Being Mr. Kenny

The title of this post is only partly ironic. I do love my cat dearly, I think she’s wonderful. She’s getting on a bit in years, and you can see this when you look at her, poor darling. We think those blue warty things on her chin are due to old age. I hope I get Age Warts when I’m her age, I’ll scare all the children away.

Anyway, in this photo you can see her doing something she has done from time to time throughout her whole life. After she’s finished cleaning herself, she will sit there with her tongue sticking out a tiny bit, apparently having forgotten to bring it back in again. She sat like that for about half an hour today, and didn’t seem to notice. She only stopped doing it when she said “meow” when I was pouring milk into my tea.

A few days ago I received a letter from the Student Loads Company. This is the comany in the UK that regulates, well, student loans. Their website is at www.slc.co.uk. Why not visit it and wish them a horrible Christmas this year?

Anyway, the letter details how much interest has been accruing on my account since September of last year. The amount is approximately £30 a month. That’s £1 a day.

This is great, because they never actually tell you that on the form when you’re applying for it. They mention, of course, that it will be in line with inflation, but they don’t actually tell you that inflation is surprisingly high, and that it all adds up, and that your naïve assumptions of it not being that much are wrong.

Misery and death forever be upon the Student Loans Company!

Update: And the government!

I got a letter from Optical Express this morning with the word “IMPORTANT” on the envelope. I opened it only to be greeted by this leaflet:

So this was the important information that relates so very closely to my eyesight. And check out that dude in the middle, did someone forget to tell him that the 80s finished seventeen years ago?

Thanks Optical Express, really helpful information there!

Landing on the moon, the pyramids, the Internet — these are among mankinds greatest achievements. Add to that number, dishwashers. I love dishwashers. They’re great. You put in dirty dishes; you take out clean ones. There’s no need for the skin on your hands to go all wrinkly, or any risk of putting your finger into a gloop of nasty congealing transparent mayonnaise.

I am not so fond, however, of dishwasher tablets. These come in their own individual wrappers, which are plastered all over with warnings telling you not to touch the tablet when you put it into the designated area. Now this makes me wonder: if these tablets are so harmful as to warrant a warning against contact with the skin, is it such a great idea to then dissolve them and spray them all over our crockery and cutlery? What untold mischief do they wreak upon our bodies if unwittingly ingested?

I say this because I have just found some white residue on the cup that’s currently holding my coffee. I am wondering to myself whether the funny taste is due to the limescale from the kettle, or whether it heralds my imminent departure from this world.

Stay tuned to see if I make it through the week.

From the song Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (by Leonard Cohen), as sung by Rufus Wainwright.

Real lyrics:

You told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.

I heard:

You told me again you preferred ham to men
but for me you would make an exception.

As you can see, the first version is a girl saying that, as a rule, she doesn’t usually date ugly guys but she could see herself being with this guy for the forseeable.

The second would be sung by a lesbian who was so bowled over by this guy that she momentarily puts down the leg of ham she’d been eating so that she could make love to him (nothing mentioned of the fact that he’s not a woman).

I love mishearing song lyrics.

I have long wondered whether the word “none” is plural (“None of us are”) or singular (“None of us is”).

Well, it suddenly occurred to me that the Internet might know, so I asked Oxford, and here is what it told me:

Some traditionalists maintain that none can only take a singular verb (as in “none of them is coming tonight” rather than “none of them are coming tonight”). However, none is descended from Old English nan meaning “not one”, and has been used for around a thousand years with either a singular or a plural verb, depending on the context and the emphasis needed.

I love the Internet dearly.

So pretty, in fact, that you might forget that it flies around eating poo and spreading disease.

This photo was taken July 2005, on a walk with my family in Dorset. Click it for a bigger version that you can use as wallpaper. Here’s another taken on the same day: