First sighting of the school year...it's THE Big Baby/Little Baby. In a world of many changes, so comforting to see some things are still things.
I have one addition to my savory portable snack list that is being reviewed by a team of scientists and culinary experts to determine the best. The Costco Chicken Bake. It is absolutely the most filling of the candidates. In TW, we not only get the chicken variety, which has less cheese and more onions than its US counterpart, but we can also buy bulgogi beef flavor, which is quite good. And in related news, after a two week absence for unknown reasons, the curry puffs are back at the store across the street and was able to snap this photo before it entered my body. Mmmmmmm...puffy.
In today's installment of "Those Wacky Asians"...nostril hair extensions. I shit you not.
We got new neighbors recently. We live on the 16th floor, which we share with one other apartment. We've been in this space for 5+ years now and the place next door has seen several tenants come and go. Don't tend to get too chummy with them cause I don't believe in the adage of keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer. Polite conversation about the weather is about as far as I'm willing to go. There was a mixed race (Chinese/Japanese) couple that had a cutie pie daughter named Judy (great name) that was a delight to chat with, but couldn't tell you a thing about any of the others. Anyhoo, met the new guy this week and he seemed nice, which for me means he speaks decent English and is keen to talk about the weather. Betty, who has not met them, asked me if he was Chinese, and I told her that I don't see race. We laughed
One thing I have noticed since we got back from the summer break, and coincides witth them moving in, was that I can smell cooking odors fairly regularly. Since we are so high, we thankfully don't get the usual street smells, and to my recollection, have not smelled cooking fumes before. But now, like clockwork in the morning there is a very oily/greasy cloud that wafts through our always open windows. Not as regularly, will get an afternoon blast of various smells. Received a great compliment from one of Babydoll's friends a while ago that our apartment doesn't smell like anything, which is the highest praise a Virgo can get. To demonstrate how seriously I take this desire, the shower gel I use has the scent of oxygen.
Was sitting on the couch one particularly humid afternoon last week and smelled something awful. Truly thought it was me cause I tend to spoil in that kinda weather and a quick deep check of my pits confirmed I had an odor, but wasn't as bad as what I was smelling. Then Babydoll and a buddy walk in after school and say how much the apartment smells like onions. Of course, it wasn't (all) me. Am not blaming the new neighbors, mainly cause I don't smell it in the hallway, but something or someone new is happening nearby in a bad way.
5 plus years here. Was thinking about that recently and it feels both way longer and much shorter depending on my mood, but in real time, it is long. Since we left, have received the stray comment that I should stay here. From the sources of those comments, could tell that they were probably tongue in cheek that the US was better off without me. In the last 2 weeks, have received four messages from wildly different sources that America is screwed and we are way better off here now. I have always felt things were overblown and that this is just another ebb in the flow of time, but man, the hatred I see everywhere for each other is simply impossible to wrap my mind around and know that everyone is feeling the same. Compromise is just not a thing that is even considered, and any discussion leads to immediate name calling and threats. Why so angry dude/babe? And that our leaders get into Twitter wars, especially the big boss that uses elementary school name calling as his main form of communication, disgusts me on a level that I didn't know existed in my soul.
I remembered another Tom Petty show I saw. Know that I've cited this before and probably multiple times, but Labor Day weekend in 1982 me and a pal went out to the first US Festival. A lot of folks say that the second one was better, but that is because they slept during the first one. Look at this line-up.
Friday, September 3[edit] | Saturday, September 4[edit] | Sunday, September 5[edit]
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All of these bands were at or near their peaks and cannot tell you how much this weekend shaped my life. You can take a peak at all of the setlists at this great website. Talking Heads and Police closer on day 1 in 1982? Day 2 was unreal from the opening note and also coincided with my 17th birthday. And Breakfast with the Grateful Dead, with Fleetwood Mac (complete with a perfectly fueled Stevie Nicks at the height of her mystical powers) to close out the weekend was mind blowing. It was 115 degrees every day and we couldn't have cared less. So many stories of that weekend, many that have been told in previous installments, and some that cannot be told in public.
The Boy is a couple of months in at his time at college. The last three weekends for him included the free Concert For Unity, whose line-up I posted previously but had unannounced guests Coldplay and Stevie Wonder show up. Next weekend was mid-term break and he jetted up to Boston to see friends from both Seattle and Taipei, caught a Red Sox game and went to Katy Perry. They went to see her cause they knew a guy...bought the cheapest of cheap seats, but then got to go backstage and then hung at the mixing board for what was said to be a fabulous and fun show. Then this weekend was the 200th anniversary party at UVA which included celebreties from all walks of entertainment and life. That kid falls up and am so jealous, but the point is, and one that I think he has gleaned from his folks, is simply to "go". Put down your stupid presumptions of what you think you don't like and see idols. One of the things they told the kids at their Montessori school was that you have to try a food 11 times before you say you don't like it. Those are words that I took to heart and try to use (with mixed success at times) in my life, which is why I can rail on stupid things like lemons in drinking water and camping. I have done it and know it is not for me. If you haven't tried something, feel free to keep your mouth shut when you want to criticize it cause you simply don't know. You only live once (YOLO) and life is too short (LITS?...I just invented that as far as I can tell) are things you hear, but in watching my mom's memory slip and starting to see signs of my own eroding, let me share another reason to do stuff. People with memory loss mostly can't remember what they just did, but have complete recall of the stuff they did when they were younger. My mom can rattle off every bad thing I ever did at the most appropriate moment. Have fun experiences and stories to share cause it'll make for better listening to those that are tasked with hearing them over and over.
Speaking of which, here's another one. A buddy of mine and I were big fans of SF Giant pitcher Matt Cain, who retired this year. He wrote a letter to the fans about his last game. You can read it here and it isn't too syrupy, but it kinda choked me up a bit and made me remember my last game. Was on a softball team in Seattle for a good dozen or so years. We were called various things...Blue Cats, Taqueria Gomez and The Real Men of Genius...but the constants were me and another friend named Mike. I still have my Blue Cats jersey and wore it yesterday to baseball practice at school. One of the moms asked me what Blue Cats were and told her that it was the softball team of the male strip club I used to work at. She didn't say anything, but could tell by her reaction that she thought it plausible. We weren't very good, never won much and even had a year where we lost every game, but those Spring evenings together were the highlights of our week regardless of the outcome. We started out without kids, had kids, drank beers, and our biggest rivals were a bunch of 'roided up bouncers from the poseur billiard place, and another team of burnouts that wore Hawaiian flowered shirts in honor of Jimmy Buffett. Dozens of players over the years, many whose names I can't remember, some lifelong dear friends, and even one guy we kicked off the team mid-season for being a complete dick. During those dozen years, I had 5 surgeries on my knees and ankles, always in the off season, and never missed a game, although I was the guy that got replaced with a designated runner for most of them
In what turned out to be my last season, we were pretty good and made it to the Championship game. Going into it, I sorta knew it was about done for me, which my doctor confirmed a few weeks after the game. We won that day. My last at bat was a freakin' rope that woulda been a home run for anyone else that I legged into a double. I was on the mound for the last inning and a giant rainbow framed the entire outfield during the last glorious out. Not a 13 year professional career, but just as meaningful to me. This is one of my favorite pictures and for the life of me, cannot remember why we were holding up the number 7.
A nuance to the English language has been bugging me recently. I had never noticed it before, which seems really odd in that I have known Brits intimately for years, but when English people use the word math, they always add an 's' and call it maths. Of course both are technically correct and it is a cultural thing, but they sound like idiots when they say it cause the 'th' always turns into a double "ff" as in..."Me mum always said I was good at maffs". Babydoll and I were discussing language and I made the case that English was better cause it can expand and change while Chinese has been static for 2500 years. It came up as Betty was saying some of her Asian traveling partners were calling an Australian in their party "kangaroo", which in Chinese is "pouch rat". They cannot even adopt a single foreign term outright as not a single sound can be added to their precious and perfect language. To her credit and my chagrin, B-doll made a pretty good case for the Chinese language and am pretty happy she has embraced learning it as it'll be a powerful tool in her kit. Still, I'd rather learn Klingon.
One more. Something I say a lot and always assumed was a common phrase, but have never heard anyone else use and always get odd looks when uttered is "you can't swing a dead cat without hitting..." You can end that statement with whatever you like; A bad Asian driver, a humble Patriots fan or a well informed Trump supporter. Swerved on you for that last one. Actually, the next well informed Turmp supporter I meet will be the first one. Looked up the 'dead cat' origins and found the below...that the incarnation of the one I use was first noted in 1980 makes a lot of sense. See you next time.
Q From Mindy: I was discussing with my husband the other day the phrases no room to swing a cat and you can’t swing a dead cat without ... He related the usual origin of the phrases as referring to a cat o’ nine tails, but this sounds suspiciously like a folk etymology to me. Are the phrases really related, and do they refer to felines, whips, or some other cat-like object?
A The second of your phrases is variously completed as a way to express that a multitude of the person or thing described is present, as “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a priest” or “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a yuppie” or “you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Starbucks”. This, however, is a modern creation — I can’t find an example of it before the late 1980s.
It’s almost certainly derived from your other idiom, which is some centuries older. It is indeed frequently said to be from that awful naval punishment. Most reference books say something similar to this entry from the Penguin Dictionary of English Idioms of 2001: “The original phrase was probably ‘not room to swing a cat-o’nine-tails’, and dates from the time when sailors were flogged on board ship. The floggings took place on the deck because the cabins were too small to swing a cat in.”A neatly summarised explanation, it falls down on two counts. Nobody would have even considered a flogging in a cabin because the ship’s company would have been mustered to witness punishment. The only place to do that would have been on deck. (The cat-o’nine-tails was also a prison punishment in some countries but similar comments apply; the person to be flogged was tied to a post in the prison yard for other prisoners to observe.) Secondly, I can’t find a case in the English literature databases that mentions swinging cats in the context of flogging, or even ships.
The earliest known example of the phrase is this:
One house I know more especially by Cursitors-Alley, where the Man, his Wife and Childe liv’d in a Room that look’d more like, for bigness, a big Chest than any thing else: They had not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat in; so hot by reason of the closeness, and so nastily kept besides, that it took away a mans breath to put his head but within the doors.
Medela Pestilentiae (To Cure the Plague), by Richard Kephale, 1665. In case you’re wondering, the absence of an apostrophe in mans is not an error — possessive apostrophes were not yet in use.
It’s clear that even by 1665 the expression was idiomatic. This makes it very unlikely that it should derive from cat-o’nine-tails, since the first mention of that term for the punishment device is in William Congreve’s play Love for Love of 1695. Your view that the story is a popular etymology is well-based.The only shipboard connection I can find is the suggestion that the origin lay not in a cat but a cot, the naval term for a suspended bed that would swing with the motion of the ship. A contributor to the Calcutta Review in 1889 wrote: “Few cabins were spacious enough to allow of a cot swinging freely lengthwise (query, is not this the origin of the phrase ‘room to swing a cat in’?)” The term appears in an old letter:
The only cabin allotted to my use is the mate’s under the poop deck mid-ships, where the mizen mast comes through, being so confined, that there is not space enough to swing a cott.
Letter from a Mr Bradshaw, the Commander of HM store-ship Malabar, dated 3 Feb. 1814, found in naval records and reproduced in a discussion of cat-swinging in Notes and Queries on 7 Mar. 1914.
But this is surely just as much a false trail as the cat-o’nine-tails story.This leaves its true origin unexplained. If the cat were a literal animal, why anybody should want to swing it at all is unclear. If they commonly did, of course, then the idiom would have naturally followed. It’s this puzzle that leads so many reputable works to suggest the punishment story.
A possible explanation was contributed by a reader after this piece first appeared. She found the following:
Swinging cats as a mark for sportsmen was at one time a favourite amusement. There were several varieties of this diversion. Sometimes two cats were swung by their tails over a rope. Sometimes a cat was swung to the bough of a tree in a bag or sack. Sometimes it was enclosed in a leather bottle.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 1898.
I wonder if this is not one of Ebenezer Brewer’s more fanciful derivations? It doesn’t appear in more recent editions, whose editors have progressively pruned the original work of its unsubstantiable oddities. However, the last of his list of amusements is mentioned several times in old documents and Shakespeare alludes to it in Much Ado About Nothing: “If I do, hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot at me.” Other reports describe putting a cat in a hanging cask with a load of soot; the game was to bash out the bottom head of the cask without getting yourself covered in soot. Black cats were often chosen because of a belief that they were associated with witches.It may indeed be that the origin lies in some such ancient cruel game.
Dont forget middle ear burst! You waited after the game to go to the emergency room. Then asked me to take Paul home so he wouldn't see you crying (from the pain)
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