Two pairs. Black leather slip-on shoes, and lace-up boots that need polishing. Both good for wearing with a suit or jacket and tie, but not much else.
TNP would gladly pay a shoe-shine "boy" (or it could be a girl — these are progressive times, after all) for his service, but is astonished that they seem to have gone missing. OR, TNP will just say that he or she really puts shining and bootblacking at home at the very bottom of list of chores to get around to.
Yeah, they're good to throw in the pot, or trotters, but in my current town you really only find them rarely except at a specialty shop. I don't think the population skews to buying "ethnic" foods unless it's at a restaurant or is otherwise sold at a trendy store — I don't believe, for example, that the local mega-pan-East-Asian grocery mega-store carries them. I doubt they have chicken feet, either, although it's possible.
TNP doesn't see the point in buying a tray of chicken feet, but is kind of hungry for a nice stew flavored with ham hocks or pigs' feet, along with other stuff.
Verlaine, Poémes saturniens [Saturnian Poems, I suppose] (1866). Published and/or written when Paul Verlaine was twenty-two years old, there are still some very marvelous little gems throughout, such as the sonnet "Femme et chatte [Woman and Pussy-cat]" (I don't remember what the metrical scheme is called, but it's not in alexandrines. Feminine rhymes on lines one and three of each quatrain, with masculine rhymes on the two and four. I can't figure out if it's mildly pornographic or just a bit sly, but it's all about scratching. No, I shan't translate it. Remarkably, either Verlaine devised himself or an editor or friend suggested a very nice partitioning of the collection into smaller subcollections, each containing a few poems, which I think is appealing. Best of all, it's in a small pocket paperback, unlike Joseph Adler's R in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference.
TNP thinks poems have a great advantage over long-form prose fiction, namely in that there aren't so many damned words.
Last edited by Jizzelbin; 27 Mar 2019 at 06:06 PM.
Well, they definitely have different purposes, and as is so often the case, form follows function. And a book you love cannot, by definition, have too many words.
I like the smell of things fermenting — I guess that's a combination of CO2 and various ingredients — like bread, wine, beer. Yet I don't care for the smell of beer as a finished product. Which is bizarre, considering it's a food group unto itself to me, right at the base of the food pyramid.
TNP recognizes that the phalanges of the hand are pretty rickety little structures and should not be abused.
No. I'm considering following the Jesus's instructions and cutting off my left index finger, but I can't find the right supplies to rebuild a better one.
TNP thinks it's pretty amusing, but not really annoying, when random people complain about minor flaws in a work which, for example, didn't exist back in his or her day, so we photocopied the very long text in a strange language and we liked it that way. Bunch of sissies.
Sure. He's the guy who fell off the building in Die Hard, right? No, I kid, but his is an effective score. Not as long a career as the beloved Jerry Goldsmith, but probably a better musician than the frequently-abused Albert Glasser.
TNP is not at all surprised that since the beginning of the modern/post-modern/whatever age composers have seemed to ride the crest of music production technology, and not at all to their disadvantage.
Yeah, underwhelmed in general when taken as a whole. I think I've seen them all (at least before they came back? not sure, but I haven't seen those). I found some amusing funny bits, but way way too much about that Monarch person, which I think is a real snooze. But there were some very good parts indeed — I just can't remember in enough detail to describe in any meaningful way.
TNP has seen all or some of the Buffy series or its spinoff series Angel and got pretty into it. Not necessarily pathologically, but got into it/them.
Yes indeed. I imagine time passes pretty slowly for the incarcerated or the bedridden and such, but I think for the average adult occupied with regular things there's a great deal of time compression. It could be from the many structures built around tasks or schedules that elide or obscure the attention one might otherwise pay to time's passage when seen from a view at a smaller scale. IOW, "time flies when you're having [fun | life | lots of things]" but "a watched clock never boils."
TNP spends a good deal of time in his or her profession or hobbies fixing mistakes of various kinds.
Nope. Maybe there's some hippie or several I vaguely know/have met who are doing some nonsense, but no.
TNP finds it enormously satisfying to follow defective drivers (tailgaters, really) to their house and sitting with the car in park outside. Watching. And TNP does not think that's psycho at all, just sort of amusing provided one has a few minutes to kill and enough gas in the tank.
When TNP sees someone on the highway who's obviously forgotten that his or her turn signal is on, TNP has been known to pass that car, get in the lane ahead of it, and put on his or her turn signal, too, to get the other driver thinking.
You know, I think I did that today. It was a variant, but same idea. Some "person" was riding my ass on a highway trying to "beat" this place where traffic merges to single-file, because of construction. She was a fucking maniac, like what I imagine somebody who takes a bunch of cocaine and has a stroke while masturbating is like. I ended up in front of her and crammed my e-brake on while continuing to accelerate. Randomly. For a few miles. (I've figured out how to use the lever without engaging the brake).
The idea was to "learn her a lesson." I didn't know it was a "she" until I followed her home, though. I didn't do it to "teach," though: I'm just an asshole.
TNP is pretty damned good at learning the intricacies of what his or her automobile can do.
No. Had to think about it, because I'm sure I've said something similar back-mensurally, but, no.
TNP is really not so much liking sitting down at a bar and having the guy next to you say "How's it going?" before you even sit down. That's like trying to shake someone's hand in a bathroom.
Probably. Can't decide. Lucretius, De rerum natura has a bit of everything in it, so I'll go with that for now. And he's not some raving neckbeard science freak incel nerd either — he can write good, too, like a person.
TNP knows someone IRL who kind of seems like they might be a serial killer.
Affirmative. His selected poems volume (I'm not going to go find the paperback [ETA but I know exactly where it is!]) were a minor revelation to me, in that Larkin was able to breezily fuse common language with sensible form. He was the British Robert Lowell, sort of. Every word I wrote is bullshit, but, yes, I have read a fair number of his poems and I liked them. Even, at times, probably subconsciously, imitated him.
TNP is pretty comfortable using a handheld radio device, like a walkie-talkie or such.
Last edited by Jizzelbin; 12 Apr 2019 at 08:25 AM.
You know, that's true. And it hasn't been that long a time — I remember a time when you basically had to have a landline in order to get DSL (or dial-up internet access, natch), and I was a full-grown adult those times. As a teenager, of course, I remember tying up the phone line at my parents' house accessing the VAX/VMS ca. 1990-1992 or so. Yeah, I don't know how many mobile phones I've had, but it's more than three: replacements all because of device failure or just because my carrier sent/enforced a "free" upgrade as part of their T'sOS (yes, I spelled that correctly, IMHO). And I'll defend the hyphen in "full-grown" as well, even though some might disagree.
TNP errs on the side of over-specifying some syntactic features, like hyphens or parentheses, even though they might be redundant or obfuscatory. Classic examples are in writing computer guff in various languages, or in mathematico-programming paradigms like Haskell (), lisp, Church's lambda calculus, and so on up into C and beyond. IOW, where order of operations and instantiation of bound variables (for example, "for all x" [upside-down 'A'] blah blah in FOPL) are really clearly specified and understood, but it still doesn't hurt.
I think there's a street (well, a pretty tiny road, maybe not even paved) in the middle of nowhere where some of my mother's family had some farming property called "O'Leary Road." I don't know if it's actually named after them, but I tend to believe it, given how small a town it is (not even really a town, exactly, just farm land).
TNP is pretty skeptical about some old "family stories" but still plays along when required.