Cardiganese

Those eyes speak volumes.

Ears erect and forward, head swinging on his neck like a tetherball on its pole, Cai is talking to me. He’s saying, “Are you sure? Where? Where is he?” Suddenly his ears flatten back for full aerodynamic capacity as he breaks into a gallop, his whole body shouting, “There he is! There’s Jack! I see him! Oh joy, oh joy, oh joy!”

For all that we humans pride ourselves on our vocalizations (and therefore scold dogs for competing with us), anyone who owns a pet knows how much can be communicated through body language. In fact, so much is conveyed by the height of an eyebrow or the speed of a tail wag, that a human can grasp the message without paying much conscious attention to how the dog has “spoken”. I have to really think, then, in order to describe Cai’s movements. Let’s see…

Here are two scenarios that begin the same way, but Cai asks a different question in each one:

• I’m in the living room watching Cai on the balcony, who in turn is watching the neighbours go by. As he shifts position, he sees me looking at him. He enters the apartment and approaches me, eyes meeting mine, ears tilted slightly backwards, mouth ajar, eyebrows playing volleyball with each other.
  • Interpretation: “Hi Mum, did you want me for anything?”
• Cai sees me watching him and enters the apartment, heaving loud, breathy whines, his vertical ears  twisted outwards. He runs to the balcony door, to me, to the window, to me.
  • Interpretation: “Ple-e-ease can we go out and play with Peanuts and Cindy and Boomer and Tango and Coco, ple-e-ease?”

Cai doesn’t usually care too much for other dogs, though. His main focus in life, even more than treats, is toys. Here are four games that he’s taught us to recognize:

• We’re playing in the back field. Cai is exercising me, having me fetch the ball once he’s run and caught it. This time as I  stoop for the ball, he jogs halfway down the field and crouches stockstill, staring hard at my throwing hand.
  • Interpretation: “I’m a Border Collie! Throw the sheep — I’m ready!”
• We’re playing in the front yard. As I reach for the ball, Cai runs behind the big Silver Maple and peeks out from one side, then the other.
  • Interpretation: “Throw the ball either side of the tree, I’ll get it!”
• I’m playing at the computer. Cai brings the plush candycane squeakytoy that Jack gave him for Christmas and drops it beside my chair. As I reach for it, he mouths it catch-and-release fashion, growling.
  • Interpretation: “Let’s play tug!”
• Cai brings the same toy to my chair. As I reach for it, he runs a dozen feet in front of me, three-sixties and crouches.
  •  Interpretation: “Let’s play throw!”

The final pair of examples of Cardiganese that I’d like to share with you have to do with canine emotions. I believe that Cai has a sense of compassion; I’ve seen him behave towards our kitty Cuca in the same way as described below, when Cuca caught a cold and was sneezing. I also believe — and after reading the final scene, you be the judge — that Cai has a sense of humour.

• I step in from the balcony, put a foot on a rubber squeaky toy, and lose my balance, grabbing the couch arm for support. Cai stands on his hind legs with his front paws on the couch and stretches his muzzle into my face.
  • Interpretation: “Are you okay?”
• Everyone’s in bed with either a good book or a good bone. Cai’s bone falls to the floor. He looks over the edge at it, whimpering softly. E.g. slips out of bed to pick it up for him. The moment she’s out, Cai scuttles up and snuggles into her pillow, his bright eyes looking at her, his mouth open.
  • Interpretation: “Fooled ya!”

 

Doglish

Dogs work hard at establishing communication with their humans.

I love languages. My French is passable, I learned a little Vietnamese at one time, and last summer I ended up being a Spanish interpreter at an international quadrennial meeting here in Toronto.

Please understand, I have never studied Spanish in my life. I picked up a few phrases from some Chilean neighbours about ten years ago. As a quadrennial volunteer, I put every last scrap of my knowledge to use during registration for one nice Cuban delegate, and was punished for it by being called over anytime one of the other hosts was trying to communicate with a hispanoparlante. Luckily my impromptu career lasted only an hour or so until some bilingual delegates arrived.

Apart from that, I can say “Thank you”, “How are you”, and “Fine” in Greek, the same first two things in Japanese, and the first thing in Ojibway. I can count to ten in Hungarian. I can say “I’m a bird watcher” in German. I used to be able to pronounce “I have a little white rabbit” in Cantonese, but I only get funny looks when I try it now. Mind you, this last sentence might be a bit of a conversation stopper in any language.

 Because of my fascination with languages, I started wondering today how many human words my Cardigan Welsh Corgi knows. For that matter, how much dog language has he taught us?

Cai knows all the basics, of course:

• ball
• toy
• pottie
• walkies
• bickie
• shh
• hush
• be quiet
• that’ll do!
• hey!!!

He comes when I call his name in a high-pitched, singsong voice: “Cai-i!”, and he knows that “good boy” is his middle name. Being a herder and not a retriever, he is still learning the linguistic nuances of “Bring it!”, but improving daily.

Cai knows a number of words and phrases that aren’t in the manuals:

• “Let’s go check the mail” means we’re gonna enter the building by the front door, not the side door.
•  ”Let’s take the stairs” means the side door, not the front door.
• “Please stop chewing on your brother’s leg” means to pause a moment before continuing to rough-house with the cat.
• One evening on the way in I remarked conversationally, “Tomorrow we’ll be going out in the car-car” and Cai turned to the back of the elevator, facing its basement-opening back door.
• If we’re playing in the back field when Jack arrives from school and I see the boy first, my whispered “Where’s Jack?” sends Cai into a four-alarm lookabout that stops just short of whiplash.
• Then there’s the phrase, “Oh, da scoodie-boodie-woobie-goobies”, which means, “I see you’d like someone to give you a nice belly rub. Will I do?”

I’m sure there are more words and phrases that Cai knows, but I think this sampling is a good start. Tomorrow I’ll discourse on some of the Cardi language that Cai has taught us.

Blog-Day Afternoon

For the last — and first — contest I held, I gave a full week till the deadline. I didn’t know who was out there reading my stuff, or if anyone new might stumble along and decide to get in on the fun. The contest closed with seven contestants, four of whom I know in real life (no, not my mom, but she helped judge the entries), and all of whom posted their suggestions in the first 48 hours.

I have since learned that most blog entries receive comments within a maximum of three days’ posting. This time, then, I shortened the lead time to 7 00 Saturday morning EST/ 11 00 GMT / 21 00 Saturday evening in Melburne.

It has been 24 hours now, and so far there is only an ominous silence (tempered by munchings of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies). In a panic, I consulted with a real-life reader over the phone.

“This contest is a lot harder than the last one,” she said, between bites.

“It is a bit,” I conceded. “But basically, it’s: you think of somebody famous and give them a blog title. You only give them a username if you want me to write a limerick.”

“All I’ve come up with so far is the Marquis de Sade,” she crunched.

“The Marquis de Sade? The Marquis de Sade? Explorers, inventors, cartoon characters, and you came up with the Marquis de Sade? That’s — like — oh, whatever. If you’ve got something, post it.”

“Except,” she said, licking the chocolate off her fingers, “I haven’t thought of a blog title for him yet.”

“Oh.” Straightening up again from the wall just before my forehead made impact, I tried: “How about, Mad, Bad, and Sade?”

“I suppose,” she said, flicking cookie crumbs off her knees. “But who else is there? I mean, there’s Homer…”

“Ah, but which one?” I challenged. “That’s why you need a few words for the disambiguous…ness… disambigi…fication… to know which one you mean.”

“Well, you’d know which one was meant if his username was ‘Duh’!” She snapped her dinner napkin before folding it. “But what could his blog title be?”

“You could call it The Idiossey.”

“You see? You’re brilliant!” she gushed, her mouth no longer full of home-baked goodness.

“But I’m poor.”

“We can’t have everything,” she lectured. “Gotta go, there’s a meeting at one. Why don’t you post the ones you’ve just come up with, as examples?”

So I am.

Example one:

“The Marquis de Sade, 18th-Century mentally unstable writer. Blog: Mad, Bad, and Sade.”

Example two:

“Homer, of the TV cartoon show The Simpsons. Blog: The Idiossey. Username: Duh. My limerick word: Kwik-E-Mart.”

(Wordless Wednesday) Green Grow the Rashes, O!

In Principio Erat Blogos (a contest)

“Hello-o-o-o, evry-bud-deeeee! This is your old pal Grover, with aynother contest, that’s right, ay nice contest, mm-hmm!”

If Sesame Street’s cute-and-loveable, fuzzy-little Grover decided to write a blog, what would he name it? Or if naturalist Charles Darwin had a blog, how would he entitle it? Or how about heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali? Or Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell? You decide! I think enough of us had enough fun with last month’s contest that it’s time for another one.

Rules

1. Choose someone fairly famous and completely dead (puppets, cartoon personalities, and characters from novels are all eligible). Someone with an unfamous name, but who did something famous, also counts.
2. Describe the person in one phrase (e.g. “who invented eraser-topped pencils”, or “first European in Tasmania”).
3. Give a humorous, fitting (or ironic) blog title.
4. Bonus: Give that person’s username.
5. If you supply a username, you’re an automatic winner! Provide me with a word, and I’ll use it in a limerick. New limericks go up on each date divisible by seven, and all limericks are kept on my “Limericks of the Turtle” page.

Judging

Like last time, I will seek out approximately two dozen non-blogging acquaintances to judge the entries. Judges will be asked to pick the entry that is funniest to them.

Prizes

• First prize: Again, like last time, I will write 500 words on the topic of the winner’s choice.
• Second prizes: See rules 4 and 5 above. Please provide your limerick word along with your entry.

Deadline

Saturday morning, April 26, at 07 00 Eastern Standard Time. Winner to be announced by Sunday evening.

I can hardly wait!

Around the Bend

 E.g. has her new blog title. When the Big Bad Science Museum huffed and puffed away her right to her title, numerous virtual hugs and sympathetic harrumphs were sent her from both her regulars and mine. Their comments cheered her considerably, and she finally sat down after supper yesterday to follow Goodbear’s advice, which was to think of her favourite journey and find a symbol in it.

E.g. decided that to her, the journey itself is at least as important as the destination. So she reviewed her photos of roads and hiking trails and boardwalks, and Jack and I refused to take Cai out until some name clicked. “The Crooked Mile?” Not metric enough. “The Long and Winding Road”? Trite. “Road to Rivendell”? Doesn’t express the techno side too well. “Footprints in the Air”? Not piscean enough. “Fred”? Some other day, maybe. “Fiddling Out of a Barn?” That’s enough beer for one night.

Finally, E.g. had a new blog title, like an unfamiliar wine. She sniffed it cautiously, sipped it, closed her eyes, rolled it around on her tongue, let it seep in, and pronounced it good. Jack accompanied her as she chose and cropped a different photo for her title bar, and then she wrote a lovely Thank-you/Introductory entry while Jack and Cai and I busied ourselves with bedtime business. You’re all invited to the housewarming — just click on the unwound road on my sidebar.

Gillian’s small heartsearching task last night has me wondering. What’s my own attitude regarding the importance of a destination versus the importance of the journey? This question probably needs more reflection, but so far I think I most agree with her in the literal sense of walking and hiking. I like to look around, admiring the leaves, smiling at the toadstools, waving to the chipmunks. I tend to walk quickly, but I’d rather walk than cycle or drive, rather snowshoe than snowmobile, rather cross-country ski than downhill.

In the more figurative sense, however, I do like to know where I’m going. I’ve been chief planner for our past several vacations. What is there to see? Where are the hostels? How many hours would we have to drive on this day? On which days is that museum closed? All those details, from the broadest to the pickiest — I love planning them. Am I showing a greater interest in process or objective, in journey or destination?

E.g. and I have been discussing several possible changes to our family situation lately. It’s occasionally been hard going, with the hardest unknown for me being not the “how” or even the “when”, but the “if”. At last, though, all the ifs have been answered, and I can relax a little. I’ll settle down now and enjoy the hike with E.g., watching for the next blaze, happily discovering what’s just around the next bend.

Good Broken Things

 Maple at the edge of our balcony

I’ve noticed some things being broken over the past few days.

On Thursday, it was a full week that my co-worker had broken her smoking habit. I kept waiting for her to turn tired, grumpy, and impatient — Thursday is stock day — but no, she was cheery and energetic all day, breaking into little snatches of song, my goodness! The change in her from the week before was incredible.

On Friday, E.g. and Jack’s mum and our mutual friend Jane and I all went out to supper. We broke bread — a long, skinny baguette, actually — in the neighbourhood chi-chi French restaurant, and the waiter broke out a bottle of Grenache to go with our dinners. It was Jack’s mum’s birthday, so while Jack was out at his youth club we enjoyed a “girls’ night out”. Our menus were in English — and so was our waiter — so he was a little puzzled when I asked in broken French for the “palourdes rembourrees”, which more or less means upholstered clams.

Yesterday, Jack and Jack’s mum and E.g. and Cai and I broke out of our usual Saturday routines, leaving the city for a drive out in the country. We went to visit half a dozen youngsters somewhere; more about that tomorrow. On the way back, we took a break at Mono Cliffs Conservation Area, hiking in a little ways until we found a nice set of boulders where we could break for lunch.

Our apartment is an end unit, just over the fence from a recreation field lined with maples. The branches of one tree touch our balcony. This morning, I was standing out there in the Spring sunshine when I noticed that the buds are just starting to break, fat and full of promise. Some of them have actually broken right open into tiny, delicate green bobbly things since I took the photo.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS TURTLE?

My photo doesn’t do justice to her details and glitter.

We went out today — E.g., Jack, Jack’s mum, Cai, and I. We left at 9 00 and returned just before suppertime. When E.g. and I got to our apartment, we found a zippered burlap bag, originally made to hold 10 pounds of basmati rice, hanging on the doorknob. Eh? Unzip, pull out a crumpled grocery store flyer. Unfold, find the prettiest little purple-and-green sea turtle. I’m pretty sure it’s resin-cast, but it’s very well done, made to look like string carefully glued over a wooden base, and it’s hand-painted and sprinkled with glitter. On its underside is a little picture hook to hang it on a wall. It’s just the same size as Seamus, the WWF sea-turtle stuffy.

There was no note. Who could have left it? E.g. guessed that Robert had come across it on his travels, but he doesn’t read my blog. It obviously wasn’t Jack and his mum, because we had picked them up and dropped them off today. What a delicious little mystery!

Our car lives in the underground parking garage. One of the things we had done today was get groceries, so we were coming up to get the bundle buggy when we found the anonymous gift. On my way back out with the buggy, I saw Coco, the German Shepherd, with her daddy Michael. Hmmm.

Michael and John were two of the judges for the Name-and-genderize-the-baby-sea-turtle contest. They don’t even own a computer, but they’re very fond of us; the other day they had given us a stained-glass rainbow flag. Their nextdoor neighbour is moving out, and they’ve acquired a few pretties from her. Maybe…

I think Michael must have seen me getting the groceries, because I was no sooner inside when the phone rang. It was John, asking if I’d found little Seamus.

“I thought it must be you guys! She’s beautiful! And her name isn’t Seamus; I think it’s Isabella.”

“Bella,” John mused, “that’s a good name.” It was then that I remembered that one of his nicknames for Coco is “Bella.”

Copywrong

I arrived home from work last night to find E.g. hunched at her computer, causing hundreds of tiny stick figures to become tiny stick corpses, each lying in its own shiny little mosquito-drop of blood. E.g. is the one who writes the “exploratorium” found on my blogroll, or at least she has been until now.

She told me she had received a note from Exploratorium, the Exploratorium, a science museum, asking that she cease and desist from using their name for her blog.

I could see the museum’s concern. There’s E.g.’s blog, practically at the top of the list, the seventh item on Google page four. Anyone might be misdirected. And heaven forfend that she increase in popularity enough to move up to item 46! The museum might as well close its doors now.

Okay, I’m ranting. The museum is completely in the right: E.g. is infringing their copyright. I’m snippy, though, because E.g. had been very pleased about “inventing” her blog’s name, and last night she was feeling all crumpled inside like someone had insulted her baby or torn a limb off her apple tree. It made me want to rise to my full height, reach up and punch that old museum in the toe.

But they’re in the right. There’s nothing for it, then, but to look for a new name. I suggested a few:

• Muirotarolpxe;
• Explorservation;
• Gillian’s Eye.

E.g. will come up with one on her own, of course, and all will once again be right with the world. But the situation got me thinking: What if the Estate of King Solomon contacted me, and told me I was commiting plagiarism? What if Home Depot claimed prior patent to the designation of their Right Blue armchair, and told Bonnie to change her blog’s title? What if Checkers Restaurant in Ottawa decreed that Checkers’ owner would have to name him something else?

Since I would hate for any of my blogfriends to be caught unawares, I decided that this morning I would, as a service to you all, prepare a list of alternative titles. And just to be on the safe side, for those blogs with tag lines, I’ve included modifications of them as well. Here goes:

Kibble Cup Owner’s World — spreading the buttoned wool sweater dog vibe worldwide.

Cooooodyyyy Beeeeeeeeaaar’s Friiiieeeeeeends!

A Singular Instance of Quotidian Ephemera

The Aged Catsup — because fridge cleaning isn’t for sissies.

Thegreatlyappreciatedindiverseenvironmentalecosystemsand -theirinhabitantsbothvertebrateandinvertebrate — visit Aristotle.com for applicable aphorisms.

The Correct Shade of Cyan — Recounting a lifetime of participation in underwater dives. No whelks were harmed in the making of this blog.

Some Reflections Concerning Life in the City — about seeking and perhaps finding a salvageable or inherent integrity or beauty or other positive value in omnes res.

Gareth Tedi blog – Canines of Celtic origin.

Voice of either the Testudine or Streptopelia turtur, depending on Your Preferred Interpretation of the Ambiguously-termed Lifeform

Hmm. Some of the above proposals may need some tweaking.

Pickup: A Horror Film with a One-word Script

One piece of advice for writers — and if it’s good enough for Little Women’s Jo, it’s good enough for me — is to write about what you know. I wonder how such counsel might work for horror films? I have watched very little of that genre myself, but today I thought I had the makings of a good one. So I played around with e.g.’s camera, which is currently wearing the macro lens, and came up with this series of unretouched movie stills. What do you think, do I have the start of a decent portfolio?

“AAA–

–AAAAA–

–AAAAAAAAA–

–AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA–

–AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA–

–AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA–

–AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaa–

–aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa–

–aaaaaaaaa–

–aaaaa–

–aah.”