Obvious / Birds / Clothes / Lit Crit / Chamberpot Room /

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Poor Mecki being tortured by evil in-laws. *Sympathy* to all those 
stuck with evil relatives. **I** am lucky, as my in-laws live on the 
other side of a mountain range and I don't interact with them, and 
both my parents are dead. (I would say "Good riddance" but too many 
readers would be shocked.) My only sibling is not a bad person but 
his and my interaction consists of e-mailing birthday greetings to 
each other.

Poor Storm, bereaved of new bird.

Amy Z wrote:

> (it is obvious that McGonagall loves Quidditch even though there is
> no sentence saying "McGonagall loved Quidditch"), 

Actually, it is NOT obvious to me that McGonagall loves Quidditch. It 
IS obvious to me that she feel extremely competitive and House-loyal 
ABOUT Quidditch, but not that she actually cares about the GAME. I 
imagine that in her student days, she went only to matches in which 
her own House was playing.

Catherine in Albion wrote:

> Ravens are great. Smart and generally easy to feed. 

Maybe you could help me speculate, if the Trio became Animagi (even 
tho' JKR said in an interview that Harry won't) and their animal 
forms were all birds, what kind of birds would they be? I thought 
Harry might be a raven because he's a good flyer with black hair, in 
which case maybe Hermione would be an owl... 
and then I thought Hermione might be a raven because she's so smart 
and then what would Harry be?
and I wondered if making Ron be a red-headed woodpecker would be 
socially acceptable...

Saitaina wrote:

> I spent, 344.00$ on new clothes thinking that they would not lie 
> when they said a 48 is the same as a 28 (I actually wear a 26 but
> bigger is better in some cases) so imagine my surprise when I 
> opened the package today and...nothing fit. 

Send them back. I send a lot of mail-order stuff back.

Clothes that are made by ill-paid, ill-supervised piece-workers have 
very inconsistent sizing: two size 26s of the same garment will be 
different from each other. Once a friend explained one reason to me: 
because they are paid according to how many finished garments they 
turn in, they want to cut more pieces out of the same amount of 
cloth, so they crumple up the pattern pieces and spread them out 
again, but a little bit smaller at the random spots that were most 
crumpled. Being smaller makes it possible to cut more from the same 
fabric. Being smaller in random places means that if one dress is too 
small in the bosom, its twin next to it on the rack might be large 
enough in the bosom. But with my beloved mail-order (I HATE leaving 
the house to go shopping), you don't get to choose which of the twins 
is yours.

Joanne0012 wrote:

> Seriously, anybody who wants clothes that they like and that fit
> should learn to sew.

The trouble is I **HATE** sewing. I sewed many clothes for myself in 
high school and college and my first job because I had very little 
choice, but my next job paid enough that I could afford to *buy* 
clothes, and I prefer the smaller suffering of wearing clothes that 
don't fit to the larger suffering of spending time sewing. Yuck.

I don't know why I hate sewing when I love crocheting and like 
knitting.

Dicentra wrote:

> The one that stuck in my craw was how Freudians would find Freudian
> imagery in pre-Freudian works (like Don Quixote). Or how Marxist
> saw all texts as definitive commentary on who's kicking whom. 

I love your rant. I always hated English classes all through school. 
The lit crit people do a great deal of nonsense. HOWEVER, once in a 
very long while the Freudian imagery IS relevant, and I would expect 
it to be MORE relevant to pre-Freudian works, whose authors had not 
been tipped off.

AMY Z wants to know what kind of sicko killed all those elephants
just to make a tower

It wasn't ALL those elephants, it was one tusk and a good Engorgement 
Charm.

Alex wrote:

> > Dave ... "Question for US (well all non-British) members: do you
> > use the expression 'take the piss' to mean to mock, or wind up, 
> > usually good-naturedly?"
> They don't. Linguistically speaking there is no direct equivalent
> in US colloquial English for 'taking the piss' (after Bryson, 
> 'Notes From A Small Island (1994) or possibly 'Mother Tongue' 199?))
> - whereas it's such a fundamental  part of British life that we
> simply don't notice it. This does, of course, mean Brits abroad 
> frequently end up red-faced and having to frantically apologise for
> a good-natured joke that was taken the wrong way. You may recognise
> the voice of experience there ::winks::

I've been a COBOL programmer since before there were PCs, so I've 
worked with enough British expats (an Aussie pgmmer who stopped over 
at Lee's house to buy winter clothes on his way to a contract in 
Holland said "The British are the software mercenaries of the world") 
that, even tho' I know that 'in hospital' and 'on holiday' are not 
the normal USA usages and 'garridge' is not the normal USA 
pronunciation, I didn't remember whether normal USAns understand when 
someone says "I was just taking the piss". I was surprised that so 
many listees piped up that they didn't. Okay, Alex, correct me if I'm 
wrong, but 'taking the piss' is short for 'taking the piss out of 
so-and-so' and in USA English would probably be phrased as 'pulling 
so-and-so's leg"?

Dave, even tho' I've heard the phrase, it still doesn't seem to me 
that the phrase of 'full bladder' functioned as a clue that the 
anecdote was a put-on.