Don’t Blame Mercury

/ Diane Henders

Last week I postulated that Mercury was causing my recent communication failures, but I’m reconsidering.  I think there’s a more pervasive issue here – maybe it’s something in the air.  (Hmmm, wacky tobacky?  I’ve seen a few Skidmark lookalikes out here…)

Anyhow, here are some captions that made me think, “Wait, what?” this week:

An inexplicable popup ad (I think it was on Facebook):

Is there an Anti-Makeup League?

“Stop makeup?” As in “Eradicate cosmetics from the planet”?  Which twice-daily activities of 50+ ladies could singlehandedly stop makeup in its tracks?  And what does Dragon’s Den have to do with either of those captions?

But regardless of Facebook’s supposedly accurate demographic targeting, the ad clearly wasn’t aimed at me – it’s common knowledge that I ain’t no lady.

And then there was this:

If there are children ON the highway, shouldn’t I stop?

The big yellow sign makes perfect sense without any further explanation:  Be watchful and reduce your speed because there may be schoolkids in the area.  Duh.

But no; apparently somebody thought the pictogram needed clarification.  They should have considered their wording a little more carefully, ‘cause now it looks as though there’s an optimum speed for running over children; like the signs they post at speed bumps where anything over 20 km/hr will rip out your car’s undercarriage.  I guess children are softer, so you can hit them at a higher speed.

Another thing that always gives me a giggle is the Accuweather forecast:

Now we know who hires the English majors.

In Calgary, any forecast that includes water falling from the sky uses one of two words:  “Rain”, or “Showers”.  Here, the forecast is quite creative:  “a touch of rain”, “spotty showers”, “a little rain”, “drizzle”, “downpours”, “periods of rain”, “patchy clouds”, etc.

Only a few weeks after we’d arrived, one forecast really made me laugh.  Accuweather had predicted “Downpours amounting to 2 inches over the next 24 hours”.

I thought, “Oooh, downpours!” and waited for the sky to open in a deluge.

But nope; nada.  Just the usual soft gentle rain.

By the end of the day I was snickering.  On the prairies where I grew up, it ain’t a downpour until you get 2 inches of rain in half an hour.  Now that’s a frog-strangler.  (But Accuweather hasn’t discovered that particular description yet – shhh, don’t tell them.)

From the above forecasts, you may be getting the impression that we’ve had a wee bit of precipitation this winter.

Um, yeah.  It’s a record year.  Even the locals are whining and bitching about it.

But I don’t care.  Yesterday I went down to the ocean and stood in the morning silence, watching the mist shroud the mountaintops and the calm water ripple against the shore.  Everything was the colour of silver and pearls, and a loon’s haunting cry drifted across the water.

It was sublime – even a 180-degree panorama doesn’t do it justice. (And it’s not stinky anymore.)

And, on a more prosaic but just as important topic:   Even the pizza is a work of art here.

They named it “La Principessa”.

Truly we’ve found heaven. 😀

43 thoughts on “Don’t Blame Mercury”

  1. Those kids on the highway are going to need to be pretty quick and agile. I always wondered what the optimum speed was for trying to get them.
    I stopped drinking mercury years ago, but it did make a good mix with scotch.

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      • Years ago I worked at a place that had one of those marquee things out front that you could change the message on. Usually it was a blurb about something we had on sale inside the store, or the owner might dig up some brief-but-profound saying to put on it. While the boss and his family were on vacation one week I was assigned the task of redoing the sign every couple of days. As soon as they cleared the city limits sign, I put this on the sign:

        Up Earth!
        Up Mars!
        Up Jupiter!
        Up Uranus!

        An hour later, the boss called the store and told me in very plain language and in no uncertain terms to get that #^*@*#^%!! off the sign and replace it with what was on the list he’d left on my desk.

        This was decades before cell phones.

        The boss’s best friends, the couple they were going to meet at their favorite campground in the mountains in New Mexico, had happened by on their way out of town a few minutes after I’d put my, er, selection up. And they took a picture of it with their Polaroid camera (I told you, it was YEARS ago!) and showed it to my boss at the restaurant they’d met up at in the next town. The buddies thought it was hilarious. My boss, not so much.

        That was forty-five years ago. Any mention of Uranus brings the whole wretched episode back in perfect clarity.

        So thanks a big freakin’ lump, C-a-L. 🙂

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  4. Back in the 80’s I worked for a wierd little company headed by an androgenous yet heterosexual couple in a long term relationship. At one point the woman of the couple came to me and told me that they both were considering getting “permanant makeup” tattooed on eyelids and lips. She asked my opinion. I told her I wouldn’t ever do it because firstly, I am afraid to let anyone with needles near my eyes unless they have an optical surgical specialty and I’m immobilized and hopefully anesthetized, and secondly, the idea of purposly injuring skin in such delicate areas and enduring the time it would take to fully heal would never be an idea I’d ever entertain, and thirdly, styles and colors in fashion are constantly changing, and I would not want to lock myself into colors and styles that are certain to date you in less than a decade. I’m still agast that anyone could be licensed to tattoo eyelids or the complete surface of lips or that anyone would willingly choose to pay someone to do this to themselves.

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    • I had LASIK surgery on my eyes without flinching, but if I saw a tattoo needle coming at my eyes I’d disclaim responsibility for any personal or property damage that might result from my attempts to escape.

      And even if I could get over the whole ‘unqualified person wielding needles near my eyes’ thing, I don’t trust anybody enough to let them draw something on my face that I’d have to wear for the rest of my life. Just… not… happening!

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        • LOL! I didn’t take Valium at all – I was fine without it. (It’s that whole ‘professional knowledge’ thing.) But I also didn’t trust them enough to have both eyes done at once – I had my non-dominant eye done first, just in case, and then had the other one done a month later after I knew the first one would be okay. Hubby, on the other hand, had Valium and then some. It didn’t help him at all during the procedure, but he was completely stoned for the rest of the day. He’s funny when he’s stoned! 😉

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          • It’s great when everyone else benefits more from the anesthesia than the patient does. I’m absolutely positive that statement is true. I’ve heard it from far too many ‘reliable’ witnesses to doubt it in the least.

            Even from my dentist: “Geez, Dood, you must be the poster child for why they call that stuff laughing gas! We give you the gas, and we spend the next two weeks laughing!”

            I make THEM sign forms when I’m going to be anesthetized now. That way my lawyer is the only one who gets to put the videos on YouTube. And that’s only if he forgets that Texas is Open Carry now. His memory seems to improve a little every time I remind him of that. Just sayin’… 🙂

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          • Hmm, I’ll have to remember that for when y’all legalize up there. Sounds like my kind of folks!
            My eyes were so bad, I did them both at the same time, because if we did separately it would have been a mess with having one perfect eye and one that didn’t see well for a few weeks with a glasses lens. I was the second worst eyes they had ever corrected, around -3000 and around -6 of astigmatism! that was 17 years ago and most of the time I only need glasses at night so I’m still pleased with my results.

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            • Wow, that’s awesome! Hubby’s eyes were pretty bad, too – without his Coke-bottle glasses he was legally blind before the procedure. Needless to say, he’s still pleased with the results, too!

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  5. Now you’ve got me curious about what I can do to stop putting on makeup. I still haven’t reached the point I can go out comfortably without it. Crazy, I know. Sometimes I do to run errands, but I always feel naked. Dang societal expectations!

    How nice it must be for you to be near the ocean now!

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  6. What a beautiful shot! You truly have landed in a good place, despite the terrible winter. Hopefully that won’t be repeated any time soon.

    I don’t care for the new trend to micro-describe the weather. I just want a general idea – sun? rain/snow? wind? That’s enough. I get confused reading all the details. Hm. Maybe that says more about me than about the weather people.

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    • I think it says you’re practical. 😉 I’ve given up even looking at the weather forecast because we’re in such an odd little microclimate here. Nanaimo’s forecast will show a solid week of rain, and we’ll get sunshine (at least for a little while). Even now that it’s bucketing down rain every day, we still get a few little sunny breaks. That’s one of the things I love about this place!

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    • Weather language must specialize under certain conditions. I had a brother who lived in the San Diego area who explained that every day the weather was exactly the same. Fog every morning which burns off around noon, then sunny and warm until sunset cools things down. Why do you need meteorologists if there is little or no weather?

      I understand that those who live with snow for more of the year and in far greater quantities will need more specific language than we in my part of the US need. When I first started using wooden cross country skis for blazing my own trails, there was a bit of a learning curve about the best wax to use on the area under your feet that makes contact with the snow depending on temperature and the texture of the snow. The waxes then were imported back then from somewhere in Scandinavia. The instructions were translated from the Nordic languages as best they could. Optimal temperature range was no big deal, but snow textures were another thing entirely. The most baffling condition was translated as, “Use when small frost changes to thaw.”

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      • That’s fabulous! I was a connoisseur of wooden ski waxes, too, and when I switched to synthetic skis I was disappointed to find that they never did perform as well as my properly-waxed wooden ones.

        “Small frost changing to thaw” does sound baffling. Right up there with “corn snow”, which, once you’ve experienced it, is a perfect description. Until then? Erm, not so much… 😉

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  7. I envy you that peaceful ocean. Speaking of heavenly pizza, if you are ever in downtown Duncan, find The Garage. It has wonderful food, groceries and all sorts of good stuff.
    What goes bumpety-squish bumpety-squish? A car speeding through a school yard at recess. (kids bring home bad jokes from school as well as communicable diseases).

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    • Bahahaha!!! Nothing like a good(bad) schoolhouse joke! And I will definitely look up The Garage the next time we’re passing through Duncan. It sounds wonderful!

      For me, going down the ocean is a major stress reliever. The closer I get to the water, the lighter my worries become. Ahhhh. 🙂

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  8. Well, of course they named it princess. There ain’t big chunks of MEAT on it! But it *is* a lovely pizza… Oh, they use shredded cheese for makeup? Is it THAT league? We would use those people for speed bumps, I think. Just sayin’… 🙂

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