New Year's Resolutions

As the Boy Wonder languishes through his second week of lurgy and we contemplate a quiet new year's eve together, naturally my thoughts have turned to what I hope to achieve in the next year. It's going to be pretty tricky to be honest, as we have had a totally awesome 2010 what with our extended sojourn in the States, the arrival of our niece and the implementation of our plans for self-employment, so it's going to be pretty hard to top. However, I have managed to scrape together a few ambitions to attempt over the next year, and in case I've forgotten what they were by the end of January I might as well record them for posterity:

1. Channel the slightly compulsive tendencies I have into something useful - rather than obsessing over whether the bottles in the cupboard are all facing forwards, I will try to spend that time achieving a basic level of cleanliness about the house. Living in a giant dust bunny, however beautifully aligned the condiments may be, suggests a substantial flaw in my ability to prioritise, which I intend to correct.

2. Make some inroads into our long term plans to try and live a dual life between here and New Orleans.

3. Write something which has the potential to be published i.e complete any writing project to my satisfaction.

4. Spend less time buggering about on the internet and more time getting gigs for the Boy Wonder.

5. Move the bloody fence to where it's supposed to be after all the stupid admin work that needed doing, paperwork, solicitors and faff the fence will be moved to its correct position!

I think that's about it - hopefully there's nothing on there which will prove insurmountable, but you never know, now that we have cider shelves a lot of things seem more challenging...

One of my biggest fears

I worry that on a night like this, when posting under the influence of a small amount of alcohol, I will post my innermost thoughts on the blog I manage for the company for whom I work. I imagine this is the technological era's equivalent of dreaming about taking an exam in the nude.

The best days of your life...

The only way in which my school days were the best of my life is in the opportunity they afforded me for purchasing, storing and using stationery. I now have to feed this habit by obsessively dividing things into plastic folders and secretly dreaming of owning a filing cabinet.

Curiouser and curiouser

Well, on checking the oil today (which by the way, our car doesn't actually seem to use, but that's another matter), the Boy Wonder found a banana skin and a prawn cracker on top of the car battery. We have come up with several possible theories on how this could have happened, but basically none of them make sense except the idea that someone with access to the car and keys popped the bonnet and put them there, presumably for a prank.

We know it wasn't left there when it was shipped as we had to jump start it three times to get it out of the port, and it couldn't have been done without popping the bonnet from the inside as the clip isn't broken. But, if you had access to the keys (which several people would have done) and wanted to play a prank, why make it something so obscure and such a rubbish prank? Why a banana skin and a prawn cracker? Why leave them in the engine where they are quite unlikely to be found? And another few 'whys' just for good measure because everything about this is weird.

So, until we can find out what happened, this will be consigned to the 'inexplicably mystery' files, along with the unfeasibly massive bird poo we once found on the windscreen, the unexpected turning up on TV of two friends who we didn't know even knew each other and the time we met someone the Boy Wonder knew from childhood in a laundry room in Canada.  Let's hope that the quest for answers turns up something so we can close this case before it drives me mad.

Excuses

Today, after a frustrating and ultimately fruitless attempt to find a boot fair and purchase amazingly cheap vintage guitars, we ended up at a PTA craft fair of a school down the road. I was caught giving perhaps my most audacious excuse for failing to make a purchase: 'I'm tempted, but my knitted food collection is already out of hand, I can't buy any more.'

The saddest thing is that it is genuinely true...

Boy Wonder - in charge of bedtime

For some reason, I have always been really bad at going to bed, perhaps because I always had a bedtime when I was living with my parents due to their inability to sleep if someone is so much as considering consciousness elsewhere in the house. When I first moved out, the fact that I lived in one room meant that my bed was my main piece of furniture so it wasn't so noticeable that I would often fall asleep on top of the covers having drifted off whilst intending to be otherwise occupied. Since living with the Boy Wonder, I would estimate that around 80% of the time we have 'headed up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire' has been at his suggestion - I will quite happily lie around on the sofa, even to the point of falling asleep rather than actually committing to going to bed.

It's not as though our bedtime routine is particularly gruelling - we have a fish and a rabbit to feed, one door to lock and some lights to switch off. We aren't exactly neat freaks, so it's not like we do anything in the way of cleaning or tidying, but for some reason the idea of choosing to go to bed is completely alien to me - despite being 30, I still feel like one of those kids on 'You've Been Framed' who ends up falling asleep in their spaghetti hoops in spite of their attempts to stave off the overwhelming tiredness. I'm not sure whether it's come about because the Boy Wonder generally has no problem going to sleep, whereas I used to spend hours in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering whether I would make it out alive in the event of a fire (one of the weirder fears I had a child after a not-particularly graphic safety lecture at school). I still have a propensity to let my imagination run wild whenever I can't sleep, which may be why the concept of going to bed fills me with a childish determination to stave it off for as long as possible.

Stupidly enough, this applies even when I'm really tired - I can spend all day planning an early night, wishing I was in bed and looking forward to a nap, but when it actually comes down to going to bed, I will still find ways to put it off. I used to be surprised at how my productivity levels increased at the most inappropriate times, namely when it was getting late and bedtime was looming, but as I become more aware of the fact that I have slight issues surrounding going to bed I realised that this is just another way to put off the inevitable.

I also really like being in bed - once the decision is made, the jobs are done and the wooden hill has been breached, I have no problem with actually going to bed - it's just the instigation of the process which I find unpalatable and when left on my own I just don't do it. I will either sleep on the sofa, start doing jobs in the bedroom so that the decision is never made or just stay awake until the whole thing becomes moot at some point the next day.

My worry is that at some point, should our mid-term future go to plan, I will be in charge of our children's bedtimes, which in some senses should be fine (I don't care if other people want to go to bed, I just don't want to myself) but I do worry that one of our kids might be like me and when they tell me that they don't want to I will feel like a huge hypocrite. Fingers crossed then that they will take after the Boy Wonder and will be thrilled at the idea of going to bed, when and wherever the urge may strike him, otherwise our kids are going to end up watching a lot of weird films of the kind that are shown at 4 in the morning and probably scar toddlers for life.

Super Glue

In spite of (or subconsciously perhaps because of) the explicit and terrifying warnings on the outside of a tube of Super Glue, and in spite of the fact that I am independently aware that Super Glue was originally designed and used for gluing skin together, for some reason whenever I actually use Super Glue I managed to glue my fingers together. Admittedly, often I am gluing something which requires me to hold the two pieces together until the glue has at least begun to set, so it's not entirely surprising that it happens, but the fact that I consistently forget to check whether my fingers are becoming a part of the item that I am trying to fix is a cause of some consternation to me. Fortunately, I now have proper fingerprints again after last week's attempt to fix the stupid freezer drawers left me with suspiciously smooth patches on several of my fingertips...

Who decided that pine = clean

Am I unaware of some natural predilection of pine trees to clear up after themselves? Is it perhaps some ancient tradition that before we had the chemical means to remedy bad smells, readily available pine leaves/sap/bark was used to reduce odours? I have never actually smelt a pine tree specifically, but I'm pretty sure I have never smelt anything like pine scented air freshener or toilet cleaner whilst wandering through the woods, so I can only assume that the smell we now call 'pine' is an extrapolation on the smell of some part of a tree rather than an accurate representation of the natural smell of pine.

I wonder if the other trees are aware that, by virtue of their exclusion from the world of cleansing products, they all fail to measure up to the sweet aroma of pine. Do they all feel hard done-by? Do pine trees get together and make fun of oaks because nobody wants their toilet to smell like an oak tree? Maybe Christmas trees and pine trees get together to enjoy their privileged status of being exalted by the human race either as decoration or nasal adornment. Perhaps they are shunned by other trees for aiding and abetting man despite his noted antagonism towards their fellow trees, which would be a shame seeing as Christmas trees never seem to survive the optimistic new year 'planting in the garden' and pine trees presumably don't even get near the reproduced smell that bears their name, let alone any royalties or even preferential treatment on the back of it.

Having thought about this for way too long, I am now considering a time consuming and ultimately pointless project to reveal the origins of pine scented products, so I can only hope that something else crops up to distract me before I end up wasting my time and boring other people rigid with my tales from the pine project.

Cereal dreams

I have always loved cereal. When I was younger, I didn't even give any other breakfast food a look in, always preferring a bowl of cereal and on one memorable occasion eating 12 Weetabix in a row at the age of around 7. A couple of years ago, my doctor recommended that I stop eating breakfast (on the grounds that I was throwing it straight back up almost every morning), which I did despite having it ingrained in my consciousness that I was relinquishing the most important meal of the day.

However, our return from the country where eggs seem only to occur in threes combined with a new working regime means that I am now firmly back in the camp of breakfast and the last delivery of shopping I received fulfilled a dream I had been having since deciding to revert back to my well trusted cereal lifestyle - a wall of cereal. That's not a metaphor - I literally had a recurring dream over the course of around 5 nights in which I owned a seemingly limitless supply of all kinds of cereal. Given the uplifting nature of this dream, I decided to make it a reality and I now have that wall of cereal adorning the top of the fridge which makes me happy just to see it.

I am a little saddened that Grape Nuts have bowed under the pressure of the modern world of breakfast snacks and instead of a small opening in the cardboard on the side of the box, they have now fallen in line with an inner bag and top opening system, but they taste just how I remember them so I can overlook their transgression. The other bonus is that cereal is a good way to up my calcium intake - I have never been able to drink milk neat, but my reignited love of cereal might also be the thing that stops be from crumbling from the insides like an ancient scroll when I reach the golden age at which these things start to happen.

Little did I realise that a wall of cereal could make me so happy, but clearly I am either a lot deeper or a lot more shallow than I ever realised.

Hotel living

Handy hints for people living in hotels/motels:

If you don't get up in time for housekeeping and eat mainly snacks from vending machines : two coke cans will fit into an empty pringles tub to maximise the length of time you can go without emptying your ridiculously tiny bins.

If you can't work the shower, and are scared to try jiggling anything else in case it breaks, try pulling the rim of the tap, where the water comes out as that is way less embarrassing than calling down to reception three times and eventually having to have someone from maintenance come up to show you.

Check everything you're going to want to use before unpacking because once you've got all your stuff out before finding out the TV doesn't work you'll be annoyed even if they kindly offer to move you to another room and will make a good five trips with arms full of trailing stuff before you've got everything from one to the other.

Watch the Family Guy episode where Peter gets a job as a maid, so that even when you are awoken at some ungodly hour by someone knocking on the door and screeching 'housekeeping' it will make you laugh rather than throw something at the door.

Take, keep and use earplugs - there is almost nothing other residents of hotels will not do,

in order to stop their fellow guests from sleeping, up to and including strangely rowdy parties, an apparent desire to rearrange whatever furniture can be moved without unscrewing it from the floor or weird, loud conversations with their friends in the wee hours of the morning about the middle east during which they display surprisingly comprehensive albeit wildly inaccurate views on the history of the conflicts taking place there.

Glad I don't believe in interpreting dreams

A couple of nights ago I dreamt that I was tied up at the wrists by a girl I hardly know (a friend of a friend) and forced to sleep in a room filled with fibre glass despite telling her that I was not only afraid of it but also concerned for my health. I was really angry with her for reading a book I was writing in, and wanted to punch her.

The night before I dreamt that my engagement ring was falling apart and the stones were shattering so I couldn't even pick them up to have it repaired.

Last night I dreamt that the Boy Wonder and his friend were playing a monopoly game based on the world cup which I wasn't allowed to join in with. Instead of proper dice, they were using an apple with numbers drawn on it in a cup of water - you tried to roll the apple and when it came up with no number on top it was declared 'in the sea' and had to be rolled again. They were supposed to be headed off to a strip club afterwards, but none of them really wanted to go, and Eric was actually riding his bike around the village letting everyone know which televisions were working in all the pubs. He also had five TVs in his bedroom which was a bit weird, but I had to stay there while they all went off to the strip club so I had plenty to watch which was a bit of a relief.

Clearly these dreams are a sign of my slightly overstuffed brain, but for anyone who actually believed in interpreting dreams, I can imagine it would be pretty terrifying to guess what the hell it all meant.

Unfortunate juxtaposition in TV scheduling

For some reason, the folks at NOLA 38 have decided that an appropriate show to follow 'Reno 911' at 4.30 in the morning is 'Cops'. This means that if you kind of half watch the TV when drunk before bed, you get about half way through 'Cops' before thinking 'That's odd - this is hardly funny at all, and that one guy in the really short shorts has hardly even been in this episode. And it's a lot more gritty than normal, what's that all about?' before realising that the junky being cuffed is actually genuinely threatening the police with an attack with an infected needle, and you probably aren't going to see the sassy black one with all the junk in her trunk any time soon. I can only assume that somebody was actively encouraging this mindset when they came up with the idea of putting these two shows back to back, otherwise it's a desperately inappropriate oversight which, if we are anything to go by, has lead to a lot of late night confusion and disappointment.

Crazy TV land

Why is it that on television, the continuity people never seem to notice flaws in weather conditions? I frequently see loads of guys in suits, clearly quite comfortable as they have kept their jackets on, talking to women in skimpy vests or sleeveless tops who 'clearly' aren't as cold as you would think...

What is with these 'reality' shows

The first time I saw Run's House, the 'reality' TV show about Rev Run and the antics of his hilarious family, I was understandably intrigued to see how life would play out when you spend your whole time with a full sized clock around your neck. Then I watched it, and realised that it was scripted, and poorly at that, making the whole premise pointless and resulting in some of the most ridiculously poor television I've ever seen.

Since then, our nocturnal lifestyle has lead to us watching TV at odd hours of the day or night, which has limited our viewing to some extent and resulted in us watching 'The Hills', the most entertaining element of which is the anger it inspires in the Boy Wonder who without fail declares all those involved to be hateful and gets genuinely agitated about their continued existence. I think the fact that every turgid, over emotional scene is played out in this weird fake reality but with peculiar camera angles, inane whiny conversation and utterly vacuous situations engineered apparently to entertain people who have yet to become bored of the pathetic teenage antics of people with nothing better to worry about than how they look and whether they can steal their friend's boyfriend without looking like a bitch on television. I find it amusingly crap, but it is worth it for the rage that 'The Hills' inspires in the Boy Wonder - watching him fume in fury at the fact that these people continue to occupy space on the planet is hilarious.

I used to be stupid tribute

Having read some of the entries on IUsedToBeStupid.com I thought I should catalogue some of my own childhood misconceptions:

I used to think that a sign saying 'To Let' on the outside of a building meant that there was a toilet inside - weirdly, I knew how to spell 'toilet', but thought that the rules of spelling were more flexible than to limit the spelling to one version.

My Dad used to let me sit on his lap and drive the car, resulting in a belief which endured till I was a teenager than the steering wheel actually powered the car and was pretty much the only important factor in making it move.

Probably my most inappropriate misapprehension was that the word 'cunning' was short for 'cunnilingus' - I don't know where I had heard the word, but I figured they were close enough, so they must be related. It wasn't until I said it to my step-dad when I was about 10 that he asked where I had heard it and explained that it probably wasn't the kind of word I should use without knowing what it meant.

Eating at times which would make my mother faint

One of my Mum's rules about eating is the meals must take place within fairly narrowly time frames to be 'good for you' as in 'it's not good for you to eat this late'. Often, it doesn't even matter what you're eating, if it's not between 6 an 9pm, it's not good for you.

Since we've been here, we've lived a fairly irresponsible life, usually getting up between 2 or 3pm, staying up till around 5am and generally enjoying the fact that we aren't tied to any 'normal' timescales, but all this does mean that meal-times have become very much a theoretical thing, and despite the thousands of miles between us, I'm pretty sure that my Mum would have cross continental palpitations if she knew it was 2.49am and we've just finished dinner.

Crawfish boil fun

One of the awesome things about Louisiana is how friendly everyone is, and how keen they are to introduce us to traditional LA pastimes. As a result of this, on Monday, which was memorial day, we were invited by Shaggy, a friend of our new best friend to a crawfish boil at his house. A crawfish boil is a special kind of event, unlike anything we have in the UK, where food is served directly onto tables and enjoyed by all-comers.

Shaggy is a pro crawfish boiler, so somewhat of a master of the art of cooking up a vast (and I mean seriously vast) batch of crawfish in a huge pot with corn on the cob, mushrooms, potatoes and an incredible number of different spices. The food is fished out of the massive pot with a net and served directly onto the table where everyone tucks in with a gusto pretty much unseen in the UK. There is an art to eating crawfish which seems to yield a ridiculously small amount of crawfish meat - you pull the tail off the body and pretty much the whole body is discarded after sucking the 'juice' out of it, which is a delicate operation akin to trying to get the sherbert out of a flying saucer because if you suck too hard the spicy mix of crawfish innards and hot boil mixture shoots straight in to the back of your throat causing you to choke. The tail is then peeled leaving a piece of crawfish roughly the size of a small prawn, which is squeezed out of the hard tail shell and eaten.

I had eaten some pre-peeled crawfish while we've been here and tried to encourage the Boy Wonder to try some on the grounds that apart from his distaste at their appearance he would probably quite like the taste and wouldn't be put off by the texture, yet he had steadfastly refused to even countenance the idea. However, 20 minutes of badgering from Sam and a couple of demonstration runs, he was all over the mud bugs, eating not just one but several.

I think part of the appeal is the sociable element that comes with a crawfish boil - because you spend most of your time peeling the things, there's plenty of time to chat whilst you do it, and because you need to eat quite a lot (one tiny woman we met said she could easily eat five pounds), you end up sitting at the table together for quite a while, with people rotating in and out, mixing up the combinations and generally making for a very convivial atmosphere. You also get covered in crawfish boil mixture anywhere from the fingers to the elbows which breaks down some of the boundaries of what is normally considered proper eating etiquette and requires you to make friends with anyone who hasn't yet eaten or has washed their hands if you need anything passed or touched without wanting to get it covered, which is a handy conversation starter

All in all, the appeal of a crawfish boil goes well beyond the pleasure of actually eating the crawfish themselves, which even the locals admit is a high maintenance chore clearly originated by people with way more persistence than is currently necessary in procuring food - we're hoping that we will be able to find some kind of equivalent back home which will serve as a suitable substitute, but so far the only thing that I can come up with that even comes close is shelling peas, which I would enjoy, but I suspect would be a bit of a flop amongst our friends.

Life in Louisiana

There are some things about living in Southern Louisiana that I haven't managed to get used to yet, and probably never will, and some that I'm already a little too used to. For simplicity's sake, here a handy list:

Lightning - a little bit of lightning goes a long way in England. Not so in LA - apparently, every third day is grounds for a spectacular electrical storm, which separates us from the locals in as much as we're there going 'Whoa - what the fuck?!' and trying to take photos, whilst they are all so used to it, it barely registers on their conscious.

Accordions - after the jam at Deckbar on Wednesday we stopped in at the Bayou Park Tavern to see Lynn Drury on the recommendation of Sam, the bassist. Three or four songs in, I heard an accordion, but because there wasn't one on stage, I just assumed I was imagining it. It wasn't till I mentioned it to the Boy Wonder that he pointed out a guy playing accordion from a seat at the bar. Apparently spending any time in southern Louisiana makes 'hearing an accordion' the default position, and the presence of an actual accordion player is only marginally more likely than the alternative.

Gun and ammo shops - I'm not sure if you have to be born in a country that enshrines the right to bear arms in its constitution to find the regular sightings of gun shops commonplace, but I'm pretty sure I will never get the the point where I stop being surprised to see them along the highway. Massive ads for gun shows are also pretty common place, as are otherwise normal people telling you they have a gun.

Brass bands in the street - the first time we went out in the quarter and saw a 10 or so piece brass band just playing in the street, we were kind of enthralled and stopped for a look. Yesterday we went down to Frenchmen St, where there was a brass band playing in the street and we thought 'I hope everyone standing around gets out of the way before we run them over'.

Dungeon Master - the film

This film doesn't seem to have anything to do with the game, except perhaps having been written by avid fans given the essential lack of believable dialogue and ridiculous premise, but in the game's defence, the film is somehow less comprehensible and more disturbing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeonmaster

To read the Wikipedia entry, you'd think that the 'seven distinct story elements' within the film would be noticeable, whereas the reality is that there are seven almost identical 'trials' that the protagonist has to endure, each of which he overcomes by using his apparently multi-purpose, wrist mounted laser-shooting computer. Even the author of the Wiki on this clearly gave up trying to paint the plot as anything other than fairly lame as no sooner have they alluded to the riddles they must figure out than they point out the surprising versatility of X-CaliBR8 in putting an end to each obstacle as it appears.

It's mental - I can't quite work out whether the poorness of the dialogue is due to the makers' belief that they had such whizz bang special effects, or whether it's just because the whole thing was made by a bunch of super geeks who realised that not having had a girlfriend between them made them uniquely unqualified to write anything believable for the couple to say to one another, but either way this film is actually bad enough to be funny, making it yet another bonus late night find on crazy American TV.

The Outer Limits

3am in New Orleans can only mean one thing - The Outer Limits on NOLA 38. It's a hugely compelling show, with the opening credits being particularly appealing as you are warned that both the horizontal and vertical elements of your television picture are being controlled, and night after night we have come in from a gig, settled on the sofa for some wind down beers and flicked on the Outer Limits to freak us out before bed.

It's a little like 'Tales of the Unexpected', except that where those stories are sometimes confusing throughout only to have the whole point of the mystery revealed in the twist at the end, the Outer Limits is almost the opposite in that the storylines are often compelling until the last five minutes where the ending reveals a surprising lack of plot development and a strange petering out of all the storylines which appeared throughout to have potential to at least provide a slightly unexpected ending. Not that it stops us of course, because occasionally there is something in an episode which makes it worth watching regardless of how everything pans out, like this guy, from an episode called 'Mutant':

(Image from http://i.ytimg.com/vi/k7Ak2DdRCto/0.jpg)

Currently, we're watching one about a bee who's turned into a woman for some as yet undisclosed purpose (I suspect to stop the scientist who can talk to bees from making the most effective insecticide ever) and which will no doubt end with a bit of a whimper, but strangely be no less compelling for that.

ETA Indeed, the purpose of the bee girl was never fully revealed - she turned up at the entomologist's lab, pissed off his wife before killing her (using bees of course) and then tried to get him to marry her at which point he threw her out of the window. Not quite sure what the point was, but enjoying it nonetheless.

My imaginary friends

I have two imaginary friends - one, who is kind of a downer, questions everything I do, and the other, who is a little bit like a puppy, is relentless impressed with my every activity. For example at this moment, the first one is saying

'Are you sure it's a good idea to write about this? People might well think you're mentally ill and medicate me out of existence. And by the way, if you phrased it slightly differently, the punctuation wouldn't be so ambiguous.', while the second one is saying 'Nah - people will think you're delightfully kooky, and it's not like anyone reads this anyway. Not because it's not entertainingly witty of course, just because you're way too modest to tell people to read your blog, which is after all supposed to be an outlet for your thoughts and is only so great to read because your thoughts are naturally hilarious. I say go for it!'

I suppose it's a little like the cartoon angel and devil that pop up occasionally on the shoulders of characters on television, except there is way more moral ambiguity and neither of them seem to necessarily have my best interests (or those of anyone else) at heart.

For example, when we go out to jams here (NOLA), quite often the Boy Wonder will get up to play and not be let off the stage for an hour or more, and the first voice (Grumpog, I call her) always hopes that there won't be anyone we know there, or at least that they will be otherwise occupied and leave me alone. The other voice (Happog) is always looking around for someone to chat to, and encouraging me to strike up a conversation with anyone who catches my eye - I know it's fairly common to have an extrovert and and introvert side, but I'm not sure how common it is to name them, or for them to interfere generally in other aspects of your life.

Perhaps I just listen to them too much, although like me they are both way more likely to be wise after the event and just bang on about how they knew that would happen but I never listen in time. Perhaps they are my way of sharing the blame for some of my most socially awkward moments in an attempt to demonstrate that I'm not alone in my social ineptness, but either way I quite like having the company.

Plarguments

I am vaguely aware that some couples play fight, but the Boy Wonder and I are way too clumsy to even attempt that without the whole affair ending in genuine injury, which kind of negates the whole point of the 'play' element of play fighting. Instead, we have play arguments or 'plarguments' as I have christened them, which more often than not end with one of us threatening to punch the other in the face or poke them in the eye.

I sometimes worry that when we do this outside the house, we run the risk of being overheard and that someone might only hear the end part whereupon they could be forgiven for thinking that we are intending to throw down and fully explore the limits of an abusive relationship once we get back home and can let our middle class rage out without embarrassing ourselves. So far nobody has ever approached us to ensure that we aren't about to do injury to one another, but it may only be a matter of time.

I also worry that if anything were ever to happen to one of us, although I'm sure our friends would tell the authorities that we were very happy together, under more prolonged questioning, one of them might let slip that they have heard us threatening to smack one another in the faceholes and start considering the other as a suspect. Having said that, I'm also worried at what a CSI team would find under our sofa, so maybe a little distraction would buy me enough time to whip round with a hoover.

Brain upgrade

I know that the human mind is an incredible thing, and we have more processing power in our heads than all the computers in the world combined (or something similar), but there are also some pretty cool things about computers and I wish I could just do a little upgrade in my brain to include some of them. Ctrl F is one - it would be so brilliant to be able to use this when reading, or on the information stored on my brain. It would also be great to delete files and rid myself of information that I know to be false so that I would get false positives when remembering information that I suspect might be incorrect, but then can't remember whether that's the reason I know it. If I could overwrite it with the correct information or just delete the incorrect snippet all together, I would save a lot of space.

Thanks Ollie!

The weather here in New Orleans is hot - not just a bit hot, but ridiculously, relentlessly hot. However, one upside of this is that the other day I watched a weather report which featured a dishevelled looking man wafting himself with a piece of paper in front of a weather map and just saying 'It's HOT, New Orleans - have you been outside? There's no rain, it's just really hot!' much in the style of Ollie the weatherman on Family Guy, making me wonder whether that is just a comedy construct, or whether this is common enough as a format for weather reports that it's actually a pastiche.

May Bugs

I am generally quite a fan of bugs - I'm not in love with them (as the Boy Wonder seems to think) but I don't have a particular problem with them and I find quite a lot of them actively interesting. The only ones I actively dislike are Daddy Longlegses and that's because I'm always really scared that in the process of trying to catch them to release them into freedom I will trap one of their teeny weeny legs and pull it off, or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile little bodies. My favourite kind of bug was, until today, the caterpillar, and although physically it still is, name-wise it has been overshadowed by the fact that I discovered today that another name for the may bugs is a cockchafer. There is no amount of maturity that will make that cease to be funny to me, and quite frankly if there was I would hope not to reach it - life's too short not to be entertained by the word cockchafer.

The wrongness of rationing reading

One of the things that I know my Mum found difficult about my childhood is that my brother and I are both avid readers, to the point where we could often be found reading when we should have been sleeping/getting dressed/brushing our teeth/almost anything, forcing Mum to tell us to stop reading and do whatever it was we were supposed to be doing. As a teacher, I know it didn't come naturally to her to actively discourage such an edifying pursuit, and I'm sure that in amongst the frisson of annoyance, there was at least a little pride at the fact that one of my most dramatic episodes of misbehaviour as a child was burning a hole in my mattress with an anglepoise lamp whilst reading after lights out.

When we're at home, I always have a selection of books waiting to be read and whenever I feel as though I'm running low, there are several charity shops where I can find something suitable to replenish the supply. Whilst on the road however, my options are somewhat more limited - the books I brought with me were all finished before we left New York, and although we've been replenishing them relatively frequently, I find myself baulking at the prospect of paying full price for books, particularly as I hate to part with any books I have read (part OCD-like tendencies, part the fact that I occasionally remember almost the whole plot of a book except for some crucial piece of information and have to find it and read it again to get it out of my head), and I know that I won't be able to take months' worth of books home with me, so will be forced to abandon them here and then possibly buy them again once we're back home.

All this means that I am trying to limit the amount I read, which doesn't come naturally to me and given that I am in the habit of reading a lot, it's hard to switch of the automatic response to pick up a book. So, today I have scoured the internet for a suitable second hand bookshop and have located on which claims to have 35,000 books in store, so hopefully we can head off there tomorrow and see what they can offer in the way of cheap, interesting books.

If I made computer games...

...everyone would be playing 'Baroque Band' with plastic harpsichords, lutes, harps and crumhorns set up in living rooms around the world and people fist pumping as they get a 'counterpoint bonus' or find themselves rewarded at the end of a song by all the ladies swooning onto love-seats.

American TV

There are several things about American TV that are weird and confusing - the breaks every five minutes for ads, the way they pretend the programme's coming back on when they are just telling you who supplied the closed captioning and 'other considerations', the insistence that we need to know that the people in the commercials are actors and that the scenarios depicted are dramatisations despite the fact that nothing vaguely 'dramatic' is happening and so on. But the thing I really don't understand is why they make what is inaccurately described 'background music' so freaking loud. We frequently have to turn the TV up too loud just to be able to make out the dialogue over the symphonic strains of whatever interchangeable dramatic music they have chosen to illustrate a point, and I am at a complete loss as to why. Perhaps it's because they have realised that a lot of the dialogue on Law and Order and other similar shows is pretty lame and they want to distract us from it by confusing us with overwhelming music.

Crazy 'mericans

One of the things I love about the US is the fact that they are surprisingly willing to give their businesses laughable names. Here are some prime examples:

http://www.cretinhomes.com/ - this company even has a section on their website called 'Cretin Staff'

http://www.bohnzone.com/ - yes - it's basically Bone Zone and it's not even a strip club, it's a car dealership

http://www.poupartsbakery.com/ - pronounced Poop Art, of course

We have also been enjoying ads for a second hand furniture showroom called Weiner Cort.

One Hour Photo

I know that I don't really like films that much, but this one came on TV at a time when there wasn't much else on, and I was drawn in. And then it finished and I realised how truly lame it was - there didn't seem to be much in the way of 'psychological thrill' except for the rather obvious 'twist' of him having been abused by his father. I think I was overwhelmed by the fact that Robin Williams was not being annoying, and lulled into a false sense of enjoyment which did not last beyond the denouement, fizzling out and making me realise that actually the overly dramatic man telling us that 'One Hour Photo will be back shortly' was by far the most enjoyable element of the whole film.

They do things differently here (4)

Watching a programme called 'Doctors' which is essentially a guy in scrubs, a guy in a lab coat and a guy in a suit recommending plastic surgery for people who have e-mailed in, cackhandedly demonstrating exactly what's involved in sucking out armpit fat on a mannequin and injecting a woman with 'lip-filler' in front of a grimacing studio audience. It's essentially an hour long advert for plastic surgery where they 'discuss' the various benefits of different types of surgery and tell women that their whole lives would be different if they were thinner.

The topic after the break is about a new set of scales which Tweets her weight to all her followers - an otherwise happy, healthy looking woman suddenly starts Tweeting depressing slimming mantras like 'a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips' and lists of foods she's not eating instead of anything of any interest or merit, whilst claiming that she loved the scales. Her gift for allowing them to broadcast details of her weight - a free subscription to one of those weird food systems where they deliver every meal to you so you're not supposed to need to keep any food in the house.

The Boy Wonder's currently singing a song he's made up called 'We are plastic surgeons' and making me wonder whether 10 minutes of it has been enough to desensitise him to the horror of what they're doing.

Soap opera predictability

Signs that two people are about to get it together:

1. Playing with water

2. Hating each other at first sight

Signs that someone's going to develop an alcohol problem

1. Being seen drinking once

Signs that someone's about to fall pregnant

1. Having their first sexual encounter

2. People talking about pregnancy at all

3. Someone joking about their weight

4. Anyone feeling ill who isn't already involved in a drawn-out set up for some other illness

Important distinctions

Woman wearing just a man's shirt - sexy

Man wearing just a woman's shirt - scary

Shave the sides of your head - mohawk

Shave the top of your head - tonsure

Sandals with socks - wrong

Smart shoes without socks - also wrong

Donating hair - generous

Collecting hair - creepy

Licking the filling out of an oreo - normal

Licking the filling out of a sandwich - arouses stares from other diners

Head stuck in the clouds - unreliable but romantic

Head stuck in the banisters - unreliable and requires greasing/emergency services

Baby oil - sexy

Lard - sick

Remote locking

I remember the first car my parents had with remote locking - when you locked it, the horn/alarm made one noise, and when you unlocked it it made a slightly different noise. As far as I recall, there was a short period when a lot of cars did that, but that was a decade or so ago, and now we have reached a point where it's widely considered to be annoying and intrusive to have your car honking away every time you lock it. That message does not seem to have reached the US yet - every time someone comes in late or leaves early, you hear the sound of a car horn beeping away to let not just the person who owns the car, but everyone else in the vicinity know that the car is locked and the alarm is set. In a country where honking seems to be used as a substitute for braking, waiting, indicating and almost any other form of activity you can perform in a car, it's also quite off-putting to have every recently locked car honking away as you drive down the street, try to park outside a shop or just fill your car with petrol, and why anyone would need to draw so much attention to the fact they have an alarm is beyond me.

The alarm is another excessively overblown event - when one goes off you get a succession of different but equally annoying alarm sounds which play themselves on rotation until someone shuts it off. I have no idea why it should be deemed necessary that one alarm sound isn't enough, but from what we've heard, a loop of different beeps, whoops and two-tone wails is the absolute minimum required to draw attention to the commission of a crime. They like things loud here, and nothing short of eardrum damage will do.

Things that make me gag

1. Thinking too hard about gagging

2. Brushing my tongue

3. Seeing someone else's spit

4. Seeing my own spit

5. Cleaning out a plughole

6. Having hair on me, even my own - once it's no longer attached to my head, it's fair game

7. Seeing someone else gag

8. Hearing someone else gag

9. Writing lists about gagging

You know what, screw it - it might be quicker to make a list of things that don't make me gag, given my irrationally sensitive gag reflex, which I believe is a direct inheritance from my Mum (not the good figure, not the strong nails or lovely teeth - no, I get the gag reflex!). Should I ever wish to become a sword swallower, I'll be absolutely screwed.

Coffee, tea and me

I remember when I was at primary school, several of my friends already drank tea but I wasn't really offered tea by my parents, so I always thought I would just grow into drinking it. The first time I had a cup of coffee was when I was 17 and I figured maybe I was just on the cusp of beginning to like things like that. When I went to work in my gap year I decided to take the plunge and drink tea with a vengeance and drank about 8 cups a day at my desk. I'm not entirely sure why as I still thought that tea tasted like dirty hot water, albeit still infinitely preferable to coffee, but I liked having an excuse to get up from my desk as I frequently nearly dozed off whilst working and everyone else worked really hard while I mostly did filing and telling people on the phone to try unplugging their computer and plugging it in again, so I was glad to have something to contribute to the team.

But now I'm nearly 30 and an reaching the conclusion that I am not going to grow in to liking tea or coffee, and something about that makes me feel as though I'm not a proper grown up. If I need help to cope with a hangover, I have to rely on Lucozade (infuriatingly unavailable in the US) and there's nothing to perk me up if I start the day a little sluggishly. Admittedly, when I try to talk to the Boy Wonder before he's had his coffee and he is incapable of forming a coherent sentence, I do feel a little pleased that I am not a reliant on caffeine as he is to live a normal life, but I still can't shake the feeling that I've bypassed a milestone of adulthood somehow.

The advertising jingle

Tragically, in the UK, the advertising jingle seems to have suffered a demise - there are occasional forays into the world of musical ads, but they are often pastiches of the traditional jingle, and whilst they are sometimes funny, they don't really have the charm that the classic jingles of my childhood had.

The US however, seems to have an non ironic love of the advertising jingle which is very appealing. One my current favourites is 'Never paint your house again' which is an ad for a ceramic house covering which will apparently last forever but the innovative nature of the substance is completely belied by the weird 80s rising jingle which sound like a child made it up in two seconds, which makes is surprisingly charming.

There's a spectacular one for a bartending school (which is a concept I enjoy anyway) which is a sung list of a load of different cocktails - who can resist a jingle about a Fuzzy Navel?

I also just heard one for a cheque cashing service which had a high octane female lead vocal jingle which sounded more like something for a fast food restaurant than a service which allows people to slip gradually behind their incomes over a course of months - "The only original, uniquely individual, One-stop money shop - check into cash".

French bread lies

The food here in Louisiana surpasses any other food we've had in the US - New York is kind of a mish mash, with excellent diners that serve a massive range of good food, but it's all much of a muchness and not that different from what you could get at home, albeit not 24/7 and not all in one place. Louisiana, however, has gumbo, red beans and rice, andouille sausage which the Boy Wonder informs me is delicious and they use pork as a seasoning, which shows impressive dedication to eating well. They owe a lot of their fantastic cuisine to the slew of cultures which have melded here, and the French influence is particularly evident as they have taken to heart the French love of rich food, with scant regard for the effects of trans-fats on the body.

And, as the local TV station keeps informing us, they also love French bread, which they sell in long, baguette style loaves almost everywhere that you can buy bread. They use it for po-boys - the unhealthily massive sandwiches which they stuff with more fillings than one person should eat in a sitting - and serve it with their delicious gumbo. However, the use of the term 'French' to describe their bread is a complete misnomer - it simply isn't French bread, I've been to France. I've wanted to move there just to eat bread and cheese for the rest of my (admittedly probably cut short by cholesterol poisoning) life. We've come home with loaves and loaves of French bread in the hope of defrosting it to its former glory to recreate the deliciousness of the experience. What they call 'French' bread here is just bread - sometimes it's ok, sometimes it's pretty bad, but it's never crusty, never has any of the fantastic soft inside and almost mouth hurtingly crusty outside. It's just bread, and given that you can't even export French flour because the French are so proud of their bread, I think they are stretching their definition of 'French' to describe their floppy, quick drying attempts at French bread. None of their bread is crusty - since we've been here we have searched every supermarket and food establishment we have entered for bread that has anything remotely resembling a crust, and it simply doesn't exist.

I love the food here - I have been more adventurous with my choices than ever before, which even extends to eating an oyster the other day (although it was fried and barely distinguishable from any other fried food in that sense), but their stretching of the definition of French bread is something with which I simply cannot get to grips.

Phantom toe-post syndrome

Having worn flip flops for between 7 and 12 hours a day for the last week or so, I have noticed a slightly disturbing phenomenon whenever we get home and I release my feet - I can still feel the toe-post in between my big and second toes. I'm not sure when I first noticed it, but once I had, I started to notice it more and more and now I'v started thinking about it I'm noticing it all the time. I'm not sure whether it's a recognised syndrome, but I'm definitely putting it on the list of things to ask a medical based scientist drunk enough that I feel comfortable asking them stupid questions like this and whether there's a physiological reason why the Boy Wonder's tongue gets brightly coloured when within sniffing distance of artificially coloured food or drink, yet mine stays resolutely tongue coloured despite the fact that I like it when my tongue goes an unnatural shade of pink.

Toothpaste and tequila

One of the things to which we have become accustomed over the last five days of jazz fest is the glorious taste of toothpaste and tequila. This is largely due to the inspirational placement of a frozen daquiri tent right by the entrance where we arrive at the fairgrounds, by also owes a nod to the incredible humidity that makes the 20 minute walk from our apartment to the festival a sweaty affair and one which demands almost instant refreshment. Beer wouldn't really hit the spot, but a mixture of margarita and 'N'awlins punch', which is mostly pink coloured rum, makes for a perfect arrival drink, and on occasion good road drink for the walk home.

So far, I have managed to balance perfectly on the line between dehydration and the need to use one of the portaloos on site. However, we have discovered that there are proper, permanent toilets in the grandstand which is somewhat of a relief and means that I have been able to make free with the beer without having to face my fear of plastic toilet facilities. Yet another reason why jazz fest is so much more civilised than any other festival I've been to.

Fest-iquette

Jazz fest is by far the most civilised festival I have ever had the pleasure of attending or even watching on television - not only do some of the tents have proper seating and carpets, but the gospel tent even has an air conditioning rig (albeit largely down to the fact that a large proportion of the performers are either old, wearing robes or both). Because everything finishes at 7 pm and there's no camping on site, they clear everything up in the evenings, change the toilets and even manage a pretty comprehensive job of putting sand and wood-chips down in the muddy areas, and everyone goes home or to their hotels every night to clean themselves up so there aren't those mud-covered ghouls that you see wondering around Glastonbury.

However, there are still those who manage to express their enthusiasm in really annoying ways, specifically those who bring along ten foot poles with flags, toys and other accessories on the top which they wave gleefully around regardless of whether they are standing in front of one of the big screens designed to aid everyone's views or in a tent which is full of people who have already seen a fishing pole in their lives and don't need another one waved in their faces while they are trying to listen to a band. There was one particular offender who managed to obscure the views of hundreds of people by planting a massive Japanese flag with a skull and crossbones underneath it right in the middle of one of the stages, so we had to continuously dodge back and forth to try and see Dr John busting some impressive moves, including a rather natty little number where he bent over and touched the floor.

Having said that, the quality of festival goers is by far higher than the gang of drugged up 'we're so crazy' students that you get at the kind of festivals I have frequented in the UK - for a start there's a good contingent of oldies rocking out which is always nice to see. Plus plenty of families with small children who are always good value particularly last week when there were a goodly number of mud puddles which were like catnip to the littlies and watching their repeated and unrelenting escape attempts was an entertaining pastime with just a tinge of guilt as we saw their parents continually breaking away from their attempts to relax to round up their offspring and try to park them in at least a semi-permanent position. The joys of the child free jazz fest experience certainly made for enjoyable viewing.

You don't know what you've got till it's gone

There are certain things that you don't really realise are essential to your happiness until you find yourself being deprived of them and over the last 7 weeks or so I have had ample chance to reflect on some of these:

1. Proper sized towels - I held out for a while using teeny tiny hotel and motel towels even though I had one with me because it seemed silly to add to our laundry loads with a towel when we could use those provided and have them laundered for us. But today I cracked and am sitting here wrapped in my big towel as I type so thrilled am I at having something which actually wraps a reasonable way around my body and isn't see-through thin.

2. Having a window in the bathroom - we haven't had a naturally lit bathroom since we left home - it's pretty rare in hotels, motels and other types of sleep shack anywhere and isn't normally the kind of thing I notice when we're away for a week or two but it has been nice to have one in our apartment.

3. Knowing where to buy things - not just where the shop is, but what each chain actually sells so that when you want something out of the ordinary (such as a pencil sharpener for example) you can accurately predict where you will be able to buy one. This is particularly important when you have to drive absolutely everywhere - nothing here is within walking distance of anything else, meaning that the simplest errand is a harrowing brush with American roads and drivers, the quality of both leaving much to be desired, for what might turn out to be a wildly unsuccessful mission to buy something really simple.

4. Having a fully equipped kitchen - so far we have managed with motel ice and the occasional fridge, but after being on the road for seven weeks you get to a point where eating out is no longer a treat, but such a regular occurrence that you start to long for the chance to pick exactly what you have for dinner and wish that you didn't have to get dressed before breakfast. We've been in an apartment for just under a week now, but we're already enjoying the ability to have cold drinks whenever we want and cook dinner for ourselves. Having said that, we are still eating off plastic and paper plates with plastic cutlery, so we are thinking of treating ourselves to some dirt cheap tableware in the next couple of days so we can fully appreciate the experience.

5. Being able to walk to places is definitely underrated - we're not averse to a longish stroll and have even been known to walk for a couple of hours under the right circumstances, but walking anywhere in the US seems to be a complete anathema to the locals meaning that everything is so spread out that it's almost impossible to sensibly walk between places. The heat in Louisiana does mean that it's easy to understand why people don't want to walk around too much without air conditioning, so I suppose it's hardly surprising, but it is a noticeable factor in our daily plans.

The downside of being delicious

Louisiana rocks, and we're having a blast here at Jazz fest and seeing more awesome bands in the evenings. The only downside is that I am so delicious -all day, and apparently all night too, I am being bitten to buggery, although inexplicably my right side is way more popular than my left, to the point where I now have about 50 bites down my right arm and another 10 or so on the right side of my back, whereas my left hand side has only been munched about 10-15 times in total. There seems to have been a bug dinner party on my forehead last night as I have four bites very close together which have taken the form of a long blister which looks absolutely revolting.

We have bought bug spray, but reading the warnings on the back has been enough to put me off using it thus far, including the opening line which is 'It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner which is not consistent with its labelling' before a long list of ways to use the spray which might kill or maim you, including information on how to contact Poison Control Centres if need be.

The upside of this is that I went to see a pharmacist at the local Walgreens who looked about 15, chewed gum loudly whilst looking with vagues distaste at my blistered arm, and recommended peroxide and Neosporin. We duly purchased both and came home for a mammoth bite treatment session which was strangely romantic, but during which we discovered that peroxide actually does bleach your skin so for quite a while I had reverse leopard-style spots around every bite which made me look like some weird Michael Jackon uber fan before it faded enough to leave the house for some more funk.

One of the reasons I find it particularly galling is that I am always nice to bugs - I never knowingly kill them, I try to save those that fall into my drinks, I actively discourage the Boy Wonder from hurting the ones that stray into our house, and yet he remains relatively unbitten whilst I am a red, blistered mess and have been munched in the most awkward places - elbows (meaning I can't lean properly on anything), shoulders (meaning putting a bra on is a particularly hazardous experience at the moment) and the backs of my hands and between my fingers meaning that I can't even wash and dry my hands without being reminded that I am a bulging, oozing blisterfest. Still, the Boy Wonder has been patrolling the house every night spraying every entry point with the terrifying chemical concoctions and (fingers crossed) the number of bites isn't actually increasing, so hopefully I will return to my non bitten state over the next week or so and survive this whole ordeal relatively unscathed.

If you've heard of it, don't bother going

A phenomenon we've come to understand is that of the awesomeness of small diners where lovely waitresses (I'm not being sexist - we haven't been served by a man in a diner since we left New York) serve food 24 hours a day at ridiculously low prices. Whilst in Lafayette we tried all the 'recommended' eateries which make the guidebooks and people tell you you have to visit, and they ranged from the alright, but not as amazing as we had been told (Randolls, Prejeans) through mediocre at best and overpriced (the Blue Dog Cafe - I'm talking about you!) to the downright disappointing (Mulates). All the places names above had outstanding reviews as 'must eat' places, whether because of the unique barn dining experience with great music, great food and dancing all night long or the iconic artwork and legendary atmosphere and in fairness, Randols and Prejeans did both have ok food and music, but Mulates was a lame duck with music finishing at 9.30 and expensive, crappy food and the Blue Dog had one of the worst duos apparently in Louisiana and the iconic artwork turned out to be pictures featuring identical images of a Blue Dog which looked slightly scared and made me feel uncomfortable.

However, Mel's Diner, John's Family Restaurant and the Hub City diner had waitresses who openly laughed at our accents before declaring them 'amazing' (not that that swayed me, but you can't help but love the way Americans are so pleased to hear an English accent) but serve huge plates of delicious food which is about ten times more enjoyable and about a third of the price of the 'big names'. You simply cannot beat that kind of deal, and we have now resolved not to bother going anywhere that's a 'must' on the grounds that the likelihood of disappointment seem inordinately high, and stick to places with a choice of sitting in a booth or at the counter, have random assortments of decorative accoutrements on the wall which focus your attention when fighting off a hangover, waiting for lunch or just enjoying the 'Happy Days' style diner-ishness of it all, and everything comes with a choice of grits, hashbrowns or homefries whether you want them or not. I wish we had this kind of establishment in the UK - we'd never cook again. And probably die of heart disease before either of us saw 40.

They do things differently here (3)

They don't have squash! Nothing approximating the magical syrupy goodness of squash, cordial or any of the soft drink mixers we know and love in the UK and Europe. They have powder - which is no use at all for curing hiccups - which quite honestly seems to be a weird substitute and doesn't really allow for the fun of making all those cocktails which require you to pour something over something slowly to make one layer sit on top of another.

The US also seems to have a slightly puritanical approach to juice - in the UK, we drink so much juice that we tend to buy the cheapest, long life cartons available to ensure that we don't bankrupt ourselves whilst loading up on vitamin C. Here in the US, the only place you can find juice is in the chiller - it's Tropicana, Sunny D or Minute Maid all the way and nothing in the way of bog standard cheapish juice to slake our morning thirst without forking out for the good stuff.

They do things differently here (2)

One of the things that I am known for amongst my friends is the fact that I eat really slowly - when the Boy Wonder and I sit down to eat effectively the same thing, I will generally take around twice as long to finish, to the point where on the rare occasion that I finish first, it's not only noteworthy, but a matter for celebratory taunting.

All this can be embarrassing when eating out as there always comes a point where people start looking round wondering why everyone's still got dirty plates in front of them until their eyes settle on me still munching away at the end of the table, holding up the process for everyone. I wasn't really aware of the fact that this waiting style is particularly European, but now we've been here for a while I have come to realise that it is practice in the US to whip away a cleared plate as soon as it's spotted, which pretty much constantly leaves me sitting there with my half eaten food in front of me and nothing for the Boy Wonder to even pretend to be doing while I carry on eating.

I can't tell whether it's better or worse than back home - in some ways it draws more attention to the fact that one of us is taking a lot longer than the other to eat, but at least the one who's finished can lie down on the table if they get so fed up of waiting for me to finish. However, having been brought up being told that it's rude to clear the table until everyone has finished (despite the fact that this often had to be done when I was a child just so that everyone could get on with the stuff that needed doing) it does seem mildly inappropriate, which is taking some getting used to.

They do things differently here

After a slightly disastrous attempt to pick up the car, we're now in Newark in a wicked cool room with a spa bath and all kinds of crazy ass furniture. We've been here in the US for just over a fortnight and learnt some things about the differences between our two nations:

The American's don't have the peculiar paranoia about people stealing coat-hangers from hotels that you find in Europe - everywhere we've been has had real hangers, none of those weird nubbin headed hook-in hangers that feature in almost every hotel I've been to back home.

Toilets are not as universally similar as you might think (or at least as I thought) - around half the toilets we've encountered here have the bite mark out of the front that I've only ever seen in schools in the UK. They also have a completely different flushing system, which is weird as you would have thought there would be one best way which everyone would use, but then what do I know about plumbing?!

TV advertising is completely different here too - there's the usual lack of restriction on naming competitors and comparing features directly, but there are also a surprisingly high number of ads for prescription medications, and a worrying tendency to have disclaimers at the bottom of the screen to tell people that the stunts are performed by professionals.

Driving seems to be a much less disciplined affair - it may just be in Manhattan that there is such a love of horn honking, but while we were there there was constant blasting at traffic lights including a particular honk which seemed to mean 'I reckon the lights are about to change, and I'm not sure you're as ready to move off as I would like you to be'. Coming from the UK where you can easily go for weeks without hearing a car horn, it was particularly perturbing to hear them every two minutes and used by people travelling in free-flowing traffic, apparently just to hear themselves making a noise.

Eating out is quite an adventure - with the exception of maybe two places, we have been given a glass of water as soon as we've sat down everywhere we have been. When we've ordered soft drinks, they mostly seem to come with a shed-load of ice and a straw with a tiny little paper hat on the drinking end, presumably to demonstrate that the straw is clean, which I would have believed anyway. Aside from the three egg minimum, there also seems to be a love of 'home-fried' potatoes, which come in plentiful supply with almost every breakfast order and consist of pretty much anything you can fry up with potatoes.

There were a few food items which we were previously aware of being named oddly, like eggplant, zuchini and capsicum, but we have also come across cilantro (coriander), arugula (rocket), rutabaga (swede) and the peculiar incomprehension of the concept of squash (in terms of a drink cordial).

One of the main things which impacts on us is what we call 'random taxation' - tax is applied to the advertised price, but apparently according to some potentially unfathomable system which we have yet to figure out. Sometimes we are taxed at around 10%, sometimes more and sometimes less and although we know that anything pertaining to tax is strictly regulated and is clearly not as ad hoc as it seems, coming from a country where tax is always included in the price you see on the label it does seem particularly confusing.

Alcohol - there seem to be two types of shop, those that sell wine and spirits and those that sell beer. Why the two haven't met, I don't know, but there's no sense to it.

Lightswitches - they are ALL upside down. Everywhere we've been has switches where you hit the top to make the light go on and the bottom to switch them off, which is counterintuitive, a little confusing, and exactly the kind of thing that we will get used to while we're here and then find even more confusing when we get home.

No sleep 'til Brooklyn

So, after spending the best part of a week in a teeny tiny hotel room in Manhattan, we have now decamped to Brooklyn. Our hotel room is lovely - large enough for us to move around without having to move everything to create floor space, free wi-fi and a full-size fridge. No more squeaky bed which wakes us both up each time either of us moves, no more window looking into someone else's apartment so you can't tell whether it's daylight outside or not, and no more stupid broken TV with only three working channels. I'll be honest, the area isn't great - we went out earlier and it was enough for us to implement a 'no leaving the hotel after dark' rule so we bought a load of beer and had pizzas delivered to our room. Seeing as we are basically waiting for the car to arrive so that we can get cracking on our trip to New Orleans, we are hoping the the wealth of TV channels and wi-fi will be enough to keep us entertained until next week. It is intriguing how many places will deliver to a hotel room - I suppose in an area which is rather prosaically called 'little Latin America' we probably aren't the only people who don't want to go wandering about late at night.

Torrential

Well, we've been in New York for three days so far and it has pissed with rain pretty much consistently. The storm is responsible for power outages, felled trees, damage to buildings and beach erosion, on top of which the satellite TV in our hotel is completely out, meaning that our tiny hotel room offers even less opportunity for entertainment than it did previously. However, given the astonishingly unpleasant sensation of wandering around with squelching shoes and sodden jeans, it's still the best of the options available to us, so the Boy Wonder and I have procured some cider, snacks and an internet dongle (they don't call them that here by the way - cue some strange looks in the Verizon store) and spent last night listening to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue on the computer in an admirable display of British stoicism. The Verizon store was an experience in itself - there's always something a little unnerving about shopping in a strange place as every country has its own peculiarities when it comes to the simple things, but I have never actually failed to shop before until we went there. Part of the confusion arose because despite giving all the outward appearances of working there, the guy by the door who nodded at us when we went in subsequently watched us wandering around looking at the displays and trying hopefully to catch the eye of a member of staff who could help us, without thinking to mention once that you have to 'check in' on a computer and put your name down in a queue to be served. However, once we had mastered that, the rest of the process was relatively simple and we returned to our room sodden and disenchanted with the Big Apple, but at least with an internet connection which has gone some way to relieving the boredom of the constant downpours and allowed us to Skype our parents and read the New York Times's predictions for when the weather might break. We did have an hour of reasonable weather earlier today and used it to enjoy the luxury of going outside and breathing air which wasn't fresh from the alley between our hotel room and the next building, which was nice while it lasted, a period just long enough for us to get ensconced in a diner from where we watched the renewed downpour while we ate three eggs each. This seems to be standard - everywhere we've been that serves eggs so far has offered three eggs or more. I asked for two eggs today and was told that I could have two, but would be charged the same as for three, so I bit the bullet and went along with it whilst secretly wondering whether I might single-handedly have discovered the root of the USA's obesity epidemic. When we last had TV, they told us the weather should be fine again by Tuesday, so here's hoping our shoes will have dried sufficiently by then to go out and make the most of it - there's a Grateful Dead exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, so no prizes for guessing where we'll be once the sun comes out.

Start spreading the news

Well, we arrived in New York last night but fortunately spent longer in the queue for immigration than we did actually being grilled - they were very nice (although the signs around the place suggest that this is a concerted effort) and even told us that the only reason we were pulled aside and subject to extra questioning was because we wanted to stay for nine months and most people only stay for six. They asked a few questions about our plans for the trip during which the Boy Wonder said the word 'ancestors' several times and then made free with the noisy stamp and we were on our way. So, a short-ish cab ride into Manhattan and a miniature trek up three flights of stairs and we were safely installed in our teeny weeny hotel room with it's much larger than average bathroom - the Boy Wonder can touch both walls with outstretched arms, but we're well situated, en suite and seem to have a neighbour across the alley who alternates between singing and having hysterical laughter attacks which is all good. Our first, slightly spaced out exploration of the surrounding area revealed a pizza place which served not only pizza topped with pasta, but also one with lasagne on it, which made us think of the Gift - if anyone appreciates dangerous levels of carbohydrate within a meal, it's him, so we'll have to encourage him to experiment back home. We moved on to a complicated bar which had around 8 different basketball games on screens around the walls, loud and strangely mismatched music and a host of loud New Yorkers making merry - it was a treat to be IDed as we went in, although the novelty of that might wear off given time. Plenty of sleep later, an unreasonably large breakfast and the news of an incoming storm sweeping the west coast until sometime next week and we're all hooked up with internet, some free papers and a vague plan for the next few days including tourist spots and a southern brunch at BB King's club. All in all, a pretty successful trip so far...

My brother from another mother

I can't believe that I have only recently realised that I genuinely have a brother from another mother. I mean, it's not the kind of thing I say very often, but I'm surprised that in the few years since it has been in common parlance that I haven't made the connection.

C-peck-mockle country and the magic basil plant

The Boy Wonder, whilst being generally brilliant, is prone, as we all are, to moments of surprising specialness which always crack me up and then go in my mental hilarity bank to be revisited whenever I need reminding of how simple pleasures are by far the best. One of my favourites was a misunderstanding in which I was unwittingly complicit and involved a month-long holiday to Canada. We had a basil plant in full growth when we left, which I optimistically left on the windowsill despite the fact that it clearly needed watering at least once a day to survive, so naturally when we returned from our trip, despite the poppies at the front of the house being so large we couldn't see out of the window properly, the basil plant was a brown, dried-up husk of a plant sitting on the windowsill like a memorial to our neglect. Being the super efficient little worker bee I am, I spent the day of our return doing all our laundry and ordering a shopping delivery, so within 24 hours of returning home, we were more or less back on track with normal life. I put our new basil plant on the windowsill and the Boy Wonder joked that obviously his giving it a pint of water the day before had worked magic on its health. It was only the next day when we went round to visit his sister and wonder at their new house, and I heard him telling her the magical story of how he had resurrected the brown and crispy basil with a pint of water and how incredible it was that it had come back to full green leafy goodness within around 24 hours, that I realised he hadn't been joking the day before, and was under the illusion that he had brought it back to life. Needless to say, I explained what had happened through my chuckles and tried to convince him that I hadn't intended to let him think he had magical powers, but I was secretly sorry that I had said anything as I would have liked to hear him tell the story at least once more before bursting his bubble. The most recent example of his capacity to crack me up is down to a music programme shown on the BBC iPlayer called 'Ceol Country' showing (often bizarrely lame) excerpts from various country music festivals around the gaelic speaking world with the occasional subtitle in English. We had been happily calling it 'Ke-Owl' Country until one day I insisted that the Boy Wonder look up the correct pronunciation before we watched another episode. He consulted the oracle on the laptop and after a few moments of looking confused he announced 'Well, that can't be right!'.

I asked him what he'd found, but he was just standing their muttering to himself 'C-peck-mock-l- hmm, that doesn't sound right'. I went and looked over his shoulder, and he was looking at a site which had pronunciations of Irish words, and next to 'Ceol' it said c, e-peck, o-mock, l. The Boy Wonder was very sweetly taking this literally, and it wasn't until I said 'I think it means to pronounce the 'e' as in peck and 'o' as in mock', not to actually pronounce the whole words!', that he said 'I thought that didn't sound right!'. I nearly wet myself, and from now on that programme will forever be called 'C-Peck-Mock-L Country' in our house.

Road Trip!

So, it's only three weeks and one day until the Boy Wonder and I skip the country to travel the US and enjoy all the southern hospitality our cholestorol levels can handle. We began our planning process by booking flights to NY which was fine, and we thought we could fly down to New Orleans, buy a car and carry on our trip up the Mississippi towards Chicago. Then we decided that it might be more fun to buy a car in NY and drive down to New Orleans. Then we realised that it was ridiculously hard to buy a car in the US without an address to register it to and that insurance is similarly hard to come-by but also extortionately expensive, because even though we can both prove that we have clean UK driving records, US insurance would be offered to us on the basis that we have no driving history. So, we are now in the process of working out how much it will cost us to ship our car, the Popemobile, to the US, driving it around amongst monsters three times its size, and then shipping it back, which seems to be a pretty convulted way of getting a bargain, but nonetheless we are undeterred and will continue to try to beg and plead with various institutions in the hope that they will succumb to our charms and offer us insurance which won't eat up our entire budget! So, as the designated home worker, the Boy Wonder has been valiantly ringing the US for the last week in an attempt to make some sense of the needlessly confusing process which seems designed to prevent us from doing what on the face of it seems simple. At least we won't be homesick for red tape...

Everybody loves toast

One of the topics that elicits most conversation in our house is the Boy Wonder's toast stand. I think it was around the time that he was made redundant that the Boy Wonder started coming up with ideas for new businesses he could start, which included such well-formed ideas as 'Let's have a shop full of cool stuff' and 'We should open a record shop where we only sell funky records' (which is pretty much the same as the 'cool stuff' idea, only a little more targetted). However, the idea that will not die is the toast stand. The concept is pretty simple - a toast stand at the station where you can buy hot, buttered toast to eat either while you wait for your train, or indeed on the train if your timing's right. The major flaw in the plan, as I see it, is that start-up would require the business owner to get up and be at the station by around 6 every morning for the beginning of rush hour and the commuter trains. There is nothing about the Boy Wonder, the last 10 years I have spend with him or his stated plans for the future which makes me think that he is capable of such early morning endeavour, and if by some miracle of circadian rythms he actually managed to get himself there in time, the resultant personality failure which occurs when he is low on caffeine is completely inappropriate for customer-facing purposes. Having said that, we have discussed the potential for this venture with several people (the very nature of our conversations being cyclical at best, plus the Boy Wonder feels much maligned at my unerring disbelief in his capacity for early rising)and to date we have not had a single detractor. I put this down largely to great marketing - the slogan 'Everybody Loves Toast' seems to be almost universally accepted as both a snappy advertising message and a universal truth - and the enthusiasm that the Boy Wonder conveys when holding forth on this topic. Unfortunately, said enthusiasm is not limited to the setting-up of such an endeavour (in fact, it pretty much skirts ronud the edge of anything useful like that) and instead is allowed to roam freely amongst all toast related subjects, resulting in plans for the invention (requiring a not-inconsiderable R&D budget) of a bread pen which could be used to write marketing messages on toast and several 'specialist' breads and spreads which would require a fleet of bakers and specialist spread manufacturers to be on hand at all times to provide exotic alternatives to white sliced and jam. I have been accused, mostly by the Boy Wonder, of being insuficiently excited by this project, which is probably true but is also probably down to the fact that it's not quite a pipe dream and therefore because it's vaguely within reach, I feel as though discussing the best design for the patent pending Boy Wonder Toast corners (for holding the toast so that it doesn't get your fingers greasy but also doesn't re-absorb its own sweat and go soggy) is probably best done once you actually have a business to use them. Also, I suspect it's because it's a pretty good idea which would have relatively low start-up and running costs and could actually become a profitable franchise, but it's neither the kind of thing we're cut out for nor the kind of thing we would actually want to do, so it's been relegated to the level of amusing after dinner conversation where I'm sure it will stay.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something awkward this way comes...

I go to the doctor's fairly regularly - not that I am at death's door, but I am female which comes with a lot of medical stuff as standard - and I have occasionally come across the strange social scenario in which you meet someone you know whilst at the doctors. I've never really got a handle on what you can say - even the classic 'How are you?' seems inappropriate when you're speaking to someone who's either visiting a doctor or accompanying someone to the doctor. A normally innocuous question is sudddenly offensively intrusive when asked at the doctor's, and once you've not asked how someone is, there aren't really any other questions which can be safely asked in the knowledge that the person might be about to receive devastating news, or even just have to wee in a pot or endure some stranger rummaging around in their pants as 'routine'. Then there's a whole range of follow up awkwardness, where you don't want to mention to anyone else that you've seen the person at the doc's but at the same time feel like you're being slightly deceptive especially if you don't know what they were in for in the first place. In short, I would prefer it if everyone agreed that we are all strangers at the surgery - I don't want to be in the waiting room with an unpleasantly warm tube of piss trying to hold it in such a way that a casual acquaintance can't work out what's in it; I don't want to put myself through these paroxysms of social etiquette only to have my toolish neighbour come barrelling up to me and start trying to guess what I'm there for (no, really - he did this once); and I don't want to end up staring into the middle distance (because they don't seem to have magazines any more, presumably due to the risk of cross-infection) trying not to look at someone I vaguely know because I don't want to be intrusive only to then wonder whether they think I'm rude for not asking how they are.

A game which shouldn't be described

After a few drinks with the Gift the other night, we somehow got onto the topic of weird sounding children's programmes which inevitably declined into the traditional game of coming up with porn alternatives for film titles, only slightly altered to fit around first animal-based and then general children's film and TV (which is the main reason the game is not christened with any easy-to-misinterpret snappy name and bears full description at all times lest we find ourselves misunderstood). The normal pitfalls were all present - the double dip of distress at your sudden inability to think of a single film followed up quickly by a list of films which already sound dirty, or are a single word thus requiring a lot more explanation than the inherent humour allows - alongside new ones borne of the fact that I barely like films and can't remember the real titles of them anyway. All the more surprising then that I was the surprise winner (well - I christened myself, but only because soliciting nominations from my husband and the Gift seemed tacky, pointless and would inevitably open up the possibility of them not picking me) with my reworking of the popular children's classic about a boy and his bear to create the monster that is 'Genital Ben'.

Air dryers

Has anyone used, or seen anyone use, the face and hair drying function of a hot air hand-dryer?

Mr Punch

After a previous post where I lamented the fact that I was unable to locate any information regarding the bizarre musical performance of the story of Mr Punch that I was involved in as a child. To my incredible good fortune, when going through a box of stuff from my younger years (and discovering that chocolate does not survive well in a loft) I found the single A4 sheet that was given to me with the lyrics to all the songs, and in the interest of preserving them for posterity I thought I would faithfully reproduce them here (including some of the peculiar punctuation): Punch's Triumph Song Punch is a jolly fellow, His coat is of red and yellow, And if now and then he's mellow, It's only among his friends. Punch is a rogue and rover; He lives, while he can, in clover For life very soon is over And there the story ends If you approve him Punch is happy If you admire him Punch is gay Lend him an ear and he'll amuse you In a delightful Punch-like way. When you have heard the story Of Punch in all his glory The more you applaud The more he Will know That you mean to show Whether high or low You are all his Good and faithful friends. Devil's Song I'm a very devil of a fellow, You can see that I'm a devil of a guy. There's no hope of slipping thro' my fingers, Be advised by me and do not even try Though you may not think it, You and I see eye to eye. Fires of hell are roasting wicked sinners, And the flames are leaping very very high. Can't escape your final destination, Be advised by me and never, never try. Though you'll not believe it, You will soon be Devil's pie! Scaramouch's Fiddle Song I play on my fiddle: Lala la, lala la, lala lala lala la, la-la My song is a riddle: Lala la, lala la, lala lala lala la, la-la I do not play high, I do not play low I don't need a string and I don't need a bow No end to my song, no beginning - and yet My song is a song that you'll never forget. Judy's Lullaby Rock-a-by baby, in the tree top The wind it will blow and the cradle will rock, The bough will break and the cradle will fall And then down will come baby and cradle and all. Doctor's Song In the exercise of his profession Every Doctor shows his skill, Searching out among the nooks and crannies All the viruses and germs that make you ill Is it here? No! Is it there? No! Well it's all the same to me. If you kill or if you cure 'em, Patients all must pay the Doctor's fee. Diagnosing of a human illness Is a hit or miss affair While the Doctors sit around and ponder All the patients' lives are hanging by a hair. Does it hurt there? No! Well it's all the same to me. If you kill or if you cure 'em, Patients all must pay the Doctor's fee. Policeman's Song and Duet (Judy) The arm of the law is never, never, never-never wrong The arm of the law is very, very, very-very strong The arm of the law is very very long, and quite infallible. The arm of the law has a very, very good grip The arm of the law will never, never, never let you slip The arm of the law will make the smartest villain trip And quite betray himself. And justice will be done. The arm of the law should be regarded as a friend. The arm of the law will get you in the end, For that is the charm of the law. Interlude Song Here lies Punch in a dungeon deep, Sing a song to cheer and comfort him. All his friends sit around and weep At the fate that's hanging over him. Poor old Punch! Hangman's' Song An eye for an eye A tooth for a tooth. This is the hangman's One and only notion of truth. Stand at the scaffold. Look at the rope. Even the jolly hangman Now is lost for a joke. Here comes the coffin, Here comes the hearse Your situation's rather grievous. Down in the quicklime Deep in the earth, Dust, bones and ash is all you'll leave us. Are you prepared, sir? Don't you be scared, sir. Close both your eyes and try my rope for size. Punch's Triumph Song Stand up and shout Hooray, For Punch he has won the day; A hero bold in every way, And no-one can deny it. Stand up and give a cheer For Punch, who, without a fear, Triumphantly is standing here. So loudly let us cry it. Though fate will lay him low, Surround him with every foe, He scorns them all and so There's nothing can defy him. Therefore: Now that you've heard the story of Punch in all his glory The more you applaud the more you will know That you mean to show, whether high or low, You are all his Good and faithful friends.

Learning to speak jive

In an attempt to make myself cooler, I am going to try to learn some jive (also because of the 'quit jiving me turkey' scene in the Simpsons), but having discovered how difficult it is to come about an official jive dictionary I am going to copy and paste the snippets of jive that I come across here: # Guitar: Git Box or Belly-Fiddle # Bass: Doghouse # Drums: Suitcase, Hides, or Skins # Piano: Storehouse or Ivories # Saxophone: Plumbing or Reeds # Trombone: Tram or Slush-Pump # Clarinet: Licorice Stick or Gob Stick # Xylophone: Woodpile # Vibraphone: Ironworks # Violin: Squeak-Box # Accordion: Squeeze-Box or Groan-Box # Tuba: Foghorn # Electric Organ: Spark Jiver # A hummer (n.) -- exceptionally good. Ex., "Man, that boy is a hummer." # Ain't coming on that tab (v.) -- won't accept the proposition. Usually abbr. to "I ain't coming." # Alligator (n.) -- jitterbug. # Apple (n.) -- the big town, the main stem, Harlem. # Armstrongs (n.) -- musical notes in the upper register, high trumpet notes. # Barbecue (n.) -- the girl friend, a beauty # Barrelhouse (adj.) -- free and easy. # Battle (n.) -- a very homely girl, a crone. # Beat (adj.) -- (1) tired, exhausted. Ex., "You look beat" or "I feel beat." (2) lacking anything. Ex, "I am beat for my cash", "I am beat to my socks" (lacking everything). # Beat it out (v.) -- play it hot, emphasize the rhythym. # Beat up (adj.) -- sad, uncomplimentary, tired. # Beat up the chops (or the gums) (v.) -- to talk, converse, be loquacious. # Beef (v.) -- to say, to state. Ex., "He beefed to me that, etc." # Bible (n.) -- the gospel truth. Ex., "It's the bible!" # Black (n.) -- night. # Black and tan (n.) -- dark and light colored folks. Not colored and white folks as erroneously assumed. # Blew their wigs (adj.) -- excited with enthusiasm, gone crazy. # Blip (n.) -- something very good. Ex., "That's a blip"; "She's a blip." # Blow the top (v.) -- to be overcome with emotion (delight). Ex., "You'll blow your top when you hear this one." # Boogie-woogie (n.) -- harmony with accented bass. # Boot (v.) -- to give. Ex., "Boot me that glove." # Break it up (v.) -- to win applause, to stop the show. # Bree (n.) -- girl. # Bright (n.) -- day. # Brightnin' (n.) -- daybreak. # Bring down ((1) n. (2) v.) -- (1) something depressing. Ex., "That's a bring down." (2) Ex., "That brings me down." # Buddy ghee (n.) -- fellow. # Bust your conk (v.) -- apply yourself diligently, break your neck. # Canary (n.) -- girl vocalist. # Capped (v.) -- outdone, surpassed. # Cat (n.) -- musician in swing band. # Chick (n.) -- girl. # Chime (n.) -- hour. Ex., "I got in at six chimes." # Clambake (n.) -- ad lib session, every man for himself, a jam session not in the groove. # Chirp (n.) -- female singer. # Cogs (n.) -- sun glasses. # Collar (v.) -- to get, to obtain, to comprehend. Ex., "I gotta collar me some food"; "Do you collar this jive?" # Come again (v.) -- try it over, do better than you are doing, I don't understand you. # Comes on like gangbusters (or like test pilot) (v.) -- plays, sings, or dances in a terrific manner, par excellence in any department. Sometimes abbr. to "That singer really comes on!" # Cop (v.) -- to get, to obtain (see collar; knock). # Corny (adj.) -- old-fashioned, stale. # Creeps out like the shadow (v.) -- "comes on," but in smooth, suave, sophisticated manner. # Crumb crushers (n.) -- teeth. # Cubby (n.) -- room, flat, home. # Cups (n.) -- sleep. Ex., "I gotta catch some cups." # Cut out (v.) -- to leave, to depart. Ex., "It's time to cut out"; "I cut out from the joint in early bright." # Cut rate (n.) -- a low, cheap person. Ex., "Don't play me cut rate, Jack!" # Dicty (adj.) -- high-class, nifty, smart. # Dig (v.) -- (1) meet. Ex., "I'll plant you now and dig you later." (2) look, see. Ex., "Dig the chick on your left duke." (3) comprehend, understand. Ex., "Do you dig this jive?" # Dim (n.) -- evening. # Dime note (n.) -- ten-dollar bill. # Doghouse (n.) -- bass fiddle. # Domi (n.) -- ordinary place to live in. Ex., "I live in a righteous dome." # Doss (n.) -- sleep. Ex., "I'm a little beat for my doss." # Down with it (adj.) -- through with it. # Drape (n.) -- suit of clothes, dress, costume. # Dreamers (n.) -- bed covers, blankets. # Dry-goods (n.) -- same as drape. # Duke (n.) -- hand, mitt. # Dutchess (n.) -- girl. # Early black (n.) -- evening # Early bright (n.) -- morning. # Evil (adj.) -- in ill humor, in a nasty temper. # Fall out (v.) -- to be overcome with emotion. Ex., "The cats fell out when he took that solo." # Fews and two (n.) -- money or cash in small quatity. # Final (v.) -- to leave, to go home. Ex., "I finaled to my pad" (went to bed); "We copped a final" (went home). # Fine dinner (n.) -- a good-looking girl. # Focus (v.) -- to look, to see. # Foxy (v.) -- shrewd. # Frame (n.) -- the body. # Fraughty issue (n.) -- a very sad message, a deplorable state of affairs. # Freeby (n.) -- no charge, gratis. Ex., "The meal was a freeby." # Frisking the whiskers (v.) -- what the cats do when they are warming up for a swing session. # Frolic pad (n.) -- place of entertainment, theater, nightclub. # Fromby (adj.) -- a frompy queen is a battle or faust. # Front (n.) -- a suit of clothes. # Fruiting (v.) -- fickle, fooling around with no particular object. # Fry (v.) -- to go to get hair straightened. # Gabriels (n.) -- trumpet players. # Gammin' (adj.) -- showing off, flirtatious. # Gasser (n, adj.) -- sensational. Ex., "When it comes to dancing, she's a gasser." # Gate (n.) -- a male person (a salutation), abbr. for "gate-mouth." # Get in there (exclamation.) -- go to work, get busy, make it hot, give all you've got. # Gimme some skin (v.) -- shake hands. # Glims (n.) -- the eyes. # Got your boots on -- you know what it is all about, you are a hep cat, you are wise. # Got your glasses on -- you are ritzy or snooty, you fail to recognize your friends, you are up-stage. # Gravy (n.) -- profits. # Grease (v.) -- to eat. # Groovy (adj.) -- fine. Ex., "I feel groovy." # Ground grippers (n.) -- new shoes. # Growl (n.) -- vibrant notes from a trumpet. # Gut-bucket (adj.) -- low-down music. # Guzzlin' foam (v.) -- drinking beer. # Hard (adj.) -- fine, good. Ex., "That's a hard tie you're wearing." # Hard spiel (n.) -- interesting line of talk. # Have a ball (v.) -- to enjoy yourself, stage a celebration. Ex., "I had myself a ball last night." # Hep cat (n.) -- a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive. # Hide-beater (n.) -- a drummer (see skin-beater). # Hincty (adj.) -- conceited, snooty. # Hip (adj.) -- wise, sophisticated, anyone with boots on. Ex., "She's a hip chick." # Home-cooking (n.) -- something very dinner (see fine dinner). # Hot (adj.) -- musically torrid; before swing, tunes were hot or bands were hot. # Hype (n, v.) -- build up for a loan, wooing a girl, persuasive talk. # Icky (n.) -- one who is not hip, a stupid person, can't collar the jive. # Igg (v.) -- to ignore someone. Ex., "Don't igg me!) # In the groove (adj.) -- perfect, no deviation, down the alley. # Jack (n.) -- name for all male friends (see gate; pops). # Jam ((1)n, (2)v.) -- (1) improvised swing music. Ex., "That's swell jam." (2) to play such music. Ex., "That cat surely can jam." # Jeff (n.) -- a pest, a bore, an icky. # Jelly (n.) -- anything free, on the house. # Jitterbug (n.) -- a swing fan. # Jive (n.) -- Harlemese speech. # Joint is jumping -- the place is lively, the club is leaping with fun. # Jumped in port (v.) -- arrived in town. # Kick (n.) -- a pocket. Ex., "I've got five bucks in my kick." # Kill me (v.) -- show me a good time, send me. # Killer-diller (n.) -- a great thrill. # Knock (v.) -- give. Ex., "Knock me a kiss." # Kopasetic (adj.) -- absolutely okay, the tops. # Lamp (v.) -- to see, to look at. # Land o'darkness (n.) -- Harlem. # Lane (n.) -- a male, usually a nonprofessional. # Latch on (v.) -- grab, take hold, get wise to. # Lay some iron (v.) -- to tap dance. Ex., "Jack, you really laid some iron that last show!" # Lay your racket (v.) -- to jive, to sell an idea, to promote a proposition. # Lead sheet (n.) -- a topcoat. # Left raise (n.) -- left side. Ex., "Dig the chick on your left raise." # Licking the chops (v.) -- see frisking the whiskers. # Licks (n.) -- hot musical phrases. # Lily whites (n.) -- bed sheets. # Line (n.) -- cost, price, money. Ex., "What is the line on this drape" (how much does this suit cost)? "Have you got the line in the mouse" (do you have the cash in your pocket)? Also, in replying, all figures are doubled. Ex., "This drape is line forty" (this suit costs twenty dollars). # Lock up -- to acquire something exclusively. Ex., "He's got that chick locked up"; "I'm gonna lock up that deal." # Main kick (n.) -- the stage. # Main on the hitch (n.) -- husband. # Main queen (n.) -- favorite girl friend, sweetheart. # Man in gray (n.) -- the postman. # Mash me a fin (command.) -- Give me $5. # Mellow (adj.) -- all right, fine. Ex., "That's mellow, Jack." # Melted out (adj.) -- broke. # Mess (n.) -- something good. Ex., "That last drink was a mess." # Meter (n.) -- quarter, twenty-five cents. # Mezz (n.) -- anything supreme, genuine. Ex., "this is really the mezz." # Mitt pounding (n.) -- applause. # Moo juice (n.) -- milk. # Mouse (n.) -- pocket. Ex., "I've got a meter in the mouse." # Muggin' (v.) -- making 'em laugh, putting on the jive. "Muggin' lightly," light staccato swing; "muggin' heavy," heavy staccato swing. # Murder (n.) -- something excellent or terrific. Ex., "That's solid murder, gate!" # Neigho, pops -- Nothing doing, pal. # Nicklette (n.) -- automatic phonograph, music box. # Nickel note (n.) -- five-dollar bill. # Nix out (v.) -- to eliminate, get rid of. Ex., "I nixed that chick out last week"; "I nixed my garments" (undressed). # Nod (n.) -- sleep. Ex., "I think I'l cop a nod." # Ofay (n.) -- white person. # Off the cob (adj.) -- corny, out of date. # Off-time jive (n.) -- a sorry excuse, saying the wrong thing. # Orchestration (n.) -- an overcoat. # Out of the world (adj.) -- perfect rendition. Ex., "That sax chorus was out of the world." # Ow! -- an exclamation with varied meaning. When a beautiful chick passes by, it's "Ow!"; and when someone pulls an awful pun, it's also "Ow!" # Pad (n.) -- bed. # Pecking (n.) -- a dance introduced at the Cotton Club in 1937. # Peola (n.) -- a light person, almost white. # Pigeon (n.) -- a young girl. # Pops (n.) -- salutation for all males (see gate; Jack). # Pounders (n.) -- policemen. # Queen (n.) -- a beautiful girl. # Rank (v.) -- to lower. # Ready (adj.) -- 100 per cent in every way. Ex., "That fried chicken was ready." # Ride (v.) -- to swing, to keep perfect tempo in playing or singing. # Riff (n.) -- hot lick, musical phrase. # Righteous (adj.) -- splendid, okay. Ex., "That was a righteous queen I dug you with last black." # Rock me (v.) -- send me, kill me, move me with rhythym. # Ruff (n.) -- quarter, twenty-five cents. # Rug cutter (n.) -- a very good dancer, an active jitterbug. # Sad (adj.) -- very bad. Ex., "That was the saddest meal I ever collared." # Sadder than a map (adj.) -- terrible. Ex., "That man is sadder than a map." # Salty (adj.) -- angry, ill-tempered. # Sam got you -- you've been drafted into the army. # Send (v.) -- to arouse the emotions. (joyful). Ex., "That sends me!" # Set of seven brights (n.) -- one week. # Sharp (adj.) -- neat, smart, tricky. Ex., "That hat is sharp as a tack." # Signify (v.) -- to declare yourself, to brag, to boast. # Skins (n.) -- drums. # Skin-beater (n.) -- drummer (see hide-beater). # Sky piece (n.) -- hat. # Slave (v.) -- to work, whether arduous labor or not. # Slide your jib (v.) -- to talk freely. # Snatcher (n.) -- detective. # So help me -- it's the truth, that's a fact. # Solid (adj.) -- great, swell, okay. # Sounded off (v.) -- began a program or conversation. # Spoutin' (v.) -- talking too much. # Square (n.) -- an unhep person (see icky; Jeff). # Stache (v.) -- to file, to hide away, to secrete. # Stand one up (v.) -- to play one cheap, to assume one is a cut-rate. # To be stashed (v.) -- to stand or remain. # Susie-Q (n.) -- a dance introduced at the Cotton Club in 1936. # Take it slow (v.) -- be careful. # Take off (v.) -- play a solo. # The man (n.) -- the law. # Threads (n.) -- suit, dress or costuem (see drape; dry-goods). # Tick (n.) -- minute, moment. Ex., "I'll dig you in a few ticks." Also, ticks are doubled in accounting time, just as money isdoubled in giving "line." Ex., "I finaled to the pad this early bright at tick twenty" (I got to bed this morning at ten o'clock). # Timber (n.) -- toothipick. # To dribble (v.) -- to stutter. Ex., "He talked in dribbles." # Togged to the bricks -- dressed to kill, from head to toe. # Too much (adj.) -- term of highest praise. Ex., "You are too much!" # Trickeration (n.) -- struttin' your stuff, muggin' lightly and politely. # Trilly (v.) -- to leave, to depart. Ex., "Well, I guess I'll trilly." # Truck (v.) -- to go somewhere. Ex., "I think I'll truck on down to the ginmill (bar)." # Trucking (n.) -- a dance introduced at the Cotton Club in 1933. # Twister to the slammer (n.) -- the key to the door. # Two cents (n.) -- two dollars. # Unhep (adj.) -- not wise to the jive, said of an icky, a Jeff, a square. # Vine (n.) -- a suit of clothes. # V-8 (n.) -- a chick who spurns company, is independent, is not amenable. # What's your story? -- What do you want? What have you got to say for yourself? How are tricks? What excuse can you offer? Ex., "I don't know what his story is." # Whipped up (adj.) -- worn out, exhausted, beat for your everything. # Wren (n.) -- a chick, a queen. # Wrong riff -- the wrong thing said or done. Ex., "You're coming up on the wrong riff." # Yarddog (n.) -- uncouth, badly attired, unattractive male or female. # Yeah, man -- an exclamation of assent. # Zoot (adj.) -- exaggerated # Zoot suit (n.) -- the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit .