A Gentleman's Domain

Thursday Thirteen #30

Okay, peeps!  Not very original this week, I’m afraid, but some little time ago when I decided to do a TT of books I own (but have not necessarily read) that have one-word titles, I found I had more than enough for several lists.  I have done two already, and here is the third.  When I put book lists together I always like to guess which ones people will have read, and which they will be curious about.  I think I can guess which of this week’s lot will be the one most people have read.  As usual, I have a buy-it link after each entry, which will take you straight to the Amazon listing for the book in question.  However, if you do decide to buy any, I urge you, once you are through to Amazon, to click on the “new and used” link and buy from an independent bookseller.  Up to you, of course.  Anyway please enjoy....

           13 More Books with One-Word Titles
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They Walk Among Us

My thanks to the friend of a friend of a friend who sent this to me a few week ago.   I'm not sure how many of these anecdotes are true but something makes me suspect that most of them are.

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They Walk Among Us!!

I was at the checkout of a Kmart. The clerk rang up $46.64 charge. I gave her a fifty dollar bill. She gave me back $46.64. I gave it back to her and told her that she had made a mistake in MY favor and gave  her the money back. She became indignant and informed me she was educated and knew what she was doing and returned the money again. I Gave her the money back again...same scenario! I departed the store with the
$46.64. 

They Walk Among Us and Many Work Retail.

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I walked into a Mickey D's with a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for a sandwich. I handed it to the girl and she looked over at a Little Chalkboard that said "buy one-get one free." "They're already buy-one-get-one-free", she said, "so I guess they're both free" She handed me my free sandwiches and I walked out the door.

They Walk Among Us and Many Work Food Service.

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One day I was walking down the beach with some friends when one of them shouted, "Look at that dead bird!" Someone looked up at the sky and said, "Where?"

They Walk Among Us!

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While looking at a house, my brother asked the real estate agent which direction was north because, he explained, he didn't want the sun waking him up every morning.
She asked, "Does the sun rise in the north?"
When my brother explained that the sun rises in the east, and has for sometime, she shook her head and said, "Oh I don't keep up with that stuff."

They Walk Among Us!!

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I used to work in technical support for a 24/7 call center. One day I got a call from an individual who asked what hours the call center was open. I told him, "The number you dialed is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
He responded, "Is that Eastern or Pacific time?"

I said, "Pacific."

They Walk Among Us!

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My friend has a lifesaving tool in her car designed to cut through a Seat belt if she is trapped. She keeps it in the trunk.

They Walk Among Us and Sometimes we know them

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My friends and I went to the store to get a 12 pack of Coke and noticed that the cases were discounted 10%. We bought 2 cases. The cashier multiplied 2 times 10% and gave us a 20% discount.

They Walk Among Us and Work Retail

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I couldn't find my luggage at the airport baggage area, so I went to the lost luggage office and told the woman there that my bags never showed up.  She smiled and told me not to worry because she was a trained professional and I was in good hands. "Now," she asked me, "has your plane arrived yet?"

They Walk Among Us!

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While working at a pizza parlor I observed a man ordering a small pizza to go.  He appeared to be alone and the cook asked him if he would like it cut into 4 pieces or 6.  He thought about it for some time before responding. "Just cut it into 4 pieces; I don't think I'm hungry enough to eat 6 pieces."

Yep, They Walk Among Us!

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They Walk Among Us, and Worst of All They VOTE

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Thursday Thirteen #29

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Heigh ho, and it’s another book list.  Being in a frivolous mood, I was looking at my shelves and I wondered about books with titles that contain animal names but are not actually about animals.  Do I have thirteen of them? As it happens, I do, so here are………

          Thirteen Books That Have Animal Names In Their Titles
                                      (but are not about animals)

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Child Care That Doesn't Care

These truths we hold to be self evident.  Seems to me I’ve heard that somewhere, or a least read it.  It never impressed me that much because I thought in the main that it was just an easy way of not bothering to justify a belief and of avoiding a debate.  A rather pompous was of saying “If you have to ask, then you’ll never understand.”  But not always.  There are certain things that are, I believe, self evident. As an example my I offer for your consideration the fact that there is no written law in Britain against murder.  It is just an agreed fact that it is self-evidently wrong, and has been since time immemorial.  Murder is wrong; no one can disagree about that.  The written laws that exist there define murder, not its criminality, and set the penalty. 

There is one matter which, I suggest, we all agree is simply wrong, and that is maltreatment of children.  Not only the obvious ways of abusing them – violence and rape, for example – but unleashing on them the full majesty of the law that is normally reserved for adults.   It is an abuse to take a child, an as yet undeveloped human being, and decide that they will pretend that he is an adult and will treat him like one.  So that your eleven year old ends up in an adult court, is prosecuted as though he were twice his age, and if found guilty is given an adult sentence. In instances like this, prosecutors and judges are themselves child abusers, hiding behind the law that permits them to act this way the way a street corner flasher hides behind a greasy raincoat.

Most of the world sees this.   The Convention of the Rights of the Child has been ratified by all the member states of the UN except Somalia and the USA, both of which refused to because they wanted to be able to continue to execute children.  The age of criminality varies from one country to another, but most states acknowledge that at below a certain age children can not be assumed to have an adult awareness of the consequences of their actions.  It is likewise ridiculous to punish a full grown adult for crimes he or she may have committed when a child. Unless, of course, one is motivated by spite and vindictiveness.  It is vindictiveness that prevented a recent vote at the UN from being unanimous.  This imperfect but well-meaning organization called for a move to end the sentencing of anyone below eighteen to a life sentence for any crime on the correct grounds that it is simply wrong.  When the vote was taken it was 185 in favour and only one against. That one was the Unites States, where there are over seventy people serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed when they were 13 or 14.  That’s right – child abusing prosecutors and judges consigned these children to incarceration until they die.

It is such a strange thing that a nation that would have us believe that it is at the cutting edge of humanity and the advance of civilization  treats its miscreant children so foully.  Do the ordinary people actually know what is being done in their name?  Last year police officers entered a school not far from the town in Florida where I live and arrested two children, 9 and 10, for having painted in their drawing class what teachers thought was a picture that threatened violence.  Unbelievable though it may seem,  two kids painted a nasty picture so they were hauled away in handcuffs for it. This was not simply a matter of a small town police department out of control, even though it would be comforting to think that this was just a bunch of power-mad hicks going too far.   They did it because the law said they could, and they simply had not bothered to think of any other way of dealing with the situation. Maybe it was beyond their abilities to do so.

The main opposition to changing the law that allows children to be legally abused in this way comes from  conservative and religious groups – now there’s a surprise – who no doubt think that all true God fearing Christians are in favour of throwing delinquent children onto society’s garbage heap and forgetting them. Or at least making them as miserable as possible.  Just this month, seven guards at a torture camp for delinquent children were acquitted of manslaughter after one of their charges a 14-year old boy, fainted in the heat of midsummer Florida and instead  of seeking medical help they tried to revive him by kicking and beating him. He died.

The other objection to ratifying the Convention of the Rights of the Child is that t would infringe the rights of the individual States. When it comes to a matter of such obvious inhumanity I don’t give a monkey’s tits about States’ rights.  The States should bloody well know better anyway. There is no justification for cruelty to children, and trying them as adults, chaining them up, and imposing life sentences on them is cruelty.  The fact that such cruelty is inspired by judicial revenge is no excuse.

I do not believe, I simply refuse to believe, that the American in the street is fully behind this.  The ones I know are loving, nurturing parents, all-round good people, humane and compassionate all of them.  I wonder if they realize that the rest of the world has moved on and has abandoned these nineteenth century practices.  I’m convinced that if they took stock of the situation, and thought about it carefully, they would let their legislators know that this state of affairs is no longer acceptable.  How could anyone think otherwise?  Think of a 10-year old of your acquaintance, and then imagine him being led away crying in handcuffs (handcuffs!) by a couple of fully grown men in uniform.  Then try to justify why that isn’t obscene. There’s your self-evident truth for you.

This posting also appears at Buck Naked Politics

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Thursday Thirteen #28

It is my dearest wish to meet as many of you T13ers in person as possible.  I  don’t know how likely that is, seeing that we are scattered around the world, but it is a lovely idea.  However, if it does happen, and I say one of the following things, then leap up from your chair and head for the hills, because it means that the Pod People have arrived and they are taking us over, one by one, as we sleep.  If you run fast enough, you may save yourself.   You will know it isn’t really me because these are

          Thirteen Things You Will Never Hear Me Say

1. “I don’t think I’ll buy a book right now, thank you.”    What an utterly preposterous idea!  You can never have too any books.  I have about 1200 in the room where I am sitting now and there is shelf space for about a couple of hundred more.  When that is filled up, I’ll buy more shelves.   I have been a bibliophile since I was about 10, and I don’t regret it for a second.

2. “Take me out to the ball game.”    I was obviously born without a sports gene.  There is nothing more likely to reduce me to a state of catatonic boredom than sport of any kind.  Ok, I get it. People, alone or in teams, hit, kick, throw or otherwise propel balls here and there and somehow or other score points.   Yawn.  One exception.  Every four years the World Cup takes place, and I really get into that. That is followed by another three years and eleven months of total indifference. So, I am next due to enjoy sport in the summer of 2010.

3. “Please pass the vegetables.”   I posted about this elsewhere in my blog some months ago.  While I love most kinds of fruit, I heartily loathe almost all vegetables. It is beyond my ability to understand how people can put that green compost in their mouths, let alone bite down on it and swallow it.

4. “Cats are people too, you know.”    I’m very fond of our cats.  I make a fuss of them, I enjoy their company and they do seem to be fond of me in return.  But they are cats, not people.  They can’t speak, they can’t write, they certainly can’t blog, not even in baby talk, and they are not concerned with most of the things that engage my interest.  There are lots of things going on in my life that do not remotely involve cats.  I’m just glad to have them around when I’m at home. They are lovely animals.

5. “Baby, you can drive my car”   No, sorry, that’s not going to happen.  My wife can't operate a manual transmission, so I am the only one who drives our car.  The insurance doesn’t cover anyone else anyway.  So, it’s just me, myself and I behind the wheel.

6. “I hope it snows”   Don’t get me wrong.  Snow is fine in its place – on mountains and Christmas cards.  It’s when it gets absolutely everywhere that it becomes such a pest.  It is very deceptive, because for the first few hours after its arrival it looks so pretty, and as soon as you step out of doors  there is a muffled silence about  the place that makes you think you have stepped into some charming land of snowmen and elves, where your daily reality is somehow cleansed by this coating of soft, downy white. This of course does not last. Snow is cold, intrusive, it gets in the way of you going from A to B and it forces you to wrap up in several extra layers of clothing before you leave the sanctuary of your home. It can even kill.  It hangs around for days, weeks or even months (I have experienced several Canadian winters).  There is an apocryphal story that the Inuit have dozens of words to describe different kinds of snow. We have only three – snow, sleet and slush.  In Florida, I am happily spared further acquaintance with all three.

7. “Yes”  (to the question “Does this make me look fat?”)    Because I enjoy life and do not wish for it to end suddenly!

8. “Lets go see slasher movie”   These were, probably still are, very popular.  As far as I can gather, they follow a set formula, and they make money hand over fist.  I can not bring myself to go see one.  I know they are classed as horror but I think of them more as revulsion movies – an opportunity for a very unpleasant kind of man to see women, often teenaged girls, being terrified, mutilated and killed.  I’m not in favour of banning anything, but I want no part of it.

9. “Appropriate”   This word has been so overused, and "inappropriate" too, over the last decade or two that it has lost its original meaning.  I hate it. It sounds mealy mouthed and divisive. “That’s inappropriate!”  meaning : “I don’t like it, so you can’t do it.”  So many better words one can use.

10. “Let’s go for an Indian”  as they say in England.  Meaning, let us repair to a nearby Indian restaurant to partake of a repast consisting of their ethnic cuisine.   Indian food is the most popular ethnic food in Britain, with Indian restaurants all over the place.  But I have never set foot in one, because I just can’t stand the stuff, or spicy food of any kind.  Season food with herbs as much as you like.  I adore continental cuisine of all kinds.  But spoil it by bunging in a load of spices to cover the taste and burn your mouth; that makes no sense to me.  Ugh!

11. “Let me show you how to juggle”    Much as I would love to, I am incapable of doing anything like that.  I am not merely right handed, but am so non-left-handed that I lack the co-ordination needed to do things like juggle.  I once remarked that my left hand only serves to stop the blood leaking out of the end of my arm

12. “Let’s use the drive thru”   I’ve never liked using those things.  I hate the whole business of ordering food by shouting from my car into a concealed microphone somewhere,  relaying orders from other people in the vehicle, asking the voice at the other end of the loudspeaker to repeat herself because she is unintelligible, and having to make up my mind what I’m going to eat as quickly as possible because there are two or three other impatient cars behind me.  I prefer to park, get out of my car, and make an unhurried decision about what I want, order in a normal, conversational tone, and hand the cash to someone whom I can understand.  Far more civilized all round.

13. “In my humble opinion”   Nah!  They are never humble!

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A Lot of Balls

I don’t usually post stuff from YouTube here as a substitute for blogging, but once in a while I’ll indulge.  This one is pure entertainment.  If, even in our rushed times, you have four and a half minutes to spare, have a look at this.   Even if you don’t particularly enjoy watching jugglers, I think you’ll be amazed by this man.  He makes it look so effortless, which is obviously the result of endless practice and intense concentration.  This is also fun for people who agree with me that “Abbey Road” was the best album of all time.  Enjoy!

Thursday Thirteen #27

When I did a list of books I own with one-word titles for my Thursday Thirteen some weeks ago, I remarked that I had enough on my shelves for several TTs.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you!   Here is the second batch, picked at random.

     Son of  “Books On My Shelves With One Word Titles”
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Five Things

No Nonsense Girl  has tagged me for the 5 "ME" MEME.   The rule is very simple, even for slow brains like  mine. All I have to do is to list five things about myself that I have never posted before. Hmm. Let’s see….   Okay…

1.    When I was about eleven, I had a chum of mine stay for the weekend.  My sister also had a friend stay over, and they, being younger, went to bed earlier than we did.  My friend and I waited till the lights went out in their bedroom and then we gently pulled a thread  that ran under the bedroom door.  That thread, which we had put there earlier, was attached to a closet door handle. The closet slowly swung open, and a 5-foot plank, over which we had draped a white sheet,  fell out onto the bedroom floor.  The barrage of screams that came from inside the room were extremely satisfying and amusing, and well worth the bollocking we got from my parents.

2.    When I was a child, when other children were scared of clowns or scary films or strange noises in the dark, the one thing that terrified me was….. people singing Happy Birthday to You!  I have no idea why,  but it reduced me to screams of fear.  It makes no sense, because I never suffered any kind of traumatic experience at a birthday party – it’s just that there was something about it.  Even today, even though it no longer scares me, I don’t like the song and I feel very uncomfortable when people start to sing it.

3.    I have never in my life worn a tuxedo.  That’s not a matter of principle, or a moral issue. I just ever had had reason to.

4.    I have one eye much weaker than the other, so I wear glasses for distance, though I never permit myself to be photographed wearing them (sunglasses are different of course).   Because  one eye is okay and the other weak, the logical  thing for me to do would be to wear a monocle. I suggested this to my wife and for some reason she vetoed it.  Because of spousal vetoes, I am also not allowed to have a go at hang gliding or bungee jumping.

5.    I have taken three different driving tests in my time.  The British test – very difficult and it took me three attempts.  The British Columbia test – not nearly as bad, and I passed first time.  The Florida test – a total farce: I have no idea how anyone could ever fail.  Five minutes driving at slow speed in the Dept of Motor Vehicles building parking lot and that decides whether you are fit to drive on public roads in heavy traffic.

I’m not tagging anyone else in particular.  Just have a go if you’d like to.

Thursday Thirteen #26

From what I have heard, when a person goes into a book store, without any clear idea of what he wishes to buy , but with a determination to browse until he finds something that takes his fancy, the usual practice, when inspecting a book on display, is to look at the front cover, then the back cover, and then to open the book and read the first few sentences. The whole exercise takes maybe fifteen or twenty seconds.  If nothing has gripped him, he puts the book down and goes off in search of something else.  Every writer knows the importance of those first few sentences.  They are as much a marketing device – to ensnare the enthusiasm of first an agent, then a publisher, and eventually the paying customers – as part of a literary oeuvre.  And likewise, when you get the book home, and pick it up to read, maybe many weeks, months or even years after you have bought it, those first few lines can either reassure you that you are in for a good read, or else tell you that perhaps you’ll leave it for another time, and for now you’ll choose something else to read.  All of which leads me, after thanking Cindi for the delighful banner she made for me, to present for your inspection, thirteen books of mine which have openings that I for one find very promising.  So...

                     Thirteen Books and their Opening Sentences

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