In passing

Whoever writes the local-feature obits for the Sunday Post had a field day this past week, writing about an elderly widow who had loved her parakeet Snookie so much that she asked that they be buried together. "Her request was to be buried with Snookie. If the bird went first, she wanted him stored in the freezer until she died. She appreciated the family comeback that if Snookie outlived her, a relative would buy a large freezer in which to keep her."

The bird died in September; the widow, in April. Her daughter-in-law notified the rest of the family via e-mail.

Header: "It's time to defrost Snookie."

Certainties

Death, taxes,...and Eurovision. There is no escape from the power of this fully armed and operational festival of continental WTF. Ayyyyy!

Also, Neil Gaiman is twelve.

Reason hangs by such a slender thread

see more crazy cat pics

I was caught mid-giggle by a spasm of twitching, because agh, THROUGH yonder window. It's through.

It has to be said

I love Jane Smiley in ways that cannot be textually rendered, even above and beyond her horse-world pieces (although if you haven't read Horse Heaven, you've got a treat in store). I mean, damn. "Bush and Cheney were hungry for war. Nothing they said could hide their eagerness. The story they put out, they had found out things, and they had explored all options, and now the invasion was a last resort, was evident bullshit. They never for one second had the demeanor of men who were thinking things over and weighing least bad options. They were hot to attack and impatient with anyone who stood in their way (the name Hans Blix springs to mind)."

The other bit of culture-conflict awesomeness, to which party I am fashionably late, is the flap about blogger/professor PZ Myers being banned from a free screening of a movie for which he had been interviewed and for which he was thanked in the credits. The topic of the movie? How intellectual dissent favoring intelligent design is—oh cruel!—being stifled on college campuses and how this is bad because it's important that everyone remember that belief in evolution leads to atheism and thence to the fall of civilization. And yes, the best way to demonstrate your commitment to free thought and open discussion of an issue is certainly to eject someone you know will disagree with you and whose interview you quotemined after getting it by misrepresenting your movie. But. BUT! While the movie's poobahs and their hired security did identify and bar Myers from the screening (for which he had registered under his own name, the foolish honest cephalopoidian creature), they let in Richard Dawkins. A grateful nation stands awestruck at this example of the difference between the fail simple and the fail EPIC.

Do you hear the people quote

Gaiman fans get animated for Obama.

Snow joke

La Mère and I hit Kim Phung for some last-minute Christmas Eve snacks. The owner tells us that the rice cakes with brown sugar that I've been craving aren't available during the colder months and that it needs to be warm for the culinary alchemy to work. We joke with him about how addictive the cakes are, while his son, maybe eight years old, looks on.

As we're checking out (pickled mango with chili flakes, small coconut pastries, some char siu bao-equivalents), the kid pops up from behind the counter and fixes us with a look.

"Is it true," he demands, "that if you sleep with your pajamas inside out and fill the toilet with ice, it'll snow the next day?"

Nonplussed, I blink at him. "Um. Did you try it?"

"Yes."

"Did it work?"

"NO." He sounds betrayed.

I have never heard this urban legend but am disinclined to do anything that might reduce the world's weirdness quotient. The counter staff are biting back grins.

"Maybe it takes more than one person. Maybe you have to get lots of people to do it with you."

The kid looks thoughtful and with no farewell takes off for the back of the store. We head out in search of boba coffees, and we make it about three strides before bursting out laughing.

A lost art

The really interesting authors find the most fascinatin' books to read. BoingBoing points out that William Gibson, who is back on the blogging horse, has republished an excerpt describing a (mercifully short-lived) trend in the 1700s for wearing tin stomachs that simulated pregnancy. I get past the WTFness of that only to find a section quoting the author on how men in these corrupt modern days are dressing like teh wimmenz ("Master Molly has nothing to do but put on his frilly little bonnet and he will pass for a lady, except for his deplorable face").

Goodness! you think. I must find the original work for myself and seek its present wisdom! What might it be called? And that's when the really great bit starts, because it's "ye blockbufter that'f burning up ye top 10 lift!" and the title is to match: Satan's Harvest Home, or the present state of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Sodomy, and the Game of Flatts, and other Satanic works, daily propagated in this good Protestant Kingdom.

Chaucer nedeth a newe payre of shoes!

Reason 2,583,899,024 to love the internets: Because someone is rewriting a Flight of the Conchords song in Middle English. "And ich haue soore nede of thy merchaundise. Aw yea. And ich am yn my red hose, the which aren cleped busynesse hose." Aw yea indeed.

No comment

Nosirreebob, I have no comment AT ALL about this picture of the Expelled Expat in a German Christmas market. Except that the picture reminds me that anybody who hasn't heard the Expat's hilarious tale of her second date with her now-husband is missing out on one of the best "and you went out with him again?!?" stories ever to end in a happy Vegas wedding and shared responsibility for a cyberkitty.

Completely POSSUM!

Heath Ledger and I have the same gloves. We both look abso-spankin'-lutely ridiculous in 'em, and I for one don't care.

Darwin pwnage, briefly

Favorite Pharyngula comment responding to last night's NOVA program about the Dover School Board controversy: "SCIENCE, FINCHES!"

Freerice.com is insanely addictive. If you're a vocab freak and/or kept an unabridged dictionary to hand while reading Shadow and Claw, beware that link.

All hail Quetzovercoatl!

Quetzovercoatl: Half man, half chicken, half jaguar, half serpent, half scorpion, half mad.

Although he now has to avoid reading fanfic for prophylactic legal reasons, Terry Pratchett has said that writing the stuff can be a useful training exercise for aspiring authors and that one of his own early stories was a Jane Austen/J.R.R. Tolkien crossover fic (the MS is tragically lost to history). He was particularly proud of the scene where the orcs attacked the rectory.

All of which is by way of saying that "The Night The Aztecs Stormed Glasgow" reminded me of Pratchett's gleeful wholesale rummaging through world mythology. Doesn't he seem the sort of man who would appreciate a song that rhymes Quetzalcoatl and anecdotal? For my own part, I cherish the illusion that perhaps such an invasion would have prevented the invention of butterscotch-flavored candy haggis.

[H/T Making Light, again some more.]

Et cetera

A day without riding is a day that will be followed by some singularly pointless posting. It turns out that an evening of laundry, paying the bills, and eating the butternut squash soup I made from Weebat's recipe (not shown: extensive prolonged cursing during the struggle to peel the squash) doth not a fruitful posting make.

Randomly, then, I bring glad tidings about the NYC yogurt chain's for expansion: "We will 'berry you." Also, here's a bit of fabulous from Defenestration magazine, the less-irritating heir of McSweeney's and makers of the pitch-perfect abridged Jude the Obscure vid. This one's for The Vamp, who lately has been operating on about twenty minutes of continuous sleep per night due to her new arrival's jet lag; maybe laughter can sub for some of the missing snooze time.

Working out is good for your braaaaaains

"Bring a yoga mat and intestines." Cannot...resist...savasana...joke!

Just be sure to remember the basic hierarchy.

Definitions

A few years ago, Making Light proposed a useful rule of thumb: "If, on appropriate occasions, the members tell, enjoy, trade, and/or devise transgressively funny jokes about their denomination, it’s a church. If such jokes reliably meet with stifling social disapproval, it’s a cult." The sorts of jokes made around my church are certainly esoteric (I once made a pun about omphaloskepsis and a convert who worked at the Naval Observatory, and other people got the joke), but that's part of the fun.

Still, the time I told a young Greek priest who visited me in the hospital that he was ten minutes too late, the Catholic guy had made a better case and I was off the Ortho roster? Probably not funny enough (in my defense, it had been an epically bad week). Certainly it didn't reach the guy, who turned out to be just out of seminary and therefore temporarily not in command of his sense of perspective. I think he recovered; word has it he's turned into a good guy to talk to.

That said, I'm still not going to forward him the Colbert Religion Randomizer, even though I can't stop pressing "CONVERT" and laughing. CONVERT! CONVERT!

A short thought

I have all sorts of trivial fun intel about my last-minute trip to NYC, where I did the usual eat-walk-spend routine and which has caused me to wonder whether I can live without a Tom SoHung wool coat or some of Coko Jewelry's Pattern Recognition-esque photos. But for now, two short love notes.

First, Paul Krugman on why conservatives shouldn't be fooling themselves that Bush is deviating even a step from the right's historical path.

And second, Viggo Mortensen, showing up on Colbert. Mortensen doesn't ring my chimes, but I love watching him ride (which he does much better than most actors), and clearly he doesn't take himself too seriously.

We only look sweet

I dunno what the context of this picture is, but it makes me twenty kinds of happy.

H/T Making Light's Particles.

Hacking the cerebral cortex

Part the nth of playing games with your fellow beings: Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day. Rose Tyler had this one nailed: "To get that many people dressed up and being silly, they gotta be students." If the respeckable adults among us did it, though, how much stranger and more fun would that be?

Favorite suggestion: "The classic version of this is to get some kind of smoke bomb or smoke machine, as well as an anachronistic costume. Wait for someone to walk past an alley, then set off the smoke and stagger out, looking dumbfounded. If they don't run away, grab their shoulder and ask what year it is. If they respond, shout 'The experiment was a success after all!' and run away. It works even better if you can get some friends wearing suits and dark glasses to go to the person immediately afterwards and ask if they've seen someone matching your description."

The wrong trousers?

Automating actions such as applying an image frame is time-saving at best and embarrassingly catastrophic at worst. Somewhere in the middle, there's...well, judge for yourself: Search inside!

Dressage did its usual thing for me and relaxed a bunch of the sore muscles, and although Cappi did display a few of his problems, we did not go flying sideways across the ring on a buzz of deer-induced adrenaline. The low point was cantering a 20-meter circle, where the Cappo di Tutti Cappi tucked his shoulder, ducked his head away, tried to speed up and completely lost track of his feet. You hate to see that sort of thing at this level of play. Of the two other horses in the class, the relatively young retired racehorse had a similar problem, while the old dressage App decided (as is his wont, the cranky SOB) that he didn't want to exert the effort. So at least I wasn't alone in feeling like a screw-up, and that's something of a comfort.

It sounds like there will be quite a crew cheering for Seesterperson tomorrow night, and the first flurry of scary planning is past. Now the pressing question is what to wear, darlingks, what to wear?

Dear Australia, all is forgiven

Sure, we've had our differences. There was the whole thing about not exporting your Tim Tams, which, right, some strong words were exchanged and we ultimately compromised that they would be called something boring like Arnott's Originals (nobody wants to do an Arnott's Original Slam), and we've moved past that not that I'm bitter about the delay and all those years of having to tell visiting Australian friends to leave their clothes at home the better to fill their luggage with crinkling boxes of joy. Then there's the part about your fauna being bizarrely aggressive, what with the hissing spiders and adorable blue-ringed octopodidae and unnecessarily large crocodiles and even venomous platypuses (what, were you out of shrieking eels?), and I think that with counseling we'll be able to agree to disagree on whether that makes for a habitable continent or not. Then there's the whole aspect where your people are aggressively cheerful even before alcohol gets applied ("Let's hike 30 kilometers before brekkie! It'll be bonza!"), doubtless because you're so happy to survive all the lurking animal menaces. I won't even get into the part about your being so far away that we almost never see you.

But I still love you.

Then these guys from the ABC comedy show, The Chasers War on Everything, are able to put together a fake Canadian diplomatic motorcade of a limo with 2 escort SUVs with little Canadian flags flapping, and that was good enough to get past $A165 million dollars worth of security planning and three security checkpoints and pull up to the front of the Intercontinental Hotel where President Bush was staying on the 29th floor.

The comedian actor Chas Licciardello, who was dressed and disguised as Osama Bin Laden, popped out of the limo at the hotel and reportedly shouted "Where is my friend Bush? It has all been a misunderstanding!!!"