For my friends of a certain age...

None of the people I know seem to be aware of the controversy behind the scenes, though: two bands claim the same name.

These guys are not the same as these guys; the latter having been together making music about a year longer than the former, who were apparently brought together under that name for a BBC documentary.

You can read more about it here.

It doesn't take away from how fun the video is.

Uff da

That title should throw Google off, but my friends of Norwegian extraction will get it.

I was hoping that a morning spent chasing the squirrel off the bird feeder would be followed by an afternoon of freedom from the critters, but such was not my luck: I came across a whole gang of them writing this site. Fortunately for me, they're French-Canadian squirrels, not at all likely to range this far south. Unfortunately, for those of you who don't at least read French (and their French is slangy (or slangish, or something. Definitely not Academie Francaise-style) it'll take a more sophisticated translator than is available on the free-use market to make it comprehensible.

So, if you don't read and/or speak French, don't bother, because even if you find an on-line translator that will handle the text, the cartoons won't get translated, and you'll miss some of the fun. But the most recent cartoon is a VERY clever retelling of a certain joke widely circulated here concerning a monkey and a tiger. And the photos of the authors have a certain appeal.

You know, I take a certain pride in having been born a mutt in mid-America, and having achieved a level of fluency in French and English both. I just wish I were as fluent in Windows as I am in Mac, so I could do all the diacritical marks on this machine.

I was born in Minnesota, and I know how to talk Minnesotan well enough that most of the people there still understand me when I visit.

I came of age (sort of) in Nevada, and never had a language problem. That may be because Nevada's population is growing as much by immigration from other states as it is by increases in the native population, which process mixes and flattens the dialect, but still.

But now I find myself living in Texas, y'all. And I understand and appreciate both the meaning and the value of that term. It's an extraordinary adaptation of language, in that it enables an English-speaker to differentiate between a singular and a plural "you." I can yap at a single squirrel with "You! Get off the bird feeder!" or I can yap at the three who chase each other in the neighbor's cypress tree with "Y'all better stay on that side of the fence!," but it will never flow trippingly from my tongue.


Uff da.

My kennel gate got rattled

I've been away at the doggie hotel for a bit while Alpha and Beta shipped out on a cruise. They're back, well-fed and rested, and trying to find someone to fix Beta's broken vertebrae (long story, unrelated to the cruise, but she's been on pain meds for a while), and I'm trying to get caught up on my regular reads.

It turns out that back toward the beginning of the month,
ElementaryHistoryTeacher mentioned in this meme that she stops by here regularly.

Now there's a coincidence. I stop by her place too, far more often than I come by this particular slice of the intertubes. She always has interesting new material - I don't. If you're I'm lucky, I find an amusing story to recycle...

Jim and Jerri, the nice folks who run the doggie hotel, raise Newfoundland hounds - great big lumbering, friendly beasts who would as soon drown you in slobber as anything else. It's a nice place, tucked away on a dead-end road out in the country. One of their neighbors raise horses, and the next neighbor over raises sheep. It's not related to this episode, but sheep are seriously stoopid. Seriously. Stoopid.

Anyway, the folks that have the sheep recently invested in a Sheltie to help move them from pasture to pasture, and as Jim and Jerri were visiting over the fence with the neighbor couple, the neighbor sent the Sheltie to count his most-recently purchased flock. It didn't take but a couple minutes before the Sheltie came back to report that there were 30.

The neighbor expressed his surprise, having only purchased 28 new sheep.

"I know," said the Sheltie. "I rounded them up."