An e-mail. ” Dear User,
Kindly go through the attached official letter, it is very compulsory.”
Just because your syntax is straight does not mean that you’re communicating what you think you’re communicating. In this case it reads: “Hi! I’m the cousin of the widow whose husband died in Dubai wanting to give you his millions because she knows you’re a good person! Have I got a deal for you!”
My answer will be: I shall be of course delighted to invest a few of the millions of your cousin’s departed spouse in your enterprise as soon as it all clears the bank.”
Curious how in such small countries, there should be so many rich widows and cousins so eager to give away millions to people in the USA, all for the exchange of an account number and so forth. The sheer amount of philanthropic altruism and the number of newly-rich relatives…. One wonders how they have any poor people at all in those places. Hah.
I have been conjuring up grammar review, trying to recall stems and endings and when this or that form goes irregular and how it does, without (yet) access to my language books still in storage. It’s shaking off some of the rust and showing me where I’m weak after too long without regular practice or immersion. My grammar knowledge is still mostly there, but I’ve noted a few weak spots that will get reviewed. Vocabulary and better grasp of speaking/listening need a boost. But several guesses have been right so far, and I’m regaining some confidence. Still, a long way to go before I’m up to my old level of fluency and then to build on that to real everyday conversational fluency. Bren would no doubt chuckle at that too, as I’ve tried a couple of times now to get across concepts or ask for words I don’t know. French is helpingg, but isn’t always a reliable source when Spanish does something quite differently. Still, it sure feels good to get some portion of a thick accent and new vocabulary, and to get more conversation right than I would have thought. I’ll be very pleased when my books are back. the search through the storage space didn’t reveal yet which boxes landed where. I hope maybe next week will prove more successful.
Too funny. After re-reading Chanur, it’s somewhat reminicient of the Mahendo’sat. Number one good money deal.
NASA has posted a lovely picture of the petal sails. I wonder if the colonists used bright stripes or plain canvas?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRb_x_vhXLo/
Counting the days til the new book comes out. It’s starting to be yardwork weather here and I’ve got a back yard full of those &^&%$#@(^%$#@! locust beans that need to be raked up and hauled to the dumpster. I got a front flower bed I want to “landscrape” so bad with perennials that bloom, like butterfly bushes and lavender and such (budgetary constraints at the moment). Tomorrow I aim to girdle my loins and take it on.
Is the weather cutting you any slack at all? Still knitting . . .
Have I got a deal for you. My plumerias have all gotten leggy and spindly, and are in dire need of a haircut. Off I went to get my chainsaw-onna-steeck, and spent most of Monday afternoon lopping off limbs that looked closer akin to feather dusters than tree branches, until I unseated the chain from the saw. My back yard is now full of bits and bobs of branches; plumerias are very brittle, and an 8′ long branch will often shatter into pieces when it hits the ground. It will take several weeks of stuffing branches into my green waste bin before the detritus is gone.
Oh, and your talk of syntax, etc, calls to mind that quintessential skunk about town Pepe Le Pew, and some of the finest comedic dialog around — and of course the rim shot of French’s “ma petit chou” (my little cabbage) and Bren’s “salads.”
Cole.Slaw: It’s a salad, it’s a side dish, it’s cabbage, it could be les petits choux (little cabbages, basically Brussels sprouts). Quelle solution parfaite!
(Eh bien, l’auto-incorrecte du browser ne sait plus comment se fonctionne la grammaire française.)
It’s still a curiosity and a mystery to me why “mon petit chou” is a term of endearment in French, but hey, you go with what it is, how it is.
These letters are deliberately not polished or entirely plausible. It’s a form of intelligence test: those not bright enough or savvy enough to recognize poorly-written letters as a warning sign are far more likely to be dim enough and naïve enough to fall for the actual scam.
This morning Zorro didn’t come running to breakfast as she usually does. She seemed fine last night, squabbling with Junior over leftovers, but this morning she is tucked up under an end table in the living room. We’ll keep an eye on her, and if she’s not more in form by Monday, off to the vet she goes.
Wishing her the best. Eyes and teeth number one to look at for mystery ailments.
Zorro’s teeth have always been problematic; the last couple of times she has been to the vet have been for dental issues, and more than half of her teeth are gone. If they are troubling her again, she may end up losing the rest. Missing teeth don’t seem to slow her down in the food guzzling department, though.
She’s a little wobbly getting up onto things today; not so hot at jumping, but she is eating now. This morning I found the trash can in the living room knocked over. I think she and Junior had a dispute last night, and she took an awkward fall and either bruised or strained something.
Here’s hoping Zorro does all right. Dental work and eye work are both on my list of essentials after the sale of my former home. This over-the-hill business ain’t fer wimps. 😉
Drat. The guys were supposed to be here today to move in my furniture. Have not seen or heard from them. Will find out this evening and reschedule. May have to chase them with a stick. Ooh, I want a desk and chair, table, etc. 🙁 grump.
a chair would be good, yes.
Off topic, except it made me laugh when I discovered this. It appears the Dutch army still has a ‘mounted’ brass band performing at exhibitions – riding bicycles! They are deliberately looking very retro and keeping alive the memory of the bike-mounted regiments from the 1930s.
I find it very clever of them to be able to ride synchronised patterns on their bikes while playing their instruments, even if it’s sometimes presented as more of a comic relief piece than serious music.
Here’s a link, for anybody who likes to watch a brass marching band occasionally, and could use a bit of a laugh.
What a fun video, Hanneke… And the snare drummers were not steering with their hands at all (elbows, it looked like). I was extra impressed that they stayed in formation so well… And at slow speeds. It’s hard to ride slowly and steer with one or no hands and not wobble.
By the way, thank you for posting the Dutch/Boston Northeastern Professor street layout videos several weeks ago. I am organizing a forum on neighborhood design & traffic configurations for my day job and it was very useful.
I had tried to thank you several times but (vainly) trying to post that over several days was when/how I found out the now prior layout of Wave Without a Shore was broken.
You’re welcome. I’m glad the ladies fixed the site, so we can have conversations again instead of occasional solitary reactions. It’s working fine now, even on my phone.
The one thing I haven’t figured out yet in the new layout is that the order of the listed reactions in the upper left is not chronological at the moment, it seems; nor is it alphabetical?
Since were all SciFi “nuts”, I’ve just got to mention this. Remember “Say it with Flowers”? This has got to be the ultimate way to smuggle information out! I’ll bet the Azi can do this!
“Researchers Store Computer Operating System and Short Movie on DNA”
http://datascience.columbia.edu/researchers-store-computer-operating-system-dna
Just don’t tell me Windows was the OS they encoded–M$ would probably throw a fit, so it’s unlikely.
Oh, it has come to my attention that besides the florists, that title has been used by others. I mean the short story by “Winston P Sanders”, aka Poul Anderson, that appeared in Analog, in 1965, and subsequent anthologies. (A secret message was encoded in a floral tattoo.)
The ‘Secret Language of Flowers’? If rosemary is for remembrance and chrysanthemums mean lost love, what do you suppose the code is for identifying deep cover assets?
Heh. I bet they could.