Placeholder title

Today's pointless photo is of two cats on a bed.

Just so you know.

Incidentally, does anyone else's cat go sort of catnip-style nuts for the scent of bleach? Yeah, I thought not. Told you you were weird, Penny.

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Today's topic? I'm not sure there is one. I put the post title up just as a placeholder (um, thus the word "placeholder"...) while I uploaded the photo and tried to think of something to blather about.

Maybe placeholders themselves are slightly blatherable? I'm not sure, but why don't we give it a try.

It's fairly common practice in publishing to use placeholder text while the real thing is being prepared, but it sometimes leads to interesting consequences when someone forgets to replace the placeholder. One of my favourites (I think it was from one of Richard Lederer's books, if I'm remembering right) is when a newspaper had to print an apology when the placeholder text was inadvertently left as the caption for a person's photo. And the text was? Dummy head. As in, not the real head(er). Unfortunate term in that case, though.

Somewhat off-topic: I can see how that placeholder would have been missed, especially in the newspaper world where things have to be done quickly. Other mistakes aren't quite so forgivable, though. I once bought an (admittedly cheap) edition of... Vanity Fair, I think it was, only to get it home and find out that there was no punctuation in it. At all. In the entire book. How could even a minimum-wage slave from a low-cost publishing house miss the fact that there was NO PUNCTUATION? Maybe they thought that Thackery was all about the stream of consciousness thing? I dunno.

Now that we've moved from the comparatively fast world of newspaper publishing to the nearly immediate world of electronic media, placeholder text is that much more likely to escape from the backroom. I'm sure everyone's found weird-looking stuff on news sites that doesn't make sense. I mean besides the stories, of course. And blogdom? Fugitive placeholders are almost a given. My two fans see them here regularly -- any post that starts with blah blah blah or something something is me trying to get my brain into blather gear. Usually the nonsense titles are removed before I publish. Sometimes not. Sometimes the "not" is on purpose (like when I find out that I really, truly didn't have anything to talk about. In that case, blah blah blah sounds about right for a post title), but occasionally it's just me forgetting to proofread. Often I'll go back and change those titles when I notice them, but the funny thing about Blogger is that changing a post title doesn't change its published url. In other words, a post that started out blah blah blah but later became something worth reading (shut up. It happens. Occasionally) will still end up being pointlessblatherblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/blah-blah-blah.html if I've accidentally posted it that way the first time. Oh, and please do note that the (purposely incomplete) address I just typed isn't a real one. Yet. There's still enough of September available that it's possible you'll get a blah-blah-blah.html before the month is through.

Naturally, I'm not the only one who does that. One of the bloggers I follow has often joked that one of these days she'll forget to remove her usual placeholder post title and we'll all wonder what the heck it has to do with anything. Her placeholder of choice? Words. And how do her followers know this? Well, self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess you could call it. And when she noticed she'd just published a post called Words, she decided to leave it in fun and just edit the post slightly to point out why it was there.

So what has any of this to do with anything? Oh, not much. Just the fact that those of us who are into language bloopers and things like that get a little chuckle out of escaped placeholders, that's all.

Hey, everyone needs a hobby.

Even if it's blah blah blah.

Shut up, Jay

Today's photo, in addition to being pointless, was also chosen at random. Seriously. I didn't even look at what I was clicking on.

Turned out not too badly, all things considered. It's still pointless, though.

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Ok. Last night I stayed up late to watch Jay Leno (which, considering that it's on an hour later here than it is for most of you, means staying up LATE) after an already long day. Really not very smart, girl-who-hasn't-been-sleeping-properly. Yes, yes, I know. But I had to, you see. I was already recording something else, and since my dvr's old enough to have just the one tuner my only choice was to stay up late.

Or, erm, find it on the internet the next day, yes. But I didn't think of that at the time. I did say I'd had a long day. Brain not exactly firing on all cylinders.

Anyway.

There are probably only two (maybe three) guests in the universe that would have me staying up late to watch Leno, but Hugh Laurie is one of them. The man is clever, funny, and entertaining as hell in the right circumstances, and I live in the eternal hope that someday, some American interviewer will manage to not only ask intelligent questions of him but also stop to hear the answers.

Jay Leno won't be that interviewer.

Hey, I'm the first to admit that I'm not a fan of Leno. I understand that he's a nice enough guy (although recent events certainly suggest that he's a weasel in business), but I just plain don't find him funny. I don't really understand how anyone can find him funny, honestly, but I'm sure that the people who do find him funny don't understand how I can find the Scottish Conan Guy anything but crude. Fair enough. We all have different tastes. Mine is to find Leno rather bland.

What bothers me more than that, though, is the general American talk show tendency (yep, they all do it) to not let the guests speak. It's so fricking frustrating. These hosts so obviously spend most of their interviews waiting for the slightest opening to make themselves look smart or funny or important or whatever when they should be paying attention to what's currently being said. And yeah, I can imagine (well, more than imagine. I'm a very regular late-night talk show watcher. Usually on the dvr the next morning rather than stupid o'clock at night, though) that they have plenty of interviews where it's necessary to do that sort of thing because the guest is more or less incapable of being entertaining otherwise, but when the guest is well-spoken and has something worth talking about, I wish they'd all learn to recognise that it's SHUT UP TIME.

Of course, with Leno I get to frustration boil-over all that much sooner simply because, unfortunately for him (unfortunate if he actually cared about what I think of him. Which he doesn't. Which, good... since if it was the other way around I wouldn't likely care either), he falls into the category of Celebrities I'd Like To Slap.

There's a few of them.

Renée Zellweger, for instance. Nothing against her personally (or any of the other people I mentally slap) but I have a visceral reaction to her mannerisms to the point where I can't watch her movies because I'm constantly wanting to smack the smug off of her face. Is she smug? Probably not. Doesn't stop me from wanting to slap her, though.

I find Gwyneth Paltrow to be fairly slappable as well. In her case I didn't make it through Emma, although I did manage Shakespeare in Love. I think it had a fair amount to do with the Fiennes fellow in that case, however. Either that or the codpieces.

Um, I just mean that I liked the costumes. Really.

No, really.

Where was I?





Oh yeah. Leno. I'm not sure why he's in the CILTS club (hey! I didn't realise until now that it makes a pronounceable acronym. Feel free to use it if you like), but between that and the fact that he's not funny you won't catch me watching his show without some very special provocation.

And I just wish that one day he'd let the provocation actually get all the way through a story or two, that's all.

[/overly tired for stupid reasons]

I visited Pointless Blather Blog and all I got was this pointless photo...

It's all you're likely to get, too.

I gave up pretending to sleep at about 3:30 am, you see.

That more or less explains the last few days' worth of invisible posts as well.

Who'd have ever thought that sleeping would get to be one of the biggest issues in my life, you know? It's all more than a little bit frustrating. As I'm sure you can imagine.

Anyway. No brain for a post today, no post tomorrow because I'm at a workshop... Saturday? Well, I guess we'll see.

Going now, though.

Is it wrong to start a post with absolutely no ideas?

Today's pointless photo is either abstract lawn art or an illustration of what happens when the squirrel in your neighbour's spruce tree decides to go absolutely cone-batty.

Tis the season, I guess.

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As the post title says, the brain is empty today. I could have sworn I had ideas for this post when I got to work today (hmm. Maybe the "idea" was just trying to remember that I should post? That could be), but apparently I don't right now.

Which is bad, because right now is when I'm trying to post.

Well, let's see. I could post something about food, I suppose. There's always something about food, right?

This week's Illustration Friday prompt was dessert, and for whatever reason that caused me to doodle a piece of saskatoon pie in my sketchbook at lunch yesterday. I miss my grandma's saskatoon pie. I'll buy store-bought every once in a blue moon out of craving for saskatoon pie, but it's kind of silly that I do because it'll never really be grandma's pie. Commercial pie crust will never be grandma's pie crust, and the filling will never contain saskatoons that we gathered ourselves (well, duh on both counts there, Dee). Still, at least I can occasionally get saskatoon pie in a store, and since that's the only way I'm likely to get it these days it'll have to do.

I can't make pie, you see. Or maybe I can make pie, but I wouldn't know because I've never made one. That was my grandma's job, you see.

OH HEY. A TOPIC!

For whatever reason, in my mother's family if one person (ok, let's narrow it down a bit to one female person) did something, then the others didn't. I don't know if it was a way to keep from fighting or what, but if one person had a skill no one else went near it. Case in point? My lack of pie-making ability. Grandma made pies, so my mother didn't. I sometimes helped my grandma fill the pies or tarts, but I couldn't tell you the first thing about making a crust (other than what I've seen on the Food Network) because Grandma made them. Oh, and it wasn't just pie crusts. Grandma knitted; Mom crocheted. Mom kind of wanted to knit, but it wasn't until Grandma decided to give up knitting because of her eyesight and arthritis that Mom bought a whole bunch of knitting stuff and started to learn. From a book. You'd think it might have made more sense to get her own mother to teach her, but no. Maybe she thought they'd lose patience with each other? Could be. Anyway, there was no hint of Mom knitting until Grandma stopped.

Kind of weird, yes.

And on a less weird but sadder note, it wasn't long before I inherited all the knitting things after Mom died. Did I knit before then? Um, a little. I taught myself when Mom was learning, but in my case learning from a book made sense because I'm left-handed and my mother wasn't. My knitting career stopped pretty quickly when my first dishcloth turned out better than her first dishcloth, though. She'd misread the instructions, and she seemed so disappointed in the result that I thought it would be easiest just to follow the family tradition of non-competitive hobbies. Even if I don't really understand it.

The thing that kind of bothers me about all of this is that I feel like the whole Mom-Grandma separate interests treaty (A non-competition agreement? You know, that could have been it all along) caused me to lose some family skills. My grandmother was of the generation that originally did home-made out of necessity, but she kept it up for as long as she was able. And while I helped out with small things when Grandma was baking or during canning season, I never did get shown the whole process because it was grandma's job. As a result it died with her, for the most part. And it's sad that if I ever get interested in doing any of those things she used to do, I'll be learning it from a book.



Aaand... just to keep this from ending on a depressing note, I should mention here that my mother made good cookies, and so does her daughter. Because her mother taught her, you see. I guess the non-competition agreement wasn't binding over the third generation...

Chapter 1185: Wherein Dee lives in denial

I have work to do to get things ready for fall school programs.

I'm currently not doing it.

And why?

Because that would mean that it's time for fall school programs.

I don't want it to be time for fall school programs, because that would mean that it's nearly fall.

Which it is.

And the first school program of the season is next week, so I have to get the fall packs ready.

But I don't want to.

Because that would mean that it's time for fall school programs....






Sigh.

Isn't circular thinking fun, boys and girls? Fun, but not productive. I guess. So I'd better get the stuff ready for fall programs. I guess.


Or maybe I'll have lunch first.





Ok then. I'll let you know tomorrow if I've got the stuff ready for fall programs. I'm betting you'll already be able to guess the answer.

Pointless random question of the day:

What is MacLaren's Imperial cheese?

I mean, I know that it's a processed cheese product, I know that it's tasty (there's some in my fridge right now, in fact), I know that it's a bit of a nostalgia food for me (which is, actually, why it's in my fridge at the moment. I was getting groceries, noticed the Imperial, remembered my mother buying it, and realised I'd kind of like some of that stuff), but I really have no idea what exactly Imperial is made of.

Cheese, obviously. I know that it has cheese in it because it says so on the the label, but other than that it's kind of a mystery.

And please don't tell me that it's "cold pack" or "product". That's no help at all.





And... I'm afraid that the cheese puzzlement will have to do it for today. There are work things that have to be done. You know, here at work.

Pointless photo of the day:

Sorry, all. Got busy with other things and forgot to blog.

This is all you get today, I guess. I'll try for something more blatherish tomorrow.