Nora Words

A while ago, Nora came out with “kittycat” but she only said it for a week or so and then returned to her cat shriek and a few of her non-english words (mostly “abu” which she’s mostly stopped saying; guess we’ll never know what it meant). In the last couple of weeks though she’s started building up a vocabulary.

Stuff she says:
– mommy (or mama). I think this was her first after kittycat. mommy is mostly associated with E, though sometimes it’s a little random. the cutest thing is if I’m with her and E is in another room, nora will keep saying mommy.
– daddy (or dada). same with mommy, it’s mostly about me but sometimes a little random.
– baby (or babby or beebee). she doesn’t seem to be able to make the sounds in nora, but she’s saying baby a lot.
– hi. she actually does say this sometimes when you come into the house or into the room.
– night-night (really more ni-ni). this is the newest.

Stuff she understands:
– all done. this usually involves a sort of jazz-hands thing on our part and a head shake (not sure why the hand shake is all done) on nora’s part, and always happens at the end of meals.
– up. if you say up, she’ll make the up gesture (basically raise the roof) and then you have to pick her up.
– book. she’ll go to her book shelf and start pulling things out and throwing them on the floor.
– hug. if you’re lucky she’ll give you a hug, where she takes a 3-second break from her constant activity to lean her head on you and maybe pat you on the shoulder.

Nora’s Menu

I wrote this in september and somehow didn’t post it:

She’ll be nine months in three more days. She’s currently eating: chicken, cheese (extra sharp cheddar), beans, zucchini, green beans, avocado, broccoli, sweet potato, plums, pluots, peaches, prunes, cheerios, yogurt, carrots, tomatoes. She’ll play with small pieces of stuff like cheerios, chicken, and cheese (one-finger method; I’ve tried showing her opposable thumbs but she’s not interested) while you shovel the mashed stuff into her mouth. She usually isn’t interested at first and will block but will eventually accept some food, if you start with something she likes (like vanilla yogurt, right now) and keep her occupied. Every meal takes at least an hour.

How god is like me

optic: YOU MEAN PEOPLE DONT LIKE JEWS? BUT WHY, THEYRE RICH ARENT THEY?
chaircrusher: well if you’d just stop using our babies for sacrifices to YVHW
optic: hey when god says jump you say how high
chaircrusher: hah
optic: we have the old testament vengeful god not your pussy new testament plur god
optic: with his son and his wine and crackers
optic: havin a kid sure mellowed him out
optic: JUST LIKE ME
chaircrusher: when i’ve read the bible, aside from the “hay lookit me i’m god” bits, jesus seems pretty OK.
optic: sure
chaircrusher: i don’t really recognize jesus in a lot of christian religions
optic: someone should found a religion based on his teachings because it would be a pretty nice one

Montreal: Wednesday 9/30/09

Our second day, we vowed to wander around eating as many different things as we could. We started by taking the subway up to the Jean-Talon Market, where we immediately fulfilled our vow by sampling a maple bar, a churro, some meats of various nationalities on sticks, and some local produce. We then sought out Chez Apo, renowned for its Armenian-Lebanese pizza, a sort of flatbread topped with spinach, feta, and zaatar and totally delicious. Then we wandered around and ended up at Sablo Kafe, where we had a tasty tandoori chicken sandwich, and sheltered from all the rain. Later that night we managed to get into Pintxo for great tapas dinner. We may have done something not food-related, but I don’t recall.


View Montreal Wednesday 9/30/09 in a larger map

Montreal: Tuesday 9/29/09

We arrived in Montreal around midday and just headed out to wander around. We had a couple of articles and some ideas of streets to explore but no really clear idea of where to go. Which can be fun. We were staying in the old quarter, which was lovely but not really what we wanted to see, so we initially just headed up St. Laurent. Going that way you first hit the Chinese quarter, where we had lunch at Pho Cali, which was pretty good.

As you continue up St. Laurent, it gets kind of sketchy and red-lightish, but once you cross Sherbrooke, there are lots of boutiques and restaurants. We passed the infamous Schwartz’s of smoked-meat fame, which we didn’t manage to eat at this trip. We did stumble across a european grocery called “La Vielle Europe” which had impressive selections of cheese, meats, coffee, and chocolate — we weren’t able to escape without some salami and chocolate “for later”. After that we went in and out of several boutiques along the street, including m0851 and a place called U&I, where E tried on some great shoes. We eventually walked over to St. Denis and back to the hotel that way, not stopping a whole lot but enjoying the variety from block to block.

That night we had dinner reservations at Au Pied de Cochon, which I’ll review separately.


View Montreal Tuesday 9/29/2009 in a larger map

Danger Man to The Prisoner

It’s easy to suppose that Patrick McGoohan’s John Drake from Danger Man is the same man as #6 from The Prisoner. Both are resourceful spies, ruthless but with a core of integrity, and of course with McGoohan’s sometimes bizarre but wonderful personal tics. But the most fun thing about such speculation is the occasional flash of the future prisoner in certain episodes of Danger Man. Oh, I know there probably wasn’t any grand intentional scheme that tied them together, but there are episodes of Danger Man where Drake begins to become dissatisfied with his masters. And there’s even one about a sort of proto-village. It transitions into the Prisoner rather nicely. Also, Drake often says “be seeing you”.

Probably the first episode in which Drake clashes with his masters is Whatever Happened to George Foster, in which Drake learns that a wealthy British lord is subverting the government of a small country for his own ends. The lord manages to influence Drake’s own boss (and his boss’s boss’s boss, the foreign secretary) to have Drake removed from the case, but Drake continues on his own and ultimately stops the lord by uncovering enough dirt on him to blackmail him.

The hypothetical resignation almost could have come about as a result of It’s Up to the Lady (though this theory is really dismantled by the fact that the episode is from the first season), in which Drake is called upon to persuade a defecting Englishman to return home. (spoilers) Drake manages it by persuading the man’s wife to change his mind, and he seals the deal on a promise that the man won’t be prosecuted on his return home — a promise made to him by his own boss. However, when they return, the man is immediately arrested. Drake seethes at his boss in vain, and the disappointed wife simply turns her back on him and walks away.

One fun Prisoner-esque episode is Colony Three, in which Drake finds himself (spoilers) at a Russian spy-training facility in the middle of Siberia that is a perfect model of an English town, complete with English defectors who are forced to play along. It’s very much a proto-Village, even down to the forced frivolity and undercurrent of menace. The other episode is The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove in which Drake has a variety of very weird adventures that involve odd camera angles and sinister music. It turns out (spoilers) that Drake has gotten bonked on the head in a road accident and the whole thing has been imagined, incorporating the doctor and others standing around him, Wizard-of-Oz-stylee. It’s weird in a way that would become familiar in The Prisoner.

Books – October 09

*** Oswald Wynd – The Ginger Tree

I really like the basic story (in 1903, Scottish girl goes to China to gets married, has affair, ends up alone to make her own way in Japan) and the central character (initially naive, somewhat conservative, slowly overcoming her upbringing and dealing with prejudices of race, class, and sex), but they’re not realized as well as I’d like in this book. Mary reads too much sometimes as the wish fulfillment of a person in the 70s (the book was written in 77) thinking about a young woman in 1903 — Mary’s evolution from naive girl to proto-feminist is a little too pat, and her insights benefit a little too much from 70s hindsight (or, in some cases, that hindsight is used to make an ironic joke, as when Mary inveighs against the horrible sound of the gramophone and wonders how any true music lover could want one). However, as the book goes on and Mary matures it’s as though the author matures with her — she becomes a more solid and real-feeling character and less of a cardboard cutout. By the end, she’s become interesting and unusual enough to miss her when she’s gone.

Movies – October 09

*** The Wicker Man (1973)
**** Coraline

The 1973 Wicker Man should not be confused with the recent Nicolas Cage remake, which by all accounts is horrendous. This one was good. It’s a little off-putting at first, at least if you don’t like weird hippy pagan musicals, but on the other hand there’s some boobs and after a while the musical stuff goes by the wayside as righteous christian policeman edward woodward battles against the depraved pagan hippies. The ending is kinda sweet.

I can’t imagine Coraline being anything other than terrifying for a child, but that aside we thought it was great. It will be a long time before we let NLP see it, I think.

Books – September 09

**** Patrick O’Brian – Master and Commander
**** Patrick O’Brian – Post Captain
*** David Foster Wallace – Girl with Curious Hair

Yes, I’ve started rereading the Aubrey books. They’re just as good the second time, plus the additional pleasure of seeing previews of future people and events (oh look! it’s Pullings! etc).

Girl with Curious Hair is an interesting read for the DFWophile. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but I feel like it’s still a little unformed. I consider his peak to be “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” and “Infinite Jest” and you can see him here playing with some of the things that would appear in those (e.g. reader annoyance, his very particular ways of rendering dialogue, certain obsessions with media, consumption, etc) but not doing it quite as well. The book’s novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is a particular example of this. It is very DFWian in its way, but ultimately doesn’t really work (for me anyway) — it gets to seem a bit boring and annoying and pointless and sometimes tediously metafictional. In my opinion, DFW mastered these kinds of things in his best writing, but he was always in danger of falling into one or another of these traps, even later on. In Girl with Curious Hair, you see him working out some of his techniques, and you get a flavor of his later mastery, but with a lot of fail.

The book did however lead me to come across this enlightening insight into DFW, found here:

It wasn’t until Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace was released did any critical work begin to focus upon the importance of Westward to DFW’s direction. On pages 16 and 17 of his publication, Boswell revealed that DFW had used the phrase ‘cynicism and naivete’ in Westward, in his essay E Unibus Pluram, and in Infinite Jest. Boswell wrote that Wallace ‘does not merely join cynicism and naivete: rather, he employs cynicism – here figured as sophisticated self-reflexive irony – to recover a learned form of heartfelt naivete, his work’s ultimate mode and what the work “really means,” a mode that Wallace equates with the “really human.” ‘

that rings true. There were some other good links there and here.