This threw me a bit at the supermarket. It should look like this:

and not like this:

I don’t know why the company, or the supermarket, now has the export packaging; has the domestic market become too small? Or had they underestimated the domestic market and run out? (which is the other side of the same problem?) I don’t think they mean ‘Holland’ as in ‘North and South Holland’ as opposed to ‘Overijssel’; it says ‘Pays-Bas’ on the French side.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that it’s “Kosher for Passover and all year use”, even though that doesn’t concern us.

But fortunately, the contents were the same, or I’d have sent the company Very Angry Mail.

If I hadn’t seen them do it, I wouldn’t have known what had caused this.

This is part of the gate of our old house, where wasps have pared some of the weathered top layer of the wood away to make their paper nest. It makes an intriguing small scratchy noise when you actually happen to be there while they’re doing it.

Here’s a detail at full resolution:

It’s interesting that they do it only vertically; the rest of the fence is of the same wood, equally weathered, but with horizontal slats, and it doesn’t show any evidence of wasp-paring at all.

Time for another roundup of search terms.

(apropos of nothing, I seem to have about 30 regular readers)

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… that ‘dragon’ is the Dutch word for tarragon. But still.

We keep the church open every Saturday from the end of June until the end of August for the benefit of whoever wants to come in and have a look. Two volunteers per Saturday, and today it was my turn. Our “CHURCH OPEN” sign couldn’t face both sides that people were likely to come from at once, so I ran upstairs and printed a “CHURCH OPEN, Welcome!” sign to tape to the open door on the other side. Still, about half the people who came in asked “may I come in? may I have a look around?”

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The birds all came looking when I leant over the rail of the bridge with my camera, thinking I had food. When that wasn’t forthcoming they swam away. There were three grey cygnets and an off-white one, but I didn’t manage to get all of them in the viewer together.

I find myself rethinking scenes, seeing images from the films in my mind; even looking half-heartedly for widescreen wallpaper of any scene that appeals. But perhaps I’ll just have to get some pictures of random New Zealand landscape and make up my own stories in it.

Looking for other people’s experiences I came across The Purist, who seems to have seen exactly the same films that I have. The reviews are spot on, the parody summaries hilarious. And here is The NitPicker’s Guide to The Lord of the Rings, detailing changes between book and film. Especially the mail the NitPicker got, reproduced at the end, is instructive.

Here is a wiki article about a Purist Edit of The Two Towers: all Peter Jackson’s changes undone again. I may want to watch it some time, though I’m not such a purist; I appreciate that film is a very different medium from print, but I do question some of Peter Jackson’s choices. The rest of that wiki is worth perusing too.

Finally, here is a full synopsis, chapter by chapter of the book. Useful, especially if you’re trying to find a reference and know what the context was but not where in the book to search, as happened to me this morning.

Too many flashbacks. Too much cutting from one piece of action to another and back (I’m clearly not of the zap generation). Too much crawling up and sliding down mountains. Too much Gollum. Too much simpering by Arwen and, come to think of it, Éowyn. Too much Slow == Important. Interminable battles, interminable whitespace between events (people standing or sitting around and occasionally saying something), interminable horror scenes, interminable farewells. And still the head-to-one-side cuteness of Aragorn when he’s already been crowned king.

Yes, this is The Return of the King, of course. I watched it a few years ago on my own when I was ill, fast-forwarding most of the Gollum stretches and all of Shelob, joined by Secunda (who was also running a fever) for the coronation, and remembered mostly the good bits.

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I stayed up writing this last night but the network didn’t see the laptop and I didn’t feel like fixing that at 2:15 in the morning; ah well, gives me the chance to add a few things I came up with while in bed and in the shower.

We watched the Lord of the Rings films again— the first two in one evening as a school-holiday movie marathon; we have the third in the house as well but the other two are so long that The Two Towers ended well after midnight, and everybody was just plain too tired to face another one even if it does have the happy ending that the others so sadly lack.

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