The Cat and the Dog

Tactile test of today: petting the cat and the dog at the SAME TIME. This must be a trial for dual pet owner everywhere: the dog likes to be ruffled, while the cat likes to be stroked. It's like rubbing your stomach and patting your head, except your stomach and head keeping moving about. The dog and the cat kept turning around as I petted, meaning I kept turning around and got dizzy.

I'm a cat person myself and I prefer the cat's method of affection - "I will caress you legs" - to the dog's - "I will nose your bottom". Nevertheless, it is important to be fair. Especially since the dog has learnt to say 'hrrrumph!'

I will never run out of pictures of cats

It was a test of mental and physical agility. I am ready for the Krypton Factor.

Watercolour Sketches

Mesmerising

To illustrate this topic I picked the mesmerising experience of watching smoke rise. Incense is a particularly good example as the sweet smell should help the mesmerising effect. I've got a blurry smoke-haze effect going on with the incense holder.
I couldn't bring myself to use the American spelling of mesmerising.

Melting All the Tigers in the World to Butter

"How much do you love me?"

"Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter."

 - Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood.


One of my favourite quotations; facebook profile worthy, no less. I thought it was indulgently surreal until today, when my mother and the second-hand bookshop owner started conversing about their childhood reads.

"Remember Little Black Sambo?"

"Yes - the tigers melted to butter."

Is this a source for the idea that tigers melt to butter? I've discovered the story online (http://www.sterlingtimes.co.uk/sambo.htm)* and it doesn't seem to be love that melts them, but centrifugal force. Perhaps Murakami means that the love his character feels is not only powerful but as giddying as the tiger-whirl-pool. Love as dizzying is a familiar concept, as can be heard from Kylie Minogue's hit Spinning Around. Unless that is about her visiting a roundabout. She is quite small in stature and could no doubt pass the height restrictions that say only children may ride. We envy Kylie, in theory, because we have seen Mary Poppins and want to ride on the big purple horse with the long eyelashes and win the Derby. However, in real life, those roundabouts you find in play-parks are scary and you can't get off when you want without grazing your hands and knees.

You need not have read Murakami's novel to know that he does use British cultural references. You do need to have read the title. This being so, it seems even less likely that butter tigers could be entirely coincidental.

*What kind of website is called 'sterlingtimes' and has a little union flag on its tab top (lack of technical language here, I'm afraid)? I checked: one with too much rainbow lettering. (It's always too much, because they always have to have it flashing, don't they? Like shouting out 'look! I'm someone who didn't grow up with the internet! Look what I can do! Wheee!' Chill.) A patriotic website, dedicated to maintaining such gems as colonial paintings of portly men drinking port in pubs and episodes of Sooty from 1955. If I wanted to watch Sooty, I would watch the episodes from the 1990s because like everyone, I believe programmes from my childhood were the best.

Mad News

This is mad.

Man dies after being tasered, 'cause of death unknown'.
I think I can guess. Was it: being hit by a taser?

Heard on BBC Radio that the last person who died in the UK after a taser attack did so because of a weak heart. So how many people have weak hearts in the UK? Pretty big risk, assuming the guy your tasering isn't one of them. And what if all deaths were explained in this way? "Man dies due to not keeping Bible in breast pocket" for example, instead of saying he was shot in the heart.


References: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-14553613
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/1651953.family_attacks_inquest_ruling_on_taser_death/ [this must be the man mentioned on the radio]




Evicting may lead to Homelessness
In the opening paragraph of a Times article this week, it explained that some people think evicting may lead to homelessness. Hmm, yes, at first I was hard pressed to see the correlation, but then I did, once I stopped being mad.


No reference provided for this one, since The Times don't let just anyone put their grubby eyes on their nice news site. I read it in the terrestrial world, from my Grandad's paper copy, earlier this week.

A Hare out of Place

Made this quick illustration for last week's Illustration Friday topic, 'Imperfect'. I am still putting it up because I think it was perfect (ha) for the topic. Unfortunately, tad too late. Excuses: ooh, blah,gah, didn't get to the scanner (sounds better when you know I don't have a scanner, have to go across the road), busy week (can't remember why; think I just felt sleepy all week), sketching for Cornish children's story, painting that banana and eating too many biscuits. Forget the biscuits. 'I was eating biscuits at the time' is never going to gain much sympathy as an excuse. Empathy, maybe. We've all been there, right. Yes, yes, right. Even JK Rowling says gluttony is the most acceptable deadly sin and she isn't even fat.

Of Painting, Decision making, and Nougat.

There has been some disagreement in the Goodfellow household as to whether Suky's painting is finished. A couple of 'yes' arguments say that a disputed area is 'heat haze' or looks unfinished because the painter in the picture has a blank canvas and so he hasn't painted that bit yet. The underlying concern in the 'yes' camp is that I will ruin it if I am allowed to go blundering near it again with wet paint. As I have a self-portrait propped against the bath that I plan to attack with some white spirit at some point (it used to look good, I remember) they may have a point. However, if I do not decide for myself when a painting is finished, then I start to see myself as a painting ape; blindly dabbing at a canvas until someone snatches it away and pronounces 'done!'
 

Best part of today was the reduced out of date nougat I bought at The Cornish Candy Shoppe. Only 10p each and only a month and a half out of date! Delish. Unfortunately there were only two and I think that I may be hooked. As they were Cote D'or, normally retailling at 75p for a 30g bar, I fear the future is bleak. 'Bleak' in this instance is being used as an adjective meaning 'without nougat'.