Freckles & Doubt

I took Pandora to the vet on Friday for a checkup, because I am concerned about her level of what the Splendid Vet calls "vocalisation", which is to say, she yells at me more or less continuously. I have been worried that this might actually be pain, probably from her ongoing arthritis problem, so wanted him to check her out (and incidentally clip her claws, which I can only do one foot at at time in rotation, since she lasts only approximately five nails before trying to bite me). So he prodded her all over and inspected her teeth, handling manfully and with some admiration the choking cloud of fur which results (she has an incredibly thick and beautiful coat, black with a very faint grey tabby, with a very fine and enthusiastic undercoat), and pronounced her, overall, ridiculously healthy for a 17-year-old cat. She's put on a bit of weight, her teeth are great, she is eating well and using the litterbox appropriately, she has slight pain in her spine from the arthritis, but didn't try to bite him when he poked it, so clearly not too bad.

He thinks it's probably age, hence slight senility, hence anxiety, hence the rise in yelling - she forgets where she is for a moment, or where I am, and panics about it. If it gets too bad we can try Prozac, but it isn't at that level yet. She is still spending the nights blissfully curled up against me, so isn't losing me and yelling about it while I'm trying to sleep. And to rule out the pain issue, he gave me a course of five mild kitty painkillers, to try over five days and see if it changes the yelling behaviour any.

So I dutifully pilled her that evening, to her indignation, but I'm actually quite good at it and she didn't spit it out. And we spent Saturday with absolutely no diminishment in the yelling (as expected), but I came dutifully to pill her on Saturday night. And... the little white pill sleeve was not on the kitchen counter where I had left it. Or on the floor. Or outside in the courtyard (because hypothetical random gusts of wind, although I don't think we had any that day). Or in the kitty-stuff drawer with the Laxapet and what have you. Or on any of the other kitchen surfaces. Or drawers. Or in the recycling, in case I'd accidentally thrown it out with something. Or in the rubbish bin, ditto. Or in my study, or next to the tv, or in my bedroom, or any of the other places I might have absent-mindedly put it down on Friday night. Or in any other drawers, cupboards or hideaways where I might have stashed it as a Logical Place. It had softly and silently vanished away, with worrying completeness.

It remained vanished throughout Sunday. And I had resigned myself to not, in fact, doing the pain test, or at least contacting the vet on Monday and somewhat shamefacedly asking for replacement meds. Until I was cooking supper on Sunday night, and cleared away after I'd finished chopping stuff, and realised, with some shock, that a white square of kitty pill sleeve was sitting innocently on the black kitchen counter, as though it had never left. I will swear blind it was not there all Sunday. It was actually mildly freaky, I have clearly been watching too much Stranger Things, because I entertained a moment's wild fear that someone had been coming in through the courtyard door and messing with me by Moving Stuff Around.

But I don't think so. I think I swept it up with Saturday night's cooking endeavours (tiny one-person roast leg of lamb because I randomly felt like it) and tidied it into the vegetable crisper in the fridge, caught up in the packaging for carrots or cauliflower or something. And then swept it back out again with Sunday's supper (lamb shawarma, with leftover roast), caught up with tzatziki ingredients, cucumber or spring onion or whatever. In both sweepings, I remained utterly oblivious to its hitch-hikery activities, hence the Mysterious Reappearance. It had a pleasant day chilling in the 'fridge, and I had a frustrated day wondering if I had, in fact, started gently going mad.

I am relieved that I am not, in fact, gently going mad, or at least not any madder than having to deal with my Cherished Institution's current fuckwitteries is otherwise driving me. So I can finish the pain test, despite being fairly confident that it'll continue to make not one iota of difference to Pandora's yell levels, but remain reassured that I am being a Good Cat Owner and Covering All Bases, although faintly guilty that I have to actually leave the house occasionally, thereby causing her anxiety. But it's weirdly helped, being able to put a cause to it, it's making me less annoyed and more sympathetic to the yelling. She is a poor old slightly demented thing, but actually, at base, very healthy and mostly happy. I'll take it.

This apocalypse is weird. A small three-person brass band has just wandered down my road, tootling tunes; from the joyously loud clothing I would judge they are Minstrel Carnival remnants. I am not sure what they were trying to achieve, as lockdown and social distancing suggest no-one should be popping out of their houses with donations; it may be simply another manifestation of the same thing that led Italians to improvise opera off their balconies. In the dark times there will be singing about the dark times, apparently. I shall try not to read the fact that their first choice of song was "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" as an omen of some sort.

However, whatever its imperative, the mini-concert has just been somewhat heavy-handidly suppressed by a truck full of police, who bundled the musicians into the back amid considerable shouting and brandishing of hand sanitiser. Thereby, may I add, aiding the dissemination efforts of the coronavirus considerably more than the simple musical trio ever did. Presumably this is a lockdown enforcement, but it seems like an overreaction.

Even micro brass bands appear to make me cry. Although that may be the apocalypse talking.

I was driving up Klipper Rd to campus yesterday morning, and there was a dude stopped on the side of the road with his car on fire. Literally on fire. The bonnet was aflame in a more or less circular patch across most of it. I have no idea what would cause that degree of catastrophic failure, but it was beyond catastrophic. Someone actually photographed it, which must have been a few minutes after I passed it, viz:



When I drove down in the evening it was a burned-out shell. No paint left at all. Gutted. It may have actually exploded. It was weirdly post-apocalyptic, and vaguely associated in my mind with student protesters burning buses. Maybe the car self-destructed in solidarity? But I can't actually get my head around how bad the engine problem actually has to be for that to happen so suddenly and completely.

Something else I can't get my head around: student narcissism. I was stopped ten minutes before the end of the day by a student, who wanted advice, from me, now, and would not accept that I wasn't available, wasn't the right person, and the advice she needed could be given tomorrow by other advisors who were there expressly for that purpose. Followed me to my office. Sat in the chair asking questions about course choices, and every time I told her "no, please sort this out tomorrow", seemed not to comprehend. Argued more, tried to slide in more course questions, talked about her medical condition and the difficulties she was having, which seemed to be largely imaginary. I eventually invented an appointment, twenty minutes later, and threw her out, still trying to con me into giving her detailed advice for which I had consistently told her I was not available. Who does that? what the hell is going on in her head that she cannot compute that I have other pressing commitments which make me unavailable to her, and to address which there is an elaborate system to ensure she receives the advice she needs? I accept that students are largely just post-adolescent and have not yet experienced the Total Perspective Vortex, but seriously, I think that was pathological.

Things you do not expect to see on a respectable campus while trotting off to the library for your important pile of Girly Swot books (subset: crash course in African cinema): live horses. Six of them. Tethered in the shade against the columns of the old Student's Union, peaceably chomping. There's something fairly major filming on campus at the moment, the place has been a madhouse: the stairs have sprouted fake extra columns and exotic greenery and weird screens positioned with arcane precision. I parked my car next to and partially under a giant cherry-picker boom sort of thing this morning, and there are approximately three million acres of random, presumably desperately important cabling snaking down the avenue, tended by skinny grip types in Bauhaus t-shirts. Actual African film, in fact. Curiously appropriate.

It's too bloody hot for serious thought (what's with February heatwaves before Christmas? Not Cricket), so have a random linkery round-up, I need to clear these tabs.

• If you go to the UK Vogue page and type the Konami code, extremely entertaining things happen when you keep on hitting A. Random internet easter eggs ftw.
  
• For some demented reason this ridiculous Boba Fett love story really amuses me, possibly because of the way the sarlacc is drawn. The rancor BFF one is also cute.
  
• Sherlock fandom is in a tizzy because of the Caitlin Moran faux pas (I never liked the wretched woman, her book is actively irritating) - she had the inexpressibly tone-deaf bad taste to pressure/trick the lead actors into reading erotic fanfic aloud at a screening. Daily Dot has a good summary. It really isn't safe these days to try and taunt subcultures you perceive as geeky and pitiable, they end up having way more power and self-awareness than you expect. I cannot help but be amused, though, at the cosmic inevitability of Moran attempting to sabotage Sherlock and failing dismally. It is, after all, simply an enactment of the Doyle plot. (Sebastian Moran is Moriarty's sniper sidekick in canon, if your Sherlock geekery is a bit rusty).
  
• Random fanfic recc! I am currently actually re-reading The Least of All Possible Mistakes, which is a rather well-written and often laugh-out-loud funny Sherlock fic featuring a Sherlock given to entertaining tantrums and a Mycroft/gender-swapped-Lestrade relationship which is both amusing and real. The fandom fascination with Mycroft fascinates me. I blame Mark Gatiss entirely.

I finally sent out the Boxing Day braai email last night, after more than average levels of procrastination and forgettory. If you weren't on the list but usually are it's probably because of my cheese-brain, please drop me a reproachful line.

The subject line is the Konami Code, which as a concept and a catch-phrase as well as a random bit of esoterica has always amused the hell out of me.

Spam is the new surrealist poetry. I still cherish with some fondness the email I received a few months back from the nice Jewish gentleman with the recently dead wife and the fixation on Kabbalah, "post-Auschwitz Spiritists" and Jewish goddess figures, whose ramblings encompassed pre-Christian gender politics, medieval sex magic, Borges, Bacon, Conan Doyle and game theory before even faintly approaching a point, which turned out to be an interest in one of my fairy-tale papers he deemed may be relevant. (Short answer: hell no). Shenanigans with font size suggest that this was a cut-and-paste approach comprising lumps of reference inserted into a hail-fellow-scholar-well-met sort of template, possibly distributed wholesale to swathes of randomly-selected paper-writing populace. The whole left me with the faint, irrational suspicion that some sort of money was going to be demanded about three exchanges in if I in any way responded. Which I didn't. Is this a new scholarly spam? I am curiously tickled to be singled out by it.

Today's was even more surreal, which is rather entertaining and has distracted me very nicely from my current state of hellweek frantic. I reproduce its initial lines wholesale, because wtf, and also because its particular confluence of high-class drivel - mystical conspiracy theory, apocalyptic religion, random header kipple and second-language grammatical and idiomatic solecism - is so deeply entertaining.

Urgent and Immediate Attention - Invitation of Chosen ONE-See “ATTENTION”

I am Saviour of Earth.
This Message is prepared from far away, beyond every Universe.
#############################################################
***************
ATTENTION
***************
Thank you for your immediate attention.
Read “Before Print” on the below, before print email.
_________________________________________________
This email have previously sent email.
During the time of email sending, some of nation government leaders or
ministers, such as Russia, China or other nation government, maybe changed.
People should consider of it.
_________________________________________________
This email have previously sent email.
To improve understanding of email, it would better, read from early days email.

With attached Message document “MASTER_OF_ALL.pdf”.

Readers should consider of it.
#############################################################

There are, in fact, attachments labelled, among other things, MASTER_OF_ALL.pdf, but I have not clicked thereon, on account of basic hygiene and generalised fear of surrealist rabbit-holes.

The perpetrator is addicted to the third-person and admits, apparently with some pride, that "Although Chosen ONE have study background of economy, but during the time when he was lived in western nation, Chosen ONE also studied several years of IT [Information Technology] subject, including, “internet” and “website development”, but never experienced some of sent email, seen on receiving email account, but some of sent email, not seen on same receiving email account, even with correct email address, by not typing email address, but selecting email address from its list." However, "Chosen ONE don’t want spend more of time to solve such problem, or to make discussion with “Gmail” from “Google” internet company, about it. Because Chosen ONE already observed it several months of time, also, importantly, Chosen ONE have to keep focus his attention to element of Earth along with element of Moon. Focusing on element of Earth & element of Moon is important to him."

I now have a mental image of some sort of wild-eyed bearded figure crouched over a green-screen monitor in a shack somewhere, clumsily channelling his element of moon fixation through this strange "internet" thing he only faintly grasps.

This actually requires some sort of medical diagnosis, I think. Schizophrenia?

I have just spent two days at home with a weird virus thingy which caused me to feel hot/cold, faint, faintly nauseous, slightly hovercraftian¹, and as though my arms are around three miles long. It's an odd feeling, watching your hands do things completely independently of yourself. I am now back at work, but am prone to look vaguely at a point just beyond a student's left ear and mutter things about squid². My hands are still typing this post more or less off their own bat, to which I say hooray. If I can work out how to outsource actual student advice to my hands, perhaps my head will stop aching.

During the course of the last two days I have read multiple volumes of frivolous YA fantasy (still very enamoured of Kristen Cashore and entertained by Tamora Pierce), played short snatches of computer games which have been prevented from being long snatches by the spinning of my head, and imbibed a great deal of fanfic. The list of links at Making Light is a particularly fine selection which has introduced me to Doctor Who/classic lit crossover fic (Austen and Gone with the Wind) and to Avengers fanfic, which tends to the cute. Still not sure about Tony/Captain slash, though. However, delightful to be reminded that Steven Brust wrote a Firefly fanfic novel. Also, memo to self, must watch Leverage, if only because Christian Kane.

My current state of weird finds curious comfort in H P Lovecraft as agony aunt. With, of course, emphasis on the agony.

---

¹ Floaty, teetering, and likely to spin off in odd directions. Also, full of eels.
² I have no idea.

The bird life in this garden is vaguely increasing, most notably in the case of the hadeda who has spent portions of the weekend sitting on the highest point of the house roof and whooping meditatively to himself in the approximate tones of someone being slightly distractedly murdered by inches. I blame global warming, myself.

Unusually, I can't also blame the cats for the unhappy dove corpse I found on the front doorstep the other day: it had clearly broken its silly neck flying into the big dining room window, and was moreover otherwise intact. If the cats get hold of a dove or pigeon it always explodes into approximately ten cubic metres of feathers all over the house, in an area effect which is in no way in keeping with the small size of the bird. I think it's something to do with quantum.

I am saddened by dead ring-necked doves, they're pretty and inoffensive creatures who are not prone to the slightly lobotomised, avian snickering of pigeons. What I have found, very weirdly, however, is that the dead dove appears to have left an absolutely perfectly bird-shaped impact mark on the window. I have spent all weekend wandering out there at intervals and attempting to photograph it, from a variety of angles and in a variety of lights. This was last night, and seems the most successful: while it's not a great photo, I'm pleased with the detail.



It's a rather pleasingly strange and ghostly phenomenon.

The ladies' toilets in my building on campus are simply weird. There are four stalls, but they appear to have been built, back in the dawn of time when these campus buildings emerged from the primordial ooze, by a numerically-challenged builder with a malfunctioning measuring tape. Two stalls are a normal size, a sort of average width for such things. One of the remaining two is significantly narrower, so your thigh brushes the toilet roll when you sit on the loo; the other is significantly wider, practically palatial in its vast expanse. It's not a wheelchair accommodation, the whole thing is up two flights of stairs and a sharp right angle bend completely inaccessible to any wheelchairs without a Dalek levitation function; nor can I can see any load-bearing wall issue which would dictate an uneven stall distribution. It must be sheer incompetence, one of those moments of horrible post-project realisation of the "Prid of Ankh-Morpork" order.

It drives me crazy every single time I go in there. I am facing the sad fact that at least some small part of me is unnecessarily nit-picky. I'd say anal-retentive, but it seems a bit pointed in the context of toilets.

Today was better than yesterday. We draw a veil over yesterday. I think its malignant Monday-energy became randomly exponentialised by eddies in the space-time continuum and the concentrations of student admissions angst. I also think I've been reading far too much Goats. My apologies to the role-players with whom I was scheduled to role-play; I hope the Scrabble was epic.

I'm seeing increasing amounts of spam on this account, several a day at the moment - mostly they're in Russian or, this morning, what appears to be Norwegian. LJ decorously informs me of them, and I delete them from the little dogbox corral of suspicion where it is wont to stash them until their bona fides are proven. In moments of extreme self-doubt, spam on my blog at least makes me feel needed.

What's weirding me out, though, is the posts they choose to spam. Most often it's this one, a generally uninspired little effusion in which I burble about my cats, with pictures. It doesn't seem to contain any commercial trigger words. It has attracted precisely three genuine comments. What is the secret of its apparently incredible allure to spammers? If they're not spamming there, they spam the Thor post, the one with the random bit of wolverine_nun-upsetting doggerel in the subject line. Likewise an unexciting piece of prose, unless you have a desperate attraction to superheroes, fangirling or godlike abs, which to be perfectly fair your average spammer might well have.

Nonetheless. In terms of reaching anyone's attention other than mine with a delete key, spamming this journal at large, and those posts in particular, seems curiously pointless. I am clearly infested with dadaist spammers, hell-bent on making a peculiar artistic statement all of their own, one whose parameters embrace obscurity, futility and a masochistic and nihilistic flirtation with unvalidated existence. If spam falls on a year-old low-traffic blog post which no-one reads, does it actually exist? Also, after looking up the Monty Python sketch, the word "spam" has ceased to have any meaning and has become a collection of curiously alien shapes.

I'm back at work. It's frying my brain. Can you tell?

I'm attacked by hiccups fairly often, and when they hit, it's violently, with full-body twitches, and, owing to the correlation between hiccups and booze, and my tendency to verbosity when slightly sloshed, the intrusion of loud and helpless "hics" into my usual babbling. All of the above has caused my loving friends to invent the notion of "comedy hiccups", and to point out their arrival, loudly and with mockery. We will not go into the horrid litany of "you're married to..." which they fling at me in an effort to shock me out of the wretched things. The fact that it frequently works is a testament to their inventiveness.

I hadn't realised for how long the hiccup affliction has been a feature in my life until I stumbled on the scrap of paper reproduced below, which egadfly scribbled, I suspect during a late-night role-playing tournament design session, lo these many years ago (as in decades). I feel his essentially minimalist style captures the full-body nature of the phenomenon very well.



This is a Microfiction weekend, and owing to a terminal difficulty with this theme ("Silver") I've actually put up two, "Silver" and "Household God". I don't like either of them much. YMMV. I don't like most of what I write, after all.