La Vie en Noir

The French might make you cringe a little, but it's cute, and oh! so apropos.

Not Tonight, Dear, I Have a Hurricane

As if it weren't bad enough that Texas is getting back-to-back hurricane action, I really take issue with the names. Dolly isn't even a real name (it's a nickname for Dorothy), and I'm sorry to report that some of my dearest friends were reduced to making terrible Broadway jokes. As for Tropical Storm Edouard - that's a good enough French name; but this morning, half the people in my office couldn't figure out how to pronounce it.

French, and headed for the eastern Texas coast? I do believe that'd be a Cajun weather system. Sacrebleu, y'all! Couldn't we at least get two letters of the alphabet off?!

Here's a better idea, for you brainiacs at the National Weather Service: How about you name the first tropical storm of the season Zelda? That way, you know, you can't have any more. How hard is that? It's meteorology, people, not rocket science.

Failing that, the names we're coming up with here seem to suggest we're running low on good ones. Why not switch to car models? Or would Ford sue the NWS if Hurricane Escape wiped out the Florida Keys? Perhaps the concern is that, if a Category 5 hurricane named Yugo were aimed straight at Mobile, everybody would just laugh and not evacuate.

But what happens if, in these strange and climatologically shifting times, we run all the way through the alphabet during a single hurricane season, and (taking a page from Excel's workbook) have to start over again with AA? Hurricane Aaron is perfectly respectable, but all the others would have to be named after Welshmen.

And the way things are looking, they'll have tropical storm action of their own to worry about.

Getting all Eastered Up

When you get right down to it, isn't every Friday good?

I mean, assuming you like your home life better than your job, which (I realize) is hardly a given. But sleeping until you are not tired anymore is generally better than the alternative, isn't it? Whoever came up with the 8-5 workday, anyhow? If I ever meet that bastard, I'll kick him right in the 'nads.

The French don't have to work from 8 am-5 pm every day. They have full-time 35-hour workweeks AND get to drink wine at lunchtime, right there in their corporate cafeterias. Can we do that? No! Not that we'd want to. If they served wine at lunch in our office cafeteria, it would probably have winemakers' toenails in it. Certainly the scrambled eggs contain a high concentration of eggshells. I'm pretty sure this is in compliance with applicable state law.

Of course, the French have to say things like "Sacrebleu!" and "Ooh la la!" which is why people tend not to take them seriously. Look at Pepe LePew, for example - though, to be fair, he really is quite a great romantic figure; passionate, expressive, and devoted, if you don't mind the fact he smells like overripe Roquefort. Then again, most of the women he meets probably don't shave their pits. So why not?

But I digress. It's Good Friday! Many of us don't have to go to work. The kids get off from school. Traffic is light. The spectre of cholesterol poisoning adds a rakish note of peril to our otherwise staid lives, and chocolate may put in a welcome appearance. But stay away from the licorice jellybeans! They are the creation of Satan!

Sleep an extra hour for me tomorrow, if you can.

Sweet Nothings

The fast approach of Halloween brings candy to mind. Plus Anna just gave me a little bag of M&Ms. I ate the green ones first.

What are your feelings on candy corn? It's one of my favorites, even though - or perhaps because - it's just like eating little candles made with sugar. I've seen candy corn-shaped candles, actually, in a few of those whimsical home-decor catalogs the mail-order gods keep sending me, the kind that cater to people who actually put up different curtains for Christmas, and who buy light-up outdoor resin gooses that come with a different weather-resistant outfit for every imaginable holiday.

I would eat them. The candles, I mean.

The worst kind of candy is probably those little bland taffy ones that come wrapped in orange or black wax paper. Or there are worse candies, but the taffy ones look like they ought to be good, so they're much more disappointing. I bet if you dug through your attic or basement and found a candy bag from your childhood, there would still be a bunch of those left in the bottom. They're the ones you unwrap and eat, reluctantly, after all the other candy is gone; but you can never manage more than one. They taste kind of gross, but mostly it's because your mouth is cemented shut.

Anything chocolate is generally good, although this doesn't include Tootsie Rolls, if those are indeed chocolate. What exactly are those things? I've never figured it out. Not worth the trouble of chewing, in any case. And Three Musketeers are not really chocolate; technically they are members of the air family, along with Cool Whip, cotton candy, and spray insulation. M&Ms are good, especially because they now have blue and red, which they didn't have when I was a kid.

When I was in high school we worked out what effect all the different colors had on you. I don't need to tell you what green does, everybody knows that one. Yellow made you frightened, and orange made you angry. Dark brown made you need to visit the restroom. Hey, we were kids. Besides, that's not nearly as bad as the effect the light brown ones were supposed to have when tossed at my French teacher - if only you could land it in her cleavage from way in the back of the room.

I know that sounds terrible. But she was the only woman I ever knew who could show cleavage in a turtleneck; and besides, her pronunciation was inexcusable.

Last year we were living in an apartment. This year we're in a house on a nice street about two blocks from the elementary school. Better stock up!

Rendre Puissant!

There's something about work-related stress that always makes me want to speak French. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the fact that the French have 35-hour workweeks? Or that at least one major French employer's company cafeteria, I have it on very good authority, serves wine with lunch? Or does stress simply bring out an otherwise latent desire to quit shaving my underarms?

Whatever the case, it's best for everyone concerned if I don't undergo too much stress at work. For one thing, I don't speak French.

The poor panicmonger. I hate it when bad things happen to people you don't like, because then you have to feel sorry for them. But whatever else you can say about her, you have to admit, she doesn't hoard bad tidings. She's great at delegating, and we should be grateful; because, as you may know if you've ever taken a Fred Pryor seminar, delegating is the same thing as empowerment.

We're so empowered, we should all be shooting lasers out our butts.

But today was not a banner day for the panicmonger. Her boss gave her a pointless project which largely entailed duplicating a lot of research already done by another group. She was not allowed access to this research, so she had to do it all over again herself in order to answer the questions the other group had raised. Fortunately she immediately empowered all of us to handle the situation for her, and went home in a snit.

It kept me so busy, I barely made it to break. Sacrebleu!