A Partridge in a Pear Tree
Hello World,
Well, we've really gotten to the crunch time now, and anyone who isn't ready for a visit by the jolly fat man in the red suit, had better hop on the stick and pogo themselves right out to do that shop-until-you-drop thing before it's too late. The holiday will be upon us in scant days, and you don't want to show up empty-handed while loved ones are gazing at you with that look of hopeful anticipation. Speaking of being late for the holidays, usually any time within the last few weeks, it would be the time to be wishing our Jewish friends a very Happy Hanukkah (which thanks to Adam Sandler, we now know we can rhyme that with "smoke your marijuan-ica and drink your gin & tonic-a," which is a new approach to the Festival of Lights as far as I know) except for the fact that this year, the people responsible for the Jewish calendar apparently took a page out of the Greek Orthodox book, as far as lagging behind the rest of civilization, and Hanukkah doesn't even start until sundown on the 25th. At some point, these winter movable holidays will get so far behind schedule that they'll catch up with the movable holidays in the spring coming in too early, and we'll have the Easter Bunny handing out chocolate-covered dreidels, with Santa sliding down the chimney to find a snack of latkes and Mogen David wine instead of cookies and milk. I'm telling you, no good can come of this.
In local seasonal news, we did go out and get our Christmas tree last week, and it's a beaut. We always get an extremely large tree, and some years, they simply don't have any nice looking large trees, but this year we were lucky to have a good selection of them. It's not the widest tree we've ever had, but it has a lovely shape, and when Bill put the lights on it, it made it look perfectly symmetrical from all sides. This is important, because our tree is right out in the room, and you can walk all the way around it, so we have no place to hide a "bad side" if we buy a problem tree. But it looked just beautiful, and we were very pleased with the results, all the way until the next morning, when we came downstairs and found that "someone" (for "someone," read "invisible cats" throughout) had apparently pulled all of the lights off of the lower branches and played with them. Some of these lights have decorative plastic covers that look like Santa, snowmen or peppermint candies, and these were scattered all around the floor in rakish profusion. Bill is a good sport, and hung the lights back up on the tree, only to find when we came home from work, that the same "someone" had been there again during the day, with similar results. When Bill turned on the switch to light the tree, we noticed that some of the lights went trailing off the tree, right into the center of the room, sprawling along the rug in a jaunty manner, all lit up and blinking merrily under the coffee table. It was so funny. People with cats will tell you that you have to expect this sort of thing, however, I would like to point out that we do not have a single cat right this minute who wasn't already with us last year at this same time, and last year, we couldn't get anyone to show any interest in the Christmas tree, at gunpoint. I have no explanation for this sudden change of heart on the part of our feline friends, although I have come to learn that logic is indeed wasted on cats.
While we're in an illogical mood here, I noticed the following curious items in our newspaper's TV section last week. Apparently there is a cooking show on one of our local PBS stations, and it is called "Everyday Food" and the topic for last week was "Asparagus Tart." I simply can't begin to imagine what kind of lifestyle a person would have to engage in, to the point that asparagus tart would be considered "everyday food." The mind reels. The other one was even better, where their review of "That 70s Show" described the characters going out to dinner. It continued, "The owner gives them a hard time, and Randy reiterates by stealing Fatso the Clown, the restaurant's mascot ..." For everyone who believes they should have used "retaliates" instead of "reiterates," please contact the Journal News at LoHud.com and apply for the job of editing their TV Week. A grateful nation thanks you.
Speaking of grateful, we had an early Christmas present here earlier in the week. For several months, we had noticed a very dashing stray cat in our yard, among the usual assortment of straggly and beat-up tom cats that we usually have. This one was a very distinguished looking brown and white long hair, and much friendlier than your usual stray. We thought he might have been related to our brownish long hair, Muffin, so this "ragamuffin" newcomer came to be called RaggMopp. We hadn't seen him last week, when it was so bitterly cold, and hoped that he was someplace warm. Then he showed up on Sunday night, limping badly, and eating like he hadn't ever seen food before. I said to Bill this was no kind of weather to turn out an injured cat, especially with those tough old tom cats out there looking for trouble, so we kept him inside overnight and brought him to the animal hospital on Monday. It was a lucky thing we did, because when the vet examined him, he found that he had been seriously injured in a fight or accident, and his whole underside was raw and bleeding. It was so bad that they ended up keeping him all week, cleaning out his wounds and treating him with antibiotics. We weren't surprised to find that he had already been altered, because he had all the earmarks of a "previously owned pet," rather than a stray, and we've had enough of both to recognize the differences. But we were surprised, and appalled, to find that his previous owners had him de-clawed, and then tossed him out on the streets, with no way to defend himself or even catch his own food. Needless to say, we consider ourselves very lucky that things worked out as well as they did, and as for RaggMopp, I expect that this will be just about his very best Christmas ever. Ho Ho Ho.
Now that we're in a holiday frame of mind, I may as well mention a curiosity that I came across in a book that I'm reading of historical romances taking place during the Christmas season long ago and far away. In this tale, the feisty dowager, Lady Kirkwood, has set her guests to a scavenger hunt where they must provide a reasonable facsimile of the items described in the carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas," with a prize to the winning team. So off gallop the dashing lords and spirited ladies, rounding up turtledoves, golden rings, pipers and milkmaids, in reckless abandon. Now, it's true that most people are not that familiar with the top of the list, since due to the structure of the song, you only hear the 12 lords a-leaping once, the 11 ladies dancing twice, the 10 pipers piping three times and the 9 drummers drumming four times. But just about everybody in the world knows the bottom half of the group, staring with the five golden rings and going all the way to the partridge in the pear tree, because those sections are repeated so many, many times. The part that surprised me was when she described the participants as trying to collect what she referred to as "four colly birds," or blackbirds, and which I always thought was "four calling birds," or what I would consider song birds. Of course, we all know how Bill loves a research challenge, so I have no doubt that he will get to the bottom of this yuletide discrepancy in no time. At least before the 12 lords a-leaping, 11 ladies dancing, 10 pipers piping, 9 drummers drumming, 8 maids a-milking, 7 swans a-swimming, 6 geese a-laying, 5 golden rings, 4 [fill in the blank] birds, 3 French hens, 2 turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree.
Well, we've really gotten to the crunch time now, and anyone who isn't ready for a visit by the jolly fat man in the red suit, had better hop on the stick and pogo themselves right out to do that shop-until-you-drop thing before it's too late. The holiday will be upon us in scant days, and you don't want to show up empty-handed while loved ones are gazing at you with that look of hopeful anticipation. Speaking of being late for the holidays, usually any time within the last few weeks, it would be the time to be wishing our Jewish friends a very Happy Hanukkah (which thanks to Adam Sandler, we now know we can rhyme that with "smoke your marijuan-ica and drink your gin & tonic-a," which is a new approach to the Festival of Lights as far as I know) except for the fact that this year, the people responsible for the Jewish calendar apparently took a page out of the Greek Orthodox book, as far as lagging behind the rest of civilization, and Hanukkah doesn't even start until sundown on the 25th. At some point, these winter movable holidays will get so far behind schedule that they'll catch up with the movable holidays in the spring coming in too early, and we'll have the Easter Bunny handing out chocolate-covered dreidels, with Santa sliding down the chimney to find a snack of latkes and Mogen David wine instead of cookies and milk. I'm telling you, no good can come of this.
In local seasonal news, we did go out and get our Christmas tree last week, and it's a beaut. We always get an extremely large tree, and some years, they simply don't have any nice looking large trees, but this year we were lucky to have a good selection of them. It's not the widest tree we've ever had, but it has a lovely shape, and when Bill put the lights on it, it made it look perfectly symmetrical from all sides. This is important, because our tree is right out in the room, and you can walk all the way around it, so we have no place to hide a "bad side" if we buy a problem tree. But it looked just beautiful, and we were very pleased with the results, all the way until the next morning, when we came downstairs and found that "someone" (for "someone," read "invisible cats" throughout) had apparently pulled all of the lights off of the lower branches and played with them. Some of these lights have decorative plastic covers that look like Santa, snowmen or peppermint candies, and these were scattered all around the floor in rakish profusion. Bill is a good sport, and hung the lights back up on the tree, only to find when we came home from work, that the same "someone" had been there again during the day, with similar results. When Bill turned on the switch to light the tree, we noticed that some of the lights went trailing off the tree, right into the center of the room, sprawling along the rug in a jaunty manner, all lit up and blinking merrily under the coffee table. It was so funny. People with cats will tell you that you have to expect this sort of thing, however, I would like to point out that we do not have a single cat right this minute who wasn't already with us last year at this same time, and last year, we couldn't get anyone to show any interest in the Christmas tree, at gunpoint. I have no explanation for this sudden change of heart on the part of our feline friends, although I have come to learn that logic is indeed wasted on cats.
While we're in an illogical mood here, I noticed the following curious items in our newspaper's TV section last week. Apparently there is a cooking show on one of our local PBS stations, and it is called "Everyday Food" and the topic for last week was "Asparagus Tart." I simply can't begin to imagine what kind of lifestyle a person would have to engage in, to the point that asparagus tart would be considered "everyday food." The mind reels. The other one was even better, where their review of "That 70s Show" described the characters going out to dinner. It continued, "The owner gives them a hard time, and Randy reiterates by stealing Fatso the Clown, the restaurant's mascot ..." For everyone who believes they should have used "retaliates" instead of "reiterates," please contact the Journal News at LoHud.com and apply for the job of editing their TV Week. A grateful nation thanks you.
Speaking of grateful, we had an early Christmas present here earlier in the week. For several months, we had noticed a very dashing stray cat in our yard, among the usual assortment of straggly and beat-up tom cats that we usually have. This one was a very distinguished looking brown and white long hair, and much friendlier than your usual stray. We thought he might have been related to our brownish long hair, Muffin, so this "ragamuffin" newcomer came to be called RaggMopp. We hadn't seen him last week, when it was so bitterly cold, and hoped that he was someplace warm. Then he showed up on Sunday night, limping badly, and eating like he hadn't ever seen food before. I said to Bill this was no kind of weather to turn out an injured cat, especially with those tough old tom cats out there looking for trouble, so we kept him inside overnight and brought him to the animal hospital on Monday. It was a lucky thing we did, because when the vet examined him, he found that he had been seriously injured in a fight or accident, and his whole underside was raw and bleeding. It was so bad that they ended up keeping him all week, cleaning out his wounds and treating him with antibiotics. We weren't surprised to find that he had already been altered, because he had all the earmarks of a "previously owned pet," rather than a stray, and we've had enough of both to recognize the differences. But we were surprised, and appalled, to find that his previous owners had him de-clawed, and then tossed him out on the streets, with no way to defend himself or even catch his own food. Needless to say, we consider ourselves very lucky that things worked out as well as they did, and as for RaggMopp, I expect that this will be just about his very best Christmas ever. Ho Ho Ho.
Now that we're in a holiday frame of mind, I may as well mention a curiosity that I came across in a book that I'm reading of historical romances taking place during the Christmas season long ago and far away. In this tale, the feisty dowager, Lady Kirkwood, has set her guests to a scavenger hunt where they must provide a reasonable facsimile of the items described in the carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas," with a prize to the winning team. So off gallop the dashing lords and spirited ladies, rounding up turtledoves, golden rings, pipers and milkmaids, in reckless abandon. Now, it's true that most people are not that familiar with the top of the list, since due to the structure of the song, you only hear the 12 lords a-leaping once, the 11 ladies dancing twice, the 10 pipers piping three times and the 9 drummers drumming four times. But just about everybody in the world knows the bottom half of the group, staring with the five golden rings and going all the way to the partridge in the pear tree, because those sections are repeated so many, many times. The part that surprised me was when she described the participants as trying to collect what she referred to as "four colly birds," or blackbirds, and which I always thought was "four calling birds," or what I would consider song birds. Of course, we all know how Bill loves a research challenge, so I have no doubt that he will get to the bottom of this yuletide discrepancy in no time. At least before the 12 lords a-leaping, 11 ladies dancing, 10 pipers piping, 9 drummers drumming, 8 maids a-milking, 7 swans a-swimming, 6 geese a-laying, 5 golden rings, 4 [fill in the blank] birds, 3 French hens, 2 turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 8:19 PM
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