at an obscure-but-excellent wine bar, and watching the Cambridge-Oxford rowing race?
(a) Discussing current events and our own personal theories of politics, economics, and literature.
(b) Recounting stories of our many and diverse travels.
(c) Making animal noises.

While watching the boat race, the right sort of picnic is
(a) Kir and brie.
(b) Diet coke and Doritos.
(c) Kir and Doritos.
(I think that last option must be an example of what Annene-of-Orkut calls Dada food.)

And a personal question: I like to wear my hair in braids
(a) for the convenience of having it out of my face.
(b) for the alternative-skater-Lolita effect.
(c) so that I can hold the ends above my head and pretend to have antennae, or in front of my face and pretend to have a moustache.

The answers should be obvious.

It was a good weekend.