Something Thick This Way Comes

Today I was horrified to come home and find that my cat Samson had left muddy pawprints all round the toilet seat and down into the bowl… where he’s probably been drinking. I thought he had grown out of that by now, especially with his lovely cat fountain downstairs!

I warned Mum, and tonight there was a graphic toilet cleaner commercial. “We should make Samson watch this,” I said. The commercial was subtitled, and it zoomed in on a couple of germs inside the toilet bowl. One germ said “hey look, something incredibly thick is approaching!”

“In our house it wouldn’t be the bleach he was referring to,” I said, glaring at Samson.

Mum laughed and said “that germ was Tony Robinson.”
I opened and shut my mouth a few times, then said, “oh, you could recognize the voices?” (This skill in others always takes me by surprise!) Then I began to understand something about the expression he used. “Was he being Baldrick from Blackadder? That whole thing was a kind of Blackadder scene? Who was the other germ?”

Another thing that takes me by surprise is when people praise actors for their roles in animated films… I think “who? Eddie Murphy was in Shrek? But Donkey is Donkey!” So much washes over my head.

Two Things That Photographers Hate

(1) Things that move when you don’t want them to. (Especially vexing for HDR enthusiasts, who need to take at least three exposures without a pixel out of place).

Pulsating Pulsatillas

(2) Things that don’t move when you’re eagerly hoping for action.

Cat No Motion

You wind up making your own images, as they will do exactly what you expect them to do, but I don’t think I’ll do that again in a hurry! I set up the name banner below in Paint.NET, and it took me hours of mostly monotonous work (duplicating layers, erasing, merging layers, saving layers…) Then I took it to Jasc Animation Wizard (in my old Paint Shop Pro 7). It took just 4 seconds to create the animation, all 96 frames of it, and I felt cheated. What an anti-climax! I expected it to chug and grumble and have things wrong with it that I needed to fix.

Ow, my tooth

I have a tooth infection… tried to make a dental appointment; got fixed up for a month away! Why? She’s doing volunteer work in Peru. I don’t know if I can last… I’ll just crawl away and die somewhere.

But if it rains on my washing again, I’m going straight out there to strangle a cloud. It took my pink towel two days and nights to dry, and even then it felt damp around the edges. Peeve.

Roaming Round the Blogs

Snoskred’s Weekly Wrap Up 01/07/07

I like this technique of Snoskred’s, and can see it being useful for my own blog. Part of my problem these days is that I keep reading things and thinking “I really like that! But I don’t have time to comment just now.” And I never get round to it. Maybe if I do this ‘weekly wrap up’ thing, or a version of it, it would organize me into responding, even if it’s on my own blog rather than in the comments section.

Well, that was my thought, but after putting a number of links in my projected ‘weekly wrap up’ post, I started to expand on a few in case I forgot what I was going to say. I typed so much that I realized “this isn’t going to be a single weekly wrap up post – this is a string of separate blog posts.”

Um. Will work on it. This might even be an occasional thing rather than a weekly exercise. Meanwhile…

I think I thought I saw you try… by Snoskred

Reminds me of when I rebelled against my allocated bed and bedroom at the house in York. I felt terrible at the idea that I was getting cranky in my old age, but even as the grey hairs start to appear, one does find oneself worrying more about things like taps, door handles, computer keyboards, toilet seats etc.

I wasn’t all that ‘uncranky’ in my young age either. It got so that I had to do all the washing up on holiday because I never trusted anybody else’s efforts. I didn’t trust people to clean between the prongs of forks (where you might find bits of mashed potato) or wipe round the rims of mugs so that there wouldn’t be a lipsticky smear of half-digested biscuit crumbs along with a drip of old coffee.

Disgusted yet? Well I try.

Automated dishwashers are a boon to me, though even those miss bits. The other day I sent back a soup spoon in our local coffee shop because it was crusty to the touch. This doesn’t happen often, but there’s no way I’m using a crusty soup spoon.

Iain on FOPP

So FOPP has gone. I’m gutted also. We had a branch of FOPP in our own small town – very recent arrival. I was just starting to value it, having got tired of ordering from Amazon. FOPP was particularly useful when searching for gifts. When looking for CDs and DVDs, the only other sources in town are:

• a small Woolworth
• Tesco Metro and Morrisons (good prices, but boring places to shop)
• various charity shops (terrible random selection of DVDs which are almost lost in a mass of abandoned videos, which I’m not buying any more)
• a second hand store (£4 for a DVD with a scratched cover? Call me fussy, but no thanks for now).

I like that second hand store, though… I found some good DVDs there with subtitles: Dancing with Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Stargate (the film) and Rainman. Rainman (and maybe some of those others) did not have subtitles in video format and so I didn’t have it in my video collection. Or any of those four, come to that.

Still, FOPP will be missed. My mother was looking for gifts for a friend’s birthday, and decided to get a gift token from FOPP. It was closed. No apparent reason. She was puzzled, but ended up getting something else. I said she was very lucky – a FOPP gift token might have been a flop – or possibly a collectable, who knows…?

And these are two blog posts I noticed earlier:

The Editor’s Reverting to Childhood

Well, I was in the middle of sorting through piles of magazines (decluttering), and found a Collect It! from several years back. There was an article about Moomin collectables which I read from beginning to end, though I probably read it before. Then I went home and fired up my Mac, and read all my blog feeds – and found this one at The Perorations of Lady Bracknell! Coincidence!

Timorous Beastie’s Culture Clash

I enjoyed this post because it really got me thinking. I went and found the article in Collect It! about Tove Jansson’s Moomin Valley, which said that Moomin collectables were hard to get in Britain and the major suppliers of Moomin memorabilia are Finnish and Japanese. There is (or was) a Japanese coffee house serving food on Moomin crockery. Now why don’t we have something like that? I would go there for sure.

A lot of characters and animations were intended for kids and have no real depth to them; many recent Disney offerings fall into that bracket – but some other things (the Moomins included) have more to them than pure nostalgia. My family liked the Moomins so much that my sister’s PhD supervisor read the books out of curiosity. He said they were deep, philosophical, and wasted on children. We called him Snufkin but I can’t remember why. He used to travel a bit. My sister was Hemulen because she collected stamps. My best friend at university was Fillyjonk, while I was the Groke.

Mum said I loved to be the bearer of bad news. Something would go wrong or topple over in the house, and I would come hotfoot to let her know.

In my view, that was unfair – Groke wasn’t a message-bearer, except (in an abstract way) the need for understanding and tolerance, but there we were – I got landed with ‘Groke’ for a name, and every time I grumbled about something, Mum said “groke, groke, groke, groke…”

Now I feel quite close to the Groke. Every time her name appears, I think “oh look, they’re talking about me,” and a little pang of familiarity goes through me, like when you see your own name in print.

To return from Moominland, I don’t know much about Hello Kitty. It doesn’t look deep, philosophical and wasted on children, but I couldn’t say. Some modern Disney films have been dubious, but Japan is known for animations (none of which I have seen); many of those seem decidedly unchildish – so I’m with the Japanese girls on that one. I wonder what this ‘mascot’ deal is? It sounds interesting but I don’t think I have any. Is my life the poorer for it? Or is the Groke my mascot? Ha, I didn’t think of that.

Keep hanging the lights in your window – I might happen to wander past.

Comments for this entry (during its previous life on Blogigo):

1. Snoskred wrote at Jul 2, 2007 at 13:27: No, not disgusted, feeling completely at home with that seeing as I am the same. I find you get the best results with an automatic dishwasher if you rinse the major crud off things first. I have yet to manage to convince my Mum of this, and therefore her cutlery is similar to that soup spoon on many occasions, even though she has a top of the line Miele dishwasher. Electronic products can work miracles, but not that kind of miracle!

The weekly wrap up thing is good for a few reasons. I found that people don’t always have time to check in daily on a blog, so to get a bit of a recap of what’s been going on as well as pointing at some of the best stuff I found all in one hit, it’s a good idea. I find I struggle at keeping stuff for a whole week though, and considered a mid-week thing as well, but it would be too much.

You and I agree on much, it seems.

I loved Rainman too!

Snoskred

2. Lady Bracknell’s Editor wrote at Jul 2, 2007 at 21:42: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip book has recently been published: it’s currently sitting in my Amazon basket

I did find a Japanese site selling the Moomin crockery, but it disappeared. (The site, not the crockery.) You can occasionally find Moomin mugs on ebay, though. Er, not that I’ve looked. Much. Obviously.

3. Lady Bracknell’s Editor wrote at Jul 2, 2007 at 21:50: Yay! http://www.finnishdesignshop.com/kids-stuff-arabia-moomin-c-352_136.html. In particular, yay for the scary Groke!

4. Diddums wrote at Jul 2, 2007 at 21:55:

Snoskred, true about the dishwashers! There’s a limit to what they can move. I like the recap idea as well – for me it might not work as well as the pointers to other folks’ blog posts, as I would probably start recapping things I never blogged about in the first place – knowing me.

Thanks, Editor, I love those! I have to get that Hemulen bowl for my sister. Or maybe the mug! Or both. And the Groke for me, and Moominmamma for youknowwho.

Actually I like them all – Stinky, and the pink ‘love’ mug, and Moomintroll. Funny how none of us saw ourselves as a Moomintroll. Perhaps only Moomintroll is Moomintroll, and nobody else can *be* him?

5. Lady Bracknell’s Editor wrote at Jul 2, 2007 at 22:58: Maybe so. We may have been struck by the fact that his Mamma recognised him even when he had been transformed by The Hat: perhaps that’s when we realised he’s the only possible Moomintroll.

Me, I want the Thingummy and Bob mug. I thought they were great

6. Diddums wrote at Jul 4, 2007 at 00:48: I forgot about that – that’s a lovely story about Moomintroll. Thingummy and Bob wanted Moominmamma’s handbag to sleep in… harrumph.

Spiderwho?

I liked Geosomin’s latest entry on Spiderman – I Heart Peter Parker. She was a cooler kid than I was, with a poster of Spiderman on her bedroom ceiling. I didn’t have posters before I was a teenager; if I had, they would have been of Peter Pan. I wanted to be Wendy, and sew his shadow back on.

I didn’t know who or what Spiderman was, and when he finally made it onto my radar, he took a lot of explaining.
“What was that?!”
“Spiderman.”
“Who?”
“He’s just a man.”
“But how…?”
“An ordinary man in a suit, climbing up buildings.”

As far as I was concerned, ‘ordinary men’ didn’t do those kinds of things. Peter Pan I understood – Spiderman was plain peculiar.

My grandmother was always telling me that the monsters and things on TV were just ordinary men, which made me more confused. In particular, I remember a conversation about a monster on Star Trek. It was a white, hairy yeti-type monster who was blundering around after the crew of the Enterprise on a rocky planet. This was worrying me, so my grandmother said “it’s all right, it’s just a man in a suit.”
“Do the other men know?”
“Yes, but they’re pretending they don’t know.”
“If he’s just a man and not a monster, why is he chasing the other men?”
“He’s just pretending. They’re ALL just pretending.”

It never did make any sense. Meanwhile, I was keen to sew fairies’ shadows back on, but they never came to my window. It was very sad.

Comments for this entry (during its previous life on Blogigo):

1. Pacian wrote at May 8, 2007 at 10:24: You have to leave nuts and cheese for them. They’re very particular about it.

2. Geosomin wrote at May 8, 2007 at 22:05: I hear they’re partial to icing sugar…

If I were little I’m afraid your grandmother would make me so confused …:). What did she think of Doctor Who? My grandpa was into the old radio mysteries like The Shadow and such…he thought the tv monsters were too hokey. When I tried to get him to watch scifi with me he’d always say ” What is that? Go read a book! It’s always better in your head”. Comics too…well he thought they were bad for the imagination…he couldn’t get over why they’d wear funny suits…although my stories on vinyl of Batman and Superman were OK…likely because they were audio only I suppose.

As for me, I was always peeking in wardrobes hoping I’d find a path to Narnia. I read the Narnia books a zillion stimes as a girl. I can’t even imagine growing up as a kid with Harry Potter to dream about…I mean as an adult I’ve gotten lost in them at times. I’ve thought about it recently…I’m sure I’d major in potions.

3. Diddums wrote at May 9, 2007 at 14:28: I never thought of baiting the fairies – probably just as well, as there would have been a lot of olives and things mouldering on the window sill.

My grandmother watched Doctor Who too – I was one of those hiding behind the sofa merely at the sound of the theme music. I don’t know if today’s Doctor Who theme music is anything like that – I only know I’m ignorant of it… maybe it’s too quiet for me. But if they’ve lost that, they’ve lost a major part of the atmosphere.

I don’t think she had to explain any of Doctor Who to me as I generally refused to watch it. .

Ah – the wardrobe! I did that too. I never thought of what it must be like to grow up fantasizing about being a witchling or junior warlock at Hogwarts. There’s a lot there to dream about, but I probably wouldn’t have anything to do with the sports; looks too violent to me. :-0.