brainylady

Gallimaufry

(Mindy inspired me to take the time to choose a good word rather than having "Various stuff connected by no particular thread at all" as a title there.)

The rain last night! I first noticed the lightning around eight o'clock: I was in the living room and noticed flashes in the dark sky outside. (I've mentioned that I can't actually see out of my windows, right? They're made of pebbly bathroom glass. Don't get me started.) I must admit that my first thought was something like "Americans! Even in somebody else's country they have to have all kinds of fireworks on the fourth of July!" Eventually I realized it was lightning (oops, my bad), which was still going strong when I went to bed at twelve-thirty. The rain was so loud that I gave up watching TV -- I couldn't hear. (By the way, I didn't just jinx the typhoon -- much of Taiwan got the exact opposite of what I'd hoped for: a destructive Severe Tropical Storm.)

I finished one cloverleaf sock on the weekend, cast on for the next, and worked five rows on PPD. What was even better, though, was packing up a huge bin of yarn to give away, After posting a message on a local forum, I got an e-mail from a beginning knitter who wants it all, and I'm so pleased. I filled a forty-liter storage tub (because I can't take that home, either) and a big bag with balls of yarn (wool, cotton, acrylic, blends, unknowns) and threw in nearly all my straight needles for good measure. And it made me feel so good! Like a Good Knitting Witch.

"Japan's Kobayashi wins eating contest again, setting record with 53½ hotdogs: See this photo? This is going to be me when I get back to Canada and get my hands on some tofu dogs.

Another thing I'm going to do is rent classic Marlon Brando movies.

"Beckham exhibition photo defaced": Vandals who can't spell are funny. Somebody wrote "you loosers" in red felt pen on a huge photo of David Beckham at a British show. According to the article, "The misspelling of 'losers' may have been a reference to Rebecca Loos, whose claims of an affair with Beckham made headlines earlier this year." Oh, it was not. It was a spelling mistake and we all know it. (This reminds me of some local graffiti from my high school days, when somebody spray-painted a pentagram and I LOVE SATIN on the wooden pier at Rotary Beach. Spelling mistake or fashion confession?)

I encounter zany Chinglish every day at work. I don't often laugh out loud, as chances are that it was written by someone else in my office. Today I laughed out loud, at this excellent example of how important it is to put clauses in the correct order in a sentence:

Harriet beckoned me to sit beside her at the dinner table with her head.
(All I could do was write "Why would I want to sit at the dinner table with Harriet's head?")