The Glamorous "Life" on the Discovery Channel

There was a Fergie song a few years back called "Glamorous" in which she spells the word glamorous and the refers to it as "the flossy". Perhaps this is her Gramma's friend Flossy, a hip elderly lady who wears bangles and bedazzled pants suits? Alas, no; flossy means "flashy, showy", as the Urban Dictionary will tell anyone who asks.

So Fergie tells us that her life appears flossy, but that she still eats at Taco Bell. She's a regular person with a seemingly glamorous job.

I watched two hours of the "Life" series on the Discovery Channel last night, and it made life in the wild seem extremely flossy. It was one stunning beauty shot after another of reptiles with Stretch Armstrong tongues, a female ostrich running (unsuccessfully) for her life, tiny frogs hurtling down cliffs, and fish, basilisks and Western Grebes dancing on water (not together, though they'd make a great inter-species dance company; probably get a lot of grants with that angle).

Anyone who's ever gone camping or walked within two hundred feet of a standing body of water swarming with mosquitoes can tell you that life is not flossy. "Life" is, but life isn't. It smells. It's dirty. It eats at Taco Bell. Anywhere there have been people -- and if you are there and if camera crews are there, then there have been other people there -- there are people-remnants, plastic wrappers or bits of toilet paper or initials inked on rocks or rock cairns or (and especially) footprints. To take pictures of the wild, you might have to frame out your Aunt Flossy (she booked the Alaska trip with you, of course; she collects pictures of wildlife and flirts with the young guides).

"Life" makes everything clean and precise. It's fascinating and informative and I very much enjoyed it, but it's also a Glamour Shots version of these creatures. They're wearing too much lipstick and posing with tilted heads in front of a pastel background, which is to say that the lighting is always very bright, the shots are very sharp, and the narrative is very clear. Nothing is chaotic or frightening or dull or matter-of-fact. Animals running for their lives look picturesque. You cannot feel the terror and the bursts of cortisone and smell the dust and sense the hot breath. The animals are presented in extreme closeups and in slow-mo. Slow-mo makes everyone look cool. It's the cheapest shortcut to glamour; it makes Steve Buscemi look like Steve McQueen. The whole thing is like the Wild West as interpreted by Sergio Leone: beautiful, visually and aurally precise and striking, and utterly untrue to life.

Amidst all the Oprah-narrated HD beauty, the most striking bits of the show are the few minutes at the end of the program when you see the crew on site shooting these incredible images. This is one scene: a cluster of cameramen perched for weeks next to a dusty, muddy waterhole where a poisoned water buffalo is mercilessly harassed by a pack of taunting Komodo Dragons. The cameramen stalk both the buffalo and the dragons; they stand and move the camera when the dragons run off. They watch the water buffalo get bitten by a Komodo Dragon, and they know what the buffalo does not; that he's been fatally poisoned and will linger for weeks. They settle down next to the Komodo dragons to watch him weaken and die.

Someone egged our house. Maybe a bird? Or a Bird?

 

I was sitting on the couch watching television while a rainstorm was doing its business outside when suddenly I heard a scratching/sqooshing sound on the bay window. It sounded like a cat trying to get in out of the rain, or maybe like one of those leafless trees with finger-like branches that comes alive and doesn't like the rain and wants you to let it in so it can shuffle around your house all creepy-like, crying about photosynthesis or something equally boring to the non-foliagic.

But when I checked, all I saw was slime. Yellowish slime. About three or four streaky blobs that landed on the top slanted panes of our bay window.

Someone egged our house! At 9pm at night! What's that all about?

I tried to think of which of my enemies would take out his aggression in an ovoid manner. 

But I also had to consider that the eggs landed on the top of the window, which is behind a tree, which is higher than the sidewalk by about two feet. So in order to land such accurate egg bombs, my enemy would need a wicked good sky hook.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar egged my house!

Was he wearing goggles when he did it?

That's what I thought for a day or two. I was preparing my KAJ revenge (very complicated: involved two ladders and Larry Bird) when I realized that there was another explanation, and from a far more likely and insidious enemy.

Birds (not Larry Bird) sometimes put nests in our gutters. Any unhatched eggs would still be lying there, and the unusually long and fierce rainstorms we had could very well have flung them out of the gutter and straight down onto our window.

Especially if a bird carefully balanced them there, practical joke-style, and waited until I went out to clean the windows to dump them right on my noggin.

But the joke's on you, birds, because I NEVER clean the windows!

And I know birds hate me because they think that just because I live with cats I must take their side on every issue (which is totally not true; e.g. the cats are all wrong on health care). And just because I eat birds and eggs must mean I have some crazy animosity toward the feathered world. I don't.

So...well played, birds. You forced me to clean the window.

Reading Poirot in French speaking English with a French accent

I decided to learn French, so I got some Agatha Christie books in French translations because I figured they'd be more fun to study than lists of imperfect verbs. And, as far as her books go, once you learn the words for "murder", "kill", and "little gray cells", you're basically fluent.

(What stinks is that you still have to look up those imperfect verbs; I was so sure I had outsmarted them.)

It was only after reading two Poirot mysteries in French that I remembered that one of his signature quirks, along with his enormous ego and his flourishing mustache, is his charmingly-phrased Franglish. He's Belgian, of course, and speaks English with a French accent. So I'd been reading his Franglish in French as translated from English.

Way to learn a language, Me!

I read Temoin Muet, then not long after I finished it I stayed in a bed and breakfast that had an old Christie paperback on the bedside table in my room, and lo and behold: it was Dumb Witness. In English! Bon chance! I told my vacation to screw off and sat there and read the book to see what I'd missed. It turns out: not much. If you want to feel a false sense of fluency really quickly, learn French the Christie way.

But I did miss the accents. Agatha is not shy about the Upstairs/Downstairs mental gap -- she's always going on about how dumb the maids are, and in English they speak in broad slang-filled accents. I didn't notice that in French, but I was pretty busy congratulating myself in my head like this: "Tuer -- to kill! That means to kill! I AM SO FRENCH!"

One thing about Dumb Witness made no sense in Temoin Muet (Clue Spoiler!): the victim leaves a pre-tuer clue by mumbling on about a "dessin vaste". Drawing vast? Big drawing? Wide design? Lady, I know you're dying, but that makes no sense. It turns out to be a misunderstood word; vase instead of vaste. She's referring to a design on a vase that sort of proves that she knew that someone was trying to kill her. Wicked clever wordplay, right?

Not in French, it isn't. That was the translator's way of dealing with the English word "ajar". The victim babbles about something being "ajar", so there's all this speculation about her door being ajar while her killer skulked around. But it turns out that she's talking about the fricking vase again in our English alterna-verse, her vase or her urn, or her JAR. So look at the drawing on the jar, dummies! Someone tuer-ed me!

And that's what got lost in translation. That and the fact that everyone says things "dryly" in her books, which sounds a lot dumber as "un ton sec".

If someday you and I have a conversation in French and I sound like a Belgian detective, you'll know why.

I will break your "bio break" over your head while you urinate

Some companies are announcing during meetings that they will be taking a "bio break". That means you are invited to use the break time to urinate and/or defecate and/or menstruate. And/or masticate.

These are companies created by adults that employ adults, although it's possible that there are some gigantism-suffering preschoolers in these meetings, maybe working in Nap Development.

Let's take a break, my fellow adults. Do whatever you want with your grown up break. Please don't tell me what you're going to do during this break, not even using cute words and especially not if it involves your tummy or your rude tube.

I blame Oprah.

"Thanks to the smartness of my intellect, I'm rich."

Thanks to anonymous commenting on the internet, I'm rich in quotes.

Please feel free to use this scavenged sentence in your daily life, preferably at the height of a self-righteous tirade.

Basement! Fovie Promo

Here, kitty kitty. Inspector Gillroy knew there was something strange about that basement.

That monkey sure did kill a lot of people

Yesterday I finally watched the movie "Monkey Shines". I've been meaning to see that movie for 20 years. One night twenty years ago, I thought I was actually watching it, but I wasn't, and then I threw up in the sink a little bit after begging myself not to vomit.

College is stupid.

[SPOILERS!] The movie was pretty good, with good actors. The best part was watching the paralyzed guy being terrorized by the cute little monkey, like when she kept shoving food in his mouth. The best villain is a darned cute one, which explains the enduring malevolence of the Ewoks.

I don't think it was scientifically accurate, though, so if you want to inject human brain material into a monkey's ass, go ahead (ask the monkey for permission, first). I really don't think it will make you telepathically bond with her brain and cause her to go on killing sprees of your enemies.

Also, I didn't think it was fair that the paralyzed guy was cured at the end, but the monkey was killed. It wasn't her fault she was injected with bad human cells or whatever.

And like it couldn't be a happy ending if he was still paralyzed and getting on with his life with the added benefit of not being stalked by a demonic monkey? That seemed like a weird message to me, given that accidents do happen and life does have to go on, with or without your monkey.

Sometimes killing your monkey doesn't solve all of your problems, but it does make things better overall -- cut off the dumb ending where he could walk, and that's what I took from this movie.

Deep!