OMG: Bianca does Dr. Phil

We try, Fred and I really do. But we can't watch her all the time, and really? Why does the onus fall on us? Am I truly expected to monitor the computer use of a mumblymumbly year old grown woman, and in a place as huge as Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé?

It happened at 3:38 in the morning. Yes, I was up but hardly felt like looking over the shoulder of a drunken Castafiore, as she picked and pecked her way across the keyboard.

She's taken to frequenting local pubs after her evening performances at the Opera House, belting out encore performances of L'air des bijoux.

The only way I could tolerate a late night, early morning onslaught of je-ris-de-me-voir-si-belle-dans-ce-miroir-oir-oir-oir? Whiskey. Stoli. The dregs of a house red.

So, out of appreciation for my liver function, I stay safely ensconced in our designated area of The Manor.

La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore decided to surf the net before passing out in her suite of rooms -- rooms that she and some of her ne'er-do-well operatic thugs refurbished last summer, in the style of François Ier. Now *that* was perhaps an episode that Fred and I might have prevented -- but she's wily, very wily, that Castafiore.

Apparently, she is a fan of this Dr. Phil person, a tall, chunky, bald man of indeterminate age -- or 59. As documented in the Dickipedia, Phil McGraw is a "doctortainer of the highest order." Still, Bianca is perhaps not the sort of fan base that The Dr. Phil Brand was designed to attract, and in that lies much of her charm and amazing ability to sour the stomachs of her interlocuteurs.

How was he to know that she idolizes Michael Vick? Still, had he known that she idolized Michael Vick, would he have curtailed the expression of his disdain for that fine, upstanding, dog-murdering human being? Probably not... but we will never know.

A docutainer who makes massive use of slapping around The Obvious with his down-on-the-farm and well-fertilized twangy wisdom, Dr. Phil wrote several blog entries on the controversial subject of animal torture, which obviously cried out for the inclusion of some Celebrity Twit as his Easy Mark, his Straw Man, his Bitch. To wit: Vick.

The doctor is a master of damning with faint praise, a trait that I've always found repugnant. As I perused his blog this morning, after discovering what La Bonne et Belle had done, I could see how Bianca's buttons might have taken a beating.

The man is brutal, despite his hominy homilies. He viciously attacked, not just people who murder animals, but "Mommies" who parent (and drive) while under the influence; He even dared to criticize the recent Gang of Gaffes -- including Serena Williams and Kanye West, though Joe Wilson got off with just a pinch of the cheek. Clearly, Dr. Phil is not afraid to wade hip deep into controversy.

Anyway, in the wee hours of the morning, The Castafiore let loose. I hope Dr. Phil is okay.

We've seized her laptop and hidden it well. The deal is that she'll get it back as soon as her behavior provides proof that she's no longer subject to the demon of stinkin' thinkin'.

She seems to have at least made judicious use of SpellCheck and her English language dictionary -- although she is typical of adult foreign language users, in that she is at her best when... well, when slightly "disinhibited":



Bianca Castafiore says:
September 22, 2009 at 3:38 am

Dr. Phil, you have begun to frustrate me.

Not because of your various (safe) opinions voiced in your blog, but because you couch some of your most interesting notions in disingenuous ways. Your tongue may get stuck in your cheek!

“I don’t drink, but…”
“I haven’t examined him, but…”

The worst of all, though? Your tacit approval of Joe Wilson’s staged and boorish behavior during a speech by the President of the United States.

He was wrong… but he gets a bit of a good-old-boy wink and a nod — because you’d never want to criticize him for being “passionate.”

Clearly, you are saying that Michael Vick is a sociopath. *That* is an interesting statement and I would love to hear you expound upon it.

Vick was convicted, sentenced, and served that sentence. He will never be free from constant public scrutiny. It doesn’t matter in the least whether he can check off as accomplished any of the things you’d like to mandate, because those mandates only exist in DrPhil Land.



In defense of La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore, there are troubling things about -- as she put it -- life in DrPhil Land:
The Doctor Is Out (of Touch)

Symptom: Two high-profile fiascoes and a career of dubious decisions
Diagnosis: Dr. Phil doesn't have a license or a clue

By Barbara Card Atkinson
Special to MSN Entertainment

Maybe it's awful to kick a walrus-mustachioed man when he's down, but I am all for the recent public backlash against Dr. Phil. His producers bailed out one of the teens jailed for (allegedly) violently attacking a Florida teenager, in exchange for an exclusive interview with her, only to backpedal in the face of public disapproval. This boundary crossing is just the latest in a string of Dr. Phil's missteps; it's high time we all admitted that the good doctor is out -- out of touch, out of step and sometimes almost out of his homily-riddled mind.

Dr. Who?
Phillip Calvin McGraw, best known as Dr. Phil, hit the airwaves as Oprah's golden boy in 1998. She seemed to enjoy his straight talk and the way her audiences responded to his no-nonsense approach. It was refreshing, at first, to listen to a shrink who gave advice free of psychobabble buzzwords; he was even a little folksy, some homespun, gingham-aproned Freud. This is the guy who said, "Sometimes you make the right decision, sometimes you make the decision right." Adorable, right? Of course, he wasn't really a shrink, and he hasn't seemed to take his own advice. McGraw has a history of not making the right decisions, nor has he done much to right them.

Doc in a Cheap Suit
It's a sad fact that, these days, many a high-profile "personality" is going to have at least one good lawsuit lobbed his or her way, but Dr. Phil seems to repeatedly provoke lawsuits. The Texas attorney general investigated him for a possible health club scam in 1973. McGraw sold expensive lifetime memberships to a health club in Topeka, Kan., and resold the contracts to a financial institution, so the members had to keep paying whether the club existed or not. According to the court papers, three different Topeka banks sued him for more than $40,000, but he never showed in court and monies were never recovered. He had moved on to Texas, where he obtained a doctorate from the University of North Texas and began to practice psychology.

In 1989, the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists imposed disciplinary sanctions against McGraw for what was deemed an inappropriate "dual relationship." McGraw admitted he hired one of his clients, a 19-year-old woman, to work in his office (can you say "breach of ethics"?), but denied her claim of a sexual relationship. The board ordered McGraw to pass a jurisprudence exam, undergo a psychological evaluation, take an ethics class and have his practice supervised for one year. Did he make amends and make it right? Well, as of 2008, no. Nineteen years in, and he still hasn't met the board's conditions. His license to practice psychology was revoked and, from that point on, he has not been licensed to practice psychology at all. As the man himself has noted, "Failure is no accident."

McGraw, who said, "We teach people how to treat us," exhibited poor judgment again when he decided to feature convicted murderer Laurie "Bambi" Bembenek. Bembenek was scheduled to appear on the "Dr. Phil" show in 2002 to clear her name. It didn't go well. She later filed a lawsuit against Dr. Phil and more than 50 of his staffers for, she said, being held against her will in an apartment with no way to contact the outside world, while awaiting potentially show-stopping, name-clearing DNA results. Bembenek claims the forced confinement led to a panic attack, which drove her to escape by climbing out a window. She fell and shattered her leg, which later had to be amputated below the knee. Despite whether Bembenek was detained against her will, one wonders at the "stinkin' thinking" involved in allowing an emotionally fragile, convicted murderer to become so agitated that she felt her only recourse was to shimmy down the outside of a building on a bed sheet ladder.

In 2006, Dr. Phil was named as a co-defendant (along with CBS) in a lawsuit filed by two brothers in relation to the Aruban disappearance of U.S. citizen Natalee Holloway. McGraw hired a private investigator to interview the Kalpoe brothers. They claimed they were recorded without their knowledge and the material was doctored, but later broadcast as being a true representation, portraying them "as engaging in criminal activity against Natalee Holloway ..."

Sure, maybe McGraw's involvement would break open the case as the one tactic that had so far eluded the combined forces of the U.S. and Aruban officials -- a trained television host.

Daddy Issues
McGraw has long been an outspoken critic of pornography. Eyebrows were raised, then, when he stood as the best man in his son, Jay's, 2006 wedding to Playboy playmate Erica Dahm; the elder McGraw even hosted the wedding at his Beverly Hills, Calif., mansion. Against porn? Fine. Supportive of his son, regardless? Terrific. Altering his "Dr. Phil" Web site to remove all of his comments about porn right after the fact? Umm, "What in the hell were you thinking?"

In January 2008, McGraw's behavior motivated a psychologist (an actual one, with a license and everything) to lodge a complaint with the California Board of Psychology, alleging that Dr. Phil was practicing illegally when he visited Britney Spears at Cedars-Sinai. McGraw was, reportedly, counseling Spears as well as inviting her to join her family on his stage for an upcoming televised intervention. After his unannounced hour-long visit, he made several long-winded statements on his show about Britney's mental state, which really chapped the family spokesperson. ..

Testing Patience
Who hasn't Dr. Phil ticked off? Thelma Box, a former business partner, alleges that McGraw sold his stake in Pathways, their self-help company (started in 1984), an entire year before he told her. Box also insists she co-created and co-authored the materials used in Pathways seminars, material that McGraw uses today in his show, but she has never been given any credit. [...]

And now this: Last week, Dr. Phil had his producers bail out Mercades Nichols, one of the six teenage Florida cheerleaders accused of beating another girl, videotaping it and posting the footage on YouTube. Nichols signed an exclusivity contract with McGraw's people, allegedly in exchange for her $30,000 bail. In light of the public outcry, producers have since announced they made an error in judgment and they have no plans to go forward with the show. Dr. Phil has yet to make his usual half-apologetic public statement, although now might be just the time for McGraw to heed his own advice: "If you want more, you have to require more from yourself." [...]

Maybe the problem isn't McGraw and his stern-talkin' daddy-tude; maybe the problem is that people are listening to him as if he's got a clue, or at least more of a clue than the rest of us. All facts point to the contrary. Just glance at McGraw's personal life (read his unauthorized biography, "The Making of Dr. Phil," for details about his never-mentioned first marriage and early company dealings); look at his business track record. Or take it from me. Just like Dr. Phil, I'm an unlicensed unpsychologist, and my advice to you, in classic Dr. Phil speak is this: "That dog really, really don't hunt."

Barbara Card Atkinson is a frequent contributor to MSN Entertainment.

Faust Before Coffee

For someone who loves language, to be reduced to a series of acronyms is beyond insulting. For the divine Bianca Castafiore -- such a fate would be a horror, although I suppose it would ultimately be recuperated as aria, as Italian air.

Me, I do not often wake "in the morning," but to claim some measure of normality, I will prepositionally use the phrase (precious, precious, much too precious).

I'm sorry about that. I cannot, however, allow you to touch my sentence.

Get the hell away from my sentence!

Du calme, du calme, ma chère...

When I wake in the morning, there is no thunder of trumpets in my brain announcing the triumphant news that I remain the inimitable Bianca Castafiore -- as in "(blow blow flap lips) congratulations! you remain (lip buzz) Bianca Castafiore (slowly slide the pitch)!"

No, when I wake, I make no sudden sound, no sudden movement, and pray that none are made on or around me. The cats that have kept me safely in the bed all scatter, willing to let me face the risks of our little pocket of weak gravity in their strong feline hope of kibble. Bianca, she would break into song, she would dance the mirror before her Bianca-face, singing "ah, je ris de me voir si belle dans ce miroir..."

It is a rare woman who can bring off Faust before coffee.

My right hand snakes toward the bedside table and snags first the hillaryclinton.com red, white, and blue water bottle, and then the other (more amber) bottles of momentary import: of percocet, of ibuprofen.

There are days I need help taking the pills, and assistance drinking the water. But those days are rare. Mostly, I medicate myself by myself.

Not quite alone. There *are* those cats: Marmy, Dobby, and Sam-I-Am. Were my bed a raft out on the sea, those three would be... sharks, circling. They know from experience, though, that it will be a good half-hour before I budge, and they are kind. While we wait for the medicine to kick in, we gently pet, we purr. Yes, we vibrate!

Bianca Castafiore *only* sings L'air des bijoux of Marguerite from Gounod's Faust; She sings it loud and she sings it often. As she is not called on to sing a high C, we do not know if she can shatter glass. We do not know if *she* vibrates.

"Ah, je ris, de me voir si belle, dans ce miroir..." O! Marguerite! Beware! It is Méphistophélès who gives you jewels and a mirror! Infernal, insightful, so clever -- the devil. And there you are, decked out and loving what you see.

Looks can be deceiving. This post will bear the label of "The Acronyms." The acronyms to which I will usually be referring are:

SLE = Systemic Lupus Erythematosus
CRPS/RSD =Complex Regional Pain Syndrome/Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy
AVN = Avascular Necrosis
AI (times two: AI! AI!) = Adrenal Insufficiency & Aortic Insufficiency

Lupus is often treated with steroids, judiciously, it is hoped, as prolonged use of corticosteroids involves a good number of significant side effects. Somehow, I ended up on high doses of steroids over much too long a time. Not always for SLE. Sometimes for CHF. Sometimes for asthma.

As the kids say: Whatever.

It is possible, even probable, that treating my SLE in that manner resulted in a killer case of avascular necrosis, AVN. Don't suggest that to your average medico, though, as it will cause them to go dark and mutter something that sounds like "informedconsentinformedconsent..." and then they poop their pants.

AVN also serves as the acronym for an adult video organization. Porn. Not erotica. Pure unadulterated smut. The good stuff.

With AVN, the bones, in layman's terms, errr... well, they rot. They become necrotic.

(Yes, you genius! Exactly! As in necrosis. Very good. All of that Latin eventually pays off -- you can decipher much medical terminology thanks to the etymologies still swarming within the brain pan, that great bucket of os!)

It hurts quite a bit. Untreated, the involved joints eventually collapse. I had some joints replaced -- a few successfully -- a few badly. Then, when further treatment became impossible, my life was in large part subsumed by the pain of bone-on-bone. Bone-on-Bone like Stratford-on-Avon.

Ashton-under-Lyne. Bexhill-on-Sea. Stoke-on-Trent.

Where was I?

Tête de Hergé?

The arm that inches toward the water, the hand that pries the pills from their plastic home --they hurt more than I have the capacity to express.

The pain of AVN, though, pales next to the pain of CRPS/RSD.

There will be time for the packing and unpacking of these alphabets. For now, I am content to remember that first half hour, each minute that much closer to movement, to the chachacha of the hobble to the bathroom, the graceless kerplunk into the power chair.

Marmy, Dobby, and Sam-I-Am precede me and lead the way to good chow, good kibble, and mugs of snooty white liberal fair trade coffee, steaming. We are deceitful in our appearances; We hum as if we could sing; We smile as if we mean it; We feel so much more Bianca Castafiore now, and so much less a dumpy, dull, decrepit educator, retired.

"Ah, je ris de me voir si belle dans ce miroir..."

Anacoluthe!

"Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles in a thundering typhoon! Subtropical sea-louse! " I stared, enthralled, at her pink sweaty face while La Belle et Bonne Bianca Castafiore paused to take a breath.

"Swine! "


That apparently exhausted her reserve of beloved Captain Haddock exhortations in English, for the next thing I knew, she was belting them out in French:


"Perroquet bavard! Sale menteur!
Anacoluthe!
Analphabète!"

Clearly, she enjoys the alliteration in English, and the vagaries of a lost insult in French.

Vagaries? Maybe to us... mais pour le capitaine Haddock? No, he was schooled by Tête de Hergé himself! "Anacoluthe"? Nothing but a blurt-out? Not hardly, as the kids say.

The Blessed Wikipedia explains:

An anacoluthon is a rhetorical device that can be loosely defined as a change of syntax within a sentence. More specifically, anacoluthons (or "anacolutha") are created when a sentence abruptly changes from one structure to another. Grammatically, anacoluthon is an error; however, in rhetoric it is a figure that shows excitement, confusion, or laziness. In poetics it is sometimes used in dramatic monologues and in verse drama. In prose, anacoluthon is often used in stream of consciousness writing, such as that of James Joyce, because it is characteristic of informal human thought.

In its most restrictive meaning, anacoluthon requires that the introductory elements of a sentence lack a proper object or complement. For example, if the beginning of a sentence sets up a subject and verb, but then the sentence changes its structure so that no direct object is given, the result is anacoluthon. Essentially, it requires a change of subject or verb from the stated to an implied term. The sentence must be "without completion" (literally what "anacoluthon" means). A sentence that lacks a head, that supplies instead the complement or object without subject, is anapodoton.

And "analphabète"? Well, that's just pee-in-your-pants funny. Ah, but the poor dear was not in a joshing mood, all pink and sweaty, her violet-besotten frock-and-sash a muddled mess. Still, even at such a moment, Bianca is one of the few women whose strong calf muscles will always nicely set off a red pointy-toed stiletto pump. Such natural gifts, in fact, are divine appointments of grace in this anxiety-driven, pain-filled world of ours.

You see, la Belle et Bonne Bianca Castafiore had just been pulled over by the cops --a mere kilomètre from Marlinspike Hall, the warm hearth of home -- and given two tickets and a summons to appear on August 12. Before I could express both my wrath that she was driving my darling Ruby to begin with, and my pleasure that, whatever the circumstances, both she and Ruby were apparently unharmed, the Dastardly Diva exclaimed:

"Et c'est tout à fait de ta faute, toi! And it is all your fault!"

My eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Comment ça?"

It turns out that she would never have forgotten to renew her driver's license if I had not been such a distraction, with all my drama, fever, infection and such. When I pointed out that she had been absent for a good period of the "drama," and was not overly concerned when she actually had been at The Manor, she looked me square in the eye, and... sniffed.

There was a brief lull during which either one of us might have chosen the higher way and opted to be the better person.

"The only reason le flic nabbed me for speeding was that I was practicing getting you from zee Manor to zee 'opital in whatisityoucall? Ah, yes! Zee no time flat! Comme je t'ai dit, tout, tout, tout -- c'est tout à fait de ta faute!"

This may have been when I felt compelled to make a few observations relating to personal and communal responsibilities, perhaps even a remark or two on hygiene -- I don't sniffin' remember.

Even though I had promised the more levelheaded Fredster not to make mention of it, I found myself, in my best scary voice, relating how, on a frigid, late-spring, early afternoon during one of her lighthearted jaunts around Europe, icicles were glinting on the Marlinspike's eaves -- and the alluring scent of two putrid cans of half-eaten Libby's Vienna Sausage* stuffed in the serpentine bottom drawer of a 16th century French armoire -- beautifully restored as a well-stocked wet bar -- led Fred and me, on behalf of our spry-tongued seafaring benefactor (and hers) -- the good Captain Haddock -- to jimmy the lock of her appartement. {don't touch my paragraph}

Slowly she turned... her BB-gun pupils a steely grey -- "Yes? Ah. Oui?"

"Yes," I continued, "we have been inside. We have seen it with our own eyes, and we are shocked, Castafiore, shocked! Whatever could you have been thinking? What will our spry-tongued seafaring benefactor conclude when he hears about this abomination, this perversion of his family's ancestral home?"

La Belle et Bonne Bianca hung her head. Without looking up, in a steady voice, sounding well-practiced, she recounted the story of Her Fall, beginning with the unthinkable -- how the Faust of Gounod had finally, and for the first time, had a closing night -- and how all those arty Anglophiles were rubbing it in with glee: The Mousetrap wins; It has never stopped running since its premier at London's Ambassador’s Theatre in 1952.

There would be no more "je ris de me voir si belle dans ce miroir" until the financial wizards of the world managed to staunch the bleeding that was hemorrhaging the bottom lines of the operatic universe.

The Castafiore, out of work and desperate to continue to earn a living, fell back on her early training as itinerant seamstress to the Wandering Renaissance Reenactors of Belgium, and, unexpectedly, Wales. All that time we assumed that she was touring Faust -- and okay, yes, I was a tad bit self-absorbed with the cartography of my own navel.

Still. Still! "Bianca... How? Where did you get the money?"

"I borrowed it, it was easy. I borrow, then I borrow again, at a better rate, and swap-switch the debt. You know -- take from Peter and give to Paul and, above all, keep washing the Messiah's feet -- no one ever takes a close look at the beautiful chica whose long hair and boobies are all hanging out..." said my friend, her bitterness spilling over. "I just wanted to be able to send money back to my familia rustica, trapped down on the farms outside Roma. Is that so wrong?"

"You really have a flair, you know. If I did not know quite a bit about Chenonceau, I might have fallen for it. I mean, really, Castafiore! How much were you going to charge?"

"That is the trick, mon amie. I would ask 'only for what you can spare, to defray the costs of upkeep.' The tourists? They would squirm in guilt, they would take out their portefeuilles and fill the coffers with their monies. After all, Francois Ier is the epitome of the Renaissance... and toss about the story of Leonardo da Vinci having died in his arms, cared for during his final days in the King's own bed chamber." Her eyes were glowing; She was far away.

She and her unemployed theatre cohorts got it in their minds to gut the Captain's appartement and build a replica of Francois Ier's bedroom at Chenonceau. Never mind how confused her explanations could get in an attempt to distinguish his digs at Chenonceau from the official residence at Château de Blois, and how they managed to confuse the one with the other in her imaginary trip down the Loire Valley.

And how was she going to get people in and out of the place without stirring, umm, lots of suspicion? Easy... cut a door through the three feet of stone leading to that nice shady spot at the northern end of the moat.

We never would have seen or heard a thing.

Hard times... they surely do bring something out of people. We sat and stared at one another -- me, determined to never complain again, because that risks causing people to be carted off to jail, so abstracted are they by my constant grief, and The Castafiore? Sorry mostly at having been caught, but also regretting the end to subterfuge, she was thinking of all those nice doublets waiting to be sown and beaded at 600 Euros a pop.

*"Vienna sausages are life’s 'fuck you' waiting in the cabinet when you’re hung over and depressed..."

How my mind works

Ever since the day I deleted, on purpose and quite efficiently, two good chapters of my doctoral thesis, along with two bad ones, I've been loathe to dispose of any piece of writing.  Let me qualify that just a little:  I've been loathe to dispose of any piece of writing that warranted an initial "save" on the computer.  Of course, saving a text doesn't always mean the text is worth anything -- it may have been a text interrupted, or a passage awaiting proper citation, or an enticing poster announcing ManorFest schedules and entry fees.  It may be something inane to me but valuable to someone else. * [see below]

Let's see what might happen, shall we, if I employ my usual artlessness in a blog post dedicated to the goings-on of The Castafiore, as she has been somewhat neglected of late:


La Bonne et Belle Bianca, The Castafiore, has laryngitis. 


That means, for those of you not tuned in to the minutiae of life here at Marlinspike Hall, ancestral home of the Haddock clan -- well represented in the current generation by The Captain -- That means, mes chers, mes petits choux, that no one, c'est-à-dire, personne, is going to be screaming, errrr, singing, à très haute voix:

ah!  je ris de me voir...
si belle dans ce miroir!

D'habitude, elle crie si fort que je risque de devenir sourde, ou dingue/dingo... folle... cinglée...  farfelue...
détraquée...  maboule... loufe... faible...  marteau... insensée... azimutée... loufoque... délirante... toquée... déséquilibrée...

[Not unlike the possum who loves bright, dangly Shiny Things,

I am momentarily caught off guard by this profusion of crazy words,

and in my embarassment, seek to draw my readers' eyes away

from this linguistic glitter by the insertion of cold, hard grammar...]

Remember, please, that dingo is, of course, invariable -- when used as French adjectival slang, that is.
Not, I repeat, not when referencing the wild dog of Australia, and certainly not in relation to the tragic event that introduced many of us to the canine dingo:  the death of baby Azaria Chamberlain thirty years ago at Uluru, and her mother's famous declaration that "a dingo ate my baby."


It's unfortunate that I tend to burst out laughing at that phrase, as delivered by a shrill Meryl Streep in the movie A Cry in the Dark. I confess to having mimicked Streep with nary a thought in my pointy head for the real actors, and their actual drama.  By the time Elaine performs her mimicry on a Seinfeld episode, I was likely inured to the tragic origins of the line.



Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, by the way, recently has requested what will be a fourth inquest about the death of her daughter, part of her search for justice being to have the death certificate reflect that Azaria was killed by the primitive canine. 


It is so little to ask, and coming from someone who lost... incalculably.  Convicted of murder (and her husband of being an accessory to it), she spent a tangible three and a half years in prison for a loss too great for reckoning.  She just wants to amend what stands as malicious fantasy with a truth.









And... scene!  My mind does work, but it does its work mysteriously.  How did any of the above possibly relate to the Dear Castafiore? 

Well, the first thought thought is not the first thought recorded, of course.

As I pondered La Bonne et Belle Bianca, and delighted in my good fortune at escaping her rehersal of Gounod's Faust, with her assigned aria, Air des Bijoux, a stray neuron misfired and I flashed on the Benes character, herself reacting to an obnoxious, repetitive voice -- the woman worried about her lost fiancé.  Thus was the deadly dingo incident planted in my fertile brow.   And somehow, that videoclip made me think of the inane, insane craziness that The Castafiore so often inspires in me on a lazy Sunday afternoon -- but even as I indulged my fantasy with an exercise in Synonyms for "Crazy" in French, I sought to reestablish the facts of the case... a travesty wherein what was called evidence of blood was a mixture of milkshake and copper dust, where a Mother's failure to behave as a proper Mother should was an indicting evil.

One day, I'll have to do a hundred focused words or so on the deadening dichotomy of Mary the Virgin/Whore and other unfortunate idées reçues.


*  [What I write] may be something inane to me but valuable to someone else... Such proved to be the rambling introduction I made to a blog entry about CRPS clinical trials.  Of course, the clinical trials themselves are of import, but in a fit of gregarious excess, I also jotted down some historical references about the ManorMaze and the family responsable for its very existence, the Mimnermuses:

I'm going to steal a moment away from ManorFest activities to update the blog on CRPS clinical trials that are currently accepting new volunteers.

I could use the rest. We opened ManorMaze to the public this year and, let me tell you, if you have the bad luck to draw Rescue Duty, your dogs are gonna bark.

Written records testify that Marlinspike Hall's Manor Maze dates back as far as 1067. Cretan Manor Jardinier Ajax Mimnermus transplanted the first thousand English Boxwood in a highly original serpentine pattern that twisted and turned over a particularly hilly, 25-acres bit of Haddock ancestral land. Twenty-two generations later, the Mimnermus Family still holds the prestigious position of JardinierOfficiel to the Marlinspike Manor Maze. A proud and loyal clan, they guard our horticultural secrets with ferocity. Both little red-headed, freckled Xenophon and his more swarthy third cousin Clinias are currently in training: One will assume the mantle of Jardinier Officiel; The other will be offered a lifetime position on the Landscape Crew. Everyone wins!

Anyway, you can imagine how huge and complex this labyrinth is today, as one Mimnermus after another has judiciously added plantings, making the maze both more elegant and more challenging to exit. (Though sometimes, I'd swear that it has a life all its own, its paths shifting in the night like sand in a storm -- but I can't prove anything.)

CRPS renders ManorMaze Rescue Duty very tiring, and my wheelchair has lost its charge more than once, over the years, leaving me to call for my own rescue. It's a restful place in which to be trapped, though, as our Illustrious Gardeners have created little enclaves of delight within -- squares dedicated to aromatherapy, curlicued paths lined with delicious mint and sweet clovers!

[Thank the Good Lord, however, that my chair has never lost power in The Marsh installed by Xenophon's paternal grandmother, Nausicaa, who loved the dramatic tension of taming a wild landscape. For The Marsh, she took as her inspiration Tolkien's Dead Marshes of Middle Earth. Being a patriotic soul, Tête-de-Hergéenne through and through, she wanted to memorialize those lands that served as battlefield during the Sixth Uprising, and modeled her marsh on his Mere of Dead Faces that border one of the entrances to Mordor. Years ahead of her time, she achieved the underwater lighting effect by solar cells and advanced the field of horticultural photovoltaics by decades. Captain Haddock's great uncle had the forsight to underwrite her studies in Moscow with Aleksandr Stoletov -- where it is our good fortune that she witnessed the creation of the very first solar cell and was able to make such an apt application of the invention!]

You are probably thinking that a history so momentous would have its own dedicated documentary support of photographic, journalistic, and epistolary evidence.  And you would be, of course, correct.  Captain Haddock's first Mother-In-Law crested the wave of Nouveau Scrapbooking and stored most everything in Marlinspike Hall's only turret, where she was, errr, housed in the early 1950s.  Her digs were eventually turned into The Computer Turret for reasons just technical enough to escape me. 

I did my usually doodling and dallying in a blog post about... Well, it was actually about Fresca, and her blog, l'astronave... but as I frequently record where I am when writing, as well as why I am where I am, I was compelled to share a little about the conditions in The Computer Turret that evening:

Excuse me, this computer -- a new, or at least, different one -- is blinking and hooting at me. Sputtering, even.


Part of me keeps thinking "This isn't very wise, Retired Educator! Better you should close the plush velvet curtains of The Computer Turret, though they are impervious to not much, so as to better shield this shy, blinking, hooting instrument from the needling horizontal rain with which the Lord has blessed us, than to continue to risk disc failure by pecking away on damp keys and dipping the world's longest extension cord into the stray puddles gracing the uneven slate flagstone."


Yes, we DO have a turret!


Only the one, though.


It was a medieval design flaw, very common, but normally disguised as a soot-spewing chimney by the gaggle of ensuing sub-contractors unleashed by the inevitable Industrial Revolutions. The original Manor Residents had Castle Pretensions. Anyway, Captain Haddock's first mother-in-law, whose living conditions he seems to have delighted in complicating, was housed up here back in the 50s. After her departure, highly fêted, it kind of became a design nightmare and went through incarnations that might shock even Niecy Nash. [I confess that I sometimes wander around Marlinspike Hall with a blindfold on, stopping suddenly and yelling: "Take your blindfold off and OPEN YOUR EYES!"


Yes, I did recently break a leg. Your point?

You probably shuddered with premonition that night, Dear Reader.  Perhaps, in your own blog or journal you wrote of your fear -- perhaps you lit a candle on our behalf, or placed a sporting bet on when, exactly, The Computer Turret would be engulfed in flames. 

For just a few short weeks later, the electrical short that had been smoldering behind "the plush, velvet curtains" turned into a sufficiently maintained blaze to destroy everything but its rock base -- panelling, curtains, computers, and, yes, all the archival material about the ManorMaze.  Oh, and an inimitable collection of Milanese Osso Bucco recipes. 

Yeah, so publishing what may seem extraneous to you, or even to me, in this blog can, indeed, serve a separate and sometimes higher purpose.  In this instance, I do harbor a bit of regret, because our Manor insurance company at the time,  BCBS -- Bull Crap Bull Skeet of Tête-de-Hergé -- refused to cover the costs of the inferno, citing my own reportage in this blog as evidence of irresponsible usage and dangerous conditions.   Dickwads.

And yet, isn't it grand that some of the invaluable history of The Manor was preserved by my seemingly mindless and circuitous writings?

That, in short, Dear Reader, is how my mind works.

Now... as I said, initially, Bianca has laryngitis.  I am thinking slippery elm tea and a pristine broth...

the one where i break my leg...

hi there, sports fans! as usual, you will just have to trust that i have scintillating posts in the works for My Dear Readers.

in fact, on my list of sixteen things to do this week, item number sixteen reads: "kindly finish the two scintillating blog posts that you have on deck" -- {that'd be the requisite sporting terminology}.

la bonne et belle bianca castafiore is driving me and fred nigh unto insanity due to her obsession with all things "Jeux-O." last night, we caught her chatting online claiming to be québécoise, d'une vieille famille acadienne. she is a riot, though, when she affects the accent, when she really puts her prodigious nose into it.

plus, it is fashion week here at Marlinspike Hall, just as it is in the greater world of haute couture. for The Castafiore, though, its purpose serves a greater urgency, that of preparing her outfits for March Madness and College Basketball viewing. sports and fashion go hand-in-hand.

[you may recall "The ACC Semis," from last March:

"La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore is decked out in a bold, strapless, beaded animal print (specifically, leopard), her considerable self poured into the sweetheart neckline whose décolletage is set off by rhinestones, the fitted silhouette amply accenting her curves, the mid-thigh slit in the front allowing the bright orange lining to flash like a stroboscopic lamp. She is plopped next to me on the bed, rounding out her come hither look with a pair of orthopedic alpaca fuzzy slippers.

During the first semi-final, she kept up a steady effff-ah you! effff-ah you! -- despite my efforts to turn that into the more accurate chant of FSU! FSU! Eventually, The Castafiore burst out of the lace-up corset that constituted the back of that safari prom dress. She's been pretty quiet since."]


you sweet folks deserve an explanation for the dearth of original posting here at elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle. lacking that, here is what i ranted just a bit ago to some acquaintances at my favored fetish site:

good morning! i am frustrated. that's the extent of the rant, really.

oh, why am i frustrated?

in a previous rant, i explained that i have crps in all 4 limbs + the lower part of my face -- i also have severe avascular necrosis pretty much everwhere thanks to years of steroids for lupus -- plus there is that pesky osteomyelitis in my shoulders (and probably one knee, too). are you up to speed? basically, my bones suck. sometimes they rot. sometimes they fester. and... very often! they break.

i fractured my tibia saturday morning. it was a brilliant moment. i am wheelchair bound (sniff, sniff) -- it's a power chair because i cannot use my shoulders, i mean, my fake shoulders, to self-propel. i was already doing what i am not supposed to do --i was rotating our mattress.

now, i keep the thermostat very low -- as in 58 degrees. so we don sweatshirts and sweaters and are just generally swathed in layers of fabric. i try to keep the various sleeves carefully rolled up, so as to avoid accidents.

what kind of accidents? ohhhhh, the kind where your sleeve catches on the "joystick" of your power chair and drives you willy-nilly at high speed into the METAL bedframe. not possessing intelligence, the chair continues to push, push, push until the idiot driver manages to smash the OFF button in between screams.

i love the various sounds of the erupting zit: schlurp! pa-pa-pop-splat!

i HATE the sound of a bone breaking: ccccc-r-aaaa-ccccc-k.

given that it was, of course, my right leg, the one my doctor suggested amputating back in november (?), the increase in pain is practically meaningless. going from a steady pain score of 8/10 to 9/10 just doesn't mean crap, y'know? i mean, what am i going to do, take more pain medication? i don't think so.

before crps, when my bones broke, i'd surround the offending skeleton with ice. after crps, ice is contraindicated.

so we sat around and watched it swell and change colors. more fun than a movie and popcorn.

and we discussed how annoying it was that my health insurance is no more. yes, i called the medic and my doc wanted it splinted right away. i knew he was going to say that, so we had already launched an expedition into our Orthopedic Supply Closet, crammed full of boots, splints (cloth and metal as well as air), velcro, exercise bands, a collection of walkers, canes, and wheelchair batteries. thanks to dislike of organization, there were also bedpans, tennis rackets, gallons of biofreeze and betadine, bendy shoelaces (back in the day, i used to wear shoes), and a few embarrassing romance novels.

my leg, though, had decided to swell quickly, too fast for the application of a splint.

PRAISE THE LORD, because if i cannot wear a sock on my feet due to pain? i surely can no longer tolerate the pressure, touch, and weight of a booted splint.

so, no weight-bearing is the rule, also the joke, as i cannot abuse that left leg either, and cannot use any type of crutch -- for those exciting trips of 15-20 feet to get from bed or chair to the bathroom.

whew. okay, thanks, y'all. i feel better. everytime i think, "oh, fuck, i *cannot* do this..."? it works itself out. not to say that i don't sometimes look forward to the day when i truly will give up! no time soon, no time soon.

wow, heavy-duty self-pity.

the good news is that having vented, i do indeed feel better.

news that you may or may not consider "good," i think i have it in me to write again. the problem is finishing. getting it to the point where it won't be a total embarrassment if viewed by others.

you dig?

The Castafiore Takes On Doktor Phil. Again.

• 9 cups dandelion flowers (6 cups dandelion petals and 3 cups dandelion flower heads, trimmed)
• 1 11-oz can Welch's 100% White Grape Juice frozen concentrate
• 1 lb 10 ozs granulated sugar
• 2 lemons (juice only)
• 2 oranges (juice only)
• 1 tsp yeast nutrient
• ½ tsp pectic enzyme
• ¼ tsp tannin
• 6¼ pts water
• White Burgundy wine yeast

In primary, combine all ingredients except dandelions and yeast. Stir well to completely dissolve sugar. Stir in dandelions, cover primary and set aside 10-12 hours. Add activated yeast and recover primary. Stir twice daily until violent fermentation subsides. Pick and prepare flower petals and heads. For dandelion flower heads, wash and trim off stems only. Put dandelion petals and heads in nylon straining bag with 1 dozen sterilized glass marbles for weight. Tie bag and submerge in liquid in primary. Gently squeeze and dunk bag several times a day for 5 days. Drain bag, squeezing lightly only, and transfer liquid to secondary. Fit airlock and rack after 2 weeks, topping up and refitting airlock afterward. After wine falls clear, wait 2 weeks and rack after adding 1 crushed Campden tablet to clean secondary. Thereafter, rack every 2 months for 6 months, adding another crushed Campden tablet during middle racking and stabilizing at last racking. Wait another month and rack into bottles. This wine is for the long term and for winning competitions, so cellar it for 2 years before tasting.

-- From Jack Keller's Dandelion Wines:  Special Recipe Collection 

Even knowing what a squirrelly creature she can be, I confess to having been beguiled by La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore... again. *

Home at The Manor unusually early of an evening, she decided to check out the latest from her arch enemy, Dr. Make-Believe-I'm-A-Psychologist Phil.   It's not clear to us what motivates this compulsion that overcomes her, though it may be some kind of seasonal affective disorder...  or -- duuuuhhhhhh -- I reckon compulsions don't have rational motivations, anyway, huh? 

Yeah, okay, you caught me.  I was trying to show off how I probably know as much as Doktor Phil in terms of... well, terms 'n all.  You try coming up with believable crap to explain Bianca's behavior and see if you don't pick up a few felicitous funky phrases.

Or it might be the wine.  As motivation, I mean.  Or as disinhibitor, allowing for the release of wave upon wave of bright green Anti-McGraw Bile.

She got it into her pretty lacquered head to do some early taste-testing of last year's dandelion wine.  Jack Keller says that "dandelion wine is fermented sunshine."

That'd be Jack Keller, the winemaker, craggy-faced guy, recently bit by a rattlesnake.  Not the songwriter, who penned hits for everyone from the Everly Brothers to The Monkees.  Certainly not the poker player or the Marvel Comics artist.

[Don't you think we should all have our own disambiguation page at Wikipedia?  It sounds like something I *need* -- and *want*.  I need disambiguation.  I want disambiguation.  Hell, I DESERVE disambiguation.]

Right!  So after indulging in a little alcoholic sunbathing, The Castafiore scoped out the latest cutting edge opinions being proffered by that Ersatz Doctor, Phil McGraw. Her overall findings?  Dr. Phil remains an Offensive Media Whore and Con Man with a Blindingly Bald Pate -- and dandelion wine doesn't have to be a body-less sweet mess.  Jack Keller can fill you in on what he calls "body-builders" and on the use of sugar.  If you decide to go straight up with the dandelion wine and not fortify it with raisins or grape concentrate ("you could use dates, figs, apricots, or rhubarb instead") -- Jack advises that you serve it with an exciting salad or some baked trout. 

He specifies trout.  I need another 100 words on why that is so, but Jack is a tease, and doesn't say.  Then again, he doesn't divulge what kind of trout, either, does he?  Ha!  Gotcha, Jack!  (My vote was originally for rainbow... then I read that 95% of what makes it to the table is farm-raised and I just don't cotton to fish from the farm.  Yes, thank you, I *do* know that it's childish to expect my rainbow trout to have leaped and fought through clear, cold, unpolluted white waters to get to my plate.) 

Would everyone just get the heck off of my back, please?  I am trying to tell a story here.  Jeez.


Okay, so I had a lapse in judgement and told La Bonne et Belle Bianca she could use my laptop to scope out Old Shiny Pate's blog, The Turning Point.

See, I really didn't think she had it in her, especially with the dandelion wine on board, to even make it up to the Computer Turret.  You'll find me up here pretty darned often, maybe even 3-4 hours a day, and it's rare for the Turret to ever be unoccupied -- but it's downright unheard of for The Castafiore to make the effort.

[A brief explanation would seem to be in order. You're probably wondering how hard it can be to get to our state-of-the-art computer center. In a post titled l'astronave, way back in April of 2010, I tackled the task of explaining the matter thusly:

The only way in or out, up or down, the pesky turret is via a thick rope ladder, dyed caution yellow, that extends down (but mostly sideways) out to the Manor Stables -- a remarkable outbuilding that is an alarming replica, as we pointed out in our last post, of the Knoppenburg Manor Stables. The proper term today is "agricultural building." You won't catch me calling it a barn if there are any prying ears about. Of course, the last outsider who dropped by was The Technician Overlord of Our Telecommunications Bundle, which he so wisely decided was best centered in the Hobby Room at the top of the Turret Tower. We had concocted a cover story about the rope bridge ("It's more a bridge than a ladder," Fred just said), which consists of the baldfaced lie that we are a new off season venue for those Cirque du Soleil performers who are fresh out of rehab. So the hefty diameter of that hemp monster, see, is easily explained away as necessary gear for these poor, troubled acrobats.


I'm usually not subject to such heights of embarrassment (heights, and, lately, riches) but I just don't want anyone to think that I have to zig zag my way from one Manor Wing to another, make it to the Grand Ballroom, out the entrance, patterned after Brunelleschi's bronze baptistery doors, over the drawbridge (Provided it is down! Men!), across the moat, down the lane, over the hedge, into the damned agricultural outbuilding, up the custom wheelchair ramp into the hayloft, and then, lickety-split, go hand-over-fist on the rope bridge for a good half mile... all just to get my email.

 

So just imagine the superhuman effort necessary to a drunken overweight opera diva... ]

Once she got to the Computer Turret, she wasn't about to leave without also leaving traces of her visit.  Luckily, she found McGraw's blog post on the "stoicism of the Japanese" sufficiently provocative.  This is a chunk of his prose from that post:

April 4th, 2011 by Dr. Phil
The Stoicism of the Japanese

...[D]o you know what astonishes me? It’s watching the people of Japan face their catastrophe with a kind of stoicism and, strangely, a grace. We haven’t seen any looting in Japan for desperately-needed supplies, like bottled water. We haven’t seen fistfights break out among the people waiting in line for hours to get gasoline or groceries. For years, I’ve heard about the legendary politeness of Japanese people in everyday life, but I just thought it was a cliché. How are they able to maintain such calm in the face of overwhelming disaster?

I’m hardly someone who thinks Japan’s way of life is in any way better than ours. But at the same time, I will say, there is something to be said for the ordinary Japanese citizen’s respect for order, good manners and hospitality. The other day, I was stunned to watch one elderly woman, standing in the cold outside her wrecked home, offer ABC anchor Diane Sawyer some water because she looked thirsty.

And what about the selflessness epitomized by those workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, risking dangerous doses of radiation without complaint as they struggle to prevent a complete meltdown that would endanger their fellow citizens?

I’m no expert in culture, and I’m not going to pretend to say I understand why the vast majority of Japanese people are enduring these impossible hardships with impeccable dignity, but we could all learn a few lessons from their example. I also hope we’ll all say a little prayer for that country. Yes, Japan is one of our great industrialized powers, and it will someday recover. But it has a long way to go. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese who live in the northern part of the country will have to endure months of homelessness and hunger.

If you want to help, you can go to the American Red Cross website and make a contribution for the victims of the earthquake and the tsunami, as well as for those families fleeing the nuclear radiation. My prayers are with Japan.

What did Our Girl have to say to such a pious post?  Gird your loins and read on.  Maybe grab a flagon or two of ale, a few carafes of dandelion wine so as to wash it all down without too much pain.  Only Marlinspike Hall would have a resident writing in apparent opposition to praise of a suffering nation... 

Can an unannounced visit from a perturbed Captain Haddock be far behind?

Bianca Castafiore says:

April 13, 2011 at 4:16 pm

It is, of course, rude of me to be bothered by what is an expression of admiration by Dr. Phil and his fans, but heck-by-golly, I don’t care. No, in all seriousness, I just feel like a few things about stereotyping need to be said — explicitly.

When we express our admiration of the “Stoic” Asian (don’t we really mean “opaque,” don’t we really mean that old chesnut — “inscrutable”?), don’t we automatically relegate the people of Japan to an easily dealt with two-dimensionality? It is less admiration for them than relief for our lazy Western minds not to have to think too hard or work up a good head of natural empathy. How could we, when they are so different from us?

Often, our assessment of the Japanese people is most firmly based on our absolute ignorance of what is happening in front of our eyes, and our cluelessness of the language going in one 耳 and out the other. I would wager that most Americans heading for a conference in Tokyo would learn to say “thank you” but not bother with “bathroom” or “help.” (And we wonder why we have so many foreign toilet emergencies…)

So what does the realization do for you, as you notice with notably Christian approval that you’ve seen no looting among these well-behaved pagans, but rather a “legendary” politeness, including an old woman offering a non-suffering Western media figure some water? Does all that “impeccable dignity” merit more aid? Or just more prayer? Or are you thinking that maybe they require *less* prayer than one would anticipate, since they stay in line so well already? Aha! I think I am catching on.

I realize that this mostly inoffensive blog post (there are scads out there way more dominated by cultural stereotype, with much less natural sympathy) simply perpetuates our established stateside understanding — that of “the model minority.” We go with what we [think we] know.

In terms of this sad tragedy, aren’t we mostly protecting ourselves from pain and denying the Japanese their real needs and their true sufferings by doting on all that we do not see, as if — because we do not see it — it is not there?

One thought that recurs and almost makes me cry out in a different kind of pain is this: How much of the “stoicism,” how much of the delicate restraint that we “admire” in the Japanese of this post-quake period is a learned response — something, in fact, that we put in their cultural curriculum after dropping atomic bombs on the men, women, and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is it stoicism and good manners — positive stereotyping, at least, eh? Or are these faces just too well versed in the suffering born of huge, massive, unimaginable (to *us*), COLLECTIVE destruction?

If there is an element of dangerous emotional repression going on… then I hope there is also much going on to which our know-all american culture is just not privy. [But I saw it on t.v.! But I saw it when I visited Tokyo with my Christian choir in 1968! But everyone knows that blahblahblah!] I hope there are all kinds of polite, stoic people blowing up, irrationally, and maybe stamping their tiny little feet; I hope there are cadres of wise, obsessively neat old men secretly wishing that some foreign media Talking Head will slip on a mandarin orange peel while on the air; I hope there is an epidemic of well-behaved, hyperrespectful (and therefore mathematically talented) Japanese teenagers snatching the last bit of rice before their fat and lazy Korean cousins have a chance…

Sometimes etiquette and behavior are superficial, sometimes they are deeply reflective, and yes, I am sure we are witnessing aspects of the very best of human nature in the news reports coming out of Japan in the aftermath of earthquake and tsunami, and as we watch the tragedy of an ongoing nuclear catastrophe.

Let’s just be sure that we are as compassionate when an occasional person cracks under the repeated strain of aftershocks and new tsunami warnings, when the murky uncertainties of a radioactive future reveal tics of anxiety, frustration, and anger — even in the most stoic of Japanese.

*****   *****   *****   *****   *****   *****   *****   *****   *****

*OMG: Bianca does Dr. Phil  [The first confrontation -- pub. 9/22/2009]

We try, Fred and I really do. But we can't watch her all the time, and really? Why does the onus fall on us? Am I truly expected to monitor the computer use of a mumblymumbly year old grown woman, and in a place as huge as Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé?

It happened at 3:38 in the morning. Yes, I was up but hardly felt like looking over the shoulder of a drunken Castafiore, as she picked and pecked her way across the keyboard.

She's taken to frequenting local pubs after her evening performances at the Opera House, belting out encore performances of L'air des bijoux.

The only way I could tolerate a late night, early morning onslaught of je-ris-de-me-voir-si-belle-dans-ce-miroir-oir-oir-oir? Whiskey. Stoli. The dregs of a house red.

So, out of appreciation for my liver function, I stay safely ensconced in our designated area of The Manor.

La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore decided to surf the net before passing out in her suite of rooms -- rooms that she and some of her ne'er-do-well operatic thugs refurbished last summer, in the style of François Ier. Now *that* was perhaps an episode that Fred and I might have prevented -- but she's wily, very wily, that Castafiore.

Apparently, she is a fan of this Dr. Phil person, a tall, chunky, bald man of indeterminate age -- or 59. As documented in the Dickipedia, Phil McGraw is a "doctortainer of the highest order." Still, Bianca is perhaps not the sort of fan base that The Dr. Phil Brand was designed to attract, and in that lies much of her charm and amazing ability to sour the stomachs of her interlocuteurs.[click HERE to read the rest]

Fiche-moi la paix!

La Belle et Bonne Bianca Castafiore? She begins to drive me batty. Yes, je ris de la voir si belle dans ce sacre miroir! How awful to be seriously wishing she would develop a bronchite or maybe some mildly debilitating skin disease best treated by an extended stay on a desert island.

Elle m'emmerde.

Though I don't think it her intent, La BBBC can make me and the Fredster feel like poor relations who have overstayed their welcome -- and since it is a question of Marlinspike Hall, deep in the Tête de Hergé? We aren't about to go ANYWHERE! Hence, considerable tension. (We've as much or more right to be here than the Castafiore -- We knew the Captain first.)

For every one of her implicit Fou le camp... we posit our own mutely responsive Putain! Salope! Morceau de merde! Sometimes language fails.

Screeeeeechhhh! (This is the sound of Retired Educator veering off topic.) Still, cursing can be such fun, and illustrative, as well. For instance, please be cognizant of the following cultural distinctions (that you'll find detailed here):

Well, it should be made clear that the swear words you learn in Paris will not help you in Québec, with the Acadians or with the Cajuns. The French tend to use swear words dealing with bodily functions or that have sexual connotations. Here is a list of some of the most common:

salope (=slut)
putain (=whore)
merde (=shit)
chier (=to shit, verb)
So, a Frenchman (or woman, for that matter) may indeed swear at you in the following manner:
"Toi, ma putain de salope, tu me fait chier avec tes trucs de merde!"
Now, the québecois, on the other than, rely mostly on religious material for their swear words, due to the early and pervasive influence of the Catholic church. Here is a list of the some of the most common swear words used in Québec:
tabarnac (=tabernacle)
calisse (=chalice)
hostie (=the host)
ciboire (=another cup)
christ (=Christ)
So, a Quebecker might swear at you in the following manner:
"Hostie! Toi (pronounced 'tway'), mon tabarnac de ciboire de St. Sulpice, tu me fais chier en christ!"
Finally, the Acadians swear like the Quebecois, but with healthy and regular doses of English thrown in. For example:
"Toi, mon christ, t'est completement fucked up!"
A few other random points -- sacre means "profanity" au Québec (I guess that's pretty clear!). Tabarna*k* is pretty common -- more common, actually. And we cannot ignore the eMs, maudit and mozusse, etc.

I spent some time doing slave labor (recording people) for a study of Joual during a stint in Montréal and the richness of her linguistics was a testament to her competing politics and social strata. Now *that* is a city that lives her politics, where conversation is truly vivante.

When I think back to those long hot summer days at the Université de Montréal, the weirdest memories surface. Obsessively eating lunch at the same restaurant on blvd Edouard-Montpetit because of its incredible trout, the incredible trout! Truite fumée, truite aux amandes, tartare de truite saumonée, clafoutis de truites, truite de mer rôtie. Yes, I was on a trout kick. The cyclist I met on the train. Ahem. Yes, moving on... The football celebration downtown, and the huge crowd of Italians that seemed to come out of the woodwork. That stupid Fabienne Thibeault concert. The Underground City (now the RÉSO).

It was a fun time, but strange, as I was completely unattached -- personally, professionally, academically. All the hours on the phone, trying to connect with where I used to be.

No, that part was not fun.

La Belle et Bonne Bianca Castafiore holds her past life close to the vest -- we've never met old friends, a lover has never greeted us in the morning, she does not speak of family. In lieu of a wall of beloved photographs, she keeps a collection of vintage opera programs and posters.

We are both here thanks to the good graces of Captain Haddock. She constantly bungles his name -- Captain Drydock! Captain Stopcock! -- but she loves him with something close to maternal love.


It is a crime that no one will extend to her a new role -- as she, and those who live with her, tire of her repetition as Marguerite in the Faust of Charles Gounod: "Ah my beauty past compare, these jewels bright I wear!...Was I ever Margarita? Is it I? Come reply...Mirror mirror tell me truly!”

And that damn mirror -- once a prop, now almost an extension of her arm!

Awww, she's alright. I'm ashamed of my silent curses because I know that every syllable is written on my face -- I have been told that for as long as I can remember, that I hide nothing, it is all there in my expression, my mouth, my eyes.

My bloodwork from last week came back -- J. called with the results last night, and she faxed them to the orthopedic surgeon whom I will see tomorrow -- the ID doc at 11, the OS at 4. All the signs of infection are there -- the elevated white count, c reactive protein, and yadda -- I can't remember. It will be nice to come home afterward. Nice to hang with La Belle et Bonne Bianca Castafiore, have a mug or two of tea, chatter endlessly about bright and shiny, tinselly things that are not quite meaningless.

Repost: Spring Cleaning at Marlinspike Hall

originally posted 3/22/2009

I repost this annually, as much for my benefit as for the New Reader who may have wandered in by mistake. To what end? Well, to remind myself that the tasks necessary to keep order in our little corner of The Manor are mere trifles compared to what we face in the rest of Marlinspike Hall. If you are new to elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle, this also may help you better visualize Captain Haddock's family home.  And who knows?  Thinking about spring, even if it's spring cleaning, might brighten your day.

I'd best get back to it. Medieval tapestries don't whack themselves clean, you know.

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Here, deep deep in the Tête de Hergé, it's the time of year when we tenants of Marlinspike Hall clean and straighten, rake and trim, sweep and scrub. Sometimes in matching outfits. Spring might herald a visit from The Captain to his ancestral home, and he expects to find a tight ship.

What is involved in keeping The Manor neat as a new pin? It's not terribly complicated and probably is very much like what you might do in your own home.

The Old Masters must be dusted and straight. Simple enough.

Before I made the acquaintance of The Biddington, I had to use whole bowls full of emulsion cleaner, varnish remover, and even a few drops of Domestic Industrial Strength Environmental Neutralizer for the dingiest of chef-d'oeuvres. Mrs. Biddington -- known in the industry as The Bo-Bizzle of Blue Ball Biddies -- influenced me to try cleaning our oils with various breads and doughs, even the occasional muffin and non-alcoholic fruitcake. Now I only violate EPA guidelines when working on some of the more obscure works stashed in the odd uninhabited corners of The Manor, and I wile away the winter snows by tending to them, one at a time, slowly. Cotton swab by cotton swab, corrosive compound by corrosive compound. Why such diligence? Captain Haddock likes to circulate his distinguished family's art holdings from year-to-year, so you never know when that smoky and yellowed Rembrandt self-portrait is going to see the light of day. (O! There are an annoying quantity of Rembrandt self-portraits to deal with. I keep advocating that they all should be hung in the creepy and destabilizing carny Mirror Room.)

I will never forget the Spring day, several years ago, when my dear friend La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore decided that she wanted to pitch in.

I cocked an eyebrow.
Fred produced a paroxysm of belabored coughing.
Marmy issued a subtle "*ack*-*ack*-*ack*" as she puffed her mighty fluffy butt and stalked off.
I don't know where the boys were.

In one smooth arcing movement, Bianca spritzed Aqua-CitraSolve Natural Household Cleaner and Degreaser on The Conversion of Saint Paul and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter by that murderous, kinda baroque-y, sorta manneristic imp-of-a-guy, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. I can't get the straight poop from Haddock as to how his family put its hands on the pair -- both once graced the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo -- until Cardinal Tiberio Cerasi, a flighty guy, himself, and Treasurer to Pope Urban the SumpthingSumpthing, couldn't make up his flighty-guy mind about whether he wanted them or whether he wanted to commission another attempt at the religious subject matter. Those Haddocks sure were lucky.

I cannot count the hours I have spent cleaning all that lucky plunder.


I don't like to complain overly much -- but as you can see from the photo at left (taken in the Cozy Breakfast Nook behind The Spit Kitchen in the Western Wing), just getting to these suckers to wield a tentative and gentle feather-dusting requires those ladder skills you learned in high school and never thought you'd use!

Back to that Spring Day of the Spritz. This was the same day Bianca waxed the reclaimed antique oak of the risers on the biggest spiral staircase in our wing of Marlinspike Hall. "Reclaimed antique oak risers"? That's what I said. Wait while I consult the History of The Manor. Yes, here it is! The wood was original to the medieval castle of Vol-le-Bois -- and Lord knows there isn't much built of wood that usually survives that era free of worm holes and degrees of rot. Il s'agit là d'une récolte très sage des produits forestiers. Really, it seems insufficient to describe what The Castafiore did as mere "waxing." She lovingly burnished each step with as much Lemon Oil as she could force the old wood to accept (if not exactly *absorb*), and then polished it all off with liberal applications of thick and gooey Creamed Lemon Wax.

Later, in the Salle d'Urgence, she would claim an unexpected and preventable "slip-and-fall." When Fred called The Captain, Haddock's perennial fear of La Bonne et Belle Bianca kicked in and he offered her a healthy settlement. Their relationship is truly one of a twisted pretzel -- the big, soft kind that street vendors sell. Hmm. Well, the ones here, in Tête de Hergé country, are a nice combination of a Philly soft pretzel, but shaped like, and as tasty as, a New York pretzel --sprinkled with a liberal amount of Kosher Sea Salt and dipped in a good pungent mustard.

But I digress.

Back to Castafiore and Caravaggio: Did you know that one of the theories about why oils can be such pains in collecting dust and crap -- is that oil paint never dries? That's why spritzing the damned paintings was such an ill-advised approach to the maintenance of Old Masters. Bianca adores the fresh scent of Aqua-CitraSolve Natural Household Cleaner and Degreaser. "Ah! C'est fabriqué avec de véritables oranges!" she crows. And crows.

[It smells not unlike harvest time in the Florida groves when The Castafiore exits her bath in mid-morning. Bourbon French Orange Blossom, for a mere $45 an ounce -- it wafts, it clogs the nares, it is unmistakeable. She sought the same cloying scent on behalf of the saintly pair of Caravaggios.]

No doubt, too, that she wants to make everything all shiny, like that bleepety-bleep miroir. It's mindboggling, but even with her troupe being out of work due to the Global Opera Crisis, she persists on belting out, à la Ethel Merman, je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir! I mean, really! They may very well want to mount something besides that tiresome Faust after Socialism takes over everything, including the theatre arts. Oh, what a happy day that will be! Art for all! Health care for all! No more inequality of resource allocation!

Anyway. Cough. The only reason those two priceless works were salvaged was because she did her spritzing right in front of me. In a reaction fueled by a burst of outraged adrenaline, I turned the wheelchair on Super-ZoomFast, a setting only to be used in the event of a true emergency. It requires an immediate administrator's authorization and key code. The first time I used it, both the chair and I ended up on our sides, not unlike Arte Johnson and his toppled tricycle on Laugh-In.

True Confession: I have been hording all the Velasquez works in the cool, dry nooks of the upper story of the Knoppenburg Manor Replica Stables. Sometimes, I lean back against wooden slats and think, "mine, all mine."

Wow. I haven't even begun to explain how we spruce up our digs every Spring. Maybe because it truly is a year long process. It never stops.

Keeping the antique Blue Jasper Wedgwood plaques free of cat fuzz. Maintaining the lawns -- replete with a scale replica of Wimbledon courts 1-19 plus Centre Court -- deeply green and trim. Oh, and the neverending battle to keep the black algae out of the moat... daily brushings and constant correction of chlorine requirements -- not too much, the eel and koi are kind of sensitive.

Like I said, it's simple enough. Sure, this year we may have to pay to have others do certain things -- Fred refuses to serve as chimney sweep, for example, and I am having a difficult time beating all the tapestries clean, plus I get a terrible crick in my neck trying to stop the stupid Persian rug borders from unraveling. There is a fix for the problem -- but weaving wool through all the fringe ends and warp threads -- it's called "cashmere and overcasting" -- followed by lots of fine needle work -- and my sore neck, back, and pinpricked hands are going on strike.

I am not gonna do it anymore.

Outsourcing. That's the ticket.

And La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore? What is she doing this Spring Cleaning? We've put her in charge of morale.

I'm Asking For Your Prayers

If you are new to my blog, welcome to a crazy place, an ambitious reflection of a complicated life, a crowded intellect, an ardent site of political yearnings, all wrapped up in an anonymizing fiction.  The Blog Back Story has me, the Profderien, and my partner of 23 years, Fred, living as squatters in a perversion of a small bit of Hergé's geography of the great Tintin books.  Captain Haddock's Marlinspike Hall is our home and our work, too.  Together with the inimitable Bianca Castafiore, the Milanese Nightingale, and a horde of genetically indentured Domestic Staff, we maintain the Haddock holdings, buff up the Caravaggio collection, and try to keep The Castafiore from helping too much -- she has been known to lust after the absent Captain, imbibe a tad bit much, and wax the Carrara marble spiral staircases.

Most of the blog is dedicated to my woes.  Truly.  Just hop around the archives, or simply bend close to your screen and cup a hand behind your ear and listen for the self-indulgent moaning.

When I do deign to mention Fred, I hope I do so with love but know that is not always evident.  Writing love is a hard task and my writing talents wane.  But know this:  I love Fred.

There are more things to say in that vein, more crass but equally true.  Things like... I owe Fred, I owe Fred everything.  Things like... Fred is a hero of the kind that are slowly drifting into the ether, fading from this orb.
Things like... there is no face I'd rather see, no voice I more long to hear.

He can piss me off like nobody's business but generally in that age-old way that provokes a roll-of-the-eye and a peeved cry of "Men!"

He does stuff like wash all the dishes but one.  He's cursed to have the most idiotic drivers in our region (west of the Lone Alp) end up in front of him on a two-lane road, and in a country where there are always double yellow lines and people who pass are considered uncouth.  He thrills at finding new and cheaper spray cleaners.  He goes to court to support women friends who are being stalked.  He welcomes people into the sanctuary at his house of worship, and often spends Friday nights killing bottles of communion wine at our next door neighbors rectory -- the Cistercians whose monastery is just past our apple orchard. Without Fred's attentiveness, the moat around Marlinspike Hall would be three feet thick with blooming red algae, blocking the emergence of the Captain's fleet of miniature submarines that travel the inner core's wormholes and the planet's high seas.

Fred paints, plays the piano, the guitar, and the ukulele.  He overcame a childhood of unimaginable abuse and survived his own acting-out.  The brain fascinates him, and he is one of those high end audio types.

It looks as if Fred may have a tumor called an acoustic neuroma.  He's not felt well since... well, I cannot honestly say, because he's studly.  At least since February/March.  He suddenly -- very suddenly -- lost all hearing in his right ear.  No pain.  Lots of fatigue.  Never close to being balletic, if possible he morphed into a dedicated klutz.  Actually, this last symptom is one we have difficulty gauging with any objectivity, as Fred will try to shorten any walking path by grazing door frames and finding ridiculously direct routes which frequently bruise his shins and stub his hairy toes.

If you will put up with some of my well-worn impropriety, the asshat of an internist, and the dipshit of a physician's assistant who saw him with remarkable frequency, considering this is a man of the old school we're discussing, who has to be feeling pretty gosh god-damned awful to set foot in a doctor's office... Ahem.  I lost the tight thread of my post.  The idiots he saw between March and this month, November, said "ear infection," said "antibiotics," said "ear drops," and essentially placed him in the basket of cases that should get better whether they did a damned thing, be that damned thing right or be that damned thing wrong.

He became dizzy.  Two weeks ago, he came home from the grocery store, shaken.  He'd gotten disoriented, shaky, almost blacked out.  Back to the doctor, who must have had his coffee enema that morning, for he finally referred dear Fred to an ENT.

The ENT found no evidence of the famed raging infection and set up some testing.  Acoustic neuromas are rare, and account for something like 1% of cases of unilateral hearing loss.  For reasons that Fred did not investigate ("Men!"), the doctor suspects that Fred is one of the one percent.  The ENT also, and rightly so, soft-pedaled what a "tumor near the cochlea" actually was, what it actually could do, what it could become, and what was entailed in treating it.

Despite our leather bustiers, dirndls, and tie-dyed lederhosen, we are a modern couple.  It took us longer than usual, but we eventually hit the internet for information.  Did I mention that Fred's degree is in neuropsychology and that he knows his way around the brain better than I know my way around Diderot's Salon of 1767?  An acoustic neuroma is essentially a non-cancerous brain tumor, slow-growing, but that grows in a terrible direction -- toward the brainstem.  It almost always impacts facial nerves and hearing loss is almost always permanent.

I'm trying to sublimate my pains and disabilities, trying to be supportive without being Pollyannish.  Truth be told, my sudden transformation into an irrepressible optimist would cause Fred to suffer a heart attack born of pure shock.

But I found myself ending an email to him -- Yes, we email each other within the same domicile.  Marlinspike Hall is a tremendous manor, and he is in the Computer Turret doing Important Computer Work, while I'm pecking away at my dilapidated laptop in our West Wing apartments, a cat on my head, a cat between my feet, a cat on watch at the window, and Castafiore taking up most of the king-sized decadent round bed, hooting and hollering at American college hoops.  I know, who knew?  Lounging on the Kodiac bear rug, toying with a massive paw of claws, not understanding basketball in the least, is Sven Feingold of the Manor Staff, whose family is genetically indentured to the maintenance of our Labyrinth, the highlight of our annual summer ManorFest.  Sven and Bianca are obnoxiously lusty, but on a cold November night, great fun.  The Castafiore is, at this moment, explaining "traveling" to Sven, who cares only for soccer, and I must say, I almost understand what she is saying.  For a few decades now, it looks to me as if everyone travels, usually in that one long stride from half court to the basket.

Right.
Well.
Anyway.

I ended my short email to The Fred this way:

For I am the Lord, your God, who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you. (Isaiah 41:13)

I am a huge Isaiah fan, and it's his time of year, and I could babble hundreds of embarrassed denials of my biblical sincerity... but this is Fred, and Fred's beautiful brain and hearing, steadiness and string-strumming, his kindness and abstract fingering of piano keys, his love of the Ethiopian sky, the sounds and smells of the Danakil. This is Fred we're talking about, a leitmotif on my blog, a raison d'être in my life.

We all have something tragic ongoing, already gone and ghostly, or on the way.  But I don't care -- I really don't.  I want this man, who has saved my life many times over and then taught me to be glad of it, to be healed.  Yes, I recognize the narcissism running rampant, but as you know, writ large in attitudinal font throughout elle est belle la seine is the ringing query:  Whose blog is it anyway?

Please pray for Fred.  You're so much more likely to have the words, the mien, the means.
Thank you.

[The relevant testing needed for diagnosis cannot begin until the first few weeks of December. I'll keep you apprised, Dear Reader.]

Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, in the well-known piano arrangement by Dame Myra Hess (published by Oxford), has single notes (not part of a chord) on the "wrong" side of the stem; this odd bit of notation occurs on the right-hand staff almost from beginning to end. Why? In the words of Sadie (2001), article "Notation", these are "reversed note shapes representing one strand of a complex texture."

© 2013 L. Ryan