Minsky wishes to protest about being reduced to a mere punctuation mark. (The ginger cats are simply glaring balefully about it, and Chomsky isn't quite sure what an apostrophe is...)



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Actually no; I happened to read LOTR just before 'The Silmarillion' was published, and naturally bought this and Unfinished Tales when they came out. The HOME series 1-5 were a regular Christmas present from mother (sadly deceased) and didn't get read for 15 years as I couldn't take it when I saw where Middle Earth had come from (The Book of Lost Tales).

Now I just run the joke that I want my Tolkien first editions signed by the author. Plus first editions have a special place in Ffordian literature. I had to be cajoled into going to the signing at Leeds, but thoroughly enjoyed it when I went.

I could be the least well read regular contributor to the Fforum, but make up in depth for a narrow list of authors.

Yes, the furry ones.

Hey, that last one has ended up in the wrong thread! How does that happen?

Sarah: I was talking purely punctuationally, honest! Speaking as the foster mother of Hannibal, Horatia, Scipio, Sophie and Maude I'm a total cat freak and would never denigrate anyone furry of the feline persuasion... Grammar, yes. I earn my living by it and so extract the u**ne out of it at every possible opportunity...

Minsky and cohorts: I grovel.

Chomsky: It's not edible and definitely doesn't taste like fish, although in sokme lights it may bear some relation to a sprat. Don't bother with it.

3 cases of apologetic Moggilicious wheeching its way to you now. *sobs*



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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

It was really Dave R's fault, so no need to grovel! However, Minsky sends thanks and very large purrs on behalf of the other cats for the Moggilicious. He is the usual spokescat for the group. Chomsky also sends thanks for the explanation about the apostrophe; if he hadn't known, he would probably have tried eating one. After all, he eats just about everything else that could even vaguely be considered edible, unless stopped first. I'm afraid that not even naming him after the world's most famous linguist could persuade him to use his brain except in the direst emergency!

Your cats have wonderful names. :-)



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Thanks Sarah - so do yours : ) Thanks also to Minsky & ginger tribe and Chomsky (you've got much better manners than my lot!)



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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

The ginger tribe consists of Klinsmann and Heidi (originally Klinsmann and Bierhoff, until I suddenly realised that one of my little ginger toms was nothing of the kind). Heidi is a perfect little lady, and far more sociable since my husband walked out; she never could stand him, and I really should have listened to her, because it turned out she was quite right about him. Klinsmann is a small cute spring-loaded psychopath with a completely warped sense of humour. Let's just say that his behaviour towards the other cats has earned him the nickname of "The Grand Old Duke of Yuck", and regularly gets him put out the back door. He has no manners at all by nature, but the other cats tend to clip him round the ear until he puts on at least some semblance of common decency!



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Excellent! How unusual to have a ginger queen. Clever Heidi! (For being ginger, discerning and a good thing.) Love 'spring-loaded psychopath' - Scipio's like that but he's got a delayed action button. He lulls you into a false sense of security and just when you've forgotten about him out pops Mr Hyde and you acquire a whole new set of matching claw marks... most of the time he's the gentlest most harmless cat you'd wish to meet.

(Alison to vet: "Don't worry, he's totally harmless. He's never bitten anyone in his life, but he's not keen on pills."
Vet to Alison: "He'll be fine. You hold him and I'll just pop this down his throat."
Alison (bleeding freely) to vet: "I don't think he wants to eat that tablet - could you try something else?"
Vet: (Screams and leaves room)
Scippi: Purrrrrrrrrr.)

Mind you, I've never met a self-respecting animal who actually likes the vet...



Post Edited (07-27-03 22:30)

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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Everyone else's cat sits quietly in its carrier in the vet's reception room. Mine, without exception, yowl loudly and embarrassingly. Fortunately they are mostly very healthy (Heidi's never seen the inside of a vet's in her life apart from the time she went for the inevitable little operation), apart from Chomsky, who's slightly prone to cystitis. He's not an active cat, bless him. He went from kitten to old gentleman in the space of about a month.

I rarely get clawed these days now that Heidi has calmed down so much, but Klinsmann has been known to take the odd lump out of me if he feels he is being unjustly restrained from annoying the other three. I'm sure he gets away with it only by claiming honorary kitten status, because any other cat who acted like that around Minsky would end up missing an ear at the very least (Minsky doesn't start fights, but if the other party insists on fighting, he will win comprehensively). These days it's generally simpler just to throw him out and let him sulk on the patio for a while.

The vets at our practice are great. They take one look at the surgical splints on my wrists and they prescribe whatever possible alternative to pills they can find - they can see I don't have the strength of grip to give a cat a pill in the normal way. Last time Chomsky was on medication, I had to squirt it into his mouth using a little syringe. All right, occasionally he'd be too quick and it would go on the floor, but generally it was wonderful!



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Hello!

..ahm.. I just wanted to mention that one more of the "Eyries" have found their way into this Fforum. Well, I even spent about 20 minutes reading large parts of the thread, but now I am loosing the track of it, and also the energy to respond in a proper way to the last messages. But anyway that might also be due to the waterskiing where I spent most of my energy today

I read also "The trial" and I liked it too, the idea itself was awesome. But that was also the case in the movie "The Truman Show" Just imagine, every single step you´d take would be filmed and shown on TV, and everbody else is just an actor..all your friends..everything is planned...really shocking somehow.

and I still didn´t get that joke somewhere in the old thread with the "read aloud-joke" about the bikini girl. too bad.

and one more question: what do YOU (and yes, I also mean the one with that awful green tie in the back-row) think of Douglas Adams? I read "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", "The restaurant at the end of the universe", "Life, the unviverse and everything" and I think I started with "So long, and thanks for all the fish"...but then, somewhere in the middle I stopped once, and was never really motivated to go on, because the jokes were somehow all the same to me..just endless repetitions..

is this because of the "overdose" (I read all the books in a row), or did some of you have the same experiences ? Right now, I am more motivated to read "the trial" again than Douglas Adams. Well thats all folks. Have a good time

Santuris

I like "The Hitchhiker's Guide" and also read the rest of the series, but I somehow got bored while reading the later books. Can't explain why, but in my opinion none of the later books reached the wit and humour of the first one. So it seems you're not the only one, who would rather reread the Trial than Adams. (Which doesn't mean I would only read Kafka if given the choice between him and Adams.)
Anyway, welcome to the fforum and don't worry about losing track of the threats, happens - at least to me- all the time



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Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

(N. Chomsky 1957)

That's what I needed! (But the vet was too thick to think of that!)



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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Hi Santuris, welcome to the Fforum! (I'm the one with the large white hat, sitting next to the one with the awful green tie.)

I must admit, I feel much the same way as you do about Douglas Adams. I loved the Hitch-Hiker's Guide, but I found that for me the series rather lost its impact as it went on, though there were always one or two really good ideas (I loved the thought of Hotblack Desiato spending a large part of every year dead for tax reasons!). Mind you, I did enjoy Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. That really was original.

I have a friend who is disconcertingly similar to Dirk Gently. I mentioned this to him, and he said I was the fourth person who'd made that comment, so it's clearly not just me!



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Hi Santuris!
I am really relieved that at least one of the Eyries har posted something! All this chatting about German literature must not have been in vain!
Waterskiing sounds great btw especially since it has been rather hot lately ...
Should one explain the bikini-girl puns (at least as far as one understands them)? Could somebody else take pity before I make a fool of myself and maybe loose the respect of my class?!

Dave Rainbow -
I agree with VV on the gerneral thing about 'Im Westen Nichts Neues'. Still - I think the book was very popular in the few years when it was available. It was of course among those which the Nazis burnt. Germany was very much divided at that time in the late 20s, especially about the issue of WWI. I think a good part of the population wanted that something like that would never happen again. Those were the people Remarque was speaking for. His book is decidedly anti-war in general and against WWI especially. It is also against the nationalist madness that accompanied it. Remarque's punchline is that the war was utterly futile and a kind of madness. The Nazis had a different view, of course ... they spread the notion that the German army had not been defeated and would have been utimately victorious if they had not been betrayed by the socialists who started a revolution and entered into talks about peace as soon as they got to power. The Nazis thus could blame the social democrats for all the trouble that was caused by the treaty of Versailles (very neat that). There is - btw - a book which is something like the antagonist of 'Im Westen Nichts Neues' ... 'In Stahlgewittern' by Ernst Jünger.
That is the account of a young officer in WWI who saw the war as a thunderstorm of steel which brought forward the best (when the goings get tough ...) and shaped a new kind of human being which would be strong and fearless and which would become one with machinery. Naturally the Nazis liked this and tried to get Jünger to join the party, yet he declined because he wound the Nazis too vulgar (being the elitist and aristocrat Prussian he was). Many French like Jünger a lot it seems ... he is quite popular there I have heard (at least more than in Germany). Jünger died only a couple of years ago, aged a-hundred-and-something ...
Anyways - Jünger's book was probably about as popular as Remarque's and the two books show the two faces of Germany at the time ...

Good morning!

In the meantime, I can spare our teacher the blame, I got the joke...I somehow just thought there would be a little bit more about it...perhaps I am still getting it it wrong..but anyway, I am not in the mood to think about it right now.

By the way, since we are (at least partly..apart from the one with the awful green tie sitting beside the one wit the large white hat)
discussing funny books, has anybody read anything of Matthew Thomas?
(apart from the name in the previous line)
"Before and After" is a fantastic book. It is about exploding sheep, which are an omen for the dawning of the apocalypse, the final battle between good and evil (a soccer match) and speaking swords and various other things. Lately, if I have had the time I would have started re-reading it, but unfortunately I had lent out my copy to a friend of mine. over a year ago. and she still hasn´t read it. i think i am going to kill her. maybe. anyway. it´s a lot of fun, so I´d strongly recommend it.
so, now I am vanishing into the deepest depths of my "Einführung in Germanistische Linguistik" (I tell you, it is far more boring than the title promises).
by the way, a big "thank you" goes to the "teacher": I remembered many things of your famous "Einführung in"-class which actually helped me a lot in Deskriptive now. So, THANX!
That´s all folks. C Y@ (I am a hacker haha)

Santuris

Morning!
Goodness Gracious! I've only been away for a weekend...
Santuris, hello and welcome! At last someone followed my call. I know this has become rather confusing, but (apart from the kitty-part that has gone astray) there is some kind of coherence in it. I hope you like it a little?

Since I've neither read Douglas Adams nor Kafka nor Remarque, there's nothing left for me to add to that...

Well, anyway, today's the big-presentation-day, I shall see how many Eyries actually did have a look at the site apart from Santuris!! *g*
(By the way, I'll have a little more on than a bikini for the presentation ;-) *hint*)

Laters
Barbie



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Never put a sock in a toaster!
E. Izzard

Nice to know I'm not the only one who thought the 'Hitchhiker' books trailed off. I think the cut-off point is #3, 'Life, the Universe and Everything'. #1 and #2 are of course fine and dandy, being composed of much the same material as the radio series. With #3 it starts to go either way, I think. Some great bits, some hum-ho bits. #4 was clearly worse, and #5 pretty damn terrible. I think the problem with those two was that they were far more serious in tone than the others - fewer jokes - and I'm not sure Douglas Adams was really very good at serious, non-jokey writing.

Dirk Gently's OK - I can't read those books, though, without recognising the 'Doctor Who' scripts he recycled them from. Takes the edge off it a bit, does that.



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"Whisky-wa-wa," I breathed - she was dressed as Biffo the Bear.

Wasn't one of the H2G2 books a Who recycle, as well? (The one with the robot warriors of Crikkit, iirc).



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

I've read Matthew Thomas! Before and After, and...um....Terror Firma. That seems to be all he's written, according to Amazon, anyway. I love Terror Firma, I borrowed Before and After from the library and can't remember it that well.

I agree with everyone else about the Hitchhikers books, with the proviso that I like the flying in the 4th one.



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Do something pretty while you can...

Ooh, sorry - random double post.



Post Edited (07-28-03 15:40)

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Do something pretty while you can...