Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: May 2024

• One T-Bone, Please

  Posted at 3:17 pm by kayewer, on May 25, 2024

  If there is one type of car accident familiar to everybody, it’s the T-bone. This is a collision in which one vehicle hits another on the side as opposed to a same direction rear-end accident, thus producing a t-shaped impact. Some television dramas have produced great cliffhangers with side impact disasters. You know the drill; the two characters are talking while driving through an intersection, and the car that should have been stopped at the red light barrels through and slams into the couple in the car with the right of way.

  Lately I have seen more than my share of people drifting carefree–or speeding–through red lights, but usually they are ahead of me or going the other way. This past week, however, something else occurred. I had the green light, so I gave the accelerator a slight press and headed across the major four-lane route to the entrance of a shopping center parking lot. Suddenly a vehicle was in front of me and zooming past; the doofus ignored what by now had been at least a good three to five seconds of solid red light.

  Yes, my life flashed before me. I pictured me getting hurt or losing my beloved car. I panicked because I expected to see a terrified driver’s face in front of my windshield any second. I hit the brakes and prayed, and I came to a neat and full stop with inches to spare. Literal inches. The driver didn’t pay the least bit of attention and kept going. Thankfully, so did I.

  The vehicle behind me apparently had not yet entered the intersection. My guess is that either they hadn’t seen that we had the green, or they saw that doofus in the other vehicle was coming up fast and hard in the left lane going the other way, and they paused while I didn’t see them coming. I never did see if the driver was a teenager, a stoner, elderly. They kept on going to the next light (which hopefully they did not whiz through while red), while I parked and collected myself.

  When there’s a holiday weekend, everybody acts as if they are on the clock to get everything done as soon as possible, or they are late and want us to bear the burden for their oversight. It’s not worth one’s vehicle or life to run red lights. Amber lights are designed to bring you to a stop before the red flashes, and you must do so if you value what is dear to you.

  The only T-bone I ever want to see for the rest of my life is on my dinner plate with a side of baked potato.

  Be safe out there when you’re driving.

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• Beauty Mod

  Posted at 3:15 pm by kayewer, on May 18, 2024

  I had to do errands and appointments this week, and at one check-in counter I found myself being served by a trainee with the team leader overlooking his activities. He was, of course, very pleasant and engaging. As he moved his right hand to take control of the computer mouse, my gaze was instantly riveted to it. As he brought up the other hand to begin typing, I made the same observation as I looked at both of them.

  This man had the most beautifully executed hands of anybody I’ve seen in ages!

  I immediately told him how wonderful his hands were, and he appreciated my compliments. Even though I tried not to stare, I was compelled to take in what made his presentation so attention-getting. By way of explanation, I told him I had never seen something so well done before.

  He had oblong hands with long fingers suited for a pianist, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he were not a part-time hand model for some forward-thinking company. His arms, wrists and the hands themselves appeared flawless and clean, as one would expect. This gentleman also chose to have intricate tattoos running vertically down both hands, and elongated teardrop pointed nails applied. Still, the overall look did not elicit a single negative impression.

  The first thing some people might think upon looking over this person would be that he was probably gay (his voice suggested it, too), which wouldn’t matter to me, and I wouldn’t judge or dare ask. The tattoos and nails, however, suggest that he doesn’t go to the local strip mall salon. The skin work must have taken hours of long labor and dedication from an artist with considerable skill, and the acrylics were sized and polished to exacting standards. This is somebody who would not accept anything less than the best, and it was obvious that, in choosing these modifications, he wanted to only put the best presentation out there for himself. I think the scrollwork was simple lines and in black. Like I said, I tried not to stare. I was in a spot where people checked in for things, and I couldn’t hold up the line by asking twenty questions.

  The grey area between what is accepted or not in terms of body modifications is as varied as the things themselves. Henna gets applied to temporarily adorn new brides, prison inmates get all sorts of hidden messages applied permanently to their skin, and there are even medical grade versions of tattoos to restore likenesses of fingernails after joint amputations or nipples on reconstructed breasts lost to cancer, in 3D replicas. Normalcy is subject to interpretation, but after reviewing the brief experience this week, I’m guessing that I found the trainee to be admirable for the effort he put into the decorations improving upon what he already has.

  I don’t do my nails. Once for my birthday, my mother gifted me a salon visit for a manicure and polish, but afterward I felt so self-conscious about them, I couldn’t hold a bowling ball without worrying about wrecking them. She said that was why she only kept hers short and used translucent colors. Also, if my nails grew over a quarter inch, I think I’d never by able to type, which would mean the end of my blog.

  A woman on a social media video I saw recently had what looked like ten half-length emery boards tacked onto her fingers, and while she told her story, all I could see were those pink sticks waving about like short conductor’s batons. I don’t remember much of what she said for the misbegotten effort on the claws she wasted.

  This doesn’t mean I can’t admire well-done jobs on people, and I did admire that man. I hope the trainee has great success as he learns his new job.

  And that he doesn’t hit Enter and break a nail.

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• Listen for a Spell

  Posted at 3:02 pm by kayewer, on May 11, 2024

  I did not go to my university commencement, because of the inconvenience it would have been to the few people I would invite to such an event, and I graduated with my bachelor degree at age 51. My goal was to complete college and be the only woman in my family to do so (mother, grandparents and greats never did). My high school guidance counselor discouraged me from attending college. I did it anyway. The slow way. One course at a time. No dorms or college life. I went to work and did my studies part-time. The ceremony was broadcast online, so I watched from the office cafeteria during lunch.

  When I read about the commencement this past week in which Thomas Jefferson University students were subjected to botched pronunciations of their names as they picked up their diplomas, my first thought was that the education system had finally revealed its flaws in 2024. The person reading the names was given cue cards with phonetics printed on them. Unfortunately the phonetics may have been from a British English translation.

  I recall the late actor Christopher Lee, whose education was at the hands of the British upper-class system, manned with the most brutal faculty imaginable. His pronunciation of Maria Theresa was met with some violence (with a ruler) and the retort that the correct way was to say* “Marya Tereezer!” and a note that, “You’re English, boy, and don’t you forget it!” His background, by the way, was also Italian.

  The mangled name of Jefferson graduate Sarah Virginia Brennan, for example, was translated as “sair-uh-vuh-jin-ee-yuh-breh-nuhn” using such an online aid. We would likely say just “sa-rah-vir-jin-yah.” This would explain why the cue cards were less than useless. As the speaker said, she should have simply read from her book. Apparently she does know how to pronounce “Thomas” and “Elizabeth.”

  I am providing a link to a well-explained YouTube video which makes the point on behalf of the poor speaker (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFNddvwLJEo.

  When we need to depend on such easily faulty guides to read people’s names, we’re truly in a language cesspool and doomed to become a non-verbal generation. If a student were named Daquan, that could be “dah-kwan” or “day-kwan.” Then, you need a cue card. Virginia and Thomas should be no-brainers for those of us with a brain to receive a college degree.

  In my career I’ve managed the landmines of such names with multiple syllables and trippy diphthongs, which I’m lucky to be able to navigate naturally without much trouble. For colleges with soup pots of multinational students, the ability to muddle through names will be a struggle for a time, until we become familiar with some of the subtleties of pronunciation in other countries (including the finer points of British English).

  The speaker should not be the one to blame. Naming starts with parents. Pronunciation starts in the classroom, and it ends when that role up yonder is read by Saint Peter at the gate.

  Congratulations, graduates. As long as it’s spelled right on the diploma, you’re good to go!

  *Being one to double-check my sources rather than rely on memory, I got home and looked inside Christopher Lee’s autobiography and updated this excerpt, but the podcast will retain the original text.

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• Can’t Bear to Watch

  Posted at 4:30 pm by kayewer, on May 4, 2024

  A video news article this week showed a group of children taking a birthday party trip to the zoo. In a glass enclosure was a brown bear whose habitat also included a female duck and her brood of ducklings.

  I don’t know for sure how avian nesting works, but for all I know the poor mother duck got stuck in an urgent situation in which she knew she had to lay her eggs in the bear enclosure. Any woman due to have a baby can tell you that when the baby comes, you can do nothing about it. In the case of birds, they have more than one baby coming, and they don’t undergo labor as we know it. Eggs pop out one at a time, and then the mother duck is held captive while she incubates them. She happened to nest with a pair of bears named Juniper and Fern. The ducklings hatched, and as they usually do, imprinted on mama and followed her around. She took a dip in the water, and they followed obediently in as well.

  Bears are known to have omnivorous habits; particularly in the wild, anything edible is fair game for bears. The video which went viral showed the birthday party children looking on in horror as Juniper took a look at the ducklings swimming behind their mother and instinctively pictured convenient snack food; Juniper proceeded to devour every duckling in turn.

  The Woodland Park Zoo put things into perspective, saying that wild fowl are discouraged from nesting in carnivore enclosures, but they go where they choose and, in this case, the mother duck apparently suffered the consequences.

  Fern, the companion bear, had no comment.

  In the course of this past week, I also had the opportunity to see a male gorilla make whoopie with his female as zoo visitors watched, and I saw another video in which a group of tourists on a safari truck ended up with a pair of lions engaged in the “wild thing” atop the vehicle.

  Two things can be learned from this. First, the circle of life is all-encompassing, and you never know when a free lesson will be presented to your youngsters. Second, never click on a video unless you’re ready to become an unwilling subscriber to anything even remotely connected to it.

  Juniper’s snack I could handle, but the rest did nothing for me. I would get more excitement out of another marathon of “50 Shades of Grey.”

  As for mama duck, I hope she has better luck next season. Maybe she should nest in the children’s zoo.

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