Dirt heap + lantern = ?

While casting a cold eye at the growing Eat Pray Love industry, Megan Daum complains:

these consumer goods tend to run the way of colorful paper lanterns you think will transform your yard instantly from a dirt heap into a Balinese paradise but fall apart when you attempt to remove them from the box (not that I tried this).

No, of course not! Just like we never thought we could transform our little bit of urban wilderness into an orderly haven by adding random bits of outdoor furniture that other people were tired of. Or that the grass under the glass table would stay nice and short and manicured. Or that the vine trailing gracefully over the unpainted arbour would draw all attention away from the about-to-collapse garage.

And I never even thought of paper lanterns! Really! They'd never hold up in the rain, even if they did make it to the backyard.

Why I need to get going on my photos earlier in the day while there's still some natural light

Glare, glare, glare, glare -- and Siamese cats sitting in front of windows.

The closest we come is maple leaf cookies in the park on Canada Day

There's an archnemesis for every superhero, and in Confessions of Super Mom it's the president of a company that makes patriotic junk food:

• Patriot Pops
• Democracy Drops
• Liberty Lemonade popsicles
• Betsy-Ross-a-Roni

What would be the equivalents in this mighty queendom?

Parliamentary Pops? Dominion Drops? Empire Loyalty Lemonade? Sir John A. -- no, his last name is pretty thoroughly taken.

Paper Fusion

Jewish Holiday Origami .

From Dover.

"To the poor, disillusioned person who lost their bag of . . . "

Here. Scroll down to "FOUND".

Reminds me of the time I wrote to the community paper to say what a sign of maturity it was to play chicken.

Cultural sidelines revisited

Signs that a place has been "culturally sidelined":

• It's home to the World's Largest [fill in the blank]
• Reporters from city newspapers occasionally visit and write about something silly they heard in a coffee shop
• Local stores get their revenge by charging $8 for a copy of the New York Times
• There are jokes contrasting it to yogurt (yogurt has culture!)
  
  
  

I know nothing about tennis, but . . .

. . . that didn't stop me from entering The New Yorker tennis cartoon contest. Especially when I saw I could put the Devil in.

Have a look.

Stop me if you've heard this one

But first, check out these clothes.

Okay. A college boy comes home one weekend wearing a trendy outfit (which I will not attempt to describe).

The neighbour, Major Smith, says, "Ah, Willie, you look just like your father used to when he came home from college."

Then the father comes home and says, "Willie, you look like a damn fool."

"I know, Dad. Major Smith just said so."

ETA: This is from a jokebook at gutenberg -- I'm not going to track down the exact file, but I thought I should give credit, even though it's public domain.

Bullets over Champagne

Took a few photos for a post about this guy.

Further note to spammers

No, I will not look at your CV. But I have a suggestion: Why don't you try for Kanye West's old job? Or Tiger Woods'? You keep telling me they've died.

Scroll down for a new post

It's way down there because I started drafting it before I wrote any of the last three.

"Culturally sidelined"

"If only I had a Globe and Mail subscription to cancel," says Bronwen Eyre.

One of their columnists " intimates that bad manners exist only in the West" because, he claims, his waitress in Banff somewhat graphically begged the indulgence of a washroom break.

Yet:

Many famous, creative people hail from, and love, culturally sidelined places. The Bronte sisters cherished the isolated Yorkshire moors; American novelist Philip Roth is deeply connected to "pastoral" New Jersey, where he grew up . . .

"Culturally sidelined places" -- that cries out for a Top Ten Signs list.

Wanted for armed robbery -- and probably some kind of environmental award

This guy stole "an undisclosed amount of cash" from a bank at gunpoint, then made his getaway . . . on a bike.

He was wearing a green shirt. How symbolic.

Eco-friendliness aside, anyone who can get anywhere quickly on a bike in Texas in August is either really fit or really desperate.

The not-lunatic-enough fringe

Professionally, I blog the award-winning jokes at the Edinburgh Fringe.

My sparetime blog here gets a couple of the worst:

Emo Phillips "I like to play chess with bald men in the park although it's hard to find 32 of them."

Bec Hill "Some of my best friends are vegan. They were going to come today but they didn't have the energy to climb up the stairs."

Confessions of a non-Jackie

So, unlike the rest of the female population born in 1962, I was named after plain, dumpy Lady Bird, not tall, glamorous Jacqueline.

-- Melanie Lynne Hauser, Confessions of Super Mom

Good book if you like the idea of a woman who can clean with the power of 10,000 Swiffers -- and her kids never notice. Who pins criminals down with her Merciless Gaze, but gets pushed around by the president of the PTA. Who works hard at bringing down the local evil empire, and at checking groceries at Marvel Fine Foods.

But I've got a review of it coming out soon and don't want to say much more -- except that the passage above made me think, because I was (full disclosure) born in 1962. Not only was I not named Jacqueline (I was named after that one of my grandmothers whose name couldn't be rendered as Peggy), I remember only a couple of Jackies from my classes in school.

Oh well -- if you presuppose a world where superheroes can exist, to the point of the Justice League's having its own time share resort, a little exaggeration is nothing.

Headache. Scheduling. Arghh. Sorry.

Back when able.

These two could be another Peppermint Patty and Marcie

1. Stop
2. calling
3. me Mikey!
   

Notes to spammers

1. No, I do not wish to join the heartbreakers' club.
2. There is an "f" in "shaft" and anyway, it's not the word you're looking for.
3. I'm glad to hear you accept Codeine as well as Visa; however, though I do happen to have some expired codeine in the cupboard, I don't think I want to trade it for anything you're selling.
4. Stop telling me you have pictures of my wife. I have no wife, and it would be illegal for me to get one -- even here in Canada.
5. 81% off? That's just weird.
   

Not last night but the night before . . .

My husband (breaking in after several minutes): I'm sorry, we don't give to charities that solicit over the phone.
Fundraising Guy: Then how are we supposed to do it?
My husband: It's called the mail. (Hangs up.)

Last night, Fundraising Guy or possibly his brother called back, just at six PM, as the chicken began to burn and the rice boiled over, and I answered anyway, thinking it was one of the family calling in to say someone else wasn't there to meet him.

After I figured out Fundraising Guy was not, in fact, anyone I knew, I told him I couldn't talk, it was too crazy.

Fundraising Guy: Listen, I just want to get the call over with. I don't care how you do it --
Me: LATER! (Hanging up.)


Where do charities get these people, and why don't they send them back there? Do they know what they're doing to their reputations?

Non-donor A: The worst is Sunshine and Santa Claus. Their guy screamed at me, "I'm not doing this for my health, ya know!"
Non-donor B: Think that's bad? The Ittle Lambs Foundation guy told me he was my nephew and he was stranded in Ulan Bator without any money. Then he said, "April fool! How many dozen units do you want to donate?" And it was October.

Deep questions

Why did I enjoy Shirley more than any of the modern books I tried to read just after it? Why wasn't I bothered about Charlotte Brontë's overuse of coincidence, her ambivalence about her Irish background (which I share with her), or her habit of pairing off her characters with their first cousins?

Oh, I don't know, maybe because it had likeable though flawed characters, and I wanted to see how the story ended. (I'd expected more of a death rate -- and it's said Charlotte Brontë may have originally planned more, but then three of her siblings died while she was writing the book, and she'd had enough.)

More Brontë stuff -- different sister

Good lines from *Shirley* , by Charlotte Brontë

To avoid excitement was one of Miss Mann's aims in
life. She had been composing herself ever since she came down in the
morning, and had just attained a certain lethargic state of tranquillity
when the visitor's knock at the door startled her, and undid her day's
work.


Had he not expressed
disdain of everything in Yorkshire? What more conclusive proof could be
given that he was better than anything there?


"Yorke, if I got off horseback and
laid myself down across the road, would you have the goodness to gallop
over me, backwards and forwards, about twenty times?"
"Wi' all the pleasure in life, if there were no such thing as a
coroner's inquest."


"Improving a husband! No. I shall insist upon my husband improving me, or
else we part."

"God knows it is needed!"

In the interests of accuracy

I'm told it may not have been the faulty mountain we were on.

Don't want to be one of those bloggers who habitually stretch a point because they figure no one's going to catch them out.

The next thing you know . . .

MacKay will be composing a Pledge of Allegiance. Or learning the words to O Canada. Or giving orders that soldier's coffins are to be draped with Canadian flags . . . oh, wait . . .

The last word on holiday reading

I took four books with me on holiday, and none of them except The War Against Boys really lived up to expectations. But I had a postmodern pleasure to look forward to: The online reviews by people who felt the same way. When I read one ending in "If you live in Chicago, you can come pick up my copy, I don't want it", it was almost like having the last word.

The mountain's fault

Taken from a mountain with a fault line 16 centimetres wide, the guy at the boat rental place told us cheerfully, nine more than last year. Sometime in the next 20 years, he said, it's expected to fall into the lake and cause a tsunami.

We scrambled up and down the mountain, twice, and came home to headlines about a huge mudslide at Mount Meager.