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RDCanecutter

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by RDCanecutter

  1. Another old Selma Alabama story from when I was late-teens/twenty. We no longer lived in the old half-mansion downtown. We had moved into our grandmother's house, post-ww2 with an enclosed porch with about 18 windows wrapping around, west side of town on former cotton fields turning into forest, on road that originally led to deserted town of Cahaba, where they'd leveled an Indian mound and disasters followed afterwards. My "room" was the NE corner of the porch, towards the road. In the springtime I'd keep the window by my bed open, sometimes the cats would come tap on the screen and I'd pop it open so they could come in. I'd sit up and read and listen to the night. One night I heard a nasty scraping sound, like a car dragging its bumper. But there was no traffic. It wasn't coming from the road. It was moving. It seemed to be coming up beside the house on the side where the curtains were closed. About to turn the corner to where I had the window open by my bed. I could hear something between a growl and a scrape. I had a box by my bed full of random tools. I grabbed the machete that was in there, trying to be quiet, but it made a clink. Right then, the scraping sound stopped.
  2. MRIs are great. I imagine that I am at a Kraftwerk concert if they went all experimental.
  3. Awesome, Possible Cousin.
  4. Talkin bout the web site? Pretty sure yes.
  5. All the trashy plane people are going to ruin Greyhound now.
  6. Stealing every last bit of this.
  7. Vous êtes bad-ass. Gender: If you mess it up, you'll sound a lot like me. Can't think of any situation where it would turn a sentence into a fiasco. My trick was to think about what gender the Spanish word was, 99% of the time that would work.
  8. Very well. Where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving electrician from Montgomery with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for truck-stop waitresses. (skips 20 years) ...so of course after the divorce and shacking up with the cray-cray girl, I got a Spanish-teaching gig on a handshake at an undesired high school. Life was a ticking time bomb back then, and I was trying to claw my way back into employability as the one-man Romance Language Department of a small college.. I figured with the high school Spanish I had that covered, so next was French. Took a GRE and laid waste to it like Legolas shooting orcs, got invited to come be a slacker at UT and study French + all the Linguistics and Spanish that I could pack in. Was in the room when they were talking about making a website, drew an armadillo on a napkin and got the job. A couple of gigs later, achieved Dream Job teaching French and Spanish at small college. New Dean was a tyrannical bully and I told him so, then my services were not required. I'd been going to Mexico, buying craft items, then selling them for multiples on eBay, so I figured I'd just take a few thousand dollars, cash, y'know, to Tlaxcala where they make most of the Drug Rugs, Baja Hoodies, Chamarras de Jerga sabes weyyy, sell them for 3xwholesale, repeat, with wads of cash as one does at no peril because it's nice tame Mexico. My wife told me I was fucking insane and to just sit down and draw cartoons, which I did, and do. But yeah I like languages.
  9. Put down that knife. The gun doesn't even fire. click click BLAM oh shit
  10. C'est possible. Zob de mulet, if you want to pop off with Franco-Arabic slang.
  11. quoi ça.
  12. Oh they were right. Definitelu=y brain damaged. But there is so much brains in that big celtic skullbone that I just need for some of it to work. Bang! See? Cranked right up.
  13. This video reminds me of when I fetched up in LeHavre with three months cash pay in my pocket and went in an internet cafe that turned out to be a ho house. Behen chot.
  14. queue de mulet, je crois.
  15. It was a miracle we got to do it in French. There were some way-too-serious people who had to be convinced. Way back when, we tried to get a similar project going with Spanish, but got the cold shoulder. [A few years later, we did a website for German: https://coerll.utexas.edu/gg/ ] There's probably been a complete turnover in both departments since then, but I am a mere hired gun. Or am I.
  16. Like a full-grown man.
  17. Republican infighting allowed Alabama Democrats to jiu-jitsu in a blue senate seat, however briefly. I expect Texans could do the same.
  18. Oh no, it'sa verrry nice-uh.
  19. They already got one.
  20. In the late-90s, several UT French professors and a scad of grad students (including moi) put together an interactive French language course with cartoon armadillos, meant for local use: https://www.laits.utexas.edu/tex/ It won awards and got added to the curriculum of many schools. It's still used today, though as you can see it's long in the tooth now. We are redoing it and updating it. I am the artist again. They are running a fund-raiser. I figured the Surly 1% would want to know: https://give.utexas.edu/a-new-francais-interactif
  21. Fluid cancer.
  22. I am psychologically set that if I live to 100, I will still be dragging a little parasitic blob of cancer around with me. Maybe I can train it to laugh at my jokes. But like @Gatorubet said, my elbow bursa blob is halfway back to normal with zero college-boy-doctor treatment. Good ol' @Gatorubet
  23. I grew up in half of an old mansion in Selma, Alabama, when it was ground zero for Spanish moss, honeysuckle jungles, and spiked iron fences leaning askew. My bedroom looked across a narrow street at the famously-haunted Sturdivant Hall. I knew there were ghosts over there, but they never bothered me. In fact, given the surroundings, I saw way less than my quota of ghosts. I had a normal childhood, talking to my toys. And they'd talk back. A regular chattering until bedtime. One time I told my Mom that my toys told me something. She said they couldn't, toys can't talk. I walked back to my room and looked inside. All my toys were looking back. They weren't saying anything. But it wasn't because they couldn't.
  24. For fractionals I usually do a tad better locally but you're limited to what they have. Austin dealers are probably pretty well stocked though. Fractional mark-ups can be high, but I have beaten the system by buying from friends, split the difference between what they'd get and what you'd pay. In Texas, if you are going with Mexican gold, I'd get the first few from a dealer. I say this because down on the border they make 2 peso copies (usually 90%, or 21.6 karat) in 18 karat, 14 karat etc for weddings and whatever. I seent em on trays at La Moneda de Oro in Laredo. Side by side it's obvious which is original, and the store wasn't trying to trick anybody, but you can see how some might get mixed up out in the wild.
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