Sunday Stealing

The Madness Meme, Part 2

23. Do you ever walk around the house naked?
I don't think I have ever done that. 24. If you were an animal what would you be? Why?
An elephant, because I just love those animals and am intrigued by their society, their emotional connections to each other, and because I just saw this video and I'm still crying about it.

25. Hair color you like on someone you’re dating?
Doesn't matter at all. If I were to start dating now, my only options, I suspect would be grey or white!

26. If suffering an injury, would you rather be left blind or deaf?
Very difficult decision, but I think I'd rather be blind (though I am terrified of going blind) because I could still hear audio books, "watch" television, and talk to friends on the telephone.

27. Do you have any special talents?
I can wiggle my ears.

28. What do you do as soon as you walk in the house?
Give the dogs their treats because Polly won't stop barking at me until I do.

29. Do you like horror or comedy?
If it's the choice of those two, definitely comedy, but I'd rather choose crime/mystery than either of those.

30. Are you missing anyone?
Oh, Lord, yes.

31. Where do you want to live when you are old?
I am old and I'm content just where I am.

32. Who is the person you can count on the most?
If you mean other than Walt, it would be my friend Char, who has always been there for all of my crises and traumas and somehow still comes back for more.

33. If you could date any celebrity past or present, who would it be?
I don't want to date a celebrity, but I wouldn't mind hanging out with a couple. I think Ellen Degeneres would be fun to visit on her ranch with all her animals, for example. I would also love to sits and chat with Rachel Maddow.

34. What did you dream last night?
If I dreamed anything, I don't remember what it was.

35. What is your favorite sport to watch?
Horse racing. I enjoy a football or baseball game if there is someone to watch it with. And of course, during the Olymics, I love to watch springboard diving.

36. Are you named after anyone?
Sort of. They were going to name me Barbara, after my aunt Barb, but decided it would be compicated having two Barbaras in the family, so they named me Beverly, which was Barb's middle name (they tell me). Ironically, throughout my entire life, when people can't remember my name they always call me Barbara.

37. What is your favorite alcoholic drink?
Probably gin and tonic, though there were a lot of alcoholic drinks we tried over our cousins day celebrations that were pretty good. A chocolate raspberry martini was one that I remember very fondly.

38. Non alcoholic drink?
ice water

39. Have you ever been in love?
Of course.

40. Do you sing in the shower?
No. It always struck me odd that people seem to think that everyone sings in the shower. The idea has never occurred to me.

41. Have you ever been arrested?
No. I'm a good girl

42. What is your favorite Holiday?
Thanksgiving, I think. Minimum pressure, and pumpkin pie--can't beat it. Though it's not as good as it was in the years when my godfather always brought a 2 lb box of See's candy to dinner. My mother put it on top of the glass cabinet and after everyone finished their dinner, she would take the box down and we passed it around the table. My first choice was always California brittle.

43. Would you ever get plastic surgery?
Only for a disfigurement, not for improvement of appearance. I earned my wrinkles, laugh lines, and all those other imperfections.

44. Have you ever caught a fish?
No. I don't remember ever going fishing, though I did go crabbing with my grandfather once. I can't remember if we caught any crabs or not.

Cartoonerisms

Oh you're going to feel so smart when you finish reading this. Walt and I went in to Sacramento this evening to see a show and, as usual when my colleague Jeff isn't with us, we listened to "Says You." "Says You" is great for that drive because it's just long enough to get us through the round trip. Sometimes we finish a little before our drive has ended, sometimes Walt has to do a little driving around Davis for a few blocks until the show ends (you can't park in the driveway and listen to it because Polly is barking her food head off).

The last segment of the show tonight was about the words used to describe the way that certain actions are indicated in comics. They gave the example of GRAWLIX. You all know what grawlix is, though you may hever have heard the word. This is an example of a grawlix.

It's that collection of symbols to represent bad words being spoken by the cartoon characters.

Here's another one:

BRIFFITS is what they call the cloud of dust that hangs in the spot recently vacated by a fleeing character (thinks Roadrunner!)

They call the flying sweat droplets around a character's head PLEWDS.

AGITRONS are wiggly lines around an object that is supposed to be shaking.

I couldn't find an example of STAGGERATION, but it is defined as the dotted lines tracing the path of an inebriated character. I became quite familiar with "staggeration" when I worked for the Physics Department at UC Berkeley. Only my boss didn't call it that. He called it the "random walk theory," which is the theory that each step a drunken man takes is totally random and there is no way to predict if he takes one step in one direction what direction his next step will be in. I typed so much about the drunk leaving a lamppost and trying to walk home that when the book ("Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics") was finally published, I gave my boss a little statue of a drunk leaning against a lamppost.

SOLRADS are those straight lines that emanate out from a light source like the sun or a light bulb or something like that.

INDOTHERMS are wavy rising lines used to indicate heat or steam squiggles.

Now just think how smart you're going to feel the next time you see a cartoon and can tell your children or grandchildren what all those special marks are called.

(Yeah, I know...they'll look at you like you're nuts.)

11/11/11

There was disgruntledness in the pen pal community that people could not mail stuff with a postmark of 11/11/11, because the date was a holiday, and post offices were closed. Because I can't send mail on 11/11/11, I decided to follow the example of Jenconsin, who frequently writes random lists, and just mention eleven things that come to mind on 11/11/11 (except her list for 11/11 has 14 things on it)

* Jeri and Phil commemorated the date by sending a video message that they had taken at 11:11 on 11/11/11. Of course it arrived around 8:11 here, there being a 3 hours time difference.

* Peach and I were in the car headed home from my mother's when it was 11:11 in California and stopped to take a photo to send to Jeri and Phil.

* It would have been cool if I'd returned home and found 11 pieces of mail awaiting me, but alas there were only 7.

* One of THEM was a weird envelope (that white one in the middle there) addressed to me, with no return address, and containing 4 stapled typed pages with no salutation and no signature about supposed plagiarism by a photographer named Sally Mann. How I happened to get this letter, I have no idea!

* It would have been cool if Sally Mann was the photographer whose work I saw once on the Internet, who had blatantly plagiarized Ruth Bernhard's woman in a box series of photographs...

...but I don't think it's the same person, at least not based on a quick Google search I did for Sally Mann's works.

* What did we do before Google?

* My computer is acting very weird these days. I'm sure it has a bunch of viruses, though I do run virus checkers religiously. For one thing, it changed the link to one of my bookmarks. The link is to the page where I upload Funny the World pages for the current month. The bookmark says "Nov11" and the link is to the folder that holds all the November files. Suddenly the link said "Jul11" and the link was to the folder the holds all the July files! I have no idea why it did that.

* It also changed my search engine of choice (Google) to Bing. I never added a link to Bing. I don't like Bing. Apparently my computer does.

* And it was acting so weird that I had to go away and watch an hour program on TV this afternoon to give it time to decide what it wanted to do. It eventually did. I never figured out why it was being so weird.

* Have I mentioned lately that I have a huge love-hate relationship with computers?

* This is random item #11 and it is appropriate to 11/11/11 because I was thinking about what there is that is significant about the number 11 in my life at the moment...and that brought me to the Photo of the Day. A nice round number of 11 photos of my 11 sponsored kids.

Anjali (India), Fred (Philippines), Shallon (Uganda), Briana (Haiti)
Emmanuella (Ghana), Henrique (Brasil), Leniel (Dominican Republic), Murugi (Kenya)
Theresa (Ghana), Wainaina (Kenya), Esther (Indonesia)

The Curse of Adestapledes

I was doing just fine, thank you, playing 65 well and winning all the money, when someone, who is related to me, but who is not my mother decided to put a curse on me. She tried several hex words, like BALDAZAR!, complete with ominous voice and wiggly fingers aimed in my direction, but she finally made points with the card gods with her curse of ADESTAPLEDES!!! said over and over again.

(Audio File)

Oh it wasn't evident immediately, I still won the game we were playing, but the curse of adestapledes hung in the air overnight as I slept on the couch and this morning the gods of cards had left me hanging, twisting in the wind. I could not get good cards to save my soul. Through all of our games the previous day, I had never scored more than 40 points (remember at in 65 it's the lowest score that wins) while my mother bemoaned (as only she can bemoan) that her score was at least double either Peach's or mine.

This morning my score was 150.

Apparently Peach had made some great sacrifice to the god of cards and the curse of adestapledes had affected my ability to win anything. And I was even being a good guy. My mother had run out of money, and I was giving her money so she could continue playing. Out of the kindness of my heart (and my very, very heavy coin bag).

Harumph.

Nice guys apparently finish last.

We have routinely had cousins days since it was no longer possible for Kathy to make the trip down to my mother's, but this was the first cousins day after Kathy's death and while there was nothing morose about it, it still was very sad that she wasn't there.

As I had promised at her funeral, "the boob" has now become Kathy and so when we had our mojitos and bruchetta, we included Kathy as well.

We arrived at my mother's around 11:30, had our coffee-and-catch up session before lunch (clam chowder, crackers, applesauce) and then started the marathon 65 session.

We were delighted that this was a great time for my mother. Very, very little sign of that worrisome short term memory loss. At one point she forgot how to play the game and needed careful instructions, but it was like hitting a slick spot in a file and then catching her footing again. Peach and I both agreed it was the best we have seen her in months.

After dinner we played another couple of games, then retired to the living room for cheessecake and The Mentalist. Then two more games, and the adestapledes curse, then off to bed.

My mother woke up with a stiff middle finger that she had to work at to loosen up. We had some interesting suggestions as to what had caused it...but, you know, what happens at cousins day.... It did, however, open up an interesting discussion.

Three more games this morning before we packed up to leave. Another good Cousins Day, even if it is a smaller group. We won't get together again, now, until January and Peach may bring her sister, Mandy with us this time. We'll see if she wants to come.

But it will never be the same again without Kathy. Sigh.

Always Research

Do you ever read something and get sidetracked by minutia? Like there's a story about some amazing political turn-around and you don't really pay attention to the story itself, but get distracted by the fact that you knew that it was Joe's restaurant where the participants were, not Joey's? Or was it really Joey's? Did you get the name wrong?

That happened to me this week when I began reading my friend author Alec Clayton's new book, "Reunion at the Wetside." I hadn't gone more than a few pages into the book when I was stopped short by something he'd written that nagged at me so badly that I had to come to the computer and send him an e-mail.

This is what he wrote:

The charge stemmed from an incident a month earlier when the octogenarian caused a ruckus in the Victoria's Secret store in Westwood Mall, when she was apprehended while attempting to shoplift a package of panties. The undergarments were priced at $12.00 a set. They were thong-style panties, which came six to a set in a variety of colors--red, black, green, blue, pink and yellow, size extra large.

Does anybody else find anything wrong with this paragraph? Panties at Victoria's Secret for $12 a set??? Six in a set to boot? That makes them $2 a pair. Has anybody ever bought anything at Victoria's Secret for $2???

As I wrote to Alec, You have Melody Sauer shoplifting a set of panties from Victoria's Secret in WESTWOOD, of all places, that was $12 for a set of SIX???? The reason I have never shopped at Victoria's Secret is it's too bloody expensive. $2 per pair of panties??? Did you research this? If this is actually accurate, I'm gonna have to start shopping at Victoria's Secret's tent department!

Alec wrote back, Well you got me there, Bev. I didn't research it. There's always some detail I get wrong and then it looms large in the reader's mind no matter how small an item it is. I hope when you recover from the shock you'll enjoy the rest of the book.

I guess I can forgive Alec (with whom I share a birthdate...I think we decided I was older than he by a couple of hours) because he's a man and may not have ever gone shopping in Victoria's secret. I have never shopped there because first, I felt there was probably nothing in my size, but more importantly, because Ifelt it was an extravagance I couldn't support.

Along with frilly "everything else" since I started wearing maternity clothes back in the 1960s, I have never spent money on frilly undergarments, feeling they were merely utilitarian and why spend lots of money on something nobody ever gets to see. I understand I may be in the minority of opinion in this feeling.

I remember being embarrassed listening to an Oprah show one time where she talked about "granny panties" and how disgusting they were and how she wanted her audience to promise to never, ever wear granny panties

What the heck is wrong with "granny panties"?? They are comfortable, they do the job, the cotton ones don't cause skin problems, and they are affordable. I've been wearing granny panties for decades and buy them in sets (6 to a set, and even those sets cost more than $12!)

I took my granny panties to Australia in 2003 and remember when Peggy and I returned home from some errand one day and discovered that one of her dogs had apparently found a pair of my panties on my bed, ready to be folded and put away, and had taken the panties outside to play with. Peggy and the little girl who lived next door had much fun laughing about how it had probably taken both of the dogs working together to get them out the dog door, since they were too large for one dog to carry by herself.

Harumph. And I was much thinner in those days!

I dunno...it just seems that there are more important things to spend money on than fancy undergarments. But even if I were to shop for something fancy, it wouldn't be at Victoria's Secret, because I just couldn't justify that amount.

(I checked the Victoria's Secret web site and learned that one pair of thongs is $12...good lord. There's almost no material in thong underwear to begin with. $12??)

I have, however, gotten past my shock at Alec's gaff and have put it behind me so I can continue reading his book.

Thursday Thirteen

Yellow Things

1. Roses
2. Bees
3. lemons
4. egg yolks
5. The sun
6. A coward’s spine
7. urine
8. champagne
9. baby chicks
10. someone with jaundice
11. sunflowers
12. corn
13. the brick road in Oz

Oh to be a Dog

The dogs' day definitely is affected by daylight savings time. They now sleep later, even if I get up. This morning I woke up at 6 a.m. and sat in the quiet of the house for at least a half hour, while the dogs continued to sleep in the living room, Polly snuggled under the quilt on the couch, Sheila on the dog bed, Lizzie in one of the recliners.

All of a sudden all hell broke lose as all three dogs raced down the hall and into my office, tails wagging, rubbing their heads into my legs, pawing at my knees, licking my hands. Polly was barking her "it's morning and I'm hungry and why aren't you feeding me RIGHT NOW" bark. Dogs don't need coffee to wake up in the morning, it's zero to 60 mph in an eyeblink.

I've read a few memes lately which ask if you could change places with any person living or dead, whom would you choose? I don't want to change places with another person; I want to know what it's like to be a dog. I want to answer all sorts of questions that have been puzzling me since I've had time to be so close to our dogs and to study them so closely.

For example, how does Polly know when I walk down the hall whether I'm going to the bathroom or going outside? If I'm going to the bathroom, she looks up before I reach the door, and then goes back to sleep. If I'm going to go outside, she is up in an instant and batting at the back of my knees. Can she sense the fullness of my bladder? Can she hear me thinking about getting the car keys and leaving the house?

How do the dogs know when I'm going to give them a piece of my meal and when I'm not. How does Sheila know that I will give her toast crusts, but not English muffin bits. Yeah, I'm one of those terrible people who feeds the dogs from the table and know I shouldn't, but since we never have guests here for a meal, and since they all look so cute sitting there waiting (not begging, but just sitting there patiently waiting)....daring me not to give her a piece!

Anyway, I usually have toast for breakfast and I give the crusts to the dogs. But when I have an English muffin or a bagel, I don't share. Lizzie and Polly haven't figured that out, but Sheila won't even come to sit next to me if I'm eating an English muffin.

They go crazy for lamb, but how do they know before I take the meat from the fridge that I'm going to be cooking lamb for dinner? Why don't they get this excited if I'm going to cook chicken?

How acute is their hearing anyway. If Sheila is on the patio barking and I'm in my office with a wall behind us and I say, "Sheila NO" in a normal tone of voice, not shouted, she stops barking, while Lizzie can be barking and I can open the door and say the same thing to her and she doesn't pay the least attention to me.

How do all three dogs know, before I've even reached the refrigerator, whether I'm going to take out an apple or some cheese. If I'm headed toward the fridge for an apple, they keep on sleeping. But if I'm going to take out cheese, all three are at my ankles before I've even opened the refrigerator door. I have often marveled at the clairvoyance of dogs.

How does Polly know when I sit down and put on socks if I'm going out, or if my feet are just cold. If I'm just covering my cold toes, she never gets up. If I'm planning on going out later, she immediately leaps off her chair and comes up to paw at me before I've even gotten the shoes out to put on.

I know that we stupid humans give subtle clues to our plans that we aren't aware of, but I swear that sometimes it just has to be mind reading! Or maybe my body odor is different if I'm going out, or if I'm going to the bathroom.

Sheila seems to be suffering from anxiety again. When we were in So. California recently, our friend Jessica and her son were here to feed and take care of them and all went well, but I think that what with my being gone, the continuing upset of the new floor and other things, it's just been too much to handle. With no rug in the living room, she doesn't know where to sleep any more. She sometimes slept on the dog bed, but mostly slept on the rug. Now she will pace around trying to find a place to sleep.

She has actually taken to sleeping in the dog cage. She never went in a dog cage before this month. There is a blanket in there and the door is always opened. Polly will sleep in my lap in the recliner, Lizzie sleeps in Walt's chair and Sheila needs to be part of the pack, but there is no dog bed in here (Sheila tore up two of them), so she sleeps in the cage--or outside on the patio in the cold, where I guess she feels she is protecting us.

If I get up in the middle of the night, Sheila desperately wants me to sleep in the living room. Sometimes I do it, just for her. Then she is happy. Her world is OK again. I'm on the couch, Polly is on my back, Sheila lies by my side and Lizzie is either in a chair or on the table behind the couch.

But with all the things that Sheila seems to feel are upsetting, she has been pulling bunches of hair out of her backside to where there is a huge bald spot there. I have her on medication and an ointment, but so far she's still doing it. I'm hoping she will feel better soon before she denudes her backside!

I love studying our dogs and trying to figure them out. I suspect it is much easier for them to figure us out.