WWTD?

From now on, I'm just going to be using these gifs everywhere the Twitter or FB thread has become so tedious that I want to punch someone.

Gonna ask myself, WWTD?

"Oh, sorry... were you still talking?"

"Oh, no no. I didn't actually want to know."

(Yes, I didn't see these movies, but thanks to my glorious high speed innnernet and a certain surfeit of  time on my hands, I've become a screaming Thranduil fan-girl. Where's my pointy nerd-ears?)



~

What photoshop should always be used for

~

Ascension Thursday Sunday

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted and some had work on Thursday, so they voted to defer worshiping Him until the following Sunday.

And Jesus came and said to them,“All authority in heaven and on earth has been divided between the denominations, with whom there must be no arguing or trying to win them over, because Amen I say to you, no one has the fullness of the Truth, and to seek it is to exclude others. Which is bad. And mean.

Go therefore and dialogue with all nations, meeting them where they're at, and accompanying them body-to-body, and learning from them in their varieties of ideas.

"But by no means proselytize because that art solemn nonsense...

...verily."



~

Appropos of nothing whatever

AAAAIIIGGHHHH!!!

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!!

It's a DUCK!!!


It'll kill us all!!!!!



~

My imaginary Youtube cooking show

Every morning I fall for it. The siren song of the internet. I rationalise it by likening it to reading the morning paper over my coffee or tea. But I don't recall the morning paper ever taking two or three hours.

So, turned off the internet, and did a whole new episode of my imaginary Youtube cooking show!

Today's recipe was yummy Spicy Thai Vegetable Stew (microwave edition) and curry chicken livers!

I gave my imaginary viewing audience a full run-down of the important nutrient content of the veg, and told them all about how buying frozen vegetables is almost as good for you as fresh, and lasts way longer, and can be a lot cheaper, and you end up throwing away way less.

I also told them that if you're looking for the health benefits of garlic, you really have to use fresh, not powdered.

Mmmmm... chicken livers!

Them's good eatin'.


I also had a glass of monk-beer. But, though I drank it on an empty stomach, the buzz only lasted five minutes, since I am not a lightweight.

(Come on, admit it. You know you do this when no one else is around.)



~

Here's for all you Halloween buzzkills out there...









~

Happy Halloween, ladies...

~

Squirrel!!

Also, learning some important caffeine lessons. One cup, means alertness and ability to pay attention. Two means jumping around the house every few minutes to burn off excess energy. Three means having your arguments with the internet out loud in high-pitched incomprehensible yelling.

Normal Hilary


Hilary at third cup.



~

Moan moan moan...

Well, yes. I suppose you have reason to complain. I know that since starting to use Facebook more, I have drastically reduced the average number of posts to this site, which I still think of as my Mothership. All the dozens of little quippy posts I used to put up here, just little quickie things responding to the absurdities in the news, I now more or less just started doing on my FB feed. And lately, even that has dropped off significantly.

I am also being told more and more that I can be paid for this sort of thing, which makes me less eager to continue to entertain you lot for free. Nevertheless, I am aware that this is like a virtual home, and all you, my loyal 500-a-day who have been with me for all these years, encouraging and commenting and arguing and making me laugh (not to mention frequently generously donating their hard-earned cash) deserve much better than such venal calculations.

I have come to sort of use this place as a spot for longer more personal, thinky posts about the stuff underneath the surface. This means, of course, that there will continue to be fewer of them. But be assured that this is still the more important place. And I'm thinking of y'all, and remembering that my little band of readers in this cozy little corner parlour are more interesting to me than all those faceless thousands out there.

Sue Sims, one of our longest-suffering reading friends recently shamed me by sending a note along with her very kind and generous donation to my moving/tooth fund: "Even if it's not for the root canal because the antibiotics have worked, put it towards the move. BUT... You'd better blog a bit more, or I'll turn up at your front door (you've described it so well that it's probably easily discoverable) and demand it back."

OK. I guess I forget sometimes that it's not just me talking to myself.

Soh, here are my two favourite videos describing in images...


what I think of Vatican II.5 the Synod...


and the whole yelling-fest, including the bishops and journalists...

(No, not really. I just wanted an excuse to introduce my favourite new funny-animal vidoe genre. Goats-yelling-like-humans... hilARious!!)

Aaand one more, that pretty much summarises how I personally feel about it all these days...




~

Saturday goofing off

OK, so you know that thing where people sing the funny weird lyrics they think is in the song just from hearing it for years, and it's hilarious because it's all gibberish and nonsense? Well, I guess They Might be Giants thought that was hilarious too...

"I'm sick of this beeswax...I'm sick of these second-story Sleestaks..." Oh me too! (Bonus Gen-X nerd-points if you know what a Sleestak is without Googling.)

I get it, Internet, I really do. Gaza, Iraq, ISIS, ebola, Synod/schism, gay marriage, Siberian Cthulhu... it's all comin' for us. And I realise we ought to be running around outside and pointing up at the sky and screaming, and falling to our knees and begging God to spare us and stuff... but I figure if it's all going to come crashing down and we all have to go live in the Mad Max world for the rest of our unpleasant and short lives, we might as well get as much fooling around and goofing off done as possible while we still can, right?


Points of interest for the day:

- So, watching archaeology videos on YouTube you often have to watch dumb adverts that have become my main means of keeping up with the weird crap Modernia gets up to. Today's was an advert from a guy who works as a "designer" for Lego telling us all about the latest thing from Lego, which is a Lego Mini Cooper... yah, that's the latest thing the kids will love. A Lego Mini Cooper.

What the hell, Lego? Why do you even have "designers"? How come Lego now only comes in these kit things that make you build what they say. I thought the point of legos was that you built stuff you made up yourself. Now it's all "Lego-X wing" and "Lego Ferrari". What's fun about that? Why not just give the kid an X-wing?

I realise that Community is a show for Gen-Xers and ... whatever the thing is that came after us... and it's all about how none of us ever managed to grow up and we all want to go back to building blanket forts and playing paintball in high school, but srsly, do kids even still build blanket forts? Are we the last generation to know how? Do they even still make space ships and time machines out of cardboard boxes? Or is it all Lego pre-fab kits for building little models of the latest iPad?

Oh, and apparently people take this so seriously that there are a dozen "review" videos on YT by grownups talking about the Lego Mini Cooper. No, I'm not even making that up to be ironic.

Every time I can be bothered to look at it, Modernia makes me anxious and confused.

~ * ~

This picture of Malta. You're welcome.

~ * ~

- Wait, what?! They banned Lawn Darts? Seriously?! What's next, Croquet? Because it's a mean game and kids could get mad and belt each other over the head with the mallets?

Back in the 1970s (and earlier), parents didn’t stress about our health and safety as much as they do today. It’s not that they cared less – they just didn’t worry compulsively about it.

I've got an idea why. The parents of young children today are my age and a bit younger, and we were all raised in the Cold War thinking we're all about to die. No wonder we're all jumpy as water in a hot fry pan.

(Also, all morning I've been laughing out loud, for realsies, every time I read the phrase, "...belt each other over the heads with the mallets..." because I'm evil or something, I guess.)

~ * ~

- Here's a thing about Rome's sculptural skeletons. Yep, yep, yep. These things are TOTally awesome, and they're all over the place in the Festering Old Town.

~ * ~

- Also, here's something that will make you jealous. Lemon Cisk. (you pronounce the "ci" in Malti, as in Italian, like "ch" in "church.") I guzzled quite a lot of this stuff, and discovering it was a revelation. There's only one drawback (well, two if you count the sugar) and that's that it is only sold in Malta. Sorry.

Moretti makes a lemon lager that I tried the other day, but it wasn't as good. Not beery enough and too sweet.

I suppose I could buy a regular beer and add some in a glass. I realise it would be cheaper and easier than moving to Malta. But...

Maybe I'll just put lemon in my beer in summer.

(Yes, Malta is that great. In fact, wait, the video ad makes it look way more boring than it is.)

~ * ~

One last thing: Hey BillyHW... you still out there, boy? Shout if you're still alive.



~

A Victim of my own success...

Here's the problem with being a good cook. You look in the fridge and freezer, and discover you've got got zucchini, asparagus, little whole mushrooms, red onion, shrimps, cream and curry paste. You think, "Hmm... I'll just put those together and make an experiment. It probably won't work very well, but at least I'll be able to have a little bit of something before gym-time."

Putting them together to make a curry turns out to work magnificently, but then you think, curry's no fun without rice, so you make a bunch of tasty vietnamese rice noodles to go with it. In the end, you've made something you really want to eat.

Unfortunately you want to eat it so much that you pretty much eat all of it in one go, thus making futile your plans to go to the gym after a "light" lunch, because now all you want to do is have a little lie down.



~

When people have worked together a long, long time...

Editor: Oh come on, this is fun!

Hilary: Sure, kinda like riding a 50 year-old roller coaster in an ex-Soviet satellite state. It's fun right up to the moment it decapitates you.



~

Good and bad Fantasy

Dallas Road Beach, Victoria, BC


So, a few days ago, I was having a discussion about what constitutes "cute". My friend and I agreed that miniature versions of things are nearly always cute. (This might be part of the appeal of Malta...)

It reminds me of my childhood attraction to tree and beach driftwood forts which I built nearly constantly from age six to twelve: a smaller and more contained and sort of fantasy version of the humdrum home I was used to.

Forts could become anything. Very often my tree fort was a pirate ship, but it doubled as the Tardis, the Enterprise and as an unspecified castle in Narnia under seige by Orcs, Morlocks and Calormenes. A whole world that was contained in my brain.

~
It's funny what your brain tells you. Most of my life, beaches looked like this:


And a beach without driftwood all over it was simply dull. What are you going to lean on when you're reading your book? How are you to build a fort if there's nothing but sand? What are you going to climb around on if there's no rocks? What's the point of a beach that's covered in sand where all you can do is just lie there? How boring is that?

It still throws me off and I'm afraid I look at Santa Marinella's beach culture as dumb, dull and pointless. Beaches are for climbing around on the rocks, gazing deep into tide pools and building forts. Period.



~

Support Bilateral Symmetry! Take back the seas!

And about that cephalopod threat...

What about the "triassic kraken" hmmmm?

"I saw them come for the sperm whales, but I was not a sperm whale, so I did nothing. Then I saw them come for the walruses and other land/sea mammals, but I was exclusively a land-dweller so I didn't do anything..."

Repost:

And here, we have another example of why I exclusively support Bilateral Symmetry. I mean really, flying squid? 65 feet?! Seriously?!

I've said it before. Water reduces the effect of gravity on the things that live in it. This does nothing but encourage all manner of morphological excess. It is our duty to eat everything in the ocean.



~

Octopus in love

Seen three in recent weeks, and each time I see one, I think the same thing: how can something be cute n'adorable and horrifying at the same time?





~

Oh yeah!?!! Come at me, see what happens...

Just had the following via that aptly named app.

@RobertH1946 That should be evident from everything I've written for the last fifteen years. Try to keep up.

— Hilary White (@Hilarityjane66) June 22, 2014

~

I've FINally figured out what Twitter is for

Adam Baldwin and William Shatner arguing over the correct use of "whom" in a sentence about punching bad guys.

“@old_critter13: @WilliamShatner Kirk sure punched out a lot of people in StarTrek.” /me points to @AdamBaldwin. Compared to WHO?

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) June 21, 2014

@AdamBaldwin Actually it's WHO because it is the subjective not the objective.

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) June 21, 2014

Also, this

“@STALINSLAPSHOS: @LAKings dude I want a picture of Captain Kirk with the cup.” they asked me to sign it. pic.twitter.com/xEa1QCkigr

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) June 20, 2014

I've died and gone to internet heaven!



~

Life in the Med

Sometimes when you see a fin coming at you, it's not a shark.



~

Clams got tongues?

Post by Corinne Comeau.

Yep. (FF to about 1:50)

That's it. I've GOT to try this. I'm going to go bring some whelks home and take some pics. Right now.



UPDATE:

Apparently this is a whole Internet Thing.


So, let's find out of whelks got tongues too.



~

Goings on

So many reasons not to go to Australia
Sooo many...

~


Sometimes it goes the other way... sometimes.

~


"This too shall pass" (One of my favourite videos of the "famous things falling down" genre.)



~