Wierd Things

One of this week’s pictures is of a rainwater tank. A lot of homes have them to collect rainwater for household use. When you live in a rainforest, that’s apparently normally a dependable water supply. Of course, it’s properly filtered and all that. One of the pictures is of a wooden lizard carved apparently out of the log it’s sitting on. It’s in a park we walked through this morning. The other picture is of a real lizard that we also saw on this morning’s walk. It was one of at least a half-dozen we saw, in fact. The woods are full of several varieties of giant, 2-foot-long lizards. To make matters worse, they have surprisingly long legs which they rise up on to run, and they run very fast. Frankly, when they’re running they remind me for all the world of those veloceraptors that chase the good guys around the kitchen near the end of Jurassic Park. I got as close as I dared, in hopes that he’d run across the picture so I could get a profile shot of him running, but I didn’t really get very close, just on the off chance that he’d run toward me instead of away from me. I don’t think he could have done anything to me if he’d caught me, but I’m pretty sure he’d have caught me.

I’m discovering that in learning the language here, you can’t just discern a general principle and then just guess from there; you have to memorize each individual pronunciation. There are differences where neither the U.S. nor the Australian position could be defended; they’re both just completely arbitrary. We pronounce “tourniquet” “turn-a-kett”. They pronounce it “torn-a-kay”. That’s probably closer to the proper French way to say that originally French word. On the other hand, they pronounce “fillet” “fill-ett” whereas we pronounce it “fill-ay”, so in that case we’re probably closer to the original French.

My one big pet peeve here is with grocery carts. I know I’m weird but I’ve always loved grocery shopping. Until now. Grocery carts in the U.S. aren’t the easiest things to steer and I wouldn’t have thought you could make them worse, but Australian grocers have turned them into an insidious instrument of torture. Each of the four wheels turns independently, 360 degrees, freely. You go through a store and you see men and women alike throwing their whole body into trying to keep their cart from wandering off sideways. No wonder they call a cart a buggy. The only wonder is how they’ve managed not to produce an entire nation of frustrated, irritable, angst-ridden, borderline psychotic grocery shoppers. Of course they have a slower, more relaxed pace of life! They have to, to make up for the emotional and physical devastation of grocery shopping.

I just got back from the store, by the way.