"...and so to close the journey."

[pyat]

I just finished Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. I liked it, a great deal, and sort of want to kick Oscar Wilde for dissing it. But then, I like my art overwrought and my prose florid. There are a number of passages that stick in my memory.

"...any propagation of goodness and benevolence is no small addition to the aristocracy of nature, and no small subject of rejoicing for mankind at large" is one from today.

Some points:

• The term “convenient ogling distance” is now permanently filed in my mental lexicon.
• People in 1830s London would throw dead kittens at people they didn’t like. Eew.
• I’m pleasantly surprised to read of Mr. Chuckster’s fate. Usually, nasty people in earlier Dickens end up with ten kinds of poetic justice (and dead kittens) piled on them. He just continued on being a snob and eating big dinners, and even stayed friends with…
• …Dick Swiveller. Possibly the most suggestive Dickens name ever.

I had a big post about Orwell, Kipling, Chicken Soup for the Soup, fandom, Dickens, and “graceful monuments to the obvious”, but I wasted all my brain energies on a monstrously long comment on someone else’s journal. So, I close with a random image from yesterday’s lunchtime ramble with commanderteddog.


“That’s nice, the snails use their tentacles to… wait a minute… snails don’t have tentacles! THOSE AREN’T SNAILS!”


These things looked uncannily like the Death Star, at least to me.

Comments

Dead Kittens of 1830s London

[ankhorite.livejournal.com]

People in 1830s London would throw dead kittens at people they didn’t like. Eew.

And fashionable women washed their faces with dead puppy water, which is exactly what it sounds like. Eew.

Re: Dead Kittens of 1830s London

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Waaaaaaah.....

[paka.livejournal.com]

Obviously, those are "flail snails" from the old Fiend Folio.

[relee.livejournal.com]

"...any propagation of goodness and benevolence is no small addition to the aristocracy of nature, and no small subject of rejoicing for mankind at large"

That sounds like something I would write, only even more.

[pwned-kisa.livejournal.com]

Why does "tentacles" have to look so much like "testicles," so that when I read a sentence with it, I have to read it twice, and I'm always left more with a mental image of the one, and not the other? Maybe it's just me.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Hmm. What's their INT level?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Snails don't have testicles either. They have "love darts."

See?





Will YOU hug the snail? :)

[pwned-kisa.livejournal.com]

...I may never eat escargot again.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

But... snails like tongue!

I'm going to shut up now. ;)

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Also, these pictures were taken when I visited a kid's science center up north, as part of a "Birds and Bees" exhibit. We wandered around a bit with Elizabeth, enough to talk about some basics of biology, but when we saw the snail we hightailed it back to the gift shop.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Somehow, I can quite see the former being the description of a new, hopeful game in the App Store.

You could be rich!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

To the patent office!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Would it have dead kitten throwers, though?

[relee.livejournal.com]

I don't think so, dead kittens aren't my style.

[hossblacksilver.livejournal.com]

They look like the Death Star diagram in A New Hope.

Their defenses are built around large scale assaults, however we believe that a snub fighter can fly along the equatorial trench and hit a two meter wide exhaust port to cause a chain reaction. You will have to use proton torpedoes as the vent is ray shielded.