OK, the worst I've seen was the cat of a girlfriend, a former barn cat that had been partly tamed and would grudgingly let you touch it for 30 seconds after it awoke. She'd eat, barf next to the bowl and then eat the barf. Those two belonged together.
I have only one good hairball story. At least I think it's good, though that's probably only because of the memories. When I was a kid, we spent a summer in a rented house in Forte di Marmi, a resort town north of Pisa - complete with our own, dedicated beach umbrellas at the Ursa Maggiore beach club. We met some older Americans from New York and they introduced us to a terrific artist, Rosario Murabito, who lived in a big house on a cliff in a little village, with a huge terrace overlooking the sea. I think it's a museum now. He said he bought it after the war for back taxes after he'd been stopped for speeding.
Saro was an old kid who collected everything. The walls were crammed with pictures, but his real treasures were kept in glass cases. Those were his knives - his Corsican and Sardinian revenge knives (he loved to act out the act of taking revenge) and, notably for this story, his hair balls. These were huge hair balls from cows. Big things, really round and densely packed. We took immense delight in them.
Old Gandalf was a past master at the yellow slime trick. He, being an indoors/outdoors cat, would go outside and eat some long blades of grass. Then, an hour or so later, he'd choose between tiled laundry/bathroom floors, lacquered hardboard kitchen/dining floors, or carpeted bedroom/study floors. Did I say choose? That's probably too strong a word. He used the carpet -- a puddle of slime with a non-digested blade or two of grass.
Lu-Tze & Isadora are strictly indoor cats. That leaves hairball hawking and stomach upsets. I hope the anti-hairball food lives up to its claim.
I like it when the vomit presents a compacted, yellow impression of the cat's insides, slightly curved, as though it regurgitated a snake. The cat looks at it, perhaps not comprehending that this thing was just expelled.
Grossness follows.
Lily, being siamese, was a prodigious vomiter, and usually in 3's. Finding the third was the challenge, since it consisted of pale yellow liquid. Finding it underfoot was disgusting. Finding a complete set under the covers - or worse, smelling it under the covers after you'd settled in - no words can describe.
In other word: EEEEEEEEEEEEEW! Man, it's that time of year around here, and everyone is catching the latest vomit bug. I am hearing vomit stories every day. It has me a little rattled, I must confess. (Not too rattled to be amused by your misfortune, though. Ha!)
Paws are for kneading my shoulder at night, for grabbing my toe when I won't get out of bed, for grabbing the edge of the counter when I'm making food (in the hope that some will be coming down).
Lily (RIP) would reach out a paw to touch your cheek as you lay in bed. She'd be jammed into your shoulder and, just as you were about to throw her the length of the room in disgust, she'd stretch her leg, place the pads of her paw on your cheek and leave it there.
If it makes you feel any better, I lost all interest in a most stylish fellow last year when he couldn't hold up his end of an argument. I think I was chatting to you on ICQ, at the time, in fact--or maybe that was someone else. Anyhow, it was driving me nuts, the amazing leaps of illogic this fellow was making. There were no more dates after that.
Some of us still do prefer a bit of substance. (We end up old maids, though, living with giant rats. Ha, ha.)
Beyond the humour of the parody, the sad part is that style (read: superficiality) is probably a clear winner when it comes to human sexual selection criteria. That saddens me because I'm still foolishly clinging to ideas about human evolution having been influenced by selection based on intelligence. It's too easy to look at the explosion of knowledge over the last few hundred years and conflate that with old dreams of enlightened utopian destiny. On an evolutionary scale, human intelligence has only increased because of its value in social manipulation and deceit: how to get more with less effort.
It's stories like your $100 bill one that remind me not to let my cynicism take over. If we can live and work in a sociopolitical environment that doesn't foster fear and mistrust, then the cooperative and caring parts of human nature will show more often.
$100 bill story: in the United States, where all the damn money looks the same, I once went into a McDonald's for a coffee and sarnie. "Two dollars," says the girl behind the counter. "Okay--one, two," I count, except it's really "One, a hundred and one," because I am too tired to spot the difference. So I hand this to the girl and start stumbling out, coffee already raised to my lips. I'm JUST going out the door, when I hear frantic footsteps behind me: "Ma'am! Ma'am! This is a hundred dollar bill!"
I must say, I was impressed. A lot of folks would've kept that.
I saw him a few times in the late 70's in showcases at clubs. A friend worked for his record company. He had great, unrepeatable in public stories of EC & Co. acting like certifiable jerks.
I liked his punkiness. I was into the NYC punk scene. Most of the music was awful, but it had so much more energy than - god forbid - disco and country rock (Charlie Daniels Band? Marshall Tucker Band? Ye gods.) Punk spoke to the my generalized anger and self-destructiveness, traits that still emerge. Oddly enough, that old style punk was probably healthier than the big disco scene of Studio 54, Magique, etc.; far fewer drugs if you weren't into heroin, which I never was.
Better looking girls in the discos though. With high price tags. That probably hasn't changed. Better looking boys too. I wasn't around that scene when HIV hit. In those days, at 3AM, you might see groups of guys in loin cloths dancing in circles, sometimes with drums, a fertility ritual of uninhibited sexual overdosing. Quite a sight. Disco was just as loud as punk, but I always used cotton in my ears.
WifeOfVirge and I went to the Elvis Costello concert at the Palais theatre last night. I was gloating before the event because I thought it was going to be an absolutely fantastic concert. It was good entertainment, but failed to blow me away. Perhaps the fans (self included) are getting too old.
I mainly dropped by, though, to tell you that the stink-bomb you dropped the other night, before running away, was stinky indeed. Thanks for the reminder that human stupidity has no bounds! :-D
I have it good authority (WifeOfVirge, who didn't sleep as soundly as I did) that I had Lu-Tze sitting on my head on one occasion. I remember waking up at one point when he clambered over my pillow, but I don't recall being sat on. I guess I can be thankful he didn't decide my ears were good to chew on.
I'm not sure how much damage Lu-Tze can do around here. We don't have a lot of really expensive decorations. He has already started finding pieces of furniture to pluck at. The sooner we get him to use the scratching post the better.
I kept a feral kitten in my room while taming him. Months later, I was admiring the huge Amish quilt that hangs on the wall over the bed. (It's really Mennonite, but who says "I have Mennonite quilts"? Amish sounds more authentic. Bought it from a stunning blonde Mennonite girl who was sitting in the middle of a wagon walled with quilts hung from poles and clotheslines. I stepped inside her outdoor room, heated by the sun, protected by the wind, ringed in patterned color.) The quilt top is 11 feet off the ground. Noticing tiny marks and holes, I followed them with hand and eye. I realized he'd run up and down the quilt, not in one place but all over. I then checked the drapes. Each one had the same pattern of holes. He'd literally run up the walls. Now he's probably curled up with Rachel, kneading her hair. From kitten to cat, feral to won't go out if it's below 45 degrees.
Congratulations on your new pets! They sound wonderful. I've always thought mischievous animals were the best kind, in spite of the inevitable mayhem. More interesting stories to tell.
Don't worry, old bean--it happens to the best of us. I once did something even sillier: unwittingly, I used the last square to wipe my nose, then had nothing left for, well, the usual purpose of bogroll. Another time, my flatmate left the seat up and I fell in. On another occasion still, I took off my coat to avoid getting the tails in the toilet water, and promptly dropped the whole THING in the bowl.
Toilets are just embarrassing moments waiting to happen. Folks who have the courage and wit to translate said embarrassments into amusing limericks for the rest of us to enjoy, well, they're just TOILET HEROES.
Virgil Keys, toilet hero. Hum. It sounded better in my head, really.
Unfortunately this one is a factual record of today's incident. There's a sinking feeling when one reaches for the fully enclosed paper roll and finds it to be completely empty. I looked around, but there were no spare rolls.
I waited until I could hear no noise, then dashed from one cubical to the next -- one hand to open the doors, the other to hold my half-mast trousers. Just as I entered the second cubical I heard the squeak of the main door opening. Phew! Not a moment to spare.
VirJournal updates! All these hysterical limericks, just as we (your ever-growing Internet audience) have come to look forward to! This one, for some reason, was particularly amusing. It caused immediate nasolactation (the violent expulsion of milk through the nose, and all over the monitor).
OK, the worst I've seen was the cat of a girlfriend, a former barn cat that had been partly tamed and would grudgingly let you touch it for 30 seconds after it awoke. She'd eat, barf next to the bowl and then eat the barf. Those two belonged together.
I have only one good hairball story. At least I think it's good, though that's probably only because of the memories. When I was a kid, we spent a summer in a rented house in Forte di Marmi, a resort town north of Pisa - complete with our own, dedicated beach umbrellas at the Ursa Maggiore beach club. We met some older Americans from New York and they introduced us to a terrific artist, Rosario Murabito, who lived in a big house on a cliff in a little village, with a huge terrace overlooking the sea. I think it's a museum now. He said he bought it after the war for back taxes after he'd been stopped for speeding.
Saro was an old kid who collected everything. The walls were crammed with pictures, but his real treasures were kept in glass cases. Those were his knives - his Corsican and Sardinian revenge knives (he loved to act out the act of taking revenge) and, notably for this story, his hair balls. These were huge hair balls from cows. Big things, really round and densely packed. We took immense delight in them.
Saro died in the early 70's.
More grossness follows. Read at own risk.
Old Gandalf was a past master at the yellow slime trick. He, being an indoors/outdoors cat, would go outside and eat some long blades of grass. Then, an hour or so later, he'd choose between tiled laundry/bathroom floors, lacquered hardboard kitchen/dining floors, or carpeted bedroom/study floors. Did I say choose? That's probably too strong a word. He used the carpet -- a puddle of slime with a non-digested blade or two of grass.
Lu-Tze & Isadora are strictly indoor cats. That leaves hairball hawking and stomach upsets. I hope the anti-hairball food lives up to its claim.
I like it when the vomit presents a compacted, yellow impression of the cat's insides, slightly curved, as though it regurgitated a snake. The cat looks at it, perhaps not comprehending that this thing was just expelled.
Grossness follows.
Lily, being siamese, was a prodigious vomiter, and usually in 3's. Finding the third was the challenge, since it consisted of pale yellow liquid. Finding it underfoot was disgusting. Finding a complete set under the covers - or worse, smelling it under the covers after you'd settled in - no words can describe.
How to spread the gag:
4. Describe steps 1-3 on the Internet!
In other word: EEEEEEEEEEEEEW! Man, it's that time of year around here, and everyone is catching the latest vomit bug. I am hearing vomit stories every day. It has me a little rattled, I must confess. (Not too rattled to be amused by your misfortune, though. Ha!)
Paws are for kneading my shoulder at night, for grabbing my toe when I won't get out of bed, for grabbing the edge of the counter when I'm making food (in the hope that some will be coming down).
Lily (RIP) would reach out a paw to touch your cheek as you lay in bed. She'd be jammed into your shoulder and, just as you were about to throw her the length of the room in disgust, she'd stretch her leg, place the pads of her paw on your cheek and leave it there.
If it makes you feel any better, I lost all interest in a most stylish fellow last year when he couldn't hold up his end of an argument. I think I was chatting to you on ICQ, at the time, in fact--or maybe that was someone else. Anyhow, it was driving me nuts, the amazing leaps of illogic this fellow was making. There were no more dates after that.
Some of us still do prefer a bit of substance. (We end up old maids, though, living with giant rats. Ha, ha.)
Beyond the humour of the parody, the sad part is that style (read: superficiality) is probably a clear winner when it comes to human sexual selection criteria. That saddens me because I'm still foolishly clinging to ideas about human evolution having been influenced by selection based on intelligence. It's too easy to look at the explosion of knowledge over the last few hundred years and conflate that with old dreams of enlightened utopian destiny. On an evolutionary scale, human intelligence has only increased because of its value in social manipulation and deceit: how to get more with less effort.
It's stories like your $100 bill one that remind me not to let my cynicism take over. If we can live and work in a sociopolitical environment that doesn't foster fear and mistrust, then the cooperative and caring parts of human nature will show more often.
$100 bill story: in the United States, where all the damn money looks the same, I once went into a McDonald's for a coffee and sarnie. "Two dollars," says the girl behind the counter. "Okay--one, two," I count, except it's really "One, a hundred and one," because I am too tired to spot the difference. So I hand this to the girl and start stumbling out, coffee already raised to my lips. I'm JUST going out the door, when I hear frantic footsteps behind me: "Ma'am! Ma'am! This is a hundred dollar bill!"
I must say, I was impressed. A lot of folks would've kept that.
/irrelevant story.
Those had me in stitches, though. Very amusing.
Haaa! My connection choked as that image was loading, and, only able to see the top third or so, I thought I was looking at a BIG HAIRY SPIDERLEG!
I must have spiders on the brain, or something.
Cool cool VERY SOMETING I CAN'T TYPE IT!!!
Hahahaha! That's great, Virge :)
I saw him a few times in the late 70's in showcases at clubs. A friend worked for his record company. He had great, unrepeatable in public stories of EC & Co. acting like certifiable jerks.
I liked his punkiness. I was into the NYC punk scene. Most of the music was awful, but it had so much more energy than - god forbid - disco and country rock (Charlie Daniels Band? Marshall Tucker Band? Ye gods.) Punk spoke to the my generalized anger and self-destructiveness, traits that still emerge. Oddly enough, that old style punk was probably healthier than the big disco scene of Studio 54, Magique, etc.; far fewer drugs if you weren't into heroin, which I never was.
Better looking girls in the discos though. With high price tags. That probably hasn't changed. Better looking boys too. I wasn't around that scene when HIV hit. In those days, at 3AM, you might see groups of guys in loin cloths dancing in circles, sometimes with drums, a fertility ritual of uninhibited sexual overdosing. Quite a sight. Disco was just as loud as punk, but I always used cotton in my ears.
WifeOfVirge and I went to the Elvis Costello concert at the Palais theatre last night. I was gloating before the event because I thought it was going to be an absolutely fantastic concert. It was good entertainment, but failed to blow me away. Perhaps the fans (self included) are getting too old.
What's the Elvis reference?
Ah, teh wisdom .... *nods sagely in attempts to appear enlightened*.
Thanks for the smile, my friend. =)
Aye. The stench is permeating every pore of society, and there's little hope of a fresh breeze.
Very witty!
I mainly dropped by, though, to tell you that the stink-bomb you dropped the other night, before running away, was stinky indeed. Thanks for the reminder that human stupidity has no bounds! :-D
I have it good authority (WifeOfVirge, who didn't sleep as soundly as I did) that I had Lu-Tze sitting on my head on one occasion. I remember waking up at one point when he clambered over my pillow, but I don't recall being sat on. I guess I can be thankful he didn't decide my ears were good to chew on.
I'm not sure how much damage Lu-Tze can do around here. We don't have a lot of really expensive decorations. He has already started finding pieces of furniture to pluck at. The sooner we get him to use the scratching post the better.
I kept a feral kitten in my room while taming him. Months later, I was admiring the huge Amish quilt that hangs on the wall over the bed. (It's really Mennonite, but who says "I have Mennonite quilts"? Amish sounds more authentic. Bought it from a stunning blonde Mennonite girl who was sitting in the middle of a wagon walled with quilts hung from poles and clotheslines. I stepped inside her outdoor room, heated by the sun, protected by the wind, ringed in patterned color.) The quilt top is 11 feet off the ground. Noticing tiny marks and holes, I followed them with hand and eye. I realized he'd run up and down the quilt, not in one place but all over. I then checked the drapes. Each one had the same pattern of holes. He'd literally run up the walls. Now he's probably curled up with Rachel, kneading her hair. From kitten to cat, feral to won't go out if it's below 45 degrees.
Congratulations on your new pets! They sound wonderful. I've always thought mischievous animals were the best kind, in spite of the inevitable mayhem. More interesting stories to tell.
Man, you ought to be getting paid for this stuff--you always have me in STITCHES! You're hilarious!
:D
I shall stand proud as did toilet heroes from times past:
Little John
Major James Bogglesworth (Boggles)
Buttman
The Flush
Wolvurine
Don't worry, old bean--it happens to the best of us. I once did something even sillier: unwittingly, I used the last square to wipe my nose, then had nothing left for, well, the usual purpose of bogroll. Another time, my flatmate left the seat up and I fell in. On another occasion still, I took off my coat to avoid getting the tails in the toilet water, and promptly dropped the whole THING in the bowl.
Toilets are just embarrassing moments waiting to happen. Folks who have the courage and wit to translate said embarrassments into amusing limericks for the rest of us to enjoy, well, they're just TOILET HEROES.
Virgil Keys, toilet hero. Hum. It sounded better in my head, really.
Unfortunately this one is a factual record of today's incident. There's a sinking feeling when one reaches for the fully enclosed paper roll and finds it to be completely empty. I looked around, but there were no spare rolls.
I waited until I could hear no noise, then dashed from one cubical to the next -- one hand to open the doors, the other to hold my half-mast trousers. Just as I entered the second cubical I heard the squeak of the main door opening. Phew! Not a moment to spare.
VirJournal updates! All these hysterical limericks, just as we (your ever-growing Internet audience) have come to look forward to! This one, for some reason, was particularly amusing. It caused immediate nasolactation (the violent expulsion of milk through the nose, and all over the monitor).