Apparently I set my birthday to private on Facebook last year, which meant that this year, I didn’t have a million Happy Birthday! posts from friends and family. I’m OK with that.
How to keep FB from exploding
Amusing
Hollow Bean 2017
Happy Hollow Bean, y’all.
…“And what is the purpose of this celebration?”
“To collect the all-important food.”
“Which is?”
“Candy.”
Some birth-year words
Thanks to Merriam-Webster’s “Time Traveler” feature, I now know that the following words’ and phrases’ first recorded use happened the year I was born:
- bikini wax,
- fight-or-flight,
- razor wire,
- postfix notation,
- deconstruct,
- gamma-ray burst, and probably my favourite,
- space cadet.
And dozens of others, too. How about you?
(Maybe later I’ll indulge in a caipirinha.)
Campfire Week
It was gorgeous out this weekend, simply beautiful. Highs of 29°C Saturday and Sunday. So I washed, like, all the laundry in my house and hung it on the line to dry on Saturday.
My neighbours decided to have themselves a fire in their backyard fire pit, about an hour before I brought my laundry in.
Long story short, every shirt I put on now smells like camping. Not that I’m complaining.
Thursday Throwback: Sesametage
Whoever mashed up Sesame Street and The Beastie Boys is a genius.
Thanks, Donna (@reloweeda)!
Definitions
For a scene in my current work in progress, I wanted to know what the proper term is for the skullcap worn by bishops in the Catholic Church. So I Googled archbishop skullcap, as you do.
The word is zucchetto. It comes from the Italian for … Pumpkin. (Because, apparently, the little caps—worn to keep the bishops’ heads warm—reminded people of pumpkins cut in half.)
I ended up going with “archbishop’s skullcap” in the manuscript.
Indescribable
A couple years ago, I had an epiphany while reading Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, when the narrator Severian pointed out that
It is always a temptation to say that such feelings are indescribable, though they seldom are.
Today, though… Today I was finishing Wolfe’s superb 1988 novel There Are Doors, and I happened upon this on page 294:
Which is it, Mr. Wolfe? Which is it?
I must admit, though, it’s nice that, immediately after he calls the sound indescribable, he proceeds to describe it with delightful economy. Wolfe may be fond of unreliable narrators, but his prose is reliably amazing.
A Truism
When someone says (especially on a website) “More information to come”, it generally never comes.
Share-Alike
From the ever-fattening file folder titled “Places I Never Expected My Writing to Turn Up”:
- An English-language quiz on a Taiwanese website.
- A village (parish? church?) newsletter.
- (Unattributed) on a charter school website.
Most of this is kosher, per the Creative Commons license that the stories were published under.
Memories of JJ, 6 — Tar Fumes
(This one’s Susie’s, but I’m stealing it.)
Dad was, shall we say, not a fan of The Simpsons. (Neither is Mom, for that matter.)
Susie was home for the weekend, or maybe for the summer. She was downstairs watching The Simpsons. It was the episode where Ralph falls in love with Lisa, and makes the mistake of telling Homer that he’d do anything for Lisa.
“Anything?” says Homer. Aaaaand smash cut to the scene above.
Just at that moment, Dad walked into the room. He laughed. And as I’ve mentioned before, Dad didn’t generally laugh aloud unless something really tickled him.
Susie gave him a Busted! look.
He still refused to watch The Simpsons, though.
My dad passed away recently. I’m going to be posting little memories of him for the next little while. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.