The Life Experience ~ Fall '12

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Autumn Equinox:

• It's a bit painful to win the trust of a shy cat and then have to destroy it again when you have to give her eye medication every few hours.
• Those profoundly stupid-looking Breathe-Right strips you stick on your nose? They help ENORMOUSLY when you have swollen sinuses.
• Awesome animator Friz Freleng would concentrate so hard on animating a scene that you could literally set fire to his desk while he was at it and he would not notice. His friends discovered this through several practical experiments.
• Some gallbladders have really recognizable problems, like gallstones. Others just slowly croak over several years.
• Trunk or Treat is not reserved for just Utahns.
• Sharpie makes good pens that don't give me a headache now!
• Quenya has an extensive case system, but it's also kind of weirdly redundant. Seems Tolkien had trouble making up his mind about a lot of things.
• If your political party forcibly ejects anyone who demonstrates even an iota of rationality, it will not go well for your crazy-go-nuts party come Election Day.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is known as the movie that invented the twist ending, but what I didn't know is that it was invented by accident because the studios thought the original untwisted ending was too macabre. Studio execs--messin' with your movies since 1920.
• It may be sad to leave your cross-town library job, but dang is it a relief not to have to drive that far all the time.
• When I observed a couple of years ago that Kevin Clash has gone mad with power, I was more right than I knew. (I was talking about the supersaturation of Elmo in everything! I didn't expect THIS! DAMN YOU, KEVIN CLASH)
• A single episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on Youtube exactly equals one medium session of boring WiiFit Free Step. Time flies when everything is hilarious.
• There may be another unexpected upside to switching narrators in my Doctors! story: my former narrator gets back all the weird characeristics that got in the way when he was narrating! Why didn't I do this sooner?!
• That butter-and-flour mixture I've enjoyed making for years as the best part of soup-cooking is called a roux.*
• The ch in "chalcedony" is pronounced as a k.

*I know how to do a lot of things in the kitchen, but I don't know what to call a bunch of them. So years after I've learned something I'll find out there's a word for it. Clearly I need an authoritative 1950's narrator looking over my shoulder at all times.

Comments

[baroncognito.livejournal.com]

And it's pronounced rue. I first learned about roux because I read an awful pun somewhere: "You'll roux the day you heat flour and butter" or something like that.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* That's one of the few French pronunciations I could guess without having to have someone read it to me.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

The ch in "chalcedony" is pronounced as a k.
Thanks for mentioning it, it turns out I've been mispronouncing that for years!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Me too!

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Always look forward to these!

That's hilariously awesome about Freling!

Not surprised by the Quenya thing. Tolkien may well have had some arcane justification for how it ended up that way that he just never ended up writing down. Or you may well be right and he just couldn't make up his mind. Probably about 50/50 odds.

I need to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at some point.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I got curious about Tolkien's languages again recently. They've always put me off--I think they're an impressive amount of work, but they also sounded kind of unpleasant to me. Kinda ... pointy, or something. (Ironically, the one I like the best is the Black Speech, which he designed to be really ugly.) But he did keep changing it around, apparently--and unfortunately, the only things we have to go on are his published works. So a very specific type of nerd is going through and cataloging when he wrote each rule and whether they contradict each other.

If you're interested--and don't mind some eye-bleeding web design--Ardalambion deals in depth with the languages of Middle Earth. The downloadable Quenya lessons could use a rewrite--they've got a lot of long digressions about the inconsistencies in Tolkien's corpus, and they over-explain the HELL out of non-English constructions. I advise sticking with the online overviews, which give highlights. (And it gives the real names of the hobbits--a bit of trivia I've enjoyed pulling out since junior high school.)

Apparently Freleng's coworkers would pitch discarded paper under his desk, then light it. The fascinating history of animation!

[acrossthelake.livejournal.com]

I've had people (namely my mom and Chris) get incredibly surprised when I've mentioned to them it's called roux. It's like, "This has a fancy French name? But it's just something you do to cook with, not something fancy and French!" It's kind of hilarious.