A woman who was a sister to me died on Monday.  Her death was not unexpected but despite this it was still a shock. This is not unusual. Having experienced the death of loved ones before, now matter how well prepared one is, death is never a comfortable experience.

Like all family, my sister and I had our disagreements but as luck would have it we were able to have a comfortable coze and admit missing each other when I came over for her daughter’s wedding. It was a good, if brief, visit and it stands as the last time I got to see her alive.

I had hoped to make it before she died, and last week made plans to come over yesterday, but Monday she was told there was nothing more that the doctors could do except make her comfortable and by mid afternoon she was dead. And so here I am back in Washington State, having left at the planned time, but, unfortunately, not before her death.

I am running up to the Reservation today to attend the first of several good-bye services. The services will last three days because there are many, many people who are, like me, travelling to say good bye to someone who will be deeply missed.

My children and I arrived in town last night, paid for the hotel room, unpacked and then (once email etc had been checked) we went out to pick up some groceries and a little fast food for my daughter. Remember now, this is the US.  We went to a Jack in the Box drive through and I ordered poutine. It was a bit of a comedy. The woman said “what?”  I said “poutine.” She said “what?” In the end I ordered chicken strips and drove up to the window to pay.  She came over to the window and asked “what did you ask for?” And so I had to explain what poutine is and the expression on her face said “what?”  ”Never heard of it,” she said. “Wrong country,” I said.

We laughed; it was a bit of a face-palm moment I fear.  A long drive, never enough sleep, grief, and the shock of it all –  I am hazy, not quite here. Yet I am alive, and so laughter remains. It is a wonderous thing being human.

and as it happens, just minutes before I left this was sent to me. I don’t look forward to border crossings much and in this case I actually have some long overdue business to attend to at the border itself so I have to get out and go have a conflab with a bevy of guards. So in this state of mind I watched this ad.

Thanks for the (much needed) giggle, Naren.

via Wimp.com

man, it is cool to watch. Makes me want to run out and but a camera capable of such a thing. Not to mention treats for my dog. (Get a load of those tongues…)

Thanks Mango for the link.

Actors and actresses be damned. The creator of this is someone worth meeting.

via Wimp.com

So a cake was commissioned to celebrate a trip to Germany. This is what they got.

Boggles doesn’t it? The text was supposed to read “here we come” rather than “hear me come.” Spelling matters.

From cakewrecks.com. Thanks, Justine, for the site.

(Thanks Shannon for the pic.)

This seems to have come from engrish and if you have a peek over there you will find some howlers. Many of them have a sexual component almost certainly not intended by the product’s or service’s advertiser.  It makes me wonder what those fortune cookies really say. But really, isn’t that the real power of language and its relationship to meaning construction. All of a sudden what is visible are some of the deep webs which bind words together with the fine thread of categorical relationships and it makes you look around for other previously invisible things. If you think about the words “poisonous” and “rubbish” you can see how they really do fit together and if you work at it even a little you can stagger backwards into meaning-folds of the original language and take a guess at how “poisonous” is used more generally.  In other words, it gives us a glimpse of the connotations of “poisonous” in another’s context and by doing that, it makes temporarily visible our own contexts. It’s the difference, the dissonance, between the two that makes this funny.

Now that I find interesting.

Here’s a woman I appreciate:

Well it was shit.  I just got out of the hospital. The pain did not go away on Sunday.

So much for my career as a health prognosticator.

(BTW – the pain is gone now but I caught a cold in the hospital. That last bit actually makes me giggle.)