Not much longer now

Returning home at 1:00 after picking up our free money from Costco, I saw a small flock of robins at the corner of Grange and Auburn. Welcome back!  Hope you're right about the arrival of spring.

Plus these two

A shopping plaza on MacArthur Road has a Dick's Sporting Goods and a Giant supermarket.  The sign at the street shows that the plaza management gave it some thought and put the individual signs so that from left to right they read Dick's/Giant instead of Giant/Dick's.

My pronouns are me/myself/I.

My Day

Breakfast:  cereal, juice with seltzer, and the New York Times Spelling Bee, as usual.  Today was my day to get the pangram, "toothpick."

BB and I went to Lowe's to look at shades.  She looked, didn't buy any.

PetSmart on MacArthur Road:  two bags of dry ProPlan plus 2 jugs of TidyCats scoopable, and a dozen or so cans of ProPlan.  Enough to get us over the $60 threshold and earn a 15% discount on the entire order.  (something like from 82 down to 68)

Walmart for bird seed, Pepsi, and Dove Bars.  Impulse, bought a $4 box of peanut butter and chocolate Girl Scout cookies.  Ate the entire box, all 15 cookies, before supper.  I still binge like that from time to time.  I can do better, but I don't.

Supper:  pizza and Pepsi.  Dessert:  homemade vanilla pudding for BB, nothing for me, not after several hundred excess calories in the form of peanut butter and chocolate Girl Scout cookies.

Other times:  BB put on the Tivo'd TCM of Pride and Prejudice, the 1940 version.  My Widdle Baby Durl (TM) Swirly climbed onto my lap and I nodded off about 15-20 minutes in, and BB shut off the film shortly after I woke up again.  She prefers the 1995 version with Colin Firth.

One piece of mail, junk trying to get BB to switch to Liberty Mutual car insurance.  

I began to write something for Tabby's Place, nominally about Fenek, but more about the financial reports and where donations go, and how an independent agency rates TP highly in terms of stewardship.  

For years, I longed for better looks and more artistic talent.  Instead, I got thick glasses, an overbite, but with some writing talent and a certain knack with computers, up to a point.  So rather than being attractive to women who wouldn't be good for me, I have one trusted best friend of 37 years.  Instead of struggling to make a living making art or music, I make a good living doing something I enjoy.

I tried drawing and cartooning.  Still don't understand how to have fun doing them.  Just want to it be over and done with.  But I can open NoteTab and start jotting down a word here, a phrase there, working up sentences and creating paragraphs. Cut and paste and re-arrange, and it's all easy and simple and enjoyable.  In a little while, there's a 200-250 word cat description, or a 400-500 word letter to a Special Needs supporter.  Can drawing be that easy and simple and enjoyable for some other people?

And, a couple of times a month, I get to visit a bunch of cats, write about one or two of them, and take as many pictures as possible while visiting and petting as many as I can get my hands on.  Yessir, living the absolute dream.

Showered, cleaned the shower and tub.  When I opened the bathroom door, there was Good Queen Swirly.  We went to the master bedroom and I put on my jeans standing up, because I knew as soon as I sat back down, she would leap onto my lap (which she did).  Brushed her cheeks and neck with an old Stanley hairbrush until she started getting overstimulated and jumped back down. 

Watched part of an untranslated YouTube of Servant of the People.  It did have Russian subtitles, and I played at deciphering the Cyrillic.  Recognized "spasibo", "president", and "Volodymr Zelenskiy" and figured out the word in parentheses when there was no dialogue was their word for "music".   

Scrolled through Twitter, containing so many salutes and memes in honor of the Ukrainian President.  A few months ago, the stories were about "how he went from TV comic actor to getting 73% of the vote for President, back down to a 25% approval rating."  (He got 30% in the first round in 2019, remember.  The 73% was in the final round, against only the incumbent oligarch.)  

For that matter, it wasn't a week ago that a Ukrainian journalist contributed a few hundred words in the NY Times that described a decent man way in over his head.  (That hasn't aged well.)

Is that pretty much everything?  (Isn't that enough?)

What comes after "son of no coincidences"?

Chrome's history page tells me that at 4:50 this afternoon, I was reading Christopher Buckley's guest essay, "P.J. O’Rourke and the Death of Conservative Humor".   

Two minutes later, I read, "Humorlessness has crept in its petty pace to the right, where it is conducted with North Korean-level solemnity by the bellowing myrmidons of MAGAdom."  (I guess Chris Buckley didn't fall far from dear old dad's tree.) 

Immediately I Google the mysterious "myrmidon" and satisfy my thirst for knowledge.

Learning a new word, and at my age, too. 

Zoom ahead to 8:15 or so, "later that same day"; the film "Twentieth Century," and this bit of dialogue:

I ran it back several times, and I don't know what he's saying at the "inaudible" point, either.  Sounds sort of like Pearl Atomics, which I doubt.

- - - - - - - - - -

Minutes later:  Why guess when you can Google?  "..bath tubs, slews of Myrmidons" brought up this article from AV Club:  

“That’s not a contract,” he tells Lily. “It’s a coronation. Barrels of rubies. Enormous carpets for your pretty feet. Pearl and onyx bathtubs. Slews of Myrmidons at your beck and call.”

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who wrote the screenplay (based on their own stage play), didn’t fret about whether audiences knew that Myrmidons were Achilles’ soldiers in The Iliad. Like many scribes of Hollywood’s Golden Age (or, say, the Coen brothers today), they valued historical and cultural literacy for its own sake, weaving it into even the goofiest of material.

Son of "There are no coincidences"

Pat and I did pretty well with today's NYT Spelling Bee.  We came up with 61 of 63 words, well past Genius level.  Not surprisingly, the word "valentine" was a pangram, although not the only one.  

I looked up the last two words, one of which was "villanelle".  We both griped that we don't even know what the word means, and what are they doing putting that kind of thing in the puzzle, and then I looked up the word.  In Wikipedia, a "villanelle... is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines."  

At which point that 19-line thing rang a bell, and I looked up the 2017 New Yorker article on Elizabeth Bishop that I had read recently.  Sure enough:

[She wrote] seventeen quickly successive drafts of an exactingly structured villanelle, a form with origins in the French Baroque... a fixed form of nineteen lines: five tercets, a concluding quatrain, and a rhyme scheme tight enough to keep any feeling from spilling over the borders. 

Marcus Welby is dead

The man's description of his experience with medical science reminds me of observing my wife's experience through 2017-2019 with cancer, kidney stones, and a broken leg caused by a fall that took place after chemo when she had lost weight and her blood pressure was normal, but nobody noticed that and didn't take her off blood pressure medicine.  

"There are no coincidences", exhibit the latest

 I have several shorts for wearing around the house during the day.  Never for wearing off the property.  Just saw two mature gentlemen wearing similar shorts at the Trexlertown Giant, and wondered what they were thinking.  It doesn't work out there unless you're young and slim.  

Bought my shorts on eBay for about $20 apiece, all with the adidas brand and a logo of the school where adidas has the account.  Nebraska, Ohio U., Texas State, Mississippi State, Tulsa, and Rice.  Today I put on Rice. and when I brought up Twitter this evening, here's what came up:

So it would appear that the data miners are not only using my phone's microphone, but now, its camera.  <wide-eyed ingenue>I mean, how else can you explain it?</wei>