Category Archives: w/r/t nothing in particular

Apr 28 2012

pitt pics

Here’s a round-up of the random things that caught mine and Ashley’s attention on our trip.

If you’re like me, you think the point of the turnpike is an exchange of legal tender for the benefit of shortened travel time.

But then, like me, you’d be wrong. Turnpikes are also apparently about setting the world record for Most Concurrent Construction Projects on a Single Thoroughfare. For roughly 2/3 of the Ohio Turnpike, the speed limit was 50 mph.

The original? Or just a fan?

Because I simply cannot overstate the importance of flushing your hands before you wash them.

Note how there’s not a soul in sight.

So…are we sure we shouldn’t change the name?

Thanks! I mean, I know. But still. Thanks!

I’ve seen Porches, Ferraris and even a Lamborghini once. But this is the coolest damn vehicle I’ve ever seen on the road.

I mean really. This thing looks simultaneously really for war and a sweet beach party.

The FBI are always closer than they appear.

Two things: I don’t get the vanity plate, so if some can’t ‘splain it to me that’d be great. And two: for an Action Maid – whatever that is – this was the most annoyingly slow car of the entire trip.

Apr 19 2012

anglophile

I’m a big fan of almost anything British.

Boddingtons?
Love it.

Shakespeare?
Love his work.

The Beatles?
Taught me everything I know about rock n’ roll.

Naomi Watts? Rachel Weisz? Kate Winslet?
Heaven will be me, Ashley, and the three of them. With Star Wars playing nearby on a huge tv.

Dr. Who?
Well, okay. There are exceptions.

But what I love the most is simply to listen to Brits speak. I know there are a wide variety of British accents and I wish I could catalog them better.(1) But it’s not the accents that do it for me. Or, not just the accents.

Brits use words like smashing and brilliant. They say things like, “I’ll deal with that straightaway.” I’m not even getting into the slang here – just normal everyday syntax.

“Oh that’s such rubbish.” “It was totally out of sequence.” “Those skills add up to zed.”

I mean, I’m sure not all Brits use these sorts of words. And I’m sure they’re not always used in each of these circumstances.(2) But any time I talk to someone from across the pond, I marvel less at the accent than at the uncommon words they toss into normal conversation.

No American has, for example, ever told me to bugger off. Which I’m sure is what an earthbound Naomi, Rachel and Kate would say, even if Star Wars weren’t involved.

  1. My brain is reading this all to me in a British accent right now.
  2. Though I almost never hear the word rubbish unless it comes from the mouth of a Brit. Or unless I say it. Because sometimes I use British words and syntax with my plain Midwest accent. The juxtaposition is jarring.
Apr 13 2012

origin story

Thirteen has been considered unlucky for a really long time. Its origins seem to be in Norse mythology. During a banquet held at Valhalla,(1) twelve guests were invited. But Loki – the god of mischief – gate–crashed the party, making thirteen. A fight ensued to evict him. In the battle, the god Balder was killed, once again making twelve.

This idea moved slowly from the Scandinavian nations south through Europe. As Christianity moved towards dominance, the idea of thirteen was sort-of grafted onto it. There’s a fairly strong parallel between the dinner at Valhalla and The Last Supper, which had thirteen guests,(2) one of whom was dead with 24 hours.(3)

(4)

Now. Onto Friday.

When the Scandinavians named their days of the week, they borrowed the name-scheme from the Romans, who of course borrowed them from the Greeks. The Romans named Friday after Venus,(5) so the Scandinavians found a goddess similar to Venus and named their second-last day after her: Frigga. This is where we get Friday.(6)

Okay, so as the Scandinavians and Germans were converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished to a hill and became a witch.(7) Legend held that every Friday, Frigga would have a gathering of witches and the devil – a gathering of thirteen – to plot revenge for their banishment. All Fridays were, for a while, considered bad. In fact, they called it the “Witch’s Sabbath.”(8) So a bad day(9) with a bad number(10) was extra bad.(11)

Not every culture shares the Friday the 13th thing. In Spain, for example, it’s Tuesday the 13th that’s bad. But many Western cultures consider 13 pretty bad.

So there you go. Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood nerd.(12)

  1. The home of the gods.
  2. Christ and his apostles.
  3. Christ, obviously
  4. Fear of the number thirteen, by the way, is called triskaidekaphobia.
  5. Dies Veneris.
  6. Most of our current day-names come from the Norse gods: Sun’s day, Moon’s day, Twu’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, Frigga’s day, Saturn’s day or Shabbat’s day (Saturday’s the weird one.)
  7. The Christian leaders are now infamous for how the turned old gods into devils.
  8. Great name for metal band.
  9. Friday.
  10. 13.
  11. But not super bad, because it’s a stupid movie.
  12. I had another footnote but felt that leaving it would be courting disaster.
Feb 9 2012

owww

I would love to blog about something interesting but all I can think of today is how much I hurt. The pain in my torso is near-constant and on some days only hurts less. Days like today, though…try as I might I just can’t not think about how much my body hurts.

So since I can’t think of anything else I though I’d show you where and to what degree I hurt.

Wait. That doesn’t look like me at all. Here:

That’s better. The areas around my knees and hips are the result of yogging. The knee-pain is constant but not bad. The hip-pain mostly rears its ugly head when I use the stairs. Luckily you don’t get to be the kind of person who can use the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man as a body-double by taking the stairs all the time. So the hip-pain, while worse, is far less occasional.

But that red sea around my dextral rib-cage? That’s the part that always hurts. Some days, like today, when I wake up I feel as though I spent the night plastered to the front of a Mack truck doing 80 mph on the interstate. The pain is beginning to interfere with my sleep, and I don’t get much sleep to begin with. Luckily I’d already made a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow. Now I just have to focus on not begging for pain medication too hard or obviously. No one likes a Stay Puft Marshmallow Junkie.

Jan 19 2012

things

(1)

There are many things I would like to blog about today.

Like how annoyed I am with Google’s Social Search and how I’ve deleted my Google+ account because of it and am seriously considering not using Google for anything.

Like that Rick Perry has dropped out of the race…and endorsed Newt. And how Newt’s ex-wife says that Newt wanted to kinda swing a little bit.

Like Facebook’s targeted ads and how they seem to think I’m a teenage girl who may or may not speak what I think is Portugese.

But all I can think about today – the only thing that’s really using up my mental real estate – is how much this lady keeps talking about her friggin’ kid.

Kids are cute, especially the little ones. And most mothers seem to love their kids, so it is natural that the mother of a cute kid would be inclined to talk about her. But seriously. All this woman talks about is her kid.

It’s pathological. She clearly has zero in the way of excitement in her own life, is the only conclusion I can draw. Which makes me a little sad for her, yes. But even that is hidden behind my desire to scream talk about anything else PLEASE!!!

  1. Meant to post this yesterday, but somehow it didn’t happen. So you’ll get two posts today.
Jan 12 2012

i got nothin’

…to really blog about today. The world is as crazy as ever and the Republicans are certainly excellent fodder right now. But I’m just too worn-out right now to go into any of it in any real way.

So I’ll just say that there really is nothing that makes me feel more white than that I don’t change the channel when John Tesh’s Intelligence for Your Life comes on and that I actually think, You know, John. You’re a great guy. Thanks for that little piece of intelligence for my life.

Sigh. Next thing you know, I’ll be listening to NPR, which while I understand that many, many people out there love NPR, people that are still relatively youthful and spry and capable of chasing down the occasional over-thrown baseball, I personally feel as though I age at least forty years at the sound of one syllable from Garrison Keillor’s mouth. The phrase All Things Considered is like a geronto-accelerator. My temples are suddenly grey and my pate not even sparsely populated and my face wrinkled and worn and basically looking like a shirt you tossed towards the hamper and are now two days later picking it up from the floor and that any over-thrown baseball will be left to rot slowly wherever it lands.

All thanks to John Tesh.

Jan 5 2012

double, double, boil & trouble

So I’m waiting in line. The room is crowded and populated by the kind of people who make you feel the need for an immediate shower with almost unbearably hot water. The two women in front of me are certainly no exception. They are dressed in a way that suggests they haven’t really done much of anything that day…or any day in the past twenty years. One look at their hair makes me glad I have no sense of smell.

One of them is holding a napkin to the left side of her face, just above her lip, right where her mustache probably ends. The moment I see it I know I don’t even want to know.

The other woman approaches the woman at the window. It’s not immediately apparent that they know each other, so when she pulls a small tin of Vick’s lip-balm out of her pocket and starts raving about it, I’m left sympathizing with the woman at the window who, I assume, probably doesn’t really care about perceived top-of-the-line lip-balms or at least cares about them way less than the room-full of surly, smarmy people she’ll have to deal with. My sympathy sort-of bleeds out though when the woman extolling the lip-balm begins going on about the fever blisters on her lips. It is replaced by revulsion.

She even does that thing I think most of us reserve for closed-door bathroom mirrors, in which she leans in real close and pulls her lower lip down. It’s the fact that the woman at the window doesn’t puke or even retch that clues me in that they know each other. And, worse, that this is likely just par for the course with this woman.

My stomach clenches. But I keep my cool. There are fewer things better for reminding you of the need for cool-keeping than a small throng of unsavory characters.

The woman with the napkin to her face joins in the fever-blister conversation. The word blister is repeated more times than at an albino nudist colony. The the napkin-woman changes course by saying, very loudly, “Oh you don’t even want to see what’s under this!” Which, yes, she’s right: I mostly certainly do not. Would rather suffer a prostate exam while eating a Vegemite sandwich.

But of course I know that her saying that means the very next thing that will happen is the reveal. And I’m right. She removes the napkin to reveal something like a pustule on a lab experiment gone horribly awry.

Not actually her. I think.

It’s gooey in that way that only necrotic flesh can be. There’s a trail of…something…from her face to the napkin and I want to hurl. She says, “It’s a boil!” The woman at the window is in no way repulsed by this. In fact, of the four people privy to this conversation I seem to be the only one suffering a major case of the howlers. For a moment I consider that this most likely points to something being wrong with me rather than BoilLady and her FeverFriend. But the revulsion is too strong for me to dwell on this question right then, though I am impressed that the woman at the window is unfazed. If I ever come down with some really disgusting pathology and have to show one person, I’m choosing this lady, who will apparently not think less of me in any way no matter what it is.

BoilLady says, “I’m telling everyone it’s a bee sting!” She says this as though it’s terribly clever even though it’s the beginning of January in northern Ohio and the only bees anywhere are on boxes of Honey-Nut Cheerios. The staggering stupidity of this statement – and by extension everyone she knows who swallows that line – is enough to distract me from the sheer grossness of the situation just enough to give me the strength to ask if I can just cut-in real quick with a question. They say sure, but I can’t tell you if they were smiling when they said it; I wasn’t looking.