08:56 – Barbara is due back this afternoon. Colin and I will celebrate. I will admit that I rewatched some stuff while she was gone. The final three episodes of Firefly, Serenity, and the fourth series of Blackadder. Right now, I’m doing laundry. A load of towels and a load of Barbara’s work clothes. The regular dark and white loads can wait until she gets home.
I’ve been trying to teach Colin not to chase cats. I’ve explained to him that they’re really pretty much just small, incompetent, ugly dogs and that he should feel pity for them rather than chase them. But this morning on our walk, Colin noticed a cat in the bushes only a couple meters from where he was standing. He went on alert, the cat bolted, and Colin was off in pursuit. Fortunately, I locked the leash before he’d gotten more than about two steps or he’d have pulled me into the bushes.
When we got home, I explained things to him: “Look, you’re a dog. A dog! Your natural prey is large animals. You and your buddies can drag down an elk or a moose and rip it to shreds, for heaven’s sake. Your jaws can bite a broomstick in half. That pathetic little creature you were chasing is a cat. It has tiny, weak little jaws. Its natural prey is mice. Even a good-size rat with an attitude is more than a match for it. Why do you think they breed three-kilo terriers as ratters? And you’re about ten times that size. It’s beneath your dignity to chase a pathetic loser cat.” Colin seemed to understand. We’ll see.
12:41 – The theme music of the fourth series of Blackadder started with a couple bars of The British Grenadiers, one of those marches that everyone recognizes when they hear it, but almost no one knows the name of. I, of course, sang the first couple bars in my basso profundo as each episode started:
Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules
Of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these.
So I just searched YouTube for those lyrics, and got a hit. ARRRGHH. Whoever the guys are singing this, they mispronounce a significant portion of the lyrics. My favor is “toe, row, row, row, row, row”, which refers to lining up on parade (toeing the row), and should be pronounced with all long oh’s. Instead, they misspell “toe” as “tow” and then proceed to pronounce both toe and row as in bow-wow. Then they mangle “fusee” into “fuze” and manage to use the French pronunciation for “glacis”, glaw-zee, rather than the proper British, glay-siss. That’s particularly ironic since they made a politically-correct alteration to the original lyrics. We now hear “We throw them from the glacis, about the enemies’ ears” rather than the original “We throw them from the glacis, about the Frenchmen’s ears”, which doesn’t even scan. Geez.