An Off Day Off

Let Us Be Clear Here
 - and also go back in time many, many years, to when your humble scribe enjoyed reading his "Animal Magic" book as written by Johnny Morris, which explained that an "Off day" was not the same as a "Day off".  The former being a generally unpleasant 24 hours, the latter being a holiday.  Art?

Stop strangling him!

     Johnny's off day included trying to feed ring-tailed lemurs, as above.  One of them, however, with anarchist tendencies, kept biting his ear whenever he looked away, until he caught it prefaratory to the act and defused it's bad behaviour with some edible leaves.  Way to go Johnny!
     More of an aside.  One anecdote in the book details when, as a younger man during the Second Unpleasantness, he had been sent from the zoo to collect a caged parrot from a rural railway station.  When he arrived the stationmaster, pale and quivering, ordered him to get the parrot out of there instanter, in tones that brooked no delay.

But - who can dislike a parrot?

     Mr. Morris found out why on the train back to his zoological gardens.  The parrot, you see, had been present in London during the Blitz, and had learned to imitate the sound of a bomb being dropped: a long, frightening whistling wailing noise followed by a rather anti-climactic "clonk".  The unfortunate stationmaster had endured this mock-bombing for several hours on end, which had stretched his nerves rather tautly.
     Anyway, that's nothing to do with my off day as of yesterday, which began rather ill, and meant I felt like delaying this post until things had definitely and literally got off the ground.  Art?

Thus

     Forsooth, did I not have a deadline to get to the airport yesterday?  Yes I most certainly did!  And what happened en route?  Oh, nothing but a traffic jam.

     That went on for EIGHT MILES.  Where we never managed more than an average of 10 m.p.h.
     Fortunately the Murder-Mobile didn't suffer explosive decompression or runaway radio-isotope meltdown, or we'd have really been in trouble.  
     The story had a happy ending: airport reached just in time, and the drop-off process, which had been an utter shambles when introduced in July and which your modest artisan was quite leery of, was quite painless, quick and entirely queue-free.

Thus

     Okay, time to feed the motley a stone of dry rice and then make it drink a gallon of water!

An Example Of Bathos
No!  This is nothing to do with balneomaniacs.*  "Bathos" refers from a literary transition from the mountain to the molehill, or from sublime to ridiculous.  Here we go from the desperate tension of not knowing if we're going to make the airport on time, to Conrad rearranging his books.  Art?

Before

      This is my collection of Official Histories of the First Unpleasantness (or most of them), interespersed with a ton of Osprey books and Hammerton's History of the First Unpleasantness.  The Divisional histories are all on the bottom shelves, where there is insufficient room for them, so - 

Hay Pesto!

     Much tidier.  Also leaving room for expansion at the top, where the Divisional histories now sit without problems due to their height.  I could perhaps fit another 15 in there, after which I need to get a new bookcase.

     There you go - bathos.

One For Absent Friends
Another example of bathos: your talented typist is Working From Home, which means having to put up with a small, disgruntled dog who thinks the entire human kingdom is there to please her.  Here we see her providing moral support for Conrad as he tackles endless e-mails and e-forms.  Art?

Ignore that bulging stomach
(It's the camera angle)

     When I say "Moral Support" that means "I am going to lie here, huffing and sulking, or sleeping, until you get up and play ball with me, or tea-time, whichever comes first."
     We shall see, shan't we?

Ah - A Lightbulb Moment
There is a line in "Arachnophobia" which Jeff Daniels' character pronounces, and I always thought it was just his accent or emphasis, when he mentions the deceased as having suffered "Titanic convulsions", in the sense of "Titanic" being derived from the Titans of mythology, i.e. those were whopping big convulsions.

A shovel?  Jeff, Jeff - for these critters you need a flamethrower.

     Well, I was wrong.  What Doctor Ross Jennings is saying is "Tetanic convulsions", because those undergoing death by tetanus would contort themselves into unbelievable positions thanks to muscle contractions.  Art?

Tetanic convulsion's poster boy

      And on that grim yet illuminating note it is time to call it a day.



*  Thomas Pynchon in-joke there.  I'm not going to tell you what Balneomaniacs are, either, because I'm horrid that way.