Darkoshi

I recorded both the opening and closing ceremonies from the Paris Olympics and finally got to watch most of the opening ceremony today. (Due to how it was recorded, I started off as the "L" teams were sailing by, and watched to the end. Now I've also watched from the beginning to the "E" teams. I hope to watch the rest tomorrow or rather later today.)

I've been quite enjoying it; it is so good!

Having started watching it in the middle, it was all quite suspenseful and surprising to me (I didn't know for sure that the boats meant there'd be no traditional parading of athletes into the stadium... nor even a traditional stadium).

The people in flowing dresses on top of long poles on the bridge, swaying back and forth and in circles! Very surreal yet familiar somehow. I can envision/feel myself doing that, despite my usual fear of heights.

In the library segment, I wished they'd translated the titles of the French books they showed. I reversed the video and paused it several times to write down the book titles. With help from a couple of other sites as well as Google translate, they are:

Paul Verlaine: Romances Sans Parole (Songs Without Words / Wordless Romances?)
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset: On Ne Badine Pas Avec L'Amour (Love is No Joke / You don't joke with love?)
Annie Ernaux: Pasion Simple (Simple Passion)
Guy de Maupassant: Bel-Ami (Good Friend)
Leïla Slimani: Sexe Et Mensonges (Sex and Lies)
Raymond Radiguet: Le Diable au Corps (The Devil Within)
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangeureuses (Dangerous Liaisons)
Molière: Les Amants Magnifiques (The Magnificent Lovers)
Marivaux: Le Triomphe De L'Amour (The Triumph of Love)

That segment ended with a presumed threesome as the door closed!

The iPhone commercial where the security cams get wings and take off flying - those look cute to me, even with the single red "eye". It seems a mean thing for the iPhone to blow them up; they were just being curious!

I like the split-screen way the NBC broadcast showed some of the segments, so one could choose to continue watching the boats or other entertainment in the one window while the interviews took place in the 2nd window.

The boats going up and down in the waves! Is it normal for the Seine to have such high waves? Did any of the athletes get sea sick?

The singing decapitated Marie Antoinettes in the windows! With heavy metal and pink smoke!

The silvery mechanical horse running down the river (with silvery rider)! That was so cool!!!

The Eiffel tower light show at the end! The disco music! OMG SO AWESOME!!!

The giant floating fiery hot-air-balloon cauldron!

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Some of the segments looked quite dangerous to me. I am glad no one got hurt. (I hope no one got hurt.)

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I wish the American team weren't shown yelling "U.S.A! U.S.A!" most of the time. It gets so old. I half suspect (only half though) that NBC prompted them to yell it, too. You don't hear most other teams being so nationalistic. I don't watch the Olympics to see the American team in particular, or to cheer on the American team, as NBC seems to want to presume. Nothing against them (let the best athlete win), but American teams and American athletes are shown on American TV all year long.

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I recorded the opening & closing ceremonies on my Tablo (4th generation) over-the-air digital video recorder (OTA DVR), which I guess I'm still learning to use.
I had scheduled the Tablo to also record the 08/10 Olympics breaking competition on the Telemundo Spanish-language channel. That was the only OTA channel I found which was listed to show the breaking competition. But I'm very disappointed that my Tablo ended up with no trace of that recording. I had recently been very impressed while watching online videos from some other break-dancing competition prior to the Olympics, and had been looking forward to it.

I didn't get to watch any of the other events except for a small amount of speed climbing which was in progress when I turned the TV on one day. I usually like to watch at least some of the gymnastics. But this year the breaking (ahh, can't I still call it break dancing?) sounded like it would be more interesting to me to watch!

I'd like to read a lot of the books on this list.

Cozy Fantasy

Looking for a low-stakes and comforting book? A cozy fantasy may be just what you're looking for. Featuring goodhearted characters, supportive friends, magical elements, and often even found family, cozy fantasies are a great palate cleanser between epic fantasy reads, or just when you are looking for a heart-warming book to curl up with.

From my daily notes today:

That woodpecker is intermittently pecking on the sunroom windows again. It goes from one spot to another, not angrily pecking, just a peck peck here and a peck peck there. Here a peck, there a peck, everywhere a peck peck.

I plan to hang up some strips of what they call "bird scare tape" to see if that will deter the woodpecker. This pecking noise isn't very loud or bothersome (unlike the rapid banging on the other side of the house which sometimes wakes me up), but the pecking itself is damaging my window screens. Today I managed to take a video of the bird when it flew to a nearby tree.

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Last night in bed, I tried to remember names of stuffed animals I had as a child. It bothers me that I can't remember some of their names anymore. I may have written the names down long ago when I remembered them better, but I don't remember where.

The name "Buttercup" came to me as a possibility for the bunny with the wind-up lullabye music box. I don't think that's the right name though, as the rabbit was pink, not yellow. It doesn't feel right either.

Then I imagined Westley from The Princess Bride saying the following (I turned the light back on to write it down as it amused me):
"Oh Princess Buttercup, you're my cup of butter in the morning, my cup of butter in the evening; multiple cups of butter at night! Oh how I love your cups of butter more than a cup of tea!"

All this time, and I never knew the Princess Bride movie was based on an actual book. I thought the book part of it was just part of the movie! Have any of you read the book? If so, how does it compare to the movie?

Tongue twister: Indubitably undebatable; undebatably indubitable.

(Despite "Indubitably, my dear Watson"*, I have a hard time remembering the doob syllable should be accented.)

Heard on TV: "Feeling buoyed".
(I believe it was said in regards to a town receiving support after the recent hurricane.)
The speaker pronounced it "feeling boo-ied", which is an accepted pronunciation for the word, but that sounds similar to "booed" to me. As "booed" and "buoyed" have rather opposite meanings, it seems a bad word choice to me. I would pronounce it more like "boid" or "bwoid", which wouldn't have the same problem.

Word! Word up! (interjections)
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25086/what-are-the-meaning-and-possible-origin-of-word-and-word-up


*It seems that phrase doesn't even occur anywhere in The Complete Sherlock Holmes. There are many instances of "my dear Watson", but none of "indubitable" or "indubitably". Was the phrase used in one of the TV series then, or where did it originate?

I've finished watching the last batch of Resident Alien episodes, and am still enjoying the series a lot. It is still quite amusing as well as touching. It's more about friendships than sci-fi.

Other TV recordings on Qiao's DVR still remaining for me to watch:
A Million Little Things
Killing Eve
The Wonder Years

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Since working from home, I've read very few books. I used to mainly read books during my lunch breaks, sitting on the picnic benches by the pond at work. I no longer take full-fledged lunch breaks like that due to the many other small breaks I take during the day. It takes me long enough to finish my work hours each day without adding an hour-long lunch break in between.

But last year I started reading books again, even if at first only while flossing my teeth before bed.

I finally finished "Good Omens", which I had started right before the pandemic. I didn't find it very amusing* nor did I feel a connection with any of the characters. But I still want to see if I like the TV series that was based on it. Maybe I'll connect more with TV characters.
*Perhaps some of the British-based humor passed me by, but perhaps also, satire of Christianity doesn't seem funny to me as I don't have enough esteem for the religion to begin with.

Now I've also started book-reading while using the exercise bike, which I try to do twice a day for ten minutes or more. Reading a book distracts me from the effort and tediousness of the exercise even better than playing word games or scrolling thru random DW entries.

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Lately, I often work on my laptop outside during the afternoons. I've sat outside in the sunshine enough this winter and spring to have gotten a tan on my arms.

I vaguely remember a scene from a book long ago, where someone was whipped as punishment and salt was rubbed into the wound. The whipped person eventually escaped or ran away, and then the rest of the story began.

I thought the purpose of the salt was to make the punishment hurt worse and/or to keep the wounds from healing as well or to make them scar more.

Something reminded me of that lately, so I looked it up. It turns out that historically, the purpose of putting salt on a wound was not as I thought, but rather to prevent infection.

Pour Salt In An Open Wound:

In the end, though, the phrase “salt in the wound” comes from the days when salt was rubbed into wounds as an antiseptic. During the earlier centuries, when England was establishing its navy, most sailors were forced into service. While at sea, punishment was often lashes with a cat’o’nine tails. These whippings would almost always break the skin, and salt was rubbed into the wound to prevent infection. In this way, “salt in wound” was a very literal, stinging phrase.

Nowadays, putting salt on wounds is NOT recommended:

Is It Safe to Use Salt on Wounds?
Salt in a Wound: Is it Viable for Emergency Medicine?

Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021

First Yahoo Groups, now Yahoo Answers. Sounds like it won't even be left available in read-only mode, as that's what it is saying it is set to now already.

Most of the time, the answers I found posted in Yahoo Answers weren't very good. But every once in a while I'd find something there which I didn't find anywhere else.
Oh, well.

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Paper books whose content can't be searched by a simple typed query.
It occurred to me again recently how outdated that feels to me now.
Each book its own private trove of information, only accessible to those who make the effort required to explore it. Each person having to make their own map, their own index and bookmarks, of what is where inside the book, if they want to find the way back to a particular place in it.

https://www.tor.com/2020/05/20/love-cant-make-you-a-villain-how-she-ras-catra-helped-make-sense-of-my-heart/

I haven't seen She-Ra and the Princesses of Power which that page talks about. But the page also mentions Thor & Loki.. now, this isn't related to what that page talks about, but it made me notice the similarities between the characters Thor/Loki/Hela (from the movies) and Caramon/Raistlin/Kitiara (from the DragonLance books).

I'm not the first to notice it; the Wikipedia page on Raistlin even mentions it:
Hellers calls the twin brothers Caramon and Raistlin the series's most compelling characters: "Caramon is a large, powerful, goodhearted, slightly childlike warrior; Raistlin is a sickly, complicated, mysterious, morally iffy magician. The dynamic feels like it's lifted straight from Thor and Loki, and that archetypal resonance is what Weis and Hickman are obviously shooting for. And almost entirely hit."

Our local Richland County Library system no longer charges fines for overdue books:
https://twitter.com/accessfreely/status/1138790635274670080

They already removed the fines for children's & teen books a while ago, but now have also removed them for adult books. There is still a replacement fee for "lost" books:

Loan period on items=21 days. If there are no holds on it, you can renew. If there are holds or you’ve exhausted all of your renewals, we give you 30 days past the due date to return the item before it’s considered lost. + If you bring it back all replacement fees are removed! :)

I wonder how that will work out. One reason I stopped using the library is because I can hardly ever finish reading a book anymore in the short time frame before it is due, even if I renew it. Theoretically, now I could check out a book and keep it for as long as it took to read it. But it would still be considered overdue and then lost in the meantime, so I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that. But maybe other people will? I prefer digital books now anyway, as carrying my Kindle is less heavy than most books.

The library also has digital books available, and movies and music... I haven't taken advantage of any of that although I started browsing through the music once.

The library's Twitter feed:
https://twitter.com/accessfreely

They've posted links to LGBTQ-oriented books: https://www.hoopladigital.com/collection/4123
graphic novels: https://www.richlandlibrary.com/books-movies-music/queer-comics-teens
and movies: https://www.kanopy.com/category/tags/celebrate-pride-month

At least one of the branch libraries even has a Pride display. I'm impressed, considering this is South Carolina.

the daffodils have started blooming.

I've been reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. It's quite good. There's no humor (that I've noticed so far), but the plot becomes quite gripping after a certain point in the story.