Random Silliness

20 Questions, Bus Edition

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On the bus the other day, we trundled past the billboard on Lamar that asks, “Can You Name 7 Kinds of Berries?” It’s a fruit ad for summer. There’s one for “5 Kinds of Apples” somewhere, too. I turned to Callaghan to see if he was up to the task.

“Okay… name seven kinds of berries!”

“Halle Berry.”

He didn’t even blink. “Halle Berry” was literally the first thing to pop into his mind when he heard “berries.” But the woman is inhumanly beautiful, so who can blame him?

“Chuck Berry,” he continued, grinning. “Barry White. Barry Manilow…”

“What’s Ronnie James’s nickname?” I cut off his string of berries, even though I was laughing.

“Precious Kitty Baby Boo Boo?”

“WRONG!”

“Wrah-Wrah Boo Boo?”

Where’s the “Boo Boo” part coming from, I wondered. I’ve never used that nickname. And “Wrah-Wrah” is one of his own terms of endearment for The Ronnie James. (Actually, it’s a word in RJ’s vocabulary. It’s Kitty-ese. We’re just imitating him when we say it.)

“It’s ‘Precious Angel Baby Bunny Dragon’,” I reminded him. Duh.

“Oh. Yeah.”

More on that later. It’s a “NOT UNLIKE” kind of thing.

Anyway, I would be remiss in not providing a visual for this post, so here you go….

 

Halle Berry

Halle Berry

 

Have a luscious (and nutritious) summer weekend, All!

I AM DYING TO SUBMIT THIS PICTURE TO ENGRISH.COM

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My parents recently went to Hokkaido for Dad’s annual Japan summer golf trip. As usual, shortly after their return, a package arrived for me because Mom went shopping and thoughtfully sent a few things my way. For quite a few years now I’ve been using random Japanese and Korean beauty products from Japan and Hawaii, and they’re amazing. (Not sure whether any of the brands are tested on animals. I know to avoid stuff made in China, but I have no idea as to the others.)

Here are some of the things that arrived last week:

 

Background: facial gel exfoliator and foaming cleanser (both made in Japan); Juicy Drop BB Cream (made in Korea) Foreground: a variety of sheet masks (all made in Korea)

Background: facial gel exfoliator & foaming cleanser (made in Japan); Juicy Drop BB Cream (made in Korea)
Foreground: a variety of sheet masks (all made in Korea)

 

A fun by-product of getting Asian cleansers and creams and such is the Engrish you’re sure to find on the packaging. In case you didn’t know, “Engrish” is the result of humorously botched English translations from some Asian languages; there’s a website that pays homage to it. Product packaging is a fairly reliable supplier of examples, and this blog post right here exemplifies why I would be a terrible beauty blogger: my amusement and enthusiasm in sharing the Engrish on the labels outweigh my interest in telling you about the products, themselves.

Behold:

 

This is the foaming facial cleanser... "Washing Form" in Engrish.

This is the foaming facial cleanser… “Washing Form” in Engrish.

 

(Not sure why there’s a picture of a horse on the bottle. Not sure I want to know why, either.)

Now take a look at THIS. I hope you can read it (click photo to enlarge). This is the text on the back of the one sheet mask that’s not an Epielle – it’s the one to the far left in the array photo above, with the woman’s face in the picture:

 

Contains beauty gredients for skin activity in the sheets! Helps horny clear up! Put a water skin on the face. TAP YOUR FACE FOR BEING ABSORBED COMPLETELY INTO YOUR FACE. Keep it coolly at the case status and use it.

Contains beauty gredients for skin activity in the sheets! Helps horny clear up! Put a water skin on the face. TAP YOUR FACE FOR BEING ABSORBED COMPLETELY INTO YOUR FACE. Keep it coolly at the case status and use it.

 

Awesome, right? And, bonus… it really is a lovely product!

Getting Eaten by a Shark in Kansas Never Seemed More Possible.

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Last week, I wrote about disaster movies. Imagine my horrified bemusement, then, when I woke up this morning to realize that #SharkNado struck the airwaves last night, and somehow, we weren’t prepared. The gory aftermath was splattered all over my Twitter.

It started with this:

#SHARKNADO (7/12/13)

Which drove me straight into the bowels of the internets. I had to find out all about it.

(This may or may not be related to Callaghan interrupting my train of thought just now to say, “Hey Baby – we need to start making a food stash.”  Seriously! He didn’t know that I was writing about this! The sixth sense is a funny thing.)

 

 

So, a Sharknado is a storm in which great numbers of some species of shark – I’m assuming Great Whites, from the looks of it – come raining down onto the land from a Category 5 monstrosity broiling over the sea. Meteorologists have no doubt already taken note that the eyes of these storms are special. For one thing, they’re lateral.

Now, I’m not a film critic. But if I were a film critic, and if I had the task of reviewing #SharkNado, the first thing I’d do is call out the omission of Samuel L. Jackson. Samuel L. Jackson was in Jurassic Park, and, of course, Snakes on a Plane, two of my all-time favorite disaster movies. Because this was the one thought pounding through my head as the trailer wound down:

WHERE IS SAMUEL L. JACKSON? A MOVIE CALLED “SHARKNADO” MUST FEATURE SAMUEL L. MOTHERF*CKEN JACKSON!!

Major casting FAIL.

That is all.

Thrashing around in the Throes

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“Mr. Hammond, after careful consideration, I’ve decided not to endorse your park.” (Jurassic Park)

What a great conclusion! What valleys of chaos traversed to reach it! (Hmm, if we were to return to our wilderness home in France, would we find T-Rex and Velociraptor tracks in our wake?) Humans seem to thrive on mayhem. What is it about disaster – especially violent disaster – that mesmerizes us?

“I wonder if robots will ever watch Terminator and figure out that they’re supposed to kill the humans,” Callaghan mused as we were eating our salad the other night. “Maybe it’s the movie that’s going to trigger everything!”

Indeed. When it comes to entertaining ourselves with disaster, it’s not enough for people to kill other people. Nature killing people isn’t enough, either. We need robots to kill us, too.

For me, it’s clowns… call me a traditionalist, or maybe just a person with a weak imagination. For those of you who were wondering, the incessant buzz over World War Z extinguished my preoccupation with zombies. Main-streaming the topic to that over-budgeted extent in a “summer action blockbuster” production finally killed it for me. (I enjoyed Zombieland, but even that was borderline. We did try to watch Warm Bodies recently, but we lost interest not even halfway through, and couldn’t finish it. When it comes to zombie movies, nothing does it for me like Shaun of the Dead.) World War Z might be a great movie, and I might really like it, but its making dethroned zombies from the top of my list of dark, fantastical obsessions. My horror sensibilities are stimulated most effectively in the more obscure tunnels of pop culture. Reading the hundredth little article on the production troubles of WWZ, I turned back to clowns with a perverse nod of respect and restored to them their hold on the freak-out center of my brain.

Clowns scare me because those colorfully diabolical characters embody the insane. Insanity means complexity, and the more complex something is, the more there is to fear. Clowns also tend to be smart, and that makes them terrifyingly unpredictable. Zombies are brainless and therefore completely predictable, engendering fear in the opposite way. (If we use this comparison as a political analogy, which would be the scarier party, then, the Clowns or the Zombies?)

Plus, clowns’ origins can be found in nature. This explains everything:

 

Am I right?

“The Dude’s not in. Leave a message after the beep.”

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A while back, we were watching something, and there was a reference to boiling a bunny. Hart of Dixie, perhaps? I think it was Zoe Hart… she was talking to Lavon or someone about Wade – or maybe about George? – saying something along the lines of, “I’m not going to boil his bunny or anything like that.” (I could be misremembering this. Maybe it wasn’t Hart of Dixie at all.) Whatever the case, it made me snicker, and it brought to light an important information deficit. Callaghan didn’t get the reference. It turned out that he didn’t know anything about boiling bunnies, because he’d never seen Fatal Attraction. This threw me off. Callaghan got his American citizenship (he has dual French/American citizenship status) back in 2003, and I don’t know, I guess I’d just assumed that familiarity with Fatal Attraction is some sort of requirement. I mean, shouldn’t it be on the citizenship test? How can you claim to be an American if you don’t know about Glenn Close boiling a bunny? The cliché has become as American as baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, as the old commercial jingle goes. It’s circa 1980’s American Pop Culture 101 material.

So we watched Fatal Attraction, effectively rectifying the situation. Now, Callaghan has all the background he needs on Glenn Close and boiling bunnies, and he is enriched. His life is complete. What would he do without me?

Being dedicated pop culture afficionados, we ventured downtown Friday night to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Ritz) for The Big Lebowski Quote-Along, so we could sit in a theater with a bunch of fellow Big Lebowski geeks and shout out the famous lines captioned on the screen (lines we all know by heart, anyway), waving our glow sticks for The Jesus and swinging our oversize blow-up baseball bats to show Larry what happens when you fuck a stranger up the ass. Our waitress brought a White Russian for Callaghan, a tall glass of ice water for me, and a huge metal bowl of the best movie theater popcorn we’ve ever had.

The timing was great, since we’d been overdue for a Big Lebowski fix. Satiated, we emerged from the theater onto the thumping street. 6th Street in Austin at almost 2:00 on a Saturday morning looks like this:

 

Austin closes off vehicle access to 6th Street during the night on the weekends. The bar-hopping pedestrian party needs all the space it can get.

Austin closes off vehicle access to 6th Street during the night on the weekends. The bar-hopping pedestrian party needs all the space it can get.

 

6th St, Austin (6/28/13)

 

6th St, Austin (6/28/13)

 

Even the going-home was entertaining! The bus that took us back to our apartment is dubbed “The Night Owl,” but it should be called “The Party Bus,” because that’s exactly what it is. From 6th Street to our apartment. Direct.

No In-and-Out Burger on the way home for us, though. Nor music by the Eagles. You see what happens, Larry?

Behind Masks and Closed Doors….

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Ha! I just startled Callaghan when he turned around and found me covered up in an Epielle Facial Essence Mask. The single-use mask is basically a small, white cotton sheet cut to fit the face, with holes for eyes, nose and mouth, heavily saturated in liquid botanical extracts and other ingredients. You unfold it, drape it over your face, and smooth it down into place. So easy! I leave it on for 30 minutes. Peel off, throw away, done. There’s no need to rinse. Your skin drinks up the product and air-dries after you remove the sheet, and then you can carry on with your normal routine.

Continuing for a second with this tangent (because I didn’t plan to talk about facial masks): I love sheet masks. Oil-absorbing clay masks have their merits, but seriously? Making the effort to remove a hardened clay mask from my face was never my favorite thing to do. I’m too lazy. (I’m not a fan of peel masks, either.) Mom sent three different varieties of the Epielle masks: Firming and Lifting with Vitamin C (“rejuvenating & conditioning formula”), Green Tea & Aloe (“detoxifying & soothing formula”), and Cucumber (“refreshing & purifying formula”). I’m currently wearing a cucumber one, which my skin loves. It feels luxurious, and it smells delightfully like a faintly sweet, fresh cucumber.

My mother has been my beauty mentor all my life. I do my own research to stay current with the science behind skincare, but I follow her advice and use the products she sends. She looks a good 15-20 years younger than she is. She’s amazing, and I’m lucky. I started using sheet masks when she first started sending them to me over ten years ago. Thank you, Mom!

So here’s the question that’s been smoldering in my mind since yesterday: Do you ever wonder what’s going on behind that closed door when you go to someone’s place and no one answers, but you suspect that someone’s home?

Yesterday, Callaghan and I were sitting here on the loveseat when someone knocked on the door. Based on recent events, we guessed that the visitor was either a kid selling something, or a couple coming to talk to us about religion, though we could have been wrong. We deliberated for a few seconds before deciding that we would answer the door. But there was a snag. Literally.

“Back here!” Callaghan hissed in my ear as he frantically pointed and gestured behind his neck. He was leaning forward at a tentative, strange angle. I looked. A thread from one of the couch cushions behind him was badly ensnarled in the clasp of his thin gold chain necklace. He was stuck! The cushion was attached to his back like a shell on a turtle, and someone was waiting at the door. I muffled a laugh with my hand as I hopped over him quickly to get the scissors from the kitchen.

The gold chain is very delicate, and the loveseat cushion is very nice, and we didn’t want either one to get ruined, so the situation required some patience and finesse. By the time I’d extricated Callaghan from the cushion, the person at the door was gone. Maybe I should have answered the door on my way to the kitchen, but then we would have had to explain that we don’t usually wear our furniture. (Rather, our furniture wears us.)

So that’s what the person on the other side of the door would have seen had they come equip with wall-penetrating X-Ray glasses. Something to think about the next time you go to someone’s house and they don’t answer the door. You just never know what’s going on!

In Every Bowl of Soup I See / Giraffes and Ligers Watching Me

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(That’s based on Shirley Temple’s “Animal Crackers in My Soup,” in case you didn’t know.)

This post is brought to you by the eleventh orange I’ve eaten this week. Not the eleventh hour. The eleventh orange. I’m pretty sure that crime scene investigators could apply their crazy ninja forensics techniques to my laptop keyboard and uncover hard evidence of all eleven of those oranges, as careful as I am to avoid smudges.

Now, what was I going to share? Oh yes:

“A Giraffe totem corresponds to farsightedness and balance between earth and sky.” (Llewellyn)

I’ve been thinking that my so-called spirit animal must be the giraffe, since reading that quote has an oddly grounding, motivating effect on me. Now, when I close my eyes and envision the giraffe at the window of the safari bus in Arizona that one time, a feeling of centeredness comes rolling back. It works!

I remember when I thought that my spirit animal was the wild horse. I re-thought that whole thing when I discovered, not too long ago, that I’m actually kind of uneasy around horses. I’m still in awe of the wild horse spirit, but the reality of a horse and me standing together is just… I don’t know. It’s a hard thing to phrase, so, just to show you, here’s a picture of me with our neighbor’s horse in France back in April:

 

Pardon me. I just live here. Oh wait, this is a French horse, so... Je m'excuse. Now how do you say "I just live here" - "J'habite seulement ici?" Or "J'habite juste ici?" Not working. American slang doesn't translate! Nevermind.

Pardon me. I just live here. Oh wait, this is a French horse, so… Je m’excuse. Now how do you say “I just live here” – “J’habite seulement ici?” Or “J’habite juste ici?” Not working. American slang doesn’t translate! Nevermind.

 

See the body language dynamic going on there? This was a candid shot of a chance encounter. Callaghan captured a spontaneous moment, and looking at this picture brings back the awkwardness of it. That horse and I were both, like, uhhh… yeah. I just didn’t know how to relate to that guy. Have you ever felt self-conscious in front of a horse? (Surely I can’t be the only person who’s ever been discomfited in the presence of a horse.) I didn’t connect with that horse on any level. It was like he was the reincarnation of someone I used to know. Someone who used to fluster me at cocktail parties.

So, yeah, giraffes.

Speaking of animals, the other night, I was reading to Callaghan about the liger (lion-tiger hybrid) and her baby liligers (offspring of a liger and a lion) at the Novosibirsk Zoo in Russia.

“Check out this liger,” I said, shoving my laptop under his nose. “They actually exist outside of Napoleon Dynamite!” We started flipping through the slideshow.

“Look at that! He’s got strots,” said Callaghan, pointing at one of the baby liligers.

“Strots?”

“A mixture of stripes and dots.”

 

The liger and her liliger cub at the Novosibirsk Zoo in Russia

The liger and her liliger cub at the Novosibirsk Zoo in Russia

 

In other animal marking news, my current favorite eye makeup look is sparkly pink shadow with a matte black overlaid on the lids:

 

Friday, 21 June 2013

 

Can you see it? (Don’t mind the hair. I had the front chopped and deep layers cut all around for growing-out purposes.)

While I’m at it, here are some pics of us goofing around before we left the house this morning:

 

Goofing around on Friday, 21 June 2013

 

Goofing around on Friday, 21 June 2013

 

A bonus cool thing that happened today - our state ID and drivers license arrived in the mail! Texas state residencies established, check.

A bonus cool thing that happened today – our state ID and drivers license arrived in the mail! Texas state residencies established, check.

 

Happy Summer Solstice, Everyone!

Of Course – Learn Something New Every Day!

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We now have a shipping date. We’re packing and trashing and selling all kinds of stuff, and Callaghan’s starting to eat some of the preserved food we’d stockpiled for emergencies, because why not? It’s there, and we’re not taking it with us. Last night, he opened a can of cannelloni to eat with the salad and fresh asparagus we were also having.

I studied the contents of his plate. The cannelloni looked like reddish-beige rubber tubes with glossy pink sausagey-looking things inside.

“So what exactly is that ‘mystery meat’,” I wondered out loud, fully aware that if there was an answer, then it wouldn’t be a mystery.

“A course,” said Callaghan.

I thought I heard “of course.” I waited for him to continue.

“A what?”

“Course!” he repeated.

I’m so confused! My head’s going to explode!

My mind whipped through all the French words I know, searching for one that would sound like “course” that might bear resemblance to a meat-related word in English.

“Course.” I tried out the word myself. Still didn’t make sense. What the hell is he talking about?

“If you don’t know whether it’s a cow or a horse, it’s a cowrse,” Callaghan explained.

Oh. Duh!

 

Survival food - little pieces of COWRSEmeat wrapped in pieces of pasty white industrial dough, smothered in some kind of red sauce

Survival food – little pieces of COWRSEmeat wrapped in pieces of pasty white industrial dough, smothered in some kind of red sauce

 

Cowrses have chicken heads, didn’t you know?

 

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

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…said Jake Chambers in The Dark Tower epic series by Stephen King. Better words to capture the essence of escapism have never been spoken.

Whoa! This last week’s been about packing, cleaning, taking stuff to the dump, hanging out with a friend who came to stay for a couple of days, and working around technical difficulties – up until this minute, in fact – with both our internet connection and my computer AC adaptor malfunction.

I’m flipping through my agenda, the book in which I keep track of exciting things coming up. I like looking forward to stuff. I have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with secondary clinical depression, so looking forward to stuff is like the key to my well-being.

Mainly, right now, I’m looking forward to moving, and that’s a big thing. It’s exciting, but it’s big. It’s so big that it’s not on my list of things that I’m looking forward to, even though I am. It’s the small things that make a difference, because they don’t carry the caveat of stress that the big things do. The small things are just there to be anticipated. They are fluff, and fluff cannot be underrated.

Here, I’ll share this with you… Fluffy Things I’m looking forward to, in no particular order:

1. The return of Arrested Development (T.V. series) in May. The Bluth family. Because the chicken dance matters.

2. The next episode of The Following (T.V. series). Thank you again for this recommendation, Arne F.!

3. Stephen King’s The Wind through the Keyhole. Because Roland “The Gunslinger” Deschain, aka Roland of Gilead in the aforementioned Dark Tower epic series, is my fictional boyfriend.

I’m not an aficionado of the fantasy genre, but I’m obsessed with The Dark Tower, which is a brilliantly crafted literary collage of fantasy-horror-western-drama. When I finished all seven books in the series, I sought out the short stories that featured Roland. After that, I had to accept the fact that I’d read everything with Roland in existence. Life went on. Then, last week, we were browsing through the books in the English section at Cultura, and guess what! I discovered The Wind through the Keyhole. How did I not know about this publication? It came out last year. It’s a new installment in the Dark Tower series, but it can be read as a stand-alone novel, too. I’m forcing myself to wait until I’m on the airplane to crack it open.

Yep. Settling down on the plane over the Atlantic with this new Dark Tower book on my tray is going to be my reward to myself for surviving the stress of moving.

4. Lee Child’s new Jack Reacher novel Never Go Back (August). Because… Reacher!!

5. American Horror Story, Season 3 (October). This new season is called “Coven,” and a lot of it will be filmed in New Orleans. I’m sure it’s going to be as richly atmospheric as the first two seasons. Can’t. Wait.

(If we’ve been friends forever and you’re confused because you never knew me to watch T.V., let me explain what happened: Netflix streaming. And we started to watch Bob’s Burgers. That was the beginning of it. Or the end of it, depending on how you look at it.)

I also used to think that I’d never be interested in reality T.V., but then? Cake Boss.

For those of you who don’t know, the Cake Boss is this guy called Buddy who owns Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey. The show follows Buddy and his family and crew as they create these freaktastically detailed specialty cakes custom-ordered by people for various occasions and events. The Cake Boss takes on some spectacular challenges; he seems to be the type of person who works well under pressure, thriving in merging funnels of drama and disaster, always managing to deliver his splendiferous works of sugary art in style. “NOW WHO WANTS TO EAT SOME CAKE?!”

Callaghan and I have an ongoing banter about what cakes we’d order from the Cake Boss. Callaghan knows that I’d love to have one for Valentine’s Day. Every once in a while, I’ll suddenly ask him… wait, okay, let me do it right now…

“What cake are you going to order for me?” I’m calling it out, since he’s in the other room.

“It’s a surprise… you’re not going to know. Heheheh! Coquine! You thought I was going to tell you, hein?”

See? He answered immediately, like he was waiting for me to ask! He has no idea that I’m writing this, and that I just keyed in what he said, word for word.

Shoot. I mean, okay, I’m not desperate to know. I’m not going to secretly administer a truth serum so he’ll tell me. I’ll enjoy being surprised.

It’s just fun to think about what he might order. It’s fun to think about getting, say, a Jack Reacher cake from the Cake Boss. Or a beautiful Dark Tower cake, featuring red roses and lobstrosities.

 

I Am a Dork.

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You know how it is when you’re standing in the shower and you glance down and your eyes pass over the long, cobalt blue tendrils drifting near your foot and your brain zooms backwards into its nifty little visual data archive and – zing! – matches the tendrils to the image of the Portuguese man o’war that wrapped itself around your ankle in the water on Maui that one time?

But in actuality, you’re looking at clumped strands of silky thread from the insides of the plush, bright blue socks you were wearing before you got in the shower?

Yeah, me too.

There is a Devil. Its Name is Netflix.

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Callaghan looked over at me as the final episode of American Horror Story: Asylum dwindled away with the closing credits.

“Wow. What’re we going to do now?”  

Season Two, fini. The wind bludgeoned our closed wooden shutters as if to make the ending perfectly clear. If you’re going to watch a disconcertingly evocative horror production such as the fine piece of art that is American Horror Story, March is your month. The weather’s antics heighten the effect, and after all, one of the goals of watching such a show is to get scared. Crazy wind, rain, snow and even hail braced the atmosphere of Murder House and Asylum during the four days it took us to tear through those two seasons. We curled around each other in the gloom of the overcast days and inky nights and had to scrape our eyeballs, dry in the chill and artificial heat, off the screen when we were done.

“Season three comes out in the fall,” I said, just as forlorn.

“But what are we going to do until then?”

“What I was wondering, exactly.”

We sat and stared at the dark, blank screen.

The next day, Callaghan got on Facebook and posted a line from the Asylum theme song, “Dominique,” which ignited a conversation with his friend Matita, a fellow American Horror Story fan. We returned to mourning the end of season two.

“I should call Matita and ask her what she’s going to do,” Callaghan said.

“Maybe we should start a support group,” I said. “For people suffering the throes of American Horror Story withdrawals.”

“Hey baby… wouldn’t it be great if we could do the support group in an asylum? We could play that song, too.”

 

 

St. Patrick’s Day – The Story of O’Callaghan and O’Dude

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Two years ago, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day at Gallagher’s pub in Chandler, Arizona. Last year, we didn’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day at all, since we were occupied in Nice. This year, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by drinking Killian’s here at home, listening to Alan Stivell – not Irish, but it’s Celtic music, so close enough – and savoring Callaghan’s cooking.

“Callaghan” is an Irish name.

With this in mind, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d interview Callaghan about how he got his nickname.

INTERVIEW, PART 1

Me: You’re French. How did you end up with an Irish nickname?

Callaghan: Because my friend’s a cowboy.

Me: Uh….

Callaghan: He used to wear a fringed leather jacket that made him look like an Indian.

Me: I’m not getting it. I need further explanation.

Callaghan: Back in 1988, Dude (Jean-Michel, aka Jean-Mi) got a beautiful fringed leather jacket that went very well with his long, dark hair.

Me: WAIT. Jean-Mi had long hair?

Jean-Mi is one of my favorite people in the world.

Callaghan: Yeah. He looked like an Indian, so we gave him a cowboy name, haha!

Me: Why – oh, because the French are enamored with the whole American “cowboys and Indians” thing.

Callaghan: Oh yeah!

Me: Okay. But why “Callaghan” for a cowboy name?

Callaghan: GriGri (that would be Christophe… no one I’ve met here goes by their actual name) started calling him that. Because of Clint Eastwood. Dirty Harry. You know, Dirty Harry Callaghan?

Me: No. I do not. I guess I’m a terrible American.

Callaghan:  You suck. Especially for a San Franciscan!

(lunch)

INTERVIEW, PART 2

Callaghan: Yay so we finally have a journalist interested in this! Well just so you know, there’s really a cult of Dirty Harry here in France. People in France really love Dirty Harry. Now I’m VERY surprised that you don’t know about him.

Me: I know about him, I’ve heard about him, but I’ve never seen it. So how did the name “Callaghan” go from Dude to you?

Callaghan:  Well, Dude decided that the name “Callaghan” was so intense that he should call GriGri “Callaghan,” too. And because I was hanging out with them all the time, I became “Callaghan” as well. And then I started to… well, it became a nom de plume… I started signing my drawings “Callaghan.” So the years have passed, and um I stayed “Callaghan” because I was signing my drawings, and… so people called me “Callaghan.” Because of my drawings. And I was still calling Dude “Callaghan” for a long time. I still do today, from time to time.

Me: Dude? I never heard you call him “Callaghan,” except when you introduced him to me as “the other Callaghan.”

Callaghan: Yeah I just call him “Dude,” really. When I came back from the States, people were calling him “Dude” because his brother Lio – that’s short for Lionel – oh, and Lio’s wife’s name is Valerie, but we call her “Valoche,” which is argo for “suitcase” –

Me: Why do you call her “suitcase”?

Callaghan: Nah, it’s an actual nickname for Valerie. “Valoche” is a nickname for Valerie, and it also means suitcase (valise). And even another word for “valise” is “valdingue.”

This is how I learn French.

Me: Okay! So anyway… Dude…

Callaghan: So Dude. Um… so um yeah so when I came back from the States, Lio was calling Dude “Dude,” so I started calling him “Dude,” too, instead of “Callaghan.” Anyway, “Callaghan” stuck for me. And I’m still signing my drawings “Callaghan.” Parce que j’ai un gros flingue. (“Because I have a big gun.”)

I won’t even go into that. It’s yet another slang phrase derived from French pop culture.

So that, my friends, is how Callaghan (Philippe) got to be called “Callaghan,” and Dude (Jean-Mi) got to be called “Dude.”

Erin go Bragh.

More Than You Wanted to Know About Our Cat

That Asian-Looking Chick 2 Comments

Our biggest armful of cat goes by the name “Nounours.” (In case you were wondering, this is the one who was originally called “Bruce Willis.” That name never worked. Nounours is French for “teddy bear,” and he responds to it.)

The upper half of Nounours was slung over Callaghan’s shoulder, the lower half was cradled in the crook of his elbow, and his back paws were tucked into the palm of his hand… 17 pounds of cat you could barely see under the smothering that was taking place. Yes, the kitty pampering in this house is shameless and pathological.

Anyway, so there’s Nounours, snuggled neatly in Callaghan’s arms, and there’s Callaghan, caught up and carried away in the bubble of kitty love.

“He’s so happy and proud, this Nounours!” he gushed, covering Nounours with kisses.

“With his big blue eyes!” I said, rubbing Nounours’s fur.

“Look at him, gros Nounours!” said Callaghan, bursting with kitty-daddy pride.

“With his pink ears and butterscotch and cream fur!” I said, kissing his velvety nose. “And his little pink nose with freckles!”

“He’s got a pink ass with freckles, too,” Callaghan added.

Um….

The Man Formerly Known as Sanford

That Asian-Looking Chick 17 Comments

The other day, I read an article about a news anchor whose photo was mistakenly captioned as “Dana Horsewomen” (in place of “Dana Holgorsen”), either someone’s idea of a joke, or the result of an autocorrect feature on crack. This reminded me of the following:

Sometime during the ‘90’s, a professor at Arizona State University (my alma mater) appeared in the university’s faculty directory under an incorrect name. Due to a typographic error, Dr. Sanford Couch became “Snaford Couch.”

Here’s the remarkable thing: For whatever reason – indifference? amusement? – Dr. Couch kept the new version of his name. Whether he made it legal or not, he’s gone by “Snaford Couch” ever since. Not only does he continue to appear in the directory as “Snaford” year after year, but he took it a step further and has it written that way on his professional web site. I love him for this.

I mean, how many people would think to become the error rather than have it fixed?

Maybe I should have contacted Dr. Couch to get his permission to talk about him in my blog, but I don’t think he’d mind. This is not me making fun of him. This is me writing a little tribute to him, because here I am throwing a fit if someone spells my name with a “Ch” or ends it with a “y.” When someone writes my name, I always say it’s “Kristi with a ‘K’,” like the K is such a big deal. Next time I feel compelled to prevent such an error, I should think of The Man Formerly Known as Sanford.

Snaford Couch is the man.