08:10 – The house diagonally across the street from us has been vacant for more than a year. Barbara mentioned last weekend that she’d seen a young couple looking at it with the real estate agent and then returning on their own to shoot some pictures. I ran into the real estate agent yesterday while I was walking Colin. He says the young couple has the house under contract. Of course, nowadays that’s no guarantee, but it looks like there’s a good chance it’ll soon be occupied again.
I just had Colin out in the front yard and saw the woman who lives across the street out in her front yard with her dog. Thinking she’d be pleased, I told her that the house next to hers was under contract to the young couple that Barbara had seen looking at it over the weekend. Her only response was, “I hope they’re not black.” Geez. I never have any idea what to say to comments like that. I almost replied, “No, Barbara said that they’re both nice young white men.” Presumably she dislikes gays as much as she dislikes blacks. So I just told her I didn’t know what color they were and asked her what difference it made.
I swear that the people who write many TV series must have science dictionaries on their desks. When they’re writing a scene that involves science, they must just flip the dictionary open to a random page, stick their finger down, and use that word. How else to explain nonsensical dialog that contains apparently random strings of sciency words? On one episode of Rizzoli and Isles, the pathologist (Isles) was explaining something to the detective (Rizzoli) about a death and said (with a straight face) that something had interfered with telophase. Eh? She never did explain whether she was talking about telophase in meiosis or telophase in mitosis. Why don’t the producers of these series hire a scientist–any scientist–to tell them when their plots and dialog make zero sense?
Barbara is going out to dinner tonight with a friend and then to a Celtic music performance. That means it’s wild women and parties for me. Either that, or I’ll watch Heartland reruns.
11:29 – Angela Merkel says she’s very optimistic that the eurozone crisis will be solved in her lifetime. Merkel is 58. The average life expectancy in Germany is 80. Allow me to translate what she really means: “I’m very confident that the eurozone will not collapse until after I am reelected next autumn.”