Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)’s Comments (group member since Sep 20, 2013)

Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)’s comments from the Net Work Book Club group.

My dad did that with a Dalmatian we somehow acquired as a fully grown dog when I was about 3...he was untrained and destructive, and when he tried to bite me, Dad "took him out for a ride", dropped him....and the dog beat him home! Don't know what did happen to Spot, in the end...

In winter my dog wears his coat. In summer my dog wears his coat and pants.

Oh no...she was a real royalist, that kid. Needed someone to admire who was conveniently far enough away she couldn't see the gaps in their character.

I was just remembering how when I was in school, a lot of friends told me "We had a dog, but he ran away." It never struck me until a few years ago that what actually happened was that Mommy and Daddy got tired of Fido and waited till the kid was at school, at Grandma's for the weekend, at summer camp...and Fido went to the animal shelter. I really think that's mean. The kid probably put up posters and worried and cried and Mommy and Daddy just kept shtum. I know sometimes a dog will run away and get hit by a car, but really? In a rural area...so many "runaways."

I was reminded of this when an Australian "missionary" couple I knew here (quotation marks on purpose) acquired a dog and then when they went home on 6 mos furlough, left it with neighbours! I told them, "Don't be surprised if you get an email in a month or two telling you Max ran away." I was right. In that case, I'm pretty sure the adults got sick of someone else's dog (who hadn't been properly obedience trained) and dumped him at the pound. Many people here simply don't like pets, and women are so houseproud it's incredible. One pee or poo in the wrong place, one shoe chewed up, and Max would be out the door.

Why do we "call things square" I wonder? I suppose it means "close enough for government work" or that sort of thing, but I wonder where it came from.

Guerrilla warfare is more than just throwing a banana.

(Back story: As a kid I'd hear about "guerrilla fighters" on the TV news...Viet Cong they were then...and I thought they meant people who jumped out and grabbed you around the neck, like a gorilla!)

The present queen seems to consider herself a cross between Victoria and Elizabeth I. I never thought I'd say this, but the whole concept of monarchy is past its use-by date...and if my 15 yr old self heard that, she'd disown the current me.

In a discussion on a comic strip website, regarding 1970s copshows where any car that leaves the road explodes, even if it is in midair and pre-impact:

It’s like when the Coyote realizes there’s no ground under him, he falls, only when a car realizes there’s no ground under it, it explodes. Unless it’s just doing a brief car chase grand jeté, which it can accomplish without even scraping its exhaust system off on the landing.

"A brief car chase grand jeté." Love it!!

Great...now I've got Frank Sinatra in my head, singing "Fly Me to the Moon."

HRHDogMatix wrote: "Just like a lot of today's "Stars""

They're not "stars" anymore, just "celebs." Stars did things. Celebs talk, pronounce, or in the case of fashion models, wear clothes and walk around.

In an email from a friend:

Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Do...not...make...joke...about...Uranus....do...not...

Mars sings "My Venus in Bluejeans" cause everything evolves, ya know?

(Yeah I know yours were better. It's early, but they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!)

Groovy wrote: "If Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Aren't all countries third world countries?"

Excellent!

They're all developing countries, trouble is the bigger ones have lost focus.

Much more of this and I'll be talking to you like a Dutch uncle, amster-dam!

Jane wrote: "Read prologues as long as they are short and pithy.

Never read introductions or forewords as they are often either spoilers or people giving their opinions of the book. I wanna make up my own mind"

^^This. I get tired of "look at me" forewords. Some of them read like somebody's term paper!

That's Edam Gouda idea!

Well, yes, there is that. But when it's a new edition of a mystery novel, skip because they are usually full of spoilers! There's a Nero Wolfe novel that was published posthumously, turned out to be a rewrite of a Tecumseh Fox novel. The person who wrote the Foreword told the Fox story in great detail, assuming nobody would want to read it I guess. But if you read the foreword it also ruined the Wolfe novel you hadn't got to yet!!

HRHDogMatix wrote: "Flipping GR, there are 20 posts here that I didn't know about, didn't receive any notifications

Did you hear about the woman who climbed up a tower in France naked?
She gave everyone an Eiffel"

Good one Doggy! In re: no notifications, it's worse when a page full of comments by various people simply vanishes--which has also happened!!

If you got a notification of a post on this thread and didn't click on "view post", you don't get anymore.

The other day I opened The Oxford Companion to Food, and what did I find? Forewords (plural) followed by Introduction followed by A Note on the Text. Strewth!

Not to mention that so often when dealing with novels, Forewords written by someone to present a new edition tend to be filled with spoilers for the new reader...because after all, everyone has read The Maltese Falcon or The Grapes of Wrath or Kokoro, haven't they? (If they had, they wouldn't need a copy, would they now!)

So I usually skip them until I've at least read the book, particularly if they weren't written by the author of the text. What about you: read or skip?