Coming soon to a heart attack near you.
Jan. 29th, 2004 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
herewiss13The Wellbutrin I've been taking must be doing something right. I actually took a step towards acquiring employment.
I went to an audition for a company that films medical emergency training videos (i.e. what to do if a co-worker breaks their arm, etc.) And lo and behold, despite a 5 year absence from the stage, I appear to have succeeded.
At any rate, I got a call the following week saying that I was on their list for future shoots, which is either a good thing or an incredibly suave brush-off. Time will tell.
In other news, after over a year of evasion, I finally sat down and read Jasper Fforde's "The Eyre Affair" (and then its sequel). My initial introduction to the book was by a fan who apparently couldn't summarize well to save her life, because she made the whole thing sound tremendously surreal and bizzare and completely unrealistic.
As it happens, there are elements of the surreal and the bizzare...but in a much different context. For those familiar with both books, the tone is quite a bit like "Alice in Wonderland" whereas it had been described quite a bit more like the final chapters in "Sophie's World" where the little girl being tutored in philosophy discovers she's only a fictional character (this introducing modern swedish philosophy somehow).
At any rate, it's a very crisp and funny book with an _internal_ consistency of great strength. Any resemblances to the real world, however, are purely coincidental.
This is a book club composed mainly of women from my mother's presbyterian church. Nice people, but not SF readers, on the whole. In fact, Mom was so clueless that, despite having actually _bought_ the book in advance, she hadn't realized that it was SF. That's a pretty tall order considering that the book jacket mentions genetically re-constitued dodos as housepets, among other peculiarities. Her response when I pointed out this fact was along the lines of:
"Oh, really? Are there aliens?"
"No Mom, just people."
"I thought all science fiction had to have aliens."
...at this point I let myself out of the room before having a coronary over her genre-atic ignorance. In most other areas, she's actually quite well read. But she prefers "uplifting" books, with the occasional period mystery and is, apparently beyond clueless when it comes to SF despite having lived with me (a literary SF fanatic) for over two decades. Given that her book club falls into roughly the same demographic, I'll be _most_ interested to see if they have the SF tropes and motifs required to truly understand the work. If they aren't left scratching their heads and going "huh?", I think they ought to enjoy it quite a lot...but those first few baby-steps toward a new kind of literacy will be a doozy.
Finally, an interesting bit of etymology.
Medieval falconers used hunger as a training aid when working with raptors. With each successfully obeyed command, etc. the bird would get a tidbit of meat. Once the bird was sated, it became quite uncooperative, intractible, and generally hostile to the trainer.
To wit: the bird was "fed up".
And now you know.
I went to an audition for a company that films medical emergency training videos (i.e. what to do if a co-worker breaks their arm, etc.) And lo and behold, despite a 5 year absence from the stage, I appear to have succeeded.
At any rate, I got a call the following week saying that I was on their list for future shoots, which is either a good thing or an incredibly suave brush-off. Time will tell.
In other news, after over a year of evasion, I finally sat down and read Jasper Fforde's "The Eyre Affair" (and then its sequel). My initial introduction to the book was by a fan who apparently couldn't summarize well to save her life, because she made the whole thing sound tremendously surreal and bizzare and completely unrealistic.
As it happens, there are elements of the surreal and the bizzare...but in a much different context. For those familiar with both books, the tone is quite a bit like "Alice in Wonderland" whereas it had been described quite a bit more like the final chapters in "Sophie's World" where the little girl being tutored in philosophy discovers she's only a fictional character (this introducing modern swedish philosophy somehow).
At any rate, it's a very crisp and funny book with an _internal_ consistency of great strength. Any resemblances to the real world, however, are purely coincidental.
This is a book club composed mainly of women from my mother's presbyterian church. Nice people, but not SF readers, on the whole. In fact, Mom was so clueless that, despite having actually _bought_ the book in advance, she hadn't realized that it was SF. That's a pretty tall order considering that the book jacket mentions genetically re-constitued dodos as housepets, among other peculiarities. Her response when I pointed out this fact was along the lines of:
"Oh, really? Are there aliens?"
"No Mom, just people."
"I thought all science fiction had to have aliens."
...at this point I let myself out of the room before having a coronary over her genre-atic ignorance. In most other areas, she's actually quite well read. But she prefers "uplifting" books, with the occasional period mystery and is, apparently beyond clueless when it comes to SF despite having lived with me (a literary SF fanatic) for over two decades. Given that her book club falls into roughly the same demographic, I'll be _most_ interested to see if they have the SF tropes and motifs required to truly understand the work. If they aren't left scratching their heads and going "huh?", I think they ought to enjoy it quite a lot...but those first few baby-steps toward a new kind of literacy will be a doozy.
Finally, an interesting bit of etymology.
Medieval falconers used hunger as a training aid when working with raptors. With each successfully obeyed command, etc. the bird would get a tidbit of meat. Once the bird was sated, it became quite uncooperative, intractible, and generally hostile to the trainer.
To wit: the bird was "fed up".
And now you know.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
fed up
Date: 2004-02-01 04:11 am (UTC)-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian,
Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody
a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
[not anonymous, just not a LJ user]
Re: fed up
Date: 2004-02-01 07:52 pm (UTC)And since I recall it, this one is from "Mail Call" on the History Channel.
Poop Deck= Ancient romans put an idol at the stern of their boat. Idol in Latin is Poopus. When Europe began constructing mighty ships, they called that raised deck in the back a Poopum.
Re: fed up
Date: 2004-03-18 08:34 pm (UTC)But saying "poopus" as though it were English, beginning with "poop", is close to real Latin: "puppis", in which the "u" would have sounded like the "oo" in "took" or "spoon". "Puppis" doesn't have anything to do with idols; it means the stern or the poop of the ship, and it's where the English "poop" came from.
The only plausible connection to 'idol' I can think of is one of mistake rather than etymology. Another Latin word, "pupa", has "doll" or "puppet" (which comes from it) as one of its meanings. Whoever sent "poopus" in to Mail Call, or whoever originated that etymythology, was probably confusing "puppis" and "pupa".