If Misty is the most well-adjusted, said Julia yesterday, why there’s only one picture of her in this post?
It’s a fair point.
And yet the race is not to the swift. Is Kate Moss, the fashion model, well-adjusted? Not according to the newspapers, and yet her picture is everywhere.
The FBI never claimed its Most Wanted posters were mugshots of the well-adjusted, and yet they’re in every post office in the United States.
Holly’s temperamental but she’d never rob a bank, she just wants a fair crack of the whip.
Vesla was more friendly today. She rubbed her horns against my trouser leg and butted my head. She’s still baaing very loudly, though; I don’t know what that’s about. In the picture below she’s chewing a clematis stem. She had quite a go at the clematis on Sunday.
I think Misty will appear tomorrow. It’s not very imaginative, but I’m presenting these pictures in the order I took them.
A Bad Guide 
The Spring: I saw my first clematis in full flower yesterday, my first fully out magnolia today. And yet you still have snow. I mustn’t goat. Oops, gloat.
¡jajaja! Very clever, Mr Crown… Now we want more than ever to see Misty again! The lady disappears…
She’s still baaing very loudly, though; I don’t know what that’s about.
You don’t suppose … could she be in the family way ? I’ve heard that men are the last ones to twig. First it was bark, now clematis.
Bark was Misty, Stu. Get your facts right!
Oh well, goats all look the same to me. That’s why I probably should stick to generalizations, instead of indulging in well-intentioned concern for individual goats.
In general it’s best to generalize although in this case Vesla (= “Tiny” in Norwegian) can be distinguished from the others by her shortage of legs.
Long ago a friend of mine married a Serbo-Croat girl. (It was long before you needn’t to know which.) She was called Vesla. Tiny she wasn’t.
That’s a story I’ll find a use for, dearie (“Did you call her Vesla? Oh sorry, I didn’t know you were Serbian”). Thank you.
Our paper today published this article (translated, of course) and I thought it was perfect to share it with you all. Perhaps you’ve already read it, but it would be funny to hear what this cosmopolitan group of people have to say about this issue.
I’d say this is a making-huge-national-generalisations-based-on-one-experience article, though (in my experience of New York) there’s maybe some truth to the US bit in the middle. But anyone who’s watched Absolutely Fabulous knows that Britons & Americans go in for air kisses as much as any French person. It reminded me, here’s a very funny chauvinistic piece by A.A. Gill that Language Hat sent me this week.
@Julia, he means “British” in the usual journalists’ sense of Londoners. He certainly doesn’t mean Glaswegians. In fact, I’d say that the tendency to touch probably varies as much inside Scotland as it does among Londoners/Parisians/Manhattanites. I can remember a boss of mine explaining the huge difference he found between Scots (undifferentiated), Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen in terms of being in charge of groups of workingmen. (He was from the English midlands himself, and preferred being in charge of Scots most, then Lancastrians, then Yorkshiremen. I couldn’t repeat what he thought of the Texans he’d been in charge of – it might cause needless offence.)
I read Gill’s television-this-week reviews in the Sunday Times for years, and also his reportage on his alcoholism. I am the last person to be turned off by vitriolic wit, but I finally was. Perhaps it should be consumed only in small quantities, like booze itself.
When I was at art school, the deputy principal was a wonderful man from Lancashire, a very good painter, called Joe Dixon. He used to suddenly grasp a student by the shoulders and shake them, he was very touchy-feeley. Of course, it would probably be illegal nowadays.
Why would that be illegal ? You don’t say why he shook them. Perhaps it was only to see whether small change fell out, so that they could afford to stand him a pint.
It was never clear why he shook them. He was extraordinarily popular though, and would certainly have bought the pints – or rather opened some bottles of his very good homemade elderflower wine.
Isn’t physical contact with students illegal? Unless you are one yourself, of course. Then it’s almost compulsory.
You say The Shakes came on unexpectedly. Possibly they were a kind of Tourette’s Syndrome ? Or, in the context, Palette Syndrome ?
Distracted by the thought of Kate Moss being tumbled into the goat shed, offered a clematis stem, and told by those in whose shaggy company she has now found herself, politely yet firmly, to Adjust By Morning (Or Else).
I know, I know, of course, those are rough generalisations (that’s why it’s funny). Imagine, for instance, how many HUGE differences could be in the “latino’s” group!
Although it’s true we say hello or goodbye with a kiss to almost everyone. Not to the taxi driver nor the supermarket cashier or to all the students in my class (but if I meet one of my students at the street and we talk, we probably would say goodbye with a kiss… more than a kiss it’s an approximation of cheeks ).
In that piece that LH sent you, I loved when he talks of the broiled kidneys
Somehow the heat had welded them together into a gray, suppurating renal brick. It could be the result of an accident involving rat babies in a nuclear reactor. They don’t taste as nice as they sound.
Yeah, he’s brutal.
Stu, he was a wonderful, generous, very smart man, and someone who had a huge influence on me. But the shaking, though benignly intended, I’ve never quite understood.
more than a kiss it’s an approximation of cheeks
That reminds me of a scene in Giulietta Degli Spiriti, involving Giulietta’s icy mother and sisters. Towards the end, the film gets scarier but clearer: “I don’t need you anymore”. It had a profoundly beneficial effect on me.
an approximation of cheeks
I like that phrase, which reminds me of “an unkindness of ravens” and other euphuisms (if that is the right word but it is the one that comes to mind – I mean convoluted metaphors – if that is the right word again).
I think it was Stu who used the word euphuism the other day, the first time I’d heard it.
Stu, that’s a great film, thanks for reminding me. But don’t you think it’s peculiar that he stubs the cigarette out on the floor of his own house? It’s at about 6:30 in that scene.
John Emerson brought up the word in the “Daffadillimo, pulcher” post @Hat on March 13. It was some other word I used a few months ago that was new to you.
I think it was another word, at any rate.
But don’t you think it’s peculiar that he stubs the cigarette out on the floor of his own house?
That was the ’60s. Philandering Italian husbands did that kind of thing, knowing that there are always women hovering in the background to clean up the mess. Or do I mean hoovering ?