um, gross

How do you react when one of your friends posts the following update on Facebook:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!baby poopy in his new potty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had SO MANY knee-jerk responses to this:

Gross.
Jealous! Wish *I* could do that!
Congrats on your baby's bowel movement!
Really, [redacted], did you just post a status update on your baby's feces?
But will he use this power for good... or eeeevil?
Now all you have to do is train your husband!  Zing!

Then I noticed her mother had made the following comment: "Grab the camera next time if you can...this is huge." Ha!

Um, just don't post the *photos* on facebook, mmm k?
I hope the toilet still flushes.

...And then I realized maybe her mom was in on the joke. (If so, her mom is TEH BOMB.) If this person is a TRUE friend, she will take a photo of her baby's water-logged feces ...and tag me as the toilet.

Exclusive: John Cleese Slams Ex-Wife, Terry Gilliam, Republicans, His Hotel ...

I thought I'd take a little time out of my busy not-blogging schedule to bring you an interview from NYMag with the fabulous, fabulous John Cleese:

Exclusive: John Cleese Slams Ex-Wife, Terry Gilliam, Republicans, His Hotel ...

Cleese performing his one-man show earlier this month. Photo: Getty Images

Funny-walking, parrot-returning comedy deity John Cleese is headed to New York for a Monty Python reunion on October 16, after the premiere of IFC’s hilarious warts-and-all documentary: Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut), airing on IFC October 18. Logan Hill spoke to him about the new Fawlty Towers Remastered DVD set, out (October 20), his recent ugly divorce, Monty Python’s even uglier breakup, and his apocalyptic new work in progress “Why There Is No Hope.”.


What age are you, Logan?
34.


Well, I have a rule not to date people less than half my age, but I guess it's okay to be interviewed by one.


Another difference between you and some of the other Pythons.
Entirely right! [Sixty-seven-year-old Terry Jones just fathered a child with his 26-year-old girlfriend.]


How are you holding up? Sounds like you’ve had a rough divorce. You've called your ex "the special love child of Bernie Madoff and Heather Mills."
I went through a very unpleasant divorce and discovered just how hopeless the American legal system is. There are a couple of occasions when I began to realize just how bad the damage was going to be. For me, most of the things people know me from —Fawlty Towers or A Fish Called Wanda — are things I’ve been able to write on spec because I had enough money to live. Now I have to pay one million dollars a year until I’m 76. So that means I have to organize my life around earning the first million dollars every year. And the normal sources of income for people like me are drying up. There aren’t as many film and TV parts — and you can do interesting documentaries but they don’t pay anything. So I’m doing one-man shows and other things ...


Like interviews like this, to sell some Fawlty Towers DVDs.
Yes, that’s a big help. I’d always hoped that, at this stage in my life, I could live on the royalties and do the things I really want to do.


It’s a large settlement.
Well, the absurd thing is, my wife brought no assets or income and we had no children. And yet she seems to have finished up with a lot more than half of the money. That’s the insanity.


Can you laugh about something like this?
You know, as they always say, it depends on whether you see life as a tragedy or a farce.


You’ve often made terrible things seem hilarious. Basil Fawlty was a jerk.
Well it’s like in W.C. Fields — he’s just about my favorite comedian, but if you actually met that character in real life, I don’t think you’d like him. Basil’s awful. He’s a terrible, shallow creature, completely obsessed with class. Ah, but he is funny. We laugh at Basil because, although he behaves appallingly to other people, a lot of the time it’s because of his fear that Sybil will get very angry. We also feel sorry for him. When people behave badly out of fear, it’s much funnier than if they were just behaving badly because that’s their default mode.


And we recognize our own worst impulses in him?
Oh, yes. I think that there’s an enormous number of people in England who, given enough stress, behave very much as Basil does. That marvelous book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman has this tremendous phrase: “Stress makes you stupid.” So the more stress you put on the protagonist in the farce, the stupider he gets. That’s one of the delights of it. They make worse and worse mistakes.


You’re speaking to me from a hotel right now. Are you a double celebrity among hoteliers?
Yes, most of the hoteliers I encounter are aware of Fawlty Towers, but it doesn’t stop them being terrible hoteliers. I mean, this place that we’re in at the moment, the Radisson … well, the accountants try to save a few pennies and meanwhile they absolutely ensure that somebody like me never comes back.


Why?
They’re greedy. Earning a reputation gets completely forgotten in the rush for quick short-term profit, which is the great sin of American business. I am often quite surprised at how poor the service is in even the most expensive chains, but I always exempt The Four Seasons, because I do think that’s a marvelous chain. But this Radisson, it’s a mess. The wastepaper baskets! There’s far too few wastepaper baskets, and when you do find them, they’re always hidden away. Like they are objects of shame. I have by me now a tiny little wastepaper basket which contains a billowing plastic bag that makes it almost impossible to get anything into the bin. But that’s so the maid doesn’t have to touch it. The hotel is run for the benefit of the staff rather than for the customer.


Like Fawlty Towers. Maybe you should open your own hotel.
I think it would be a tremendous thing to do, and I may produce some training films again, because most people are absolutely clueless, but I like projects that have ends to them. With TV or a movie, you work on something for two years or six months and at the end of it, you move on. I would not be good at something that required year after year of attention.


That’s a big point of the new documentary on Monty Python. The other Pythons were angry when you quit the show a year before everyone else.
Two things: One is I did not like the fact that we were repeating a lot of our material, even if other people didn’t notice; the others didn’t care. They were having a good time. I think if one was playing “I’m the pure artist,” I would win on that one. The other thing was that I was carrying the alcoholic [the late Graham Chapman]. That seems to get forgotten in all of these discussions. They were completely blind to an extraordinarily important point, which was: I was the guy who was having to work with the alcoholic. They never said, ‘We’ll share part of that burden with you. I’ll write with him one day a week.’ This is never mentioned. It was ‘Oh, John was rather difficult … ’


How bad was it?
Well, I never knew what he was up to, because alcoholics — I now know quite a lot of them — they are all, I’m afraid, basically liars. The words are almost synonymous. There were two types of days: days where I did 80 percent of the work and days when Graham did 5 percent of the work. He was basically lazy, but he had two great qualities: He was the most extraordinary sounding board and he was capable of coming in with very good off-the-wall ideas. But he was very lazy.


In the doc, Terry Gilliam bashes your respect for psychotherapy.
I think Gilliam was so frightened of what he’d discover if he ever explored his own conscience. He is completely unbalanced, as are many of the Pythons. He is notably unbalanced.


You were the first man to say “shit” on the BBC, and possibly the first man to say “fuck” at a funeral — Chapman’s. What do you make of the controversy over an actress saying “fucking” on Saturday Night Live recently?
I think the older you get the more you begin to realize what a madhouse we live in. People get upset about things that don’t matter at all and people don’t really get upset at all about things that matter a lot. You’ve got a rotten, rickety old legal system that anyone with money can manipulate — and nobody goes around saying this; they go around worrying that somebody said “fuck.” I mean, frankly, it’s pathetic and so completely half-witted that you give up any expectation of any kind of rational behavior of any kind, in any way, as you get older. It’s a madhouse. There are small pockets of sanity, but the rest of it is irretrievably second-rate at best. So when these things come along now, I just shrug.


On the Fawlty Towers commentary you say it’s harder to laugh now.
You laugh less at entertainment because you’ve seen most of the jokes before and you can guess where the new ones are going. It’s not like when you’re young and you discover Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields or Eddie Izzard or Bill Hicks. What you begin to see is how funny life is. You turn Sean Hannity on and there is wall-to-wall insanity. They have absolutely no idea what clowns they are.


As you get older, are people getting stupider?
It can be depressing. But you have to let go of the idea that this can ever be a decent and rational place. I already have quite a lot of material for a new show I will call Why There Is No Hope. I’ve tried it out. A friend said it was fascinating afterwards because the more I destroyed people’s hope that this could ever be, in any way, a rational planet, the more they laughed.


Could you give me a preview?
Well, I’m a funny kind of professor at Cornell, and there is a psychology professor there called David Dunning who discovered that in order to know how good you are at something, it requires almost exactly the same skills and aptitude as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. In other words, if you’re a really good tennis player or mathematician then you know how to tell how good you are. But it also means if you’re absolutely no good at something then you lack exactly the skills to realize your idiocy. It explains why so many idiots out there have no idea that they’re idiots.


Do you run into this in comedy?
You find this particularly with scripts. I wrote a really good script for Disney, and the woman in charge wanted to make changes which were completely and utterly wrong. She had the confidence of the truly stupid. Then you look at the Republican Party: Here are people that are so out of touch with reality that it could be screamingly funny if it weren’t so dangerous.


As politics gets more childish, does satire get harder for you?
Yes. Take Sarah Palin — so many Republicans love her. I suddenly realized that in order to actually understand that someone is not very bright — or to be brutal, that they’re rather stupid — you really have to be more intelligent than them. Most Republicans aren’t smarter than Sarah Palin. It’s true.


If there is no hope, you must not trust Obama.
No, I have real hope for Obama, because I think without the slightest doubt he is operating from a considerably higher level of mental health than we’re used to in our politicians. I think that’s what frightens the shit out of Republicans. Because if you put very mad people in a room with very sane people the mad people start feeling madder, do you see what I mean? Whereas, if you put mad people in together — if you put the Gestapo in together — they’re all sort of reinforcing each other’s madness and everyone’s happy.

jam-packed

As I was taking a break from the 19th-Century art history conference today at Columbia, I heard a guitar piddling around, and it sounded kind of like one of my favorite bands. Which was weird, because why would VAMPIRE WEEKEND being playing at Columbia today, when I'm supposed to be in a darkened lecture hall from 9am until 5pm and it's 79 degrees outside? Well, turns out that it was indeed Vampire Weekend testing out the old sound system and that they were going to play at 3pm, followed by Talib Kweli. (Yes, really.)


Needless to say, I skipped out on the afternoon sessions (though I returned, of course, for the cheese and cheap wine at the reception) and stood on Alma Mater's feet to enjoy the 45 minute set and the blazing sunshine:


It was, as the French say, LE AWESOME. I mean, really, I'm just wandering around campus, happen to hear a few random notes of music and discover that one of my favorite bands is playing that day? And it's beautiful out? And the band is LE AWESOME live? This, my friends, THIS, is why I love New York City.

...And for those of you out there who aren't jealous enough, I give you a snippet of the closing number, "Walcott":


Fantastic.

these are not the hammer

In preparation for AWESOMEFEST 2009 (i.e., Blythe coming to NYC TOMORROW), I have been watching this masterwork of awesomeness: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. i'm sure that I am only about 9 months behind on this, but whatever. To watch it is to love it:Please refer to 24:50-25:05. Thank you, Joss Whedon.

blood of the bourgeoisie

Lindeman's Framboise: the blood of foppish Belgian dandies who dined only on raspberries and champagne.

emo lumberjack is not my favorite music genre (thoughts on Fleet Foxes on SNL, or: my dad may be a closet emo hippie)

Emo lumberjacks?
Isn't three guitars kind of overkill?
Long-haired, flannel-wearing falsettos?
Whiny Nirvana?
Seriously, is there like some beard requirement?
I sort of like the song "White Winter Hymnal" [video above] because it reminds me of Joan Baez or Peter, Paul, and Mary songs my Dad used to sing me as lullabies that were really just sad and/or scared the crap out of me (cf. "Puff the Magic Dragon," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?," "Blowing in the Wind," "What Do Ye Do With a Drunken Sailor?", all of which make me want to start crying for some odd reason [well, except for maybe the last]). ...Actually, if it reminds me of all those other minor-keyed songs, maybe I don't like it that much after all.


I confess myself confused. Though perhaps that's my dad's fault.



*Also, the guy on Burn Notice seems like a poor man's Guy Pearce. Thoughts?

behind the times

Yes, I know this is mega-old, but what am I going to do? Post about how much time I spent downloading Vampire Weekend songs? No.It still makes me laugh every time I see it.

you bastard waffle, you!

Can I just quote other people and that counts as a post of mine? No? Well, I'm going to do it anyway.
Expect an update from my very exciting paper on the interstices of historical romance fiction and masquerade just as soon as I finish it, which might be never.

The Shoe Heard Round the World

By JOHN KENNEY

The New York Times (online)
Published: December 16, 2008

Hitting someone with a shoe is considered the supreme insult in Iraq. It means that the target is even lower than the shoe, which is always on the ground and dirty.

— The Times, Dec. 15

IN France, of course, it's a waffle. Throw a waffle at someone and you have said, in essence: "I loathe you. You are scum. Your people are donkey traders." It suggests that the target is even lower than a waffle, which is sometimes on the ground if it happens to fall off a plate, and the ground could be dirty, depending upon the ground.

Who's to say why, exactly? Some say the waffle's association with Belgium is enough to disgust any Frenchman. Others suggest it is its annoyingly spongy consistency. Still others say it's the derivation of the word — "le waffle" in French, from the Flemish "wafflintis" and originally the Latin "wafflibus," all of which translate, loosely, to "waffle."

For scholars of insults, what comes to mind almost immediately after a high-profile insulting incident is the central African nation of Chad, where hitting someone with a pair of pants is the highest form of insult. It means that the target is lower than pants, the hem of which, while not on the ground, is often near the ground and, again, unclean. The only problem with this form of insult is that the thrower then has to retrieve the pants, as he or she had been wearing them.

For many years people threw shorts, but almost no one was offended, as the hem of shorts is a great distance from the ground. "We're working on new forms of insult, as well as changing our country's name, which, strangely, is a common first name in California," said a Chadian cultural attaché. "We need to be taken more seriously."

In the former Soviet Union it is not uncommon, especially among the savage Russian mafia, to throw a 68-ton American-made Abrams M1A1 tank. It means that the target is even lower than a tank, whose treads are always on the ground, unless they're not for some reason — say, repairs or what-have-you. In fairness, though, the throwing of tanks appears to be happening with less frequency, due to the near impossibility of surprise, especially at indoor events.

In Peru, meanwhile, people throw their voices as a form of insult. While not technically near the ground, a voice suggests "sound" and "sound" rhymes with "ground," the ground being low and possibly unclean, depending upon where, exactly, you're standing.

Peruvians say that throwing your voice is the ultimate insult because the intended victim doesn't know where it came from. It is not uncommon to hear someone say, "Who said that?!" on the streets of Lima after a particularly cutting remark. The danger, of course, is insulting someone by trying to throw your voice, but doing it poorly and instead moving your lips. The intended victim knows immediately where it came from.

And what of tiny Bhutan, snug between Tibet in the north and India to the south? In this mysterious Buddhist country, perhaps the only one in the world that measures its Gross National Happiness, people throw brightly colored tissue paper, so as not to hurt anyone. The paper falls harmlessly to the ground — a symbol of both lowness and dirt — and the thrower quickly picks it up, disposes of it, and then apologizes profusely.

How To Accurately Label Your Pets, PSA

[Posted in tandem with Kittenheads.]

Have you ever been frightened by an animal whose identity is unclear? Confronted by a strange beast in the morning that may or may not be a flesh eating dragon? How do you know? The most effective resolution is to ensure all non-humans are appropriately labeled. These videos were part of the short-lived public service program "How To Accurately Label Your Pets." For example, as you can see from the label, the animal in these videos is a cat. What a relief!

Step 1: Create a label. It is especially helpful if the label has some sort of directional indication system (e.g., an arrow) so as to avoid confusion.
Step 2: Afix the label to the correct animal (please refer to chapter 4.37 of the Label Guidebook regarding matching animals with names). Note that this may be harder than you anticipate, especially if said animal has experienced many previous labelings.
Step 3: Voila! You now have an accurately labeled pet. Watch carefully for any hints of shapeshifting (see Example II, below).
(Step 4: Re-afix label to animal.)

Example I:



Example II:



Easy as pie.

weird things accost me

Seen...

In a rest stop parking lot while driving to Boston:
guinea fowl in a pickup truck.

At the entrance to my local market:

On the checkout line at the local independent bookstore:
blue rose garden

she worshiped the sausage
near her peach
picture him gorgeous & languid
purple beauty from above
use me like the love goddess
for it is light
easy smooth moon
moment after
fast like music


At a bus stop:

Have a tryptophan-filled day

You know when your sinuses are all clogged and nothing really makes sense? Yeah.

off the record

Yeah, so I'm busy. I work all the time, have too many papers to write, etc etc. Blah blah blah.

It's too bad, really, since there is SO MUCH that I want to post on the blog but that the never-entirely-anonymous nature of blogging is preventing me from writing. Shame. Because otherwise I would tell you that, last Monday, I very stupidly decided to go to class on migraine meds. Not only did I almost pass out on the walk there, but I arrived late, which ensured that the ENTIRE CLASS witnessed me walk into a closet door--thus creating an enormous lump in the middle of my forehead (which blossomed into a bruise later in the week). Not my finest hour.

I would also tell you that on Friday there happened to be yet another encounter with the elusive Rebound from last year, in which the following conversation took place at approximately midnight:
Me: "Are you seeing anyone?"
Him: "Uh, no."
Me: "Well. Do you want to see me?"
Him: "Ok."*
[There may have been partial nudity involved. Maybe.] I would confide in you that the migraine that seemed to have gone away on Tuesday returned so forcefully Saturday morning that I had to go beg at the health center for a shot of medication I hadn't had to resort to since 2003, after which I went home, split a bottle of Lindeman's Framboise with my fabulous roommate who made me pigs in blankets, and slept until about 5 minutes before going to work on Sunday. I would also tell you that, on Sunday morning, the heat and hot water were out, which meant that I hadn't showered for about three days** when, Sunday night at the gallery--less than 48 hours after seeing the Rebound and approximately 56 hours since my last shower--I got asked out on a date by an attractive man.

...IF I were to post about all this on my blog--and this is NOT EVEN COUNTING the making out with fellow students, the debilitating inability to get to bed before 2am which is seriously f*cking up my life, the very ambiguous email flirting with professors (which may just be in my own mind), the not-so-ambiguous flirting with artists, the annoying cigarette habit I seem to have developed over the summer which has proved obnoxiously hard to quit, the encounters with ex-boyfriends, etc.--alls I would be saying (if I were to be saying this, you understand) is that these must be some DAMN strong pheromones I'm pumping out. And also, that the dude I'm meeting up with on Wednesday is clearly blind. But I'm cool with that.


* I am not known for my subtlety.
** Okay, seriously, if you don't sweat all that much and the hair isn't too greasy, then it's not that big a deal. ...Unfortunately, I sweat a lot and my hair gets gross after about 36 hours. So, clearly: dude is blind.

And we now return to our regularly scheduled hibernation.
See you in January!

purple-headed womb ferret?

I am too busy to write down all the crap I have to do these days, but I have to bring myself out of semi-hiatus to post the following video of Kate Winslet on the English TV show Extras:

Some of the best euphemisms I've ever heard (and that's saying a lot considering my most recent paper) delivered by Kate Winslet wearing a nun costume? I almost stopped breathing I was laughing so hard. The lines after the jump:

"Why don't you just start off with something light, you know. Like, um, 'I'd love it if you stuck your Willy Wonka between my Oompa Loompas,'--you know, something a bit fun, a bit jokey. And then you can get more hard-core, rattle off the old classics, like, 'I'm playing with my dirty pillows. I'm aching for your big purple-headed womb ferret.' And then go straight in hard, like: 'Get 'round here 'cause I'm fudding myself stupid and I'm bloody loving it.' Alright?"

I heart Tina Fey

Maybe she'll be my friend if I ask real nice.

seriously, make me stop laughing

In searching for Georgette Heyer eBooks to download (for a paper on masks and masking in popular romance fiction), I ran across the eHarlequin.com bestseller list. Witness:

Top 10 Bestsellers:

	1.	Sicilian Husband, Unexpected Baby
	2.	The Prince's Arranged Bride
	3.	Ruthlessly Bedded by the Italian Billionaire
	4.	Hired: The Italian's Convenient Mistress
	5.	Claimed for the Italian's Revenge
	6.	The Sheikh's Wayward Wife
	7.	The Mediterranean Prince’s Captive Virgin
	8.	Pregnant on the Upper East Side?
	9.	The Spanish Billionaire's Christmas Bride
	10.	Public Scandal, Private Mistress

I cannot stop laughing. I especially enjoy the question mark on #8, as well as the fact that Italians are the lovers of choice. I think if you combined it all into one, you'd get an arranged marriage to a Mediterranean billionaire prince who, having never seen his betrothed before, mistakes her for a courtesan and abducts her--on Christmas! After he [ruthlessly!] beds and impregnates her, this captive [former] virgin runs--waywardly--away to the Upper East Side? [Then they live happily ever after, etc etc etc ad nauseam.]
Really, just how many adjectives do you need for one title? Especially when the cover pretty much says it all (i.e., SEX).

Warhol + graffiti = tomato spray

Also pasted on the wall surrounding the vacant lot next to the gallery was the following poster:It serves absolutely no purpose other than being witty, and for that, I love it.

context is everything

This poster was pasted on the vacant lot next to my gallery. It's rather amusing, of course, but what's even better is exactly *where* it was posted [see after the jump]...

Heh heh heh. One can only dream, right?

some observations

I ate at a popular bar on the LES last night, which turned out to be an exercise in hipster anthropology.

First: it doesn't matter how attractive you are—if you look like you might barf on me, I'm not interested. Really.* (See below. Suffice it to say that drama comes to me.)

See? Still disgusting.

Other observations: beards are IN among the LES/alternative music crowd. Like, on seemingly every other guy I saw last night. Is it because it's getting colder and scarves don't fit into the aesthetic? The price of razors is too high? There has been a spate of contagious eczema?

Finally, don't walk behind wildly gesticulating Eastern European tourists--you never know when one of them might fling a hand backward without looking and stab you in the Adam's apple with a sharpened acrylic fingernail.


* Especially if you do any of the below:

1. You initiate contact by flicking my cuff and smiling at me in a way that suggests you know me. Since you remind me vaguely of my English Ex, I confusedly ask if I know you.
   
2. You don't respond, just grin expectantly, so I roll my eyes and go back to my reading.
   
3. You continue to benignly touch me—caressing my sleeve, poking at my hair in drunkenly gentle manner—even though I am both reading Bakhtin AND ignoring you.
   
4. You continue to do this even after I've asked if I can help you. Really, is there something you want? Some reason you're provoking me?
   
5. You don't answer the above question. In fact, you don't speak at all, leading me to ask, in sign language, if you are deaf.
   
6. After again flicking my jacket cuff (which I am wearing), I say, "Really, WHAT IS IT? What do you want? Because otherwise, QUIT." Loudly. And you grin stupidly. I go back to my reading with renewed vigor.
   
7. The bartender takes pity on me and says, "I think she's busy reading and doesn't want to talk right now." She probably says this because I am about to start screaming at you to shove fuck off and instigate a barfight if you touch me one. more. time.
   
8. After discovering that the bar doesn't accept the card you gave the bartender, you can't figure out how to pay your $88 bar tab. Allow me to repeat: You can't figure out how to pay your $88 bar tab. As in, you try to hand the bartender a $20 bill and ask if that's enough.
   
9. Upon hearing you speak I discover that you're English. You remind me even more of my English Ex. This is not really a good thing.
   
10. A tip: if you hear the following monologue from your bartender that goes anything like:
    

    Sir, we don't take Maestro. Do you have another card?
    [mumble mumble. Present $20 bill.]
    Sir, that's not enough.
    [Present $20 bill AGAIN.]
    No. [She waits for the penny to drop. It doesn't.]
    Do you have a different card?
    [Pulls random dollar bills out of pocket.]
    Noooo. Do you just have a different card? If you give me a--
    [Presents $20 bill. "Thasss not enouf?"]
    A different--grrrr. Do you--Do you have a wallet? Give me your wallet.
    [You are befuddled by its inexplicable presence in your pocket.]
    I'm going to use this card, ok? [She runs card. You put your head on the bar.] You need to sign the receipt, sir. [You don't look up. She mutters: I'm putting my own damn tip on here.] Sign here, sir.
    Sir. Sign. Here. THANK YOU. ... ... Sir? Sir, you can't sleep on the bar.

    ...you need to go home.
    
11. What's that, you say? You don't have a place to stay for the night? You were trying to find someone to go home with at the bar? Jerk.

seen on the subway

Actually, I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you.

baby-jumping: kind of like Evil Knievel, only without the motorcycle

In the Spanish town of Castrillo de Murcia, there is a yearly festival where men run out of a church dressed in their finest bright yellow jumpsuits to leap over mattresses of babies.Do they ever get kneed in the face, I wonder?Look at that one in the little red jumper, she's all like, "Wow." It reminds me of the reactions my cats give me when I'm doing something particularly foreign to feline behavior.

...Also, is it really any wonder why I want to move back to Europe?