No Golden Eggs From This Goose

There were strange noises from the woods and the dogs were barking.
Eventually they stopped and I was busy on the computer when the worthless ones had another hysterical fit and some one was yelling my name from the street.
Golly, thought I. Have one of the worthless ones escaped and attacked an innocent tourist.
What, I wondered, was happening.
I got up and went to the front door to check, and there was my neighbor Yose, armed with a big stick and a machete, chasing an enormous gray goose who must have been the source of the strange noises we heard earlier.
This is dinner, he yelled over the din of the excitable mutts, I am going to get it.
Well, the goose was not of the same opinion, so every time Yose got a little too close, it spread its wings and hissed at him something fierce.
After many futile attempts at getting near the goose, Yose realized this was not going to happen, and I think he was secretly happy for that, so he wiped his brow and poufed his coif, put his hand on his hip and said to me
If you promise not to tell, I will say that the goose escaped.
Who was I to argue ?
So from chasing it as his dinner he was now trying to make the recalcitrant goose get a move on and flee, and again the goose had other ideas and took its sweet time waddling down the street, stopping and coming back sending the worthless ones into another fit of frenzy until, in its own time, the goose went into the woods.
I checked later on, and aside from some goose poop, there most certainly were no golden eggs.
Drat it.

The Wonderful World Of Whatevers

I have a musical radar system that will make me sit up and take notice whenever something special plays on my radio, as to-day when the station played a beautiful piece, sung by a counter tenor and accompanied by harp and lute.
I waited and this time they did tell who the artist was ( many times they will announce before and not after ) but the trouble is that the way a name is perceived in Spanish is somewhat different from ours, so I strained mightily to understand the name and came up with
Andra Skol.
Well, thought I, let me check the web. How many counter tenors are there.
And I found him easily enough, only he was named Andreas Scholl, but close enough.
The music was a little more difficult as the title was given in Spanish as El Povre Vagabundo.
So I went through all of his recordings, one by one, and nothing seemed to match, and most certainly not in Spanish until, the last entry, a song cycle with a song named Wayfaring Stranger.
And with a harp and lute.
So this must be it.
I think,
but of course I will never be sure till I hear the record which I will not, since it is from the States and import duties on DVDs an CDs are offputting high.
But I looked at the clock and somehow I had spent a wonderful couple of hours searching the web for musical whatevers.
Time well spent.

At The Bus Stop

Brunch was over and I made it to the place where the buses to Mismaloya stop.
Multiples of white, old gringos of both and indeterminate sex were waiting for the bus to come.
It came, and bearing in mind what my departed mother used to tell me as a child;
allow women, pregnant females and old folks to enter the conveyance before you.
So I did.
I stood aside and let all the old geezers get on the bus before this person, and the last one, an ancient geezer, turned to me as he was shakily hoisting himself up the stairs to pay the fare and said with what he thought was a leer: You are not just a nice person. You are checking out "the ladies" getting on the bus .
OH Brother I thought; You could not be more wrong.
But telling him that might invoke a stroke, so I just smiled and nodded and got on the bus with all the old geezers.
The nerve of that old fart. Really. There I was, in my mind listening to my dear old mother, being polite, and all that was misconstrued.
I don't want to be an old geezer.
Better check out my automobile, since riding the bus has become dangerous, what with all those old geezers and geezerettes, thinking that I am one of them. The nerve.

In Praise Of Wine...

Albin mailed me this email.
I wholeheartedly agree.

Annegrete’s lillebroder er vin entusiast, og har derfor begavet mig et udvalg af det han mener der er det ypperste.

På kortet har han skrevet om vin:

”Jeg drikker vin når jeg er lykkelig,

Jeg drikker vin når jeg er ked af det.

Nogle gange drikker jeg vin når jeg er alene; og når jeg er sammen med andre, betragter jeg vinen som helt nødvendig.

Jeg nipper til den når jeg ikke er sulten, og drikker den når jeg er.

Ellers rører jeg aldrig vin – undtagen når jeg er tørstig…!”

It translates to

"I drink wine when I am happy

I drink wine when I am sad

Sometimes I drink wine when I am alone; and when I am together with others I regard wine as absolutely necessary

I sip it when I am not hungry, and drink it when I am.

Otherwise I don't touch wine - except when I am thirsty...!"

Any objections ?

Poor Toby

Toby is my male Schnauzer.
Intact, in a house of four fixed females.
I never thought it would make any difference, but lately I have reconsidered.
Some stray dogs were loitering in the neighborhood in the last couple of days, and I think one, or maybe more of them must have been in heat or close to, for poor Toby has been glued to the front gate waiting, waiting for these canine dames to reappear.
He even refused his dinner so as not to miss his vigilance at the gate.
The canine dames won't be back, but poor Toby, surrounded by spayed females, still hopes. And prays, I'm sure.

Full Monty or Not

In the brilliant TV drama "Rome", there is a scene where Mark Antony is having a conversation with the centurion Lucius Vorenus in a gym while a servant is scraping him down after exercise. And Mark Antony is naked, the full frontal Monty.
To be sure, this is a brief moment and I had to re-watch to make sure that I did not imagine this.
I noticed that the same segment was to be aired again and watched it, but when it came to the scene in the gym, Mark Antony suddenly was clad in a big, red towel.
Who, I wonder, decides when and where people are allowed to watch a naked person.
Does there, I wonder, exist two copies of what some might think of as unsavory moments, one for the US and one for the rest of the world.
And what is so upsetting about the naked male ? Could it be, as I begin to suspect, penis envy ?
When one at times get to see the folks who make these arbitrary decisions, it is easy to believe that that might be a very substantial part of the reason, and you cannot, not even if you are the Attorney General of the United States, cover up all nude statues in the world.
So live with it and, if nudity offends you, avert your eyes for that brief moment.

A Truism

In a video that Louise mailed me there was a button with this saying :

Why Do
We Kill People
Who Kill People
To Show People
That Killing People
Is Wrong ?

Ponder that !

But Can (S)He Type ??

I don't type very well.
When I went to school we did not have typing as part of the curriculum. And if we had had it, surely no "real boys" would have chosen to learn how to type. Real boys had "shop" and girls had "home-ec."
The only men I knew of who typed were the journalists who sat in smoke filled news room with their Fedoras on and rolled up shirt sleeves, pounding two-fingered on some typewriter with the inevitable cigarette dangling from their mouths, or the writer of the next major novel, always in need of a shave ( this is way before the fashionable , constant stubble ) sitting in an unheated room with a bottle of something strong, cigarettes and surely either consumption or worse, but typing, typing away.
These were the typing males I knew of. Girls typed because that was what girls did to get a job, but not guys.
It all came back to me the other night watching some program where a distraught father of a teenage son who had been led astray by web-friends, a father who looked like he spent a lot of time taking his kid to ball practice and who would be secretly proud when the kid got plastered the first time or when he discovered a condom in his bedroom, showing that the kid was all man, all a chip off the old block.
So imagine my surprise when this dad sat down at his son's computer and started typing and communicating with the creeps who got to his son. He typed at ( it seemed to me ) lightning speed, not at all the old two-finger system that men are supposed to use. This guy could type, and I bet he is not the only one.
In truth, I am the dinosaur; I am the one to be made fun of, the guy who cannot type.
Well, better two fingers than none at all.

T-shirt Adverts

We used to be amused by the Japanese sweat and t-shirts with sometimes incomprehensible sayings, translated mostly from the English.
Well, the Mexicans are gaining ground.
On the bus to-day the little guy in front of me proudly sported a t-shirt with this on the back:
puma
cloth for achampion

I have no idea who or what Puma is, but surely it should have been
clothes for a champion.
Anyway, it kept me amused on my ride on the bus.