Tag: Humor

Humor, Weekend

Past and Future

“What is a weekend?”
– Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham

I spent the weekend playing with Catriona and Bear (who were in town from Florida), scouring the local library’s annual book sale and donation drive, cleaning, shopping for a birthday present for my niece and a just-because present for Marie, baking, and watching Downton Abbey.  I have thrown up my hands in despair at all of the characters besides the indomitable Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess.  I have decided that I am going to be her when I’m old.  Although I have heaps of other characters and personalities to try on before I get there.

So fabulous it hurts.
Fun, History, Humor

Nomenclature

“Puritanism.  The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
– H.L. Mencken

Recently, for reasons far too ridiculous and complicated to explain, Scarlett and I have a bit of an inside joke ending emails and phone calls with some sort of admonition followed by, “or God will smite thee.”  Have a good day, or God will smite thee, etc.  It’s silly and stems from a midnight conversation when her flatmates were getting drunk and crowding up her New York flat so she hung out in the hallway and called me up to chat until they descended on Greenwich Village.   Many an inside joke has found it’s birth in such events.

Anyway, it put me in a sacrilegious frame of mind, so these Puritan baby names made for a good Friday afternoon read.  Let’s have a look at some of these poor parenting choices and make a few guesses on how the Early Modern era panned out for them, based on their unfortunate epithets:

I disapprove strongly of this frivolity.

Wrestling Brewster, I can only surmise, turned out to be the dame school class bully.

Kill-sin Pimple, to no one’s surprise, ran off to live in the woods and found happiness among the Iroquois.

Continent Walker, a great colonial explorer.  Annoyed his relatives by insisting on dressing “in the manner of the heathens” in the privacy of his own home.

Preserved Fish refused all pickled food for the entirety of her life.

Anger Bull was unfortunately prone to fits of rage at the sight of red flags.  Laudanum helped.

Magnyfye Beard was appropriately enough, one of history’s earliest hipsters.  His whiskers were the pride of the early cavaliers.

Hope-still Peedle.  Pessimist.

Weakly Ekins: picked on in school.  Probably by Wrestling Brewster.

If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned (known familiarly as “Dr. Damned”) Barebone, never really understood why his medical practice never did very well.  Scraped by as a body snatcher for the burgeoning field of anatomy and made many, sadly unrecognized, contributions to science.

Let’s play a game: pick a name, submit their life story in three sentences or less.  Winner get applause and acclaim from the minion coterie.  Off you go.  (Or God will smite thee!)

Home, Humor

Upsetting the Natural Order

“A good neighbor is a fellow who smiles at you over the back fence, but doesn’t climb over it.”
– Arthur Baer

The building that contains my flat is typical student digs: old, in less than mediocre shape, and seldom improved or upgraded in any way (see my 30 year old furnace).  But it sets itself apart in one way: the landlord prefers to rent to young married couples and the occasional small family.  His logic, not entirely unjustified, is that couples and families are more likely to treat the place as a home rather than some dump you rent for a couple of semesters before moving on and mostly likely leaving a substantial amount of damage behind.

As a result, a sort of culture has sprung up in our building.  People are largely quiet, go to bed early, take pains not to annoy one another.  Many of us are done with school, finishing up internships, or generally in the transitional stage that comes after university when one gets a Real Job, but is still laughably poor.  There are rare cases like My Lord and Lady Stompington, but when they rear their heads, people in the building are likely to mention such behavior to the managers, who in turn mention it to the perpetrators, who in turn usually manage to shape up.  It’s a watered down version of Suburbia, everyone plays by the rules.

That is, they did, until the landlords decided to take a risk and let the flat next door to mine to four younger girls still at university.  Our tranquility is shattered.

The other night I’d turned in and just barely shut my eyes when suddenly I heard one of them start to tune her violin and then practice scales for 45 minutes.  Luckily the couple beneath them just had a baby and was able to invoke the Wrath of Mothers and the performance hasn’t been repeated at night.

Where I used be able to wind down at 10pm, that is the hour they they are just livening up. They crank up their music and have the occasional impromptu dance party.  The opera (at reasonable levels), Edith Piaf, and Ella Fitzgerald, and plenty of indie rock I don’t object to in the slightest – but for the lateness of the hour.  The Miley Cyrus, on the other, I object to strenuously, particularly because of the lateness of the hour.  No one needs to listen to that at 11pm (or indeed ever) with the stereo cranked up.

Don’t they realize that the rest of us are old and boring?!

Grad School, Humor, Husband, London, Sad

Absence Makes the C. Grow Nostalgic

“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Things I really miss about my husband (all of the time, but particularly this week):

1.  How buddy buddy we are in public and how sickeningly cute he is in private.  One of my best memories of him is from the first year of our marriage.  It was the middle of the night and he woke up for some reason and got out of bed which woke me as well.  But thinking I was still asleep, he leaned over and kissed me on the nose.  Just because.

2.  We had a really great household system: I do laundry he does dishes.  I hate dishes, loathe them with an intensity usually reserved for cockroaches and split pea soup.  With him gone, I am reduced to doing my own dishes, which is a hateful nightly event.

3.  How easy it was to talk to my best friend about my day and hear about his.  We schedule Skype dates and email and chat regularly throughout the day, but it’s not as satisfying as our conversations during car ride home after work..

4.  Cuddling.  We are shameless cuddlers.  We cuddle on the couch, going to sleep, watching movies, talking, you name it.  The most satisfying feeling in the world is his arms around me, and not having it for months at at time makes me excessively grouchy.

5.  Believe it or not, listening to or watching sports with him, it’s ridiculously funny to hear my normally calm, reserved guy randomly exploding with, “C’mon!”  “He was in!”  “Travel?  TRAVEL?!”

6.  His quiet steadiness.  Sometimes I feel like the family tornado, constantly doing something, running, planning, doing until I burn out and collapse on the sofa.  Which is usually when he steps in with a grin and  calmly handles whatever it was that seemed so overwhelming a mere five minutes ago.  No doubt this trait will feature more heavily when we finally decide to spawn.

7.  Doing things with him.  We are really good about indulging one another’s interests and likes.  I bought him tickets to his favorite team for his birthday one year, even though I couldn’t care less about basketball.  He returned the favor by taking me to the opera.  I had Korean food for the first time with him, he went to England for the first time with me.  We’re far more adventurous together than apart.

8.  How helpful he is.  Since he’s been gone it seems like the flat has decided to show it’s age and start to go to pieces.  Cupboards have needed to be fixed, furnaces have needed tweaking, faucets refuse to shut off, oven handles have come undone…the list goes on.  Margot’s charming gentleman caller (Wrench) has been an absolute wunderkind and helped out whenever he visits, but keeping up with a house is a full time job.  Largely doing it by myself is rotten.

9.  Dates.  I have no problem going to movies or restaurants by myself, my alone time is valuable and relaxing to me, but there’s no question that dinner with him is ten times better than dinner without him.

10.  His scent.  His cologne, which I love, is not very powerful, but it lingers.  It still haunts his side of the closet, which packs a powerful punch of nostalgia whenever I open it.  I miss smelling it every day.

No doubt about it, minions, separation sucks.  On the plus side, he’s coming to stay for a few weeks sometime in March or April.  On the plusser side, less than six months and we’re done with school and on to the next adventure!

Humor, Office, Work

Casual Friday

“He looked around slowly at the grimy, squat white monolith, and that was the exact moment at which he realized without a shadow of the doubt that his fridge had begun seriously to lurk.”
– Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Don’t you love it when tiny little jobs that nobody wants to do, allow you to wrangle  subversive concessions?  For example, lacking anything else to do, I volunteered to clean out both of the department fridges, and asked if I could dress more casually in order to do it.  Our department’s dress code is very professional, even student employees dress nicely, and exceptions are almost never made.  But when one volunteers to exorcise/disinfect the more horrid lairs of one’s office, one can usually negotiate.  Thus I’m sitting pretty in jeans and topsliders on this lovely Friday afternoon, feeling pretty good about it. Heck, I only put on mascara this morning!

I’m also in a bit of a mischievous mood today, so throwing away a lot of things (that could probably be successfully used to teach the theory of evolution…) is a little sneakily gratifying.  The more so when some teenage student officer asks what happened to “that sour cream I had in there one time?” and I am able to retort, “Ah yes.  As it turns out, it went bad in 2009.  I may have just saved your life.”

As per usual, though, I fell into a bit of a scope creep vortex when I finished.  My desk has been reorganized, everything I work with has been wiped down with antibacterial cloths, and I’m currently tackling some of the unnecessary files clogging up our server disk space (I’m not sure if that’s the techie term for it all).

So!  I’m going to take a break from that and share some fun links from around the web.  There is nothing like the internet to take your mind off of serious things, now is there?

New favorite tumblr: dogs riding trains around Britain.  J. and I spend an inordinate amount of time wishing for a dog, so this doesn’t help, but we can all agree they’re pretty cute, huh?

Miniskirts and fascinators have been banned at Ascot!  But what will we judge?!

And, in more Downton Abbey news, I may be cheering for the reform minded Lady Sybil and her Irish bolshevik chauffeur (and I may tear Julian Fellowes from my love and bury him forever if screws this one up), but my heart belongs to the Dowager Countess and her fabulous one liners.

We all judge some people on Facebook.  Here’s a list of some of Those Types.

One of my favorite TED talks, a theory on the origin of pleasure, in which a Nazi discovers there’s evil in the world.  Enjoy.

Humor, PBS

Dear Dear, I’ve Drunk the Kool Aid…

“You should never take anything I say seriously.”
– Lady Mary, Downton Abbey

I am a great admirer of Julian Fellowes.  My first exposure to him was his foppish portrayal of the Prince Regent in The Scarlet Pimpernel (which, incidentally, is required viewing for my children and will eventually make it to the list I’m sure).  I loved Gosford Park, and I swallowed his novel Snobs down whole.   His screenplay of The Importance of Being Earnest is common viewing at my parents house, and most people I know liked The Young Victoria.  I’m currently knee deep in his latest novel Past Imperfect with no signs of slowing.  And like most people, I enjoy Downton Abbey, his latest achievement.

Alright.  That’s not true.

I’m sucking down the outrageous drama in great, gasping gulps.  There.  Never say I lie to you, kittens.

One of the worst things about being separated from J. is that he gets to taunt me about all the programming I miss on this, the wrong side of the pond.  Not only did he get the entire series of Downton months ahead of me, he’s just finished up with the second series of Sherlock.  It’s going to affect our marriage soon, if we’re not careful, especially since J. is notoriously closed lipped about spoilers.  It’s very annoying.

Meanwhile, I’m hilariously worked up over the personal life choices of entirely fictional characters.

I mean really, come on!

Although, to be fair, the mark of any good work is whether or not you care about the characters or plot.  So I suppose that anything that makes me want to throw something at the television whenever someone does anything foolish must be good.  Or I’m just someone who hates dillydallying and wants Lady Sybil to run off with her hot Irish chauffeur already.  Either is possible.

And that, my dears, is how I spent my long weekend.  Let’s not judge one another.

Humor

(Insert That Screeching Noise from Psycho Here)

“Its going down, basement.
Friday the 13th guess who’s playing Jason?
Tuck yourself in you better hold on to your teddy.
Its Nightmare on Elm street and guess who’s playing Freddy?”
– Nicki Minaj

Update: yes there was blushing and a little public-speaking-induced dyslexia, but I counteracted the first with a pair of bright red pants so no one would notice the face, and the other with lots of jokes.  People asked a lot of questions and participated, so we’re going to call this one a success.

Savage chickens worked yesterday, why not keep it going?

I am not a superstitious person in the least.  I smile when I see black cats, any number of crows or magpies do not alarm me in the least, horseshoes do nothing for me, and the only reasons that spring to mind to not walk under ladders involve avoiding industrial accidents.  That said, I certainly appreciate the historicity behind lots of superstitions, religious traditions, and folk beliefs, and have fun participating in them.  It’s why I wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, carve pumpkins at Halloween, fills shoes with candy for St. Nicholas’ Day, and make hot cross buns on Good Friday.

But Friday the 13th has always puzzled me.  I know a great many people like me, who seem to have nary a superstitious bone in their body, who get well and truly freaked out when a 13th rolls around.  I’ve seen people stay home from work to avoid accident!  When I was still a student, my flatmates and I would hold a Hitchcock movie party every Friday the 13th, it seemed a much more entertaining way to spend an evening than paranoia.  I think I’ll resurrect the tradition tonight, come to think of it!  All minions are invited to participate vicariously.

Enjoy/dread your Friday the 13th (whichever you prefer)!

Humor, Work

Tomorrow, Please?

“I wish you a tolerable Thursday.  That’s all any of us can hope for.”
– April Winchell

Susie and I had our mid-morning water bottle refilling and check in, and we both decided conclusively, that it should be Friday.  My evidence:

Last week was a four day work week, which after two weeks off for vacation completely resets one’s work clock.  Luckily next week is another four day week, thanks to Martin Luther King Day.  As welcome as this is, I know that it will exacerbate the problem.

This week has been rough.

I didn’t have time to do my hair this morning, it’s currently twisted up on top of my head – universally recognized as a bad start to a morning, thereby consigning the rest of the day to grumpiness.

I currently have four feet of uniforms and gear (yes, this is accurate, I measured) stacked in piles to find room for in an already stuffed to bursting supply room.

I also need to unpack a pallet of reams of paper.

Tonight, I’ve been asked to give a presentation on personal safety and law enforcement resources to my Ladies Aid Society this evening.  Now you may not believe me, ducklings, given my verbosity and general ranting abilities, but I hate public speaking.  Hate it.  I stammer, I blush constantly, I can’t make eye contact, I speak in spoonerisms, you name it.  Not looking forward to it.

So, what say you, minions?  Shall we collectively disavow this Thursday?

Humor, Life, Sad

Not Just Your Grandmother’s War Slogan

“Most of life is routine – dull and grubby, but routine is the momentum that keeps a man going.”
– Ben Nicholas

I’ve always found post-tragedy a bit surreal.  Somehow, in spite of the calamity that has just taken place and probably changed your life forever, the world just keeps on going.  People still need to eat, sleep, work, and go about day to day tasks, you can’t just check out.  After the typhoons, the damage needs to be cleaned up.  After the earthquake, pictures need to be rehung.

Life goes on.

Weird.

It’s hopelessly British, but the stiff upper lip is a lifesaver, kittens.  There is nothing to keep you going through a tough slog, or helpful when your nearest and dearest are slogging along their own troubles, like routine.

What small things keep you going when Stuff Happens, m’dears?  Nothing is insignificant.

Humor, Life, Money

Le Sigh

“I don’t have pet peeves.  I have whole kennels of irritation.”
– Whoopi Goldberg

I have been home and back at work for only two days, but I am already in the tiniest, littlest, most miniscule fight with the cosmos.  It’s a small thing really: just our car needing $600 worth of repairs.  This is the same car that required $1500 this past September.  I’ve retaliated like a grownup – dramatically glaring at my bank account and (continuing to) refuse to unpack my suitcase, but for essentials, until the weekend.

All I can say, darlings, is that it’s a bloody good thing my vacation was so relaxing because if it had not been, Aunty C. might be in a bit of a strop.  And we wouldn’t want that, would we, universe?