The rhetoric of the grumble gets far too much space on these here intertubes - yea, it is the bread and butter, the tofu and potatoes, the long johns and the flannel spencer of your amateur internetian. There's a reason for this. Waxing vitriolic is far more fun than waxing your legs. Clinical research demonstrates that grumbling releases endorphins, which taste like chocolate. And so loathe as I am to pollute the shades of Pemberley with symptoms of my displeasure, for the good of my health, here goeth ...
1. The silly old vet - let's call him the Archfiend – forgot to unpick one of Harriet's stitches last night. And this, after she'd suffered proximity to Maltese terrier puppies, the clammy thermometer-wielding hands of the Archfiend, and being gassed for the preservation of his, the Archfiend's, dermal integrity. She clambered onto my lap this evening, and snip-snip said my nail scissors, ping-ping said the forgotten stitch, and "Good grief, I should have done all of your stitches myself and saved you the unutterable horror of going to the vet I'm so sorry you poor gel", said I.
2. They just don't make felafel rolls down here like they do oop north. Where I come from, a felafel roll is hommus and tabouli and onion and chilli sauce and felafels wrapped in flat bread and toasted. Where I come from, a felafel roll makes you want to buy a carpet and wear a fez and summon up whichever other Orientalist cliches swim your way, to yodel in Yiddish from the Golan Heights, to sail to Byzantium, to farm chickpeas, to bathe in tahini and rosewater. Down in the 'Bourne they appear not to have heard of the unleavened loaf, and the felafel roll is less roll than festival of yeast, soft fluffy mounds of bread, tiny felafels embedded in doughy embonpoint. Melbourne and Sydney may only be 800 kilometres apart, but they are separated by a great culinary gulf. Melburnian felafel roll? Schmelafel roll. If I were the litigious type, I'd souvlaki.
3. The special-intranet-thingo at my place of employ has chosen first week of semester to go splendidly bung. Poor students (can't access their readings for next week), poor me (pleading with tech support persons, apologising to students), poor tech support persons (sending out emails telling me that my problem has been resolved, i.e., they have identified a systemic problem, it is not just my problem, and they are working ten thousand hours in a row to try to fix it).
8 comments:
Let me guess: Blackboard?
You might enjoy reading about their patent tribulations at http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/28/1438221/Blackboard-Patent-Invalidated-By-Appellate-Court .
Everybody hates Blackboard.
Yes, Blackboard, a.k.a. my bête noir.
I was once lucky to live a few doors from the famed Gloria's Felafel House in North Carlton (now, I think, The Camel's Hump) which used flat bread and fried the balls to order. Since its closure, you're right: the regrettable ascendancy of pide goes virtually unchecked.
In Toronto earlier this year I found a felafel outlet in a basement food court which made them as you describe: flat bread, felafel balls fried to order, and the whole thing quickly toasted in a press. What a revelation! A road to Damascus experience! A Turkish delight! O little town of Bethlehem!
Carrier pigeon never fails...
...although they are tasty in a Hollandaise sauce...
I knew it! (Nice use of a circumflex to be circumspect, by the way, but calling what it really is would have been more cathartic).
The institution where I currently perform feats of deep thinking also uses the dreaded Blackboard, although I have managed to avoid it. But at least I can get a decent felafel roll at the U. foodcourt, and usually do on Fridays. So there are some compensations to living in tarty old Sydney town.
Maybe the closer to Mecca you are, the nicer the felafel roll? I had a pretty splendiferous one in Queanbeyan the other day.
I'm getting those emails too, it's delightful wandering along the side of a canal in the rosy light of hte setting sun and wondering whether is working properly yet.
See you on Monday.
Jayne: carrier pigeon nice in a Hollondaise sauce? Have you seen their mating rituals? No person with half a smidge of empathy could eat a carrier pigeon after witnessing all that amorous hullaballoo.
AD and AB: Sydney, Queanbeyan - some people have all the luck.
Lucy T: is working. I think. Safe travels and good sleeping to you.
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