Barkerburgh

…and I’ve got diagnosed osteoarthritis in both hips so I figured, for Wetstock this year, I’d just go easy.

But my people do not go easy into that good night. And this was in the afternoon.

I didn’t run around too much with the general ruck and rumble of the water-gun fight itself, although I wanted to. Luisa came to be, with water balloons, in the upstairs john which is always a target as it is overlooking the backyard wetting-fields, and I went up to tag her, but I got suborned to her side. We got Jeff R. and a couple of young people who I’d just met that day, (and bravo for the next generation, God bless’ em), and we won the day. We did. We did so.

Reid, with a high-powered water-rifle, employed a ladder to climb up to the bathroom window, in spite of the absence of one of our dear family of friends, partly, in part I’m sure, due to a ladder accident a few weeks back, with a head thing. And Baby H. Jesus, Reid, what were you thinking? But since he didn’t fall. it was genius, and hilarious. And he pulled open the window nearest me and I took the brunt of his humid and humorous assault.

This was Simon’s first Wetstock, and he needs experience, God love’im, he’ll be three in November.

Later, in the round backyard pool, we did the traditional whirlpool, with two reversals. K. A.

As always, the company was great, the food was great and I look forward to several next years.

What’s hilarious, seriously, is, that right now, two days later, when I was expecting one or both hips to be almost literally killing me, WTF and NGOOHA, it’s my thirty year old chronic back condition that’s bugging me, not my hippage.

At this same age, my parents did not have this suite of experiences or concomitant consequences. But they didn’t have waterguns.

I was always a big Inspector Morse fan, both the books and the series, and was sad when all ended as all human things must end.

Now, Kevin Whateley, who played Endeavour Morse’s faithful sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, has returned to PBS’ Masterpiece as Inspector Lewis, and is welcome. There was one episode (as far as I know) a few years ago, but with last night’s episode and next week’s promised one, there are least two more. The ads for DVDs during the show suggest there’s an entire series; whether PBS will carry it all, I don’t know yet.

Seven words you won’t be able to say on TV anymore.

I will always laugh about Cardinal Glick.
(more…)

I’m just sayin’.

I just discovered that Buffalo’s PBS station, WNED, broadcast 17, cable 61 (Rogers, downtown) is rerunning The Vicar of Dibley and the exquisite mid-1980s Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett in the title role.

Dawn French is almost flawless in The V of D, (en passant, closing credits include “Dawn French supplied by: Saunders and French Productions”) and Jeremy Brett is the best Sherlock Holmes ever. Ever.

Leslie and Peter (and Simon)  invited me to join them for a Sunday afternoon on the Oak Ridges Moraine at the former Koffler estate known as Jokers Hill, now a U of T biological reserve.  It was a horse farm once and the outbuildings still stand.  There’s an overgrown race-track overlooking the Holland Marsh on one side of Dufferin and hectares and hectares of beautiful forest on the other

As you all probably know, Peter is an Indiana Jones biologist, (the Tibetan Plateau, the California coast, Western Australia…but just let him loose in Pellucidar or on Skull Island) and he’s worked a lot at Jokers Hill so he knows the ecology and biodiversity of the area.  And where to find newts, one of which Simon found fascinating.

(I have a picture of the newt he found that Wordpress won’t let me upload…)

What I got was an amazing natural history tour of the area, from the bedrock up, the moraine being about 100 metres of glacial sediment topped with that beautiful forest.

The day was warm but neither hot nor humid.  There was a light breeze even in the forest and, lots of sand.

We saw many patches of white trilliums ranging from one or two in number to a dozen or fifteen or more.  There were several lone red trilliums, patches of different kinds of violets, of little blue wildflowers, of yellow ones, a patch of dog-tooth violets (leaves only, no flowers) in a shaft of sunlight, small streams, swampy seeps, a lovely stand of quaking aspens demonstrating the reason for their name in a mild breeze, the scent of sun-warmed hay off a small feral meadow, a low stone wall made from glacial erratic boulders (probably from back in the olden days when settlers tried to farm the moraine), an old-fashioned stubby beer bottle which I snagged, many cool rocks which Simon found and carried around until we found a pond or a stream, and only one (that I noticed) patch of good old jack-in-the-pulpits, one of my favourites when I was a kid in Georgetown nearly forty years ago.

We must have walked about fifty kilometers - or like three or four

We had a nice French farmyard lunch of baguettes, cheeses, sausage, pate, oranges, and water - not local, from a water-cooler

When I got home, I napped like crazy.
 

Over the last two nights, on Space (Rogers Cable 50, downtown) they showed a two-parter that took place entirely in the ‘Mirror, Mirror’ universe from the classic series.

There was the usual duplication of people in nearly identical capacities or roles (but working for the Empire not the Federation), and the link to our universe was the Defiant, which had been lured through a transverse spatio-temporal discontinuity (I made that term up) by the Tholians.  They captured the Defiant, killed the crew and began to dismantle the ship which was technologically advanced.

Mirror Archer (no evil Cartman beard) and his crew captured the ship from the Tholians (no beards), and so on.

Scott Bakula’s acting was horrendous, but the show was good.  Grim and sad, even the ending, but much more satisfying than the other episodes that I saw before I just stopped watching it.

Okay, score one (and only one) for Braga and Berman.  Lucky dummies.

…while I was housesitting for Peter and Leslie. Go on. Guess! (more…)

Peter and Leslie heard this (or a version of it) on the BBC in France a few years ago.

I googled a few key terms that they remembered but all I found was this transcription from an English girl’s blog on Bebo. It’s the right bit, but no attribution or credit…

Does anyone know who originally recorded and/or wrote it?

Welcome to Hufflepuff

You’ll just have heard the Sorting Hat mention, in his curiously insensitive song, how Gryffindor is for the Brave, Slytherin for the Cunning, Ravenclaw for the Wise, and Hufflepuff for… The Rest. And I realise that to hear that, and then almost immediately to find yourself sorted into Hufflepuff, well, it’s not quite the ego boost one hopes for on one’s first day at school.

You are one of “The Rest”. The Sorting hat has looked deep into your very soul, and what it saw there evidently didn’t impress. Oh, I’m aware that the hat has, in the past, occasionally described you as “kind”. Yes, and I’m sure that you also have lovely hair.

Some of you may be wondering about the thinking behind the school’s decision to put all the appalling duffers into one house, call it “Hufflepuff”, and give it the symbol of a Badger. A little harsh, you may feel. You may even, who knows, be questioning the wisdom of trusting the school’s entire admissions procedure to a Hat.

These are not, alas, questions I can answer. All I can do is urge you to look on the bright side. At least you’re not in Slytherin! (Another curious decision from the school there. To dedicate an entire house to the children in its care who are Evil. Surely a recipe for trouble.)

Anyway, being in Hufflepuff isn’t all bad. We have our moments of excitement and achievement. Last year, one of us was killed! That was exciting! And it’s something we can all aspire towards.

It’s okay.  It’s Science.