In the last post, dearie mentioned “niff”; it’s defined by the free dictionary as “a distinctive odor that is offensively unpleasant”. It reminds me that when we have a heatwave, northern peoples are prone to all sorts of unusual ailments. My wife woke me at four this morning, yelling “Musky toes!”. This was new to me. So, after repeating it several times, it was a relief when I realised she had only been woken by something like an aircraft noise.
A Bad Guide 
Has the disease know as chicken gunya reached Norway?
http://correcteurs.blog.lemonde.fr/2006/01/31/2006_01_chikungunya
(But maybe you don’t yet have flying tigers up there.)
(The post keeps changing as I comment. Arthur, it’s high time you went to bed! Your mother is going to get angry.)
Oh, wait a minute… Could it be that the Moses…?
(merci à Siganus)
With the picture of the chili peppers… mmm!
Bed? I just got up.
« Hakuna masika yasiyokuwa na mbu » (proverbe swahili signifiant « Il n’y a pas de saison des pluies sans moustiques » So that’s what you meant about having miserable weather.
Hakuna matata.
I suppose there’s already broad daylight outside, no? You’re right, one cannot decently stay in bed when the sun is up.
Yes. The sun didn’t really seem to go away last night. I’ll catch back some sleep at Christmas.
Something struck me in the corridor while I was walking there with my bowl of Weetabix: your wife being Norwegian, she must speak Norwegian, mustn’t she? How can it be that, being awaken in the middle of the night, she starts to speak English? Does it mean that she was asking you, the man-hunter of the tribe, to do the job you’re supposed to do, i.e. hunt the aggressor down until it is no more a threat?
Does this mean that A Bad Guide would be hibernating for several months? That might turn out to be dangerous for the goats.
Flying tigers? Giant mosquitoes? The Norwegian word for a mosquito/gnat is “mygg”, but it always sounds to me like the Soviet aircraft, a MIG.
I must start eating Weetabix, I hadn’t thought of that. Why was she using the English word? I’ll ask her.
Exactly! If there’s a miserable weather and you’re suffering from a particularly painful disease (I do not mean suffering from an empty purse), then you can really be misérable. The entire world’s hakuna matatas may not change much to such a state of affairs.
Your mosquitoes bite at 4 am? American mosquitoes bite at dusk. Jordanian mosquitoes bite at 2 am, but they’re quite easy to kill once they are trying to feed. Try to get them off the walls in the evening though. They’re nearly invisible and they drop about two inches in a freefall before veering off to either the left or right. Your only chance of killing one is to guess which way it will veer and slam your newspaper against that spot on the wall.
The Jordanian mosquitoes come indoors at dusk though. If you go to the mosque to pray at sundown, you will have to leave sometime before dusk, and the mosquitoes will find some non-pious person to move in with while you are praying.
We all sleep more in the winter. The small parrot almost hibernates, he doesn’t have cold-weather genes.
I don’t think it was biting, it was buzzing.
Migs against Mosquitoes. Who is going to win? Maybe the Asian Tiger, who knows…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_tiger_mosquito
He’s a rascal, being very active during the day as well.
I don’t think it was biting
It has always amazed me to see that English-speaking mosquitoes could actually bite. Do they have a mouth?
(Not to mention teeth.)
Incidentally, there is no photo for this post?
Of course they have a mouth. How do you think they speak English? What do French-speaking insects do, bother you with hand gestures?
Maybe I’ll take one later, but I really need a macro lens.
ego: He’s a rascal
Sorry, “she‘s a rascal”: we all know who bites — mostly during night-time — in any mosquito couple…
It’s six a.m. and already twenty comments. That’s a full day’s work, I can go back to bed now.
They do that right before they land. I think they smell you first.
They do it just to annoy you. Me.
Sig is right about why your wife said it in English. Killing mosquitoes is a man’s job, at least in America. At least it was my father’s job when they were camping. My mother used to call him the “big game hunter.”
I can go back to bed now
I’m afraid you can’t. You have to wait for November at least.
A few of those Mauricien Rhum et eau drinks and I’ll be out like a light.
“The Norwegian word for a mosquito/gnat is “mygg””: is that pronounced as in the great Scottish pest, the “midge”?
I’d forgotten that. I expect it’s a good proof that the Vikings must have been plagued by them. It’s pronounced like the Soviet fighter, except the ‘Y’ isn’t quite the same an ‘I’ in English or Scottish pronunciation (but close enough).
I expect the ‘gg’ versus ‘dge’ can be accounted for by linguists in some great shift of pronunciation.
Othello. (Un conseil d’ami.)
AJP, on a hard disk I was browsing I found an old cartoon full of mosquitoes. It told the story of people being so afraid of them that they preferred avoid the risk of hearing the noise you mentioned this morning — this frightening sound. I couldn’t help putting it on display, for your
eyesears only. (Check the sig.)Rum with water sounds barbaric. I have been known to add it to my hot chocolate, though.
Othello? Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday..?
That whine is one of the worst noises in the world.
My wife might not agree with you. I’m sure she’ll place a snoring husband above any mosquito, be it made of wood.
“Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep”
That sweet sleep sounds pretty good right about now. This H1N1 is indeed a swine of a flu
There is actually swine flu in NZ? And you have it?
There have been some deaths here from it–it is emphasized in people whose health is already compromised–but it’s not being publicized.
Yes, there is swine flu in NZ, 507 documented cases as of Saturday morning, and yes, it seems I do have it. the official diagnosis is that I am a swine flu “suspect”, until the swabs are tested for confirmation. The doctor seemed pretty sure that it was swine flu, and the fact I noticed a significant improvement after one day on Tamiflu makes it all the more likely, as Tamiflu is not that effective against the ordinary seasonal flu. H1N1 is very susceptible to Tamiflu and so the speed with I started getting better tends to confirm the diagnosis.
This post appears as a “New post” today in my mail-box ¿What have you done to it, Crown? ;-)
I had made it disappear from public view for copyright reasons (i.e. because it has pictures in it that I didn’t take myself), but Siganus Sutor wanted to see it again, so I brought it out of its file.
I didn’t know it would appear in people’s mail. I’ve got 20 more in there, I could flood everyone’s mailboxes with old posts… I could create my own spam. What fun!
I see. It happens a lot with WordPress . The blogger changes just a bit of its post and appears again as new. Though never happened with you before.
But, yes please, do it: create your own spam! I realized now that I haven’t read many of these old posts.
Google, which we hear is advancing with the boldness of a Great White Hunter into the confusing bog-like area of sorting out content algorithms, buzzes around this post in my inbox like mosquitos around a sleeping hunter in an inadequate tent, recommending remedies for “Ammonia Body Odor”, “Foot Pain Ball of Feet”, “Foot Problems”, & c. — proving, perhaps that, in the Spam department, it takes Spam to know Spam.
How true. I think the clue is in the backwards spelling of spam, namely “maps”.
The original post was somewhat different. If I remember well you said that, in the beginning, you were guessing what kind of disease your wife might have got during the night. That was a nice piece of narration.
I can’t remember changing it, but there are a lot of things I can’t remember these days.
Sometimes discretion and selective forgetting are the better part of valour.