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If It’s Not One Thing. . .

. . .it’s another.

Olde Pharte tomcat (what? ~19 years old, now?) is having the Olde Pharte “everything tastes like crap” issue. A brand new fresh bag of kibble? He’ll nibble. . . for a while, then, nah. Can of “run to get it” canned cat food? He eats it for a while, then, “It is no longer to my taste.”

Found something that the “everything tastes like crap” issue does not apply to, though. I cook up a few rashers of bacon. Drizzle a bit of the grease over any old dry food. Yummers! Absolutely da bomb!

And yes, I know the commercial foods are designed for the average domestic cat’s “higher than canine’s” fat needs, and bacon grease really screws with those ratios, but he had been getting ghastly thin until I stumbled on this lil trickerooo. Now he’s a much happier camper and–side benefit–cleanup of cat puke is down. *shrugs* If I can make his “Lead Years” (what? you were thinking “golden”? *pfui* 😉 ) a bit more pleasureful for him, I’m OK with that.

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It’s Really Just a Slothful Willful Ignorance

Confusion about personal pronouns has abounded among the lazy and willfully ignorant (the most pernicious form of stupidity) for much longer than the current “gender fluidity” stupidity. A typical construction for someone stuck at a VERY low English fluency (let alone literacy) level, and yet I see it time and again in books, passed over by illiterate proofreaders and editors goes something like this: “We have done something bigger than you and I.” Really? Take the magic “and” as well as the other person out: “We have done something bigger than I” just looks and sounds stupid doesn’t it? It doesn’t get any less stupid looking and sounding by adding a magic “and.” Nope, “We have done something bigger than you and ME.”

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Adds to Your “Privacy Routine”

Nuke Cortana, Alexa, Siri, and any such “digital assistants” within one’s power from orbit. Report robocalls to appropriate authorities and follow up on complaints lodged. Salt the earth from whence they sprang. Lather, rinse, repeat. 😉

Oh, and “if you hear, ‘This call is being recorded for training and quality control,'” but do–eventually–get a live person on the line, tell THEM you are recording the call. . . in case you need to take legal action later. You might be surprised how many terminate the call. That’s fine. If you initiated the call, just call back and escalate your call. Firmly. The Internet is a funny critter. You can too track down and call someone in authority in a company that has irritated you. Do so. Repeatedly, if necessary, until you achieve a resolution you can live with. Make it known that you appreciate good behavior and abhor–and will appropriately “punish”–bad behavior

And, as above, lather, rinse, repeat.

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Sharing Through the Generations

Something that interested me when I was a young lad, sitting and, yeh, staring at my maternal great grandmother (she was OLD, I tell ya! *heh*), particularly as she sharpened her pen knife and used it to trim her fingernails VERY short: onychorrhexis. Nah, I didn’t know what to call it as a six-or seven-year-old lad, but that’s one of the things that interested me: the ridges on her fingernails. *huh* Same as on my maternal grandfather’s hands, and. . . mine, now. (I have one sib I have noted who has the same issue: ridged nails that split easily.) So: trimming my fingernails (yeh, and toenails, now) very short has become a thing for me. Recently, however, I’ve had a really handy tool added to the task: a nail trimming device (a small, rechargeable rotary grinding tool) soundly rejected by the dog. Works for me, though.

Oh, med resources list a lot of different causes for the issue, but only three of them seem to apply to me: heredity, aging, and arthritis. *shrugs* If I can live with joint pain, I can live with this, especially since I have naproxen sodium for the one and this neat lil grinding tool for the other.

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Delightful

I had lost track of Margaret Ball and not read anything by her for several years when I ran across A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1). Good stuff, Maynard. I’m now working my way through the seven book series, and, if then quality remains at the level I expect from Ball, I am NOT looking forward to finishing book seven and discovering she has not written book eight. Yet. *heh*

Oh, there’s nothing “important” about the books (although my brief spate of appreciation for advanced–or even just semi-advanced–math ~50-ish years ago and continued casual appreciation to this day does enjoy the “math talk”). They are just fun, well-told stories with amusing and interesting characters. Juuuust a wee tad Wodehousian in “fluffiness,” if Wodehouse were to have been mathematically inclined and in tune with contemporary “college kidsian” mores.

*sigh* OK, it’s taken a bit of a “bodice-ripper” turn in book 3. Oh, well. It was good while it lasted.

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Oops! #2,965

In order to check your compatibility with Standard Social Media English, you might want to take an English language fluency/literacy quiz. If you score too well, your English will not be down to the “standards” of typical social media drivel. Here’s an easy-peasy MOR quiz, though it does have a couple of BrE (British English) quirks:

Test your English

Sadly, my English language fluency/literacy disqualifies me from engaging in Standard Social Media English drivel:

English Literacy 3

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Ah! From the File, “Book Blurbs That Make You Say ‘NO!'”

“If you like Hitchhikers guide [sic] to the Galaxy and the Starship Troopers movie, you’ll love this book!”

Firstly, the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers sucked swamp gas. Secondly, The two VERY different stories had almost nothing in common whatsoever, apart from the fact that the books they were based on were a couple of the best works of two very different masters of the science fiction field.

If the execrably written and edited excerpt from a book blurb that went downhill from there is at all representative of the book, then the best thing to do is flip on by with a curt, “No.”

Aside–and having nothing to do with the comment above–I dislike “dramatis personae” lists in the front of a book. Sure, I imagine it might help folks keep characters straight, but I think a writer is better served (and better serves his readers) by organically introducing his characters within the narrative, as different characters meet, and, although if a book is in a series and I have read 1,000-1,100 books–not all fiction, of course–in the six months between episodes (and that’s roughly a six month reading list for me), I still prefer to exercise my lil grey cells and recall the characters that were introduced previously w/o reading down a list of ’em.

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Things Tend to Work Out. . .

. . .or not.

For example, as I walk, my left-right strides are about equal, despite the fact that my left leg is longer than my right leg. It kinda works out, cos my left foot is shorter–missing part of the heel, as a result of the same incident that caused my left leg to be a bit longer than my right leg.

It just kinda worked out that way. Cool.