Your tongue is your ambassador

Fiancé: Your head has too many angles, like a thirty sided die.
Me: So what, I can play that French racing game?
Fiancé:Wow, good on you for coming up for a place the d30 is actually used. I have a keeper.




Bryan: I assume it's so high fantasy that you can't breathe the air up there.



Coworker: We were watching the beginning of the walking dead, and [my Fiancé] felt bad about the horse.
Me: Well that was totally Rick's fault. He was too much of a pussy to go into that house with the dead people.
Coworker: After all he's seen.....
Me: No. It's the zombie apocalypse. You go big or go home.
Coworker: YOLO.




Me: Look, it's the Bremen Town Musicians!
Fiancé: Does anybody ever know what the fuck you're talking about?



Bryan: I loved the fuck out of Sailor Moon at the time. Look at their faces. And it's stupid. Tuxedo Mask. Dumb as shit.



Fiancé: It's a fourth wall breaking knife YOU'RE IN A VIDEO GAME.



Me laughing
Fiancé: What are you doing?
Housemate: I just told her that I didn't know where we should put curtains.
Fiancé: They go on windows.


My fortune cookie: Your tongue is your ambassador
(I laughed until I cried. For five to ten minutes. While the rest of the table kind of awkwardly finished their meal.)



Me: So the AKC is following me on Twitter now.
Fiancé: They should. You're a crime against dogmanity.
Me:  .....what?

Nature red in tooth and.....shell?

So, part of my job "requirement" is to be up on the news, in case patrons talk to us. They don't, much, other than to bitch. But, things happen. So, I saw this headline in The Atlantic: Walk for your lives! Deadly giant snails are invading Texas!  I was intrigued, of course.

Before I clicked on the article, I also (of course) immediately had expectations. Perhaps you've read the delightfully chilling short story by Patricia Highsmith (yes, of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley fame)? "The Quest for Blank Claveringi"? I think I first read it in an Alfred Hitchcock short story collection in 6th or 7th grade. I honestly thought you could read it online, but am having a hard time locating it.

 (Giant African Snail, from Wikimedia Commons)

Six degrees

So, my trains of thought (perhaps crazy trains? Though Crazy Train is the best song ever.) are odd voyages. I don't normally think so, because they're in my head. Normally I just think they're interesting, but sometimes by the time I open my mouth to share with somebody, I just get a completely blank look. So then I have to explain how I got there.

Example: I was telling one of my coworkers that the fiancé  and I were watching Hemlock Grove on Netflix (which, by the by, is quite good so far if you haven't watched it. I'm only up to episode 6 or something. I don't know how many there are. No spoilers). Only I kept wanting to call it Cypress Grove, for no good reason. Which made me think of China Grove, the Doobie Brothers song. Which then made me think of this Juicy Fruit commercial:

Once I'd explained this train to my coworker, she said "Your six degrees are always....interesting." I kind of laughed, and then thought on that for awhile. Because most people play the Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon game, but I don't really care about Kevin Bacon (though he's been very good on The Following, which I'm also not up to date on. But, James Purefoy is a serial killer, and that's what got me watching it in the first place. No spoilers.) So I asked her (probably after far too long a pause): "Six degrees of what?"  She said "What?" I explained that most people do the Kevin Bacon thing. So what was I doing? She looked mystified. So then I figured it could be dogs. Because after Juicy Fruit, there's the Big Red commercial, also from the 80's, where at the end the kissing couple is pulled apart by an Olde English Sheepdog.

Then I told the story to my fiancé, who said he would have taken it in a different direction, Big Red to Clifford, the Big Red Dog. Which is all well and good, but "Big Red" can also go in two animal directions. It's the title of a book by Jim Kjelgaard about an Irish Setter, or it's the nickname people usually use for horses. If I remember right, both Man o'War and Secretariat were called "Big Red" by the people around them.

Black market rhino horns, Irish Gypsies, and bitcoins

So, I promised you in A Lesson in Reading Labels that I would tell you a tale of international rhino horn sales. These are not, of course, legal rhino horn sales, because it seems there isn't such a thing any longer. It also would seem that Vietnam's nouveau riche has taken it into their heads that rhino horns are hallucinogenic, and will drink them ground up in wine (which, strangely, is a lot like the "identify" spell in 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons, only that required a pearl ground up in wine). Rhino horns are made of keratin; y'know, the stuff our hair and fingernails is made of? Somebody should be making a killing off of these people selling "already ground rhino horn" that is in fact something more like "sweepings off the barber shop floor". Recycling, and it would serve them right.

 

A Dovetail of Interests

Last week on the Poodle (and Dog) blog, there was a post about an anthropologist and his dog. The kicker is that both have shuffled off this mortal coil. The anthropologist, Grover Krantz (evidently"the world's foremost Bigfoot expert") donated his remains to The Body Farm in Tennessee on the condition that his dogs must not be separated from him. Doug Owsley, a Smithsonian Institute forensic anthropologist (and one of the people who identified bodies at Waco, Texas, after the raid on the Branch Davidians), used Dr. Krantz's remains along with those of one of his beloved Irish Wolfhounds in an exhibit, which shares a title with Owsley's book, Written in Bone: Bone Biographer's Casebook. Doug Owsley is not to be confused with Owsley Stanley, the storied LSD provider (cooker, even?) for the Grateful Dead. Only so many degrees away, though, I guess.

Well. These two things are a match made in heaven for me. Dogs and forensics? Perfect!

The Body Farm (Colloquially named; its actually the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center), if you don't know (have I posted about it before? If not, I've been remiss), is where forensic students may study the decay of human bodies in various conditions. That's right; people who donated their bodies to science may then be out in the elements, in a garbage bag, in a car, etc. so that scientists may better learn about the stages of decomposition in those circumstances. Having hard observations of such things are extremely valuable when discerning cause and time of death in a death investigation. Bill Bass has written several fantastic books on the topic, and it's also mentioned in Mary Roach's book Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers (a book I really just ought to own).

Anthropology is another one of those "missed majors" I had in college. I really enjoyed the anthropology classes I took, but it never occurred to me to switch to that from psychology. Might I have been happier? Might I have discovered my interest in forensics all those years ago instead of now, and have collegiate education in it instead of my frenetic layperson's research? It's funny; the job my grandmother had for years and years was as a secretary in the hospital where I was born....in the pathology department. I spent a little bit of time there in her office, every once in awhile, if there was a gap in daycare, or secretary day, or really I don't know why I was there. But I remember spending some time on one of those visits drawing animal "skeletons" and telling people I was going to be a veterinarian. I may or may not have received a Barbie veterinarian just prior to that visit, complete with pink scrubs in dress form, a white coat, and a white dog. I'm sure her shoes were white pumps as well, for the total practicality. I certainly know I didn't really know what skeletons looked like at the time. But it's funny to think back on these little breadcrumbs through my life, and put together my interests now, and paths I could have taken.

Why Rummage Sales are Worth It

At times, I'm bad about impulse purchasing. I've really improved, and was never a shopaholic, but I do have a compulsion to go to rummage sales, rubberneck at garage sales, and periodically peruse Salvation Army (which really, you should, as you end up with pieces of the Berlin Wall, or a Sushi cookbook in Spanish that you can give a friend for Christmas). I'm not quite so bad as, say, Gallagher's wife, whose explanation (per his standup routine) was "But it's on sale! Somebody else might buy it! Then it's our stuff in somebody else's house!" But I've felt like that on occasion. I don't want to miss something that would change my life.

So. The church next to the library has a twice yearly (at least) rummage sale, in the Spring and at Christmas. I go to it regularly, even though 4 out of 5 times, I don't find anything I need. But, I've been looking for a laptop bag for some months now. I had a bag that was suede (or more like wash leather, I guess) from Wilson's Leather, but it was Jim's, on perpetual loan. Then the strap started fraying because for a little while I had a paracord bracelet on it, and though it was plastic, it started the woven strap unraveling. So. Rather than thoroughly ruin his bag, I sought a new one.

I am not a ______

I read in the "news" a couple of weeks ago that Alexander Skarsgard (of True Blood and the Straw Dogs remake) doesn't want to be thought of as a sex symbol. On one hand I thought "well, too bad buddy" but on the other, I thought "Well, wait a minute." Because after all, wasn't I just talking about the way people (like writers) get put into categories? The way you are perceived affects all kinds of things, not least of all marketing.

I'm curious as to whether Leonardo DiCaprio ever gave matters such as these the same thought. I was of the "appropriate" target audience when Titanic and Romeo + Juliet came out (I saw the former 3 times in the theater and own the latter. Shut up.) He's continued to make movies, though. The Aviator was amazing, Inception was fabulous, and he just keeps working at it. He even won accolades from Vladmir Putin when he risked his life on two different perilous flights in order to make it to Moscow for a summit on tiger conservation.  Putin called him a "real man".

Incidentally, according to my stats, somebody in Moscow has been reading my dog blog fairly frequently. Do we think Putin is considering a Doberman? We know very well the man likes puppies; there's even a tumblr, putinwithdogs. He's received them as diplomatic gifts. And given them. Apparently this is a Thing; the Kennedy's received a puppy from the Russians back in the 60's, Pushnika, who was whelped by Laika, one of the Soviet space dogs (y'know, one who survived). So what do we label Putin as? Dog love? Scary Russian not-quite-dictator? Do some people consider him a sex symbol? (yeah, they're probably out there)