And all that's to come runs in with the thrust on the strand

[sovay]

I did not see Psycho (1960) at the Brattle this afternoon. I thought seriously about it, because I loved that movie so much when I saw it last October that I have not actually managed to write about it since, but given the weekend I had to conclude that most of the audience would be showing up for irony as opposed to Anthony Perkins, so instead I stayed on the couch with a cat on my lap and wrote some more fiction which I am still attempting not to jinx and in the later afternoon went out to Lexington to make dinner with my mother and run errands and help with cleaning the house. It was low-key and nice. Frozen custard was involved. I have given her an IOU to plant things for her next weekend. Yesterday was my family's major observance of Mother's Day: despite the cold and the rain, we went to Kimball Farm in Westford where seafood and ice cream were had by all except my father who does has never liked seafood and my niece who is going through a phase of liking hot dogs better than anything else; she made small contented porcupine noises to herself as she ate. Tomorrow we have a plumber coming at some unknown hour, so I am prepared to get up early and treat them like Godot. Somehow I have a cat on my lap again.

Comments

[poliphilo]

Irony? How can one be ironic about Psycho? It would be like trading witticisms with Oscar Wilde.

[sovay]

Irony? How can one be ironic about Psycho? It would be like trading witticisms with Oscar Wilde.

I'm pretty sure that any theater that shows Psycho for Mother's Day will try it. That's the reason it took me until last year to see the movie, when the Somerville programmed a triple feature of Psycho, Psycho II, and Psycho III as part of their month-long Halloween: I wanted to see it for the first time in a theater and the Brattle shows it only for Mother's Day. And I loved it, when I finally saw it. I did not expect to. I actually saw it three times. I keep not writing about it because I don't know where to begin. And it's not that I don't have a sense of humor, or that I am incapable of seeing the humor that Hitchcock put into his movies himself, but I never want to repeat the experience of seeing The Birds (1963) for the first time in a theater, when I was there for the movie and too much of the audience was there to prove how much more sophisticated than the movie they were.

[choco_frosh]

"Somehow."

Good luck with the plumber...

(If it makes you feel better, one of my bellringing colleagues had the hot water hose in the kitchen sink in his dorm suite simply fall off over the weekend - at like 10pm - and since it was HOT water, he couldn't find the emergency shutoff without getting scalded. So by the time the after-hours plumber showed up, he had an inch of water on his floor and it had soaked through into the - non-Harvard - space below him, and the steam had set off two lots of fire alarms.
Getting up at Ass to wait for a plumber who will probably show up at ten is still terrible, though.)

[moon_custafer]

I feel bad for your bellringing colleague, but at the same time I envy your ability to use the phrase “one of my bellringing colleagues.”

[choco_frosh]

? There are towers in Canada, though I guess you may well be in one of those areas with none...

[moon_custafer]

Yes, but bellringing just sounds so esoteric. There might be a few groups that do it on university campuses; I think many churches just play a recorded bell.

[choco_frosh]

Accurate, although the one I grew up in had an actual bell.

This kind is...a bit more complicated than that.
http://nagcr.org/pamphlet.html

[moon_custafer]

So, like, Sayers’ Nine Tailors complicated?

[choco_frosh]

That's the variety of complicated, yes.

[sovay]

Getting up at Ass to wait for a plumber who will probably show up at ten is still terrible, though.

And lo, the plumber never came! The property manager called spatch to say that the landlord's father will be coming to replace the faucet either tomorrow or Wednesday. We have no idea whether this will solve the problem. In the meantime, we still have no bathroom sink!

(But no fire alarms and no flooded kitchen, so I take the point of your story and appreciate it. Augh. Is he all right and is the kitchen sink fixed?)

[choco_frosh]

Yes and yes; and he has renters' insurance, so he's treating this as a potential opportunity to upgrade furniture.

Of f'ing course the plumber never came. That sucks.

[sovay]

Yes and yes; and he has renters' insurance, so he's treating this as a potential opportunity to upgrade furniture.

I'm very glad to hear it.

Of f'ing course the plumber never came. That sucks.

Truly, I feel we have participated in an age-old ritual.

[jesse_the_k]

I am so sorry that someone living in your part of the planet doesn’t like seafood, but that's more for the rest of us.

I didn’t discover frozen custard until I came out to the Midwest. It’s a pretty wonderful invention!

[sovay]

I am so sorry that someone living in your part of the planet doesn’t like seafood, but that's more for the rest of us.

I should be clear that it's stronger than a dislike, although fortunately not as severe as an allergy; whereas I am even more inclined to eat something if it swims. Definitely more for the rest of us.

I didn’t discover frozen custard until I came out to the Midwest. It’s a pretty wonderful invention!

It is! Technically my family's traditional strawberry ice cream is a frozen custard—it involves eggs, not just milk—but no one realized until a couple of years ago, so we just go on calling it ice cream.