Ninth week of Anshen (including part of the tenth week). It’s Part 20 already!

All the supermarkets are playing St.Nicholas songs instead of their usual muzak.

All the supermarkets appear to have the same tape sung by a very off-key children’s choir— no, they’re not very off-key, they’re subtly, annoyingly off-key, which is worse.

They’ve set all the songs to straight 4/4 time arrangements, even the ones that aren’t. That is even more annoying than the off-keyness: instead of this
[ETA: sheet music]

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A while ago I made custom 403, 404 and 410 pages for my web site, each with a background picture of the numbers in faint green. They worked when I put them up, but last week when I wanted to show one of the pages to someone (one never sees one’s own error pages, right?) the picture was gone. And from the other error pages too.

I didn’t remember having changed anything— not to those pages. Not to the relevant rules in the stylesheet either. I had changed some other stuff in the stylesheet, but poring over it with Kate’s excellent syntax highlighting would have uncovered the most elusive missing colon or curly bracket so it couldn’t very well have been that.

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What the celebrities use I wouldn’t know— the message, in triplicate, was spam and I threw all three of them away immediately. Probably a remedy for “ED dysfunction”. I never tire of pointing out that if a remedy for ED dysfunction works, it will leave you with functioning ED, and that’s probably not what people want to achieve. (Yes, I know that it’s probably a case for the Department of Redundancy Department, like Bengloarafurd Ford.)

But it did make me think. Celebrities don’t usually impress me, at least not the mere fact that someone is a celebrity. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the Netherlands called “BN’ers”, Bekende Nederlanders (Well-Known Dutchpeople) who seem to be known only for being well-known: TV starlets, featherweight singers, footballers’ girlfriends, all of whom I can joyfully ignore because I don’t follow the media much.

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From Jay. It has only a minimal overlap (food/snacks) with the four things meme I posted in December 2007.

I’m being elaborate on a meme that seems to call for brevity, but I don’t care.

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He wasn’t exactly late, but took a lot of game time coming!

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Raisse’s player writes:

Raisse blindly assumes that she is doing Moyri a favour by finding a replacement and that Moyri sees it the same way. If she ever thought about that consciously that may change. Probably because she is concerned for Moyri’s health and does not want her friend sacrificing it for her benefit.

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Someone sent me a .msv file to transcribe and edit. To start with, it wasn’t easy for them to send it— it took me hours of troubleshooting my KMail installation, and the mail server, and the spam handler, until I finally gave up and told them to send it to my gmail address. Only to find that in all probability they’d misunderstood Secunda on the phone and tried, three times, to send the file to my address with a letter missing. (The gmail message had the old message headers embedded in tiny letters, or I’d never have known.)

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Wednesday evening, 20:00, about to serve pumpkin and coconut soup.

Phone: Ring, ring! It’s the art-class teacher. “Am I right that you were going to sit tonight?” Me: “Isn’t that tomorrow?” Him: “Yes, but tonight as well.” Well, it wasn’t on my schedule (we still don’t know which of us made the mistake) but it’s only five minutes away, so I grabbed a piece of bread, admonished the family to save me some soup, and wasn’t much more than half an hour late for the lesson.

Only five people there, most of them old acquaintances; a bit of chaos from the chaotic start, but that wasn’t at all unpleasant. Only, when I got home I was too tired for anything except sipping a glass of wine and reading Golden Ashes (a great find from the 25-cent bin of one of the local second-hand bookshops). Oh, and eating pumpkin and coconut soup, of course.

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Seventh week of Anshen, part II. In which she gets chicken pox, poor girl, but not until she’s had her wedding party.

I approve wholeheartedly of the technique to get instantaneously to any place by dreaming of it and waking up there. But it did land me in Copenhagen with no cash at all and only 50 euros in the bank (which, usefully, I could see on the screen of my mobile phone, green on black like an old Hercules monitor). And when I discovered that it could be done with a web page too, and demonstrated that to someone, I ended up outside Copenhagen on the site of a news item, in a field, without a computer or any other means to get back except my own feet. This made me arrive after midnight and miss the last train.

Fortunately, the nice woman at the post office let me have 1,50 euros to phone my mother (who, in waking reality, died ten years ago this month) in exchange for about a foot of sticky tape— I gave her the rest of the roll, too, because I had nothing to cut it with.

I could conceivably have taken a plane home —the post office had some on offer— but the 50 euros sort of precluded that. When looking at plane schedules and prices I realised that the man and woman behind the counter, who I had been conversing with in a mixture of their barely adequate English and my (realistically) very inadequate Danish, were actually speaking Dutch with one another; as were the various gaudily dressed fat middle-aged women in the street, obviously well-to-do tourists.

I did get back eventually— by waking up again.

I swear on Queen Alyse’s grave that I didn’t know this.

Well, perhaps I did pick it up somewhere along the way when reading linguistics under the table in boring geography classes (or above the table in boring English classes; my teacher encouraged it as long as my grades stayed above 8-out-of-10 and what I read was in English) but it wasn’t a conscious choice, unlike orla “eagle” which I borrowed shamelessly from Church Slavonic because it analysed perfectly in Ilaini as “grand master bird” or “magic bird”.

But if I’d been aware of this connotation, I’d probably have gone out of my way to call him something else.

I’ve heard the Resurrection Gospels so often that I practically know them by heart, but now Prima stands next to me on the choir platform and that seems to make me notice different things. Today: clueless disciples.

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If Barack Obama wins the election —which I sincerely hope— he will be the first president of the United States who is younger than I am. That’s truly a sign of advancing age: that it’s not only doctors and police(wo)men who are younger than oneself, but also presidents of the United States. And when Queen Beatrix retires, the king as well.

On the upside, he will be the first president of the United States I’m conscious of who isn’t an old white man. Though technically Bill Clinton wasn’t old either: almost a year younger than Obama when he was elected. (This surprised me a bit when I looked it up.) But older than me, at the time, and undeniably white.

In fact, this post is in the first place an excuse to link to slacktivist’s post about bigotry and stupidity which everybody ought to read.

Seventh week of Anshen. Lots of work for Cora!