Tuesday 28 February 2023

A mixed bag from the Old Bag

I actually wrote a letter several weeks ago. The kind you put in an envelope with a stamp on it. I thought that the YD might enjoy getting such a thing as a change from emails and WhatsApp and Facetime, much as I appreciate these things and much as she employs them with great éclat. (Spellcheck just refused to give me that last word. It is, oh horror, French! And I am too lazy to go looking for the accent aigue. Hah! Got it.) I mailed it shortly after it was written, February 6th as I recall, and she acknowledged receipt yesterday, February 26th. Not a good venue for urgent communication. The term ‘snail mail’ comes to mind. 

 I first started using email when the ED (E is for Elder, sorry) was in Great Britain, either as a grad student or newly married. She and her spouse set it up for me, I think as a birthday gift. Later, when her marriage broke down, the email was a lifeline between us, for me anyway, as I heard from her pretty well every day and knew that she was surviving and managing and at least a bit okay. This drama took place before the cell phone era arrived out here. I had a ‘bag’ phone in the car to use in mobile emergencies, but it only was viable in Canada. When we had the big ice storm in ’98, the landlines went down for lack of power. No internet either, of course. I was frantically worried about the daughter and tried to phone from the car phone. Bell Canada held me up for most of a day and I had to prepay a preposterous sum to get overseas coverage, but I did manage it and we got through to the ED, who had flown back to the UK during a lull in the ice storm, and she was okay. After eleven (as I recall) days, we got the power back and email back and I got back in touch with my world.

 

I was thinking about that phone when I wrote the quick post about the car phone conversation that is the one below this one. ‘Plus ca change’, and all that. Spellcheck blue lines again. Hah! I got ‘ca’ but without the cedilla, but am called out for the placement of ‘plus’ which Spellcheck thinks is English. I am now going to go back and put that in single quotation marks and see if the blue underline disappears. Nope. Still there. Spellcheck, or whatever the correction program in Word is now called, is anally retentive sometimes. “After an introductory word or phrase, a comma is best”, it pontificates. Now that the computer geeks are bringing AI along, I look forward to having an AI doing the spelling and grammar review. That should be instructive. 

And here is a just-for-fun instructive aside. French has much nicer words for the various kinds of quotation marks than we do in English. I love ‘accolades’, and ‘crotchets’, both of which are also words in English. Here are the terms for your reading pleasure.

 « » guillemets (m)         quotation marks, inverted commas
 ( ) parenthèses (f)           parentheses
 [ ] crochets (droits) (m) (square) brackets 
{ } accolades (f)             curly brackets, braces 

For my pleasure, I have just read a post in a blog I follow that has a couple of paragraphs of pure gold – an analysis of some of the author’s writing skills. In another blog I read regularly, the writer is a really skilled photographer and frequently posts about how he sets up and why and how he edits. I learn something almost every time. There is also a blogger in PEI whose posts are full of information about the coast, the birds and the laneways of that lovely island. And then there is me. I try all of these themes from time to time but …. JOATS do most things, but none of them all that well. 

There is very little in here that is even brass, let alone gold. But sometimes, just sometimes, the words flow, pour off the ends of my tapping fingers and arrange themselves gloriously on the page. Sometimes. (I just substituted a word in that penultimate sentence and will probably reread it a multitude of times before I finally post it. I did much the same process with the letter to the YD.) And, my goodness!, how I do love my parentheses. Yeah, okay, brackets. 

There are a lot of functions up there in the drop-down menus. One of which is, it appears, translation. The sentence below is provided by Microsoft Translator and says, essentially, that I could translate if I knew how.

 اگر میں چاہوں تو اس کا عربی سے اردو میں سینتیس زبانوں میں سے کسی ایک میں ترجمہ کر سکتا تھا۔ یا مجھے لگتا ہے کہ یہ دستیاب ہے. کاش میں جانتا تھا کہ یہ کیسے کرنا ہے. And now I do. There are approximately three dozen language options, from Arabic to Urdu, the last of which is the one I chose. The things we can do! 

 Anything, it appears, except stop the carnage around the world that is taking innocent lives daily, in various horrible wars and accidents. I had to stop there and go out and watch the snow fall and calm down. When I think about what is happening in so many places in the world today, my reaction is rage. Pure, unadulterated rage. It should be stopped, it must be stopped. Why cannot it be, simply, stopped. I will stop here. More snow fall needed.

Thursday 23 February 2023

Car Phones

This is just a quickie post to share one of the funnier moments that modern technology allows. 

 JG came home from shopping in our local town yesterday quite bemused as well as amused. I appears that he was chatting with his daughter on his (hands free) mobile as he drove along the highway coming home. The daughter was also on her mobile in her car and, get this, driving the Autobahn in Germany. JG said that the connection was crystal clear (we are only a little over 100 years from ‘crystal’ wireless sets). 

Every time I think about this, I giggle a bit. How technology changes and changes us. My grandmother saw the change from horse and buggy to automobile. She lived in one of, I think, nine households on a party telephone line that crackled and hissed. She did not drive a car nor expect to do so. In my residence at university there was one telephone in a common room on each floor. I thought it the height of decadence that my daughters had their own phones in their residence rooms. Not so, and the height of decadence has become my grandkid chatting with her parents on her mobile as she walks the streets around her university. And now this. 

 The daughter in question just got her new car, and says it talks to her. It wants her to have two hands on the wheel and stay in the centre of her lane. And tells her so, or at least will do so until she figures out how to turn this fine feature off. She says it sounds like her father. I wish I had my grandmother here to tell about this. Can’t you just picture her incredulous face?

Friday 3 February 2023

Anyone for a Mackinaw?

 

A loading of icy rain.


It is cold out there. When I was out on our porch for my post-prandial cigarette (Yeah, I know) it was -26°C, translating to -11°F and it is supposed to get even colder later on. I zipped up the coat I wear out there and covered my head. I was, however, still in my Birkenstock sandals and I may have to change them for fuzzy slippers at bedtime, the next scheduled trip into the Vortex. (Or whatever) I was, as I zipped, reminded of a silly song I learned around a campfire in my misspent youth, about a logger. One verse goes, as I recall, ‘At forty degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest.’ It does not say which zero in the song, but when I was that young it was Fahrenheit. Okay, can’t spell that. And since I have to go and find the spelling, (I forgot the first ‘h’) I will find a link to the logger song, just for your enjoyment.

Here is the reference for the Frozen Logger. I had no idea so many people have ‘covered’ it. Here below are the frankly idiotic but fun lyrics in entirety and, of course, I did not remember the line I wanted correctly. Only the AC can do that, with hymns anyway, eh? And why, just in passing, can I not reduce the line values here to save space? Argh. I have edited punctuation and changed a few words for rhythm in this version. There are many.

As I stepped out one morning into a small cafe

A 40 year old waitress to me these words did say...

 "I see, sir, you’re a logger, and not just a common bum

'Cause nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb.

My lover was a logger, there's none like him today.

If you'd pour whiskey on it, he'd eat a bale of hay.

My lover came to see me, ’twas on one freezing day.

He threw his arms around me and broke three vertebrae.

I saw my lover leaving, trudging through the snow

Up going gaily homeward at 48 below.

                                      I learned this one differently, as:

'My lover he did kiss me, so hard he broke my jaw.

I could not speak to tell him he forgot his Mackinaw. '

The weather tried to freeze him, it tried its level best;

At a thousand degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest’

It froze clear through to China, it froze to the stars above

At a million degrees below zero, it froze my logger love.

And so I lost my lover, and to this cafe I come

And here I wait 'til someone stirs his coffee with his thumb."

 This is a fine cartoon rendering. 

  It has been a warm if snowy January. We had a thaw that was well above freezing and the rain fell, mostly, as rain. No ice storm, although we are celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of our big one, about which you can read (if you must) here. Look at it, I should correct myself. The above is a video. This one should be print.

There were lots of photos, but I can’t resist adding at least one of my own, heading off this less than coherent offering of a post. I will not add a shot of the thermometer. Lots of us are doing that.

The aftermath of the 1998 ice storm.