[lit-ideas] Re: Ok, so I already broke the one-only-every- three-days rule

One of the things that inquiring minds have long puzzled over is what counts as progress. If, chez nous, we had well-defined domestic outcomes of the sort that people put on syllabi, then we could quite simply explain that all have been achieved and so call the job done. But when there is a backlog of small-but-really-quite-urgent tasks-- removing the smell of cat pee from my work area, for example...I do so love elderly cats--sometimes it is hard to know whether you are indeed passing a landmark, or the train is going backwards. No doubt you have experienced this sense of dislocation and confusion.
I *believe*, empiricism having gone all wobbly on me, that I achieved some good today. I finally persuaded the third round of Applepersons that I am due a rebate, to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars. Not a small tune. I have rid myself of stink. I drafted a paragraph or two that attempt to define what I'm setting out to do in my research. I read "Plum Lines."
Plum Lines is the magazine of the P.G. Wodehouse society. It generally is not very engaging, but this edition was for me worthwhile due to the following sentence. As preamble you should know that when I answer my cell phone and I know that a daughterly person is on the other end, I generally say, "What ho, E." or "What ho, J." The sentence, "The cocktail party was the usual affair of many meetings with the usual attendant 'what ho'-ing." Imagine standing in some hotel in St. Paul, MN. and "what-ho"-ing away, 'what- ho"-ing until there's no more "what-ho"-ing needed, "what-ho"-ing to your heart's content or a sufficiency is achieved. It's enough to warm the cockles.
At the biennial gathering they had a quiz, run by a vet, on the care and feeding of pigs. 

Q3: Pigs can be housed at all the following except:
A. A meadow with a house
B. A bathroom
C. A caravan
D. A two-seater
E. An empty cottage
The answer is, of course, A. We all know that the Empress of Blandings is never found in a meadow.
In the same magazine there's quite a nice piece, written in a voice that Dean Miller, of Chicago, thinks belongs to Jeeves (to me it sounds like committee work, part Jeeves, part Bertie, part simply wrong; perhaps the dean has been at the communion wine?) re. an encounter in St. Paul, the city in MN.:
"Whilst ambling down a nearby street, flaneuring fit to bust, I was attracted into a sort of artistic boutique (no it wasn't Eulalie's), and I was impelled to check out the wares there set forth [this is Bertie, surely?]. The salesperson, a young, blonde, and attractive woman, was kind wnough to inquire as to whether I was visiting in the area (the aura of Chicago was evidently strong on my person--perhaps it was the two-toned golf shoes) and I replied that, yes, I was at the St. Paul Hotel with The Wodehouse Society. [This is more like Jeeves, though Jeeves in two-toned shoes is impossible to imagine]. She took this in. I found an object I wanted to purchase; we concluded the deal and then, making conversation while I counted out the simoleons, the young lady said, 'Are you interested in preserving old homes, then?' Oh, dear me. I hastened to explain the particulars of P.G. Wodehouse and of the organization dedicated to getting him canonized as the greatest humor-writer of the 20th century, and thereby was able to spread the word to one more innocent soul. [Jeeves saying "greatest humor-writer"? He who understates always? Surely he would have said, "I hastened to explain the particulars and mentioned that among the literati of Minnesota there are those who regard Mr. Wodehouse as a man not without talent as a writer of humorous pieces of fiction."]" 

David Ritchie,
President and CEO, What Ho Enterprises,
Suite Bumble B,
Croydon, UCT IC2
United Democratic Republic of Snifters

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