Or so I believe. Sorry for the confusion. And thanks to Anita for the heads-up.
Normally I would consider the words “McDonalds” and “upmarket” in the same phrase to constitute the most basic kind of oxymoron. Oh well…maybe I just don’t have enough caffeine in me yet.
“[McDonalds] says staff will be better trained, would smile and apologise.”
As Peter’s Mum would say: “Oh, well that’s all right then.” (wry look) And are they going to start paying their staff more than the minimum wage? That would be nice too.
…Meanwhile, in local news, Beemer seems to be less interested in the fish out in the pond. This may have to do with my having changed the spray head on the pond’s fountain, the other day. The new spray head throws the water around in a way that creates more turbulence on the surface, and makes it harder to see the fish clearly. (It also makes it harder for me to count the critters, but that’s my problem.)
I’ve republished the archives in “monthly” format. Still trying to figure out what to do about permalinks. Please bear with me…
Shame on me. Take a look at their take on media coverage of the war. I particularly like the article “U.S. Forms Its Own U.N.”
Meanwhile, something peculiar is going on with the archives. I’m going to try republishing them a little later and see if that straightens the problem out.
…and the honor they get in their home country after they’re safely dead, is here.
But there are some oddities. Among them: plainly the writer hasn’t been here for a while, as the Floozie in the Jacuzzi hasn’t been on O’Connell Street for — what? a year, or two? Or more? — since they removed her to make room for the Spire of Dublin. 
Other peculiarities: “Bloom’s Day?” Obviously this guy doesn’t even have the wee bit of Joyce-savvy necessary to know how the word (isn’t) punctuated. But probably most annoying to me is the way the article gives the impression that this celebration of writers is something Dublin’s just started doing, possibly as a cynical ploy for publicity….which is simply untrue. Where such commemoration happens, it’s meant with genuine affection. And probably as much to the point are all the places where it doesn’t, or didn’t happen.
Consider Jury’s Antique Bar in Dame Street, Dublin. In the ancient day, Joyce used to drink there. In the early 1970’s, Jury’s (then in the act of becoming a hotel chain as well as an owner of “licensed premises”) was preparing to gut the wood-paneled bar with its painted tiles and replace it with something more modern. The ornate paneling and brass fittings would have been sold for salvage: everything else would simply have been thrown away.
It took the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich — the place where Joyce fetched up for the longest, I believe, after leaving Ireland — to keep this from happening. Members of the Foundation raised enough money to buy the interior of the old bar, import it to Switzerland, and then prevailed on one of the Big Three Swiss banks (now UBS) to give the interior a new home in a bank building at Pelikanstrasse 8 in Zurich, where it could be recreated exactly as it had been.
There it stands now, as pleasant a place to have lunch or dinner as you could hope for…and with genuine Irish craic seeping out of the walls. When the crowd gets in there in the evening, it takes careful listening to the language to determine that you’re not in fact in Dublin. (The pub pulls a pretty good pint, too. — I know I have some pictures of the place around here. I should dig them up…)
EXT. FRONT YARD, MORNING -- THE FISHPONDTHE COUNT
One, two, three golden orfe! One, two, three shubunkin!
(SFX: SINISTER ORGAN STING)
THE COUNT (CONT'D) Bwahahahahahahaaaa!
DIANE One cat, one, watching them!
(SFX: SERENE TINKLING OF FOUNTAIN... BUT FOR HOW LONG?)
DIANE (CONT'D) (resigned) I was kind of hoping this was just a phase she was passing through....
…Peter has helped make the situation a little less nervewracking by moving a couple of larger stones onto the one Beemer’s been sitting on, thus forcing her to do her fishwatching from a slightly more remote situation and angle. At least she won’t be able to reach straight down into the water and hook one of the fish out.
I think.
I should put a daily status box over in one of the columns. (Oh, great, one more thing to do. A fish body count…)
Yesterday Peter and I were out running some errands in the nearest shopping town (as usual, these errands centered mostly around cat food) when we ran into Brian, an acquaintance who works in forestry and organic farming. He told us (with some amusement) about this story, which I’m delighted to find was not an April Fool’s joke of some kind. (However, the source, the Weekly World News, is a tabloid of the type which routinely publishes headlines along the lines of Dwarf Rapes Nun — Flees in UFO.)
“Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges — and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!”
What would be fun now, if I wasn’t up to my nose in other things, would be to find out whether there was the slightest grain of truth from which this story might have grown. …Yeah, I know, I’m the eternal optomist.
As work continues on the fishpond, Beemer has taken to spending more and more of her time, both by day and night, staring into the water at the fish.
There are three golden orfe and three shubunkin. (There was also a small Mystery Fish, but we’ve lost track of him — he may have been lost during a pool-cleaning accident in March. But he’s almost impossible to see, he’s so small and dark. He may be in there and doing just fine.) But now I find myself going out every morning, and every evening, to check that there are the same number of fish that there were previously.
I feel like the Count. “One! One golden orfe! Two! Two orfe! Three! — no, wait, that’s the same one I just counted. Okay, let’s start again. One — two — Will you guys stop moving around??!” …Yeah, right, tell the fish to stop swimming. And Beemer just crouches by the water, on her favorite fish-watching stone, and keeps watching.
Last night Peter went out with a flashlight and came back in after a while, saying, “I only see two orfe…” So I spent the night waking up every few hours to wonder whether Beemer had indeed eaten one of them. We’d thought, earlier, that we might have some trouble along these lines with the blue heron that fishes in the big pond behind the house — the “hern-cran”, as Peter’s friend Charles likes to call it — but the hern-cran (a) couldn’t find anywhere shallow enough to stand in the little pond, and (b) is highly unlikely to spend much time tyring to find a good standing-spot when any one of four cats might come along at any moment. And now it seems it’s going to be the cats who’re the problem, not the hern-cran. …I had always said, “If the cats eat the fish, we’ll replace them.” But I find I’ve gotten attached to these guys, after watching them grow over the past couple of years. Replacing them would be no problem…but I’d miss the first ones…
Out I went first thing this morning to do the Count Thing. One, two, three golden orfe. Three golden orfe: yayyyyy! Everybody’s where they should be. Big sigh of relief.
Beemer is presently sleeping near me on the Patagonia fleece throw on top of the couch. But she won’t be there for much longer. Pretty soon she’ll wake up and go back out to sit on the fish-watching stone again…
While I’m thinking about the Muppets: the other day, on TG4 (that’s the Irish-language TV channel here) I saw one of the more mind-bending things I’ve seen lately: the Muppet Show dubbed into Gaeilge. It loses something, if you ask me. But worth noting is the fact that the voice talent dubbing Kermit into Irish does, if you ask me, a much better Kermit than Jim Henson’s son does. Astonishingly better. I’m sorry I didn’t tape it, in retrospect. Oh well…next week, maybe.
“As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.”
…Had I been at this press briefing, the urge to run up to the person involved, hit him over the head with a bo, shout “Mu!”, and scamper away, would have been too much for me to resist. So it’s a good thing I wasn’t there, since such a course of action would almost certainly have resulted in me being put away for the rest of my natural life. (Thanks again to BoingBoing for the original link.)
Time for something more classical to take the taste away. From Ikkyu:
“A Meal of Fresh Octopus”
Lots of arms, just like Kannon the Goddess;
Sacrificed for me, garnished with citron, I revere it so!
The taste of the sea, just divine!
Sorry, Buddha, this is another precept I just cannot keep.
…from Ryokan:
Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.
…and the great Bashō:
The summer grasses
As if the warriors were a dream.
Also: “There’s a vacant house right around the corner from here. We put some cameras in it, just in case something interesting happens. We don’t guarantee anything, but we think there’s a pretty good chance squatters might move in at some point. Or the house might be demolished. Or something. Hey, you never know.”
…at part of the cover sketch for the 20th anniversary edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard. The artist, Greg Swearingen, will be doing the “digest” edition covers from now on. (Cliff Nielsen will continue to do the hardcover and mass-market edition covers.)
Guys, I didn’t say I had no English fandom! I know you’re out there. But my royalty statements from Corgi (such as they were) suggest strongly that all the books together sold about a thousand copies in the UK (and via export to Australia, New Zealand, etc) over the course of two years or more. This is secondary to the books’ editors going freelance (not that I grudge them that! — but no dedicated SF editors came in to replace them); as a result, no one was left in-house at Corgi who felt any great impulse to urge the books on the sales force — and this went for the “Door Into…” books as well.
The truly weird thing is that, even in the wake of all the Pottermania, my UK agent still cannot get any UK publisher interested in the “Young Wizards” group. They all either point to the horrible Corgi sales figures (nobody in the present market wants “books with a bad history”) or else they say one of these things: (a) “We already have something like that” (they do??), (b) “Too American.” Or sometimes they do both. The long-suffering Meg has hit every single major UK publisher, repeatedly, as editorial staff and other circumstances change. No dice. I tell you, it’s enough to make a girl go off and write movies or something.
…The upshot of all this is that Harcourt is arranging with our UK and US agents to start exporting the books into the UK market itself (distribution in the Canadian market is already handled by Raincoast). No idea how this is going to affect the Antipodean markets as yet.
In other bizarre news: the Russian publisher which has just picked up the rights for the books is the same one presently being (pur)sued by Scholastic regarding their publication of “Tanya Grotter and the Double Bass”. How this is going to affect the YW books, there’s no way to tell.
PS — Emily: Thunderbolts? What thunderbolts? I prefer the subtle approach. I might silt up your local harbor, but that’s about as blatant as I get. 😉