Do Do Do… Da-Da Da Don’t… is all I want to say to you.

Posted on April 16, 2008 by borysSNORC

Had a nice wander through the Bulimba bookshops today. The Riverbend Bookshop over there has a pretty good range for a suburban bookshop – plenty of art books and a nice range of history ones too – I can always find something to add to my library there…. it’s as dangerous for my credit card as CD shops used to be back in the late 80s 🙂 Today I found the other little book of Don’ts that I was keeping an eye out for – Don’ts for Husbands by Blanche Ebbutt.

The last one had some absolutely priceless little pearls of wisdom and this one does too.

Don’t try to “drive” your wife. You will find it much easier to lead her.

Don’t delegate the carving to your wife on the plea that you “can’t” carve. You should be ashamed to own that you can’t do a litte thing as well as a woman can. Besides, a man ought to take the head of his own table.

Don’t scowl or look severe. Cultivate a pleasant expression if Nature hasn’t blessed you with one.

Don’t insist on having gorgonzola or other strong-smelling cheese on the on the table or the sideboard twice a day when you know the odour makes your wife feel ill.. After all, it is a small thing to forgo in comparison with your wife’s comfort.

Don’t forget to buy your wife a pair of gloves occasionally. She will always be pleased to have them.

Don’t omit to learn to dance as soon as you get married, if your education has been neglected before. Your wife will lose half her pleasures if you can’t dance.

Don’t let your wife pledge your credit beyond what is necessary and reasonable. She must learn to cut her coat according to her cloth. (Poppycock I say! 🙂

Don’t neglect to insure your life for a reasonable sum. .Then you will at least know that your wife will not be left in actual want if you die suddenly. *

Don’t expect your wife to wait on you hand and foot. She is good for other things than to fetch and carry for you. If you don’t exact it, it will give her pleasure to wait on you to a reasonable extent. (WTF?)

and lastly …

Don’t hang about the house all day if your occupation does not take you abroad. Spend regular hours in your study or “den” … but don’t inflict your company on your wife every minute of every day. She is fond of you, but she wants to be free of you sometimes. And she has business to do, even if you haven’t.

Thank goodness I was born when I was… for I’m fairly certain I would not have made any man a good wife 100 years ago…. that is if I was fortunate enough to have found the good favour of some gentleman so as he might wish to marry me!

* For surely the loss of one’s husband is far easier to bear if one is able to grieve in Tuscany or Thailand … or maybe Tahiti would be nice 🙂

Bee count:

114 down … 40 to go.

little book

Et tu Brute?

Posted on January 2, 2008 by borysSNORC

I finished reading one of the books I bought at the Boxing Day sale today – Orgy Planner Wanted by Vicki Leon. It’s a book about occupations in ancient Greece and Rome and I picked it up because I rather enjoyed the British TV series Worst Jobs in History. (oh there’s a quiz… my results below!)* Being part of the SCA, you occasionally wonder what your life would have been like if you’d have lived in the medieval period or ancient times. We’d like to think that you would have had a pretty good life had you existed back then – but odds were you’d have been a peasant, worked hard all your life for little or no wages, ate crap food, slept hard and cold and then died young of some hideous (but now totally curable) disease. Which was probably par for the course but for a very privileged few.

The book was quite a good read, and right about my speed (given my limited concentration span these days) which means it was written as a piece of entertainment rather than as a historical essay for scholars…. not too heavy going and filled with interesting and often amusing anecdotes. I reckon I would have had to try and marry young or become a Vestal virgin. Maybe I could have been one of the charlatans making little lead curses for a fee or perhaps it would have been the whorehouse for me… options were pretty limited for women by the looks of it.

I’ve also been watching Rome again lately. I’ve been inflicting it on a friend (as you do when you’ve really enjoyed something) which means I get to watch it all over again. I loved this series, the vibrant way they bought classical history to life and served it up in an easily identifiable way for modern audiences. I particularly love how earthy they made it and thought had something for everyone enough nudity, violence, blood and gore for the boys, and enough politicking, backstabbing and conniving for the girls. Bonus! 🙂 Unfortunately it never got a run up here… the first episode or two I think were run at a ridiculously late time slot and then it got axed which is a shame cos it was certainly well worth it. And while Lucius Vorenis is no Captain Mal, we think he made a strong, hunky male lead anyway. 🙂

History’s Worst Jobs Career Guide Quiz

Your Score – You scored 20 points.

0 to 30 No one is saying that you’re work-shy, but a more sedentary occupation would suit you, even if it gets a trifle monotonous. It’s a little messy, but being an Executioner won’t put huge demands on your time. If you don’t mind getting wet or sitting still, Bath attendant or Artist’s model might do for you. Or if you’re not too squeamish about the sight of blood, pus or the odd taste of urine, try putting in an application form for some of the medical jobs: Leech collector, Barber-surgeon or Loblolly boy.
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You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

Posted on January 1, 2008 by borysSNORC

Woke up this morning and stumbled out of bed. Wasn’t hung over … which must be a first for me on a Jan 01. Wasted about an hour and a half watching the Transformers movie with Angel while sitting on some heat packs and hoping my drugs would kick in. I tell you it’s fucking tiring waking up every morning feeling like crap…every… single… fucking… day 🙁

By about 10am I felt like I should go out and doing something… anything! Just wanted to get out of the house for a bit and remembered there was a giant book / CD/ DVD sale happening down at the Convention Centre and thought it might be worth checking out.

Turns out I was wrong. There were tables and tables of CDs most of which had dodgy titles like ‘Scotland the Brave – Tunes from the Highlands’ or ‘Million Seller Hits of ’44-’53’ and while I didn’t actually see anything titled ‘Frankledick Humpdeback’s Panflute Classics’… I am sure something of that ilk was in there somewhere. The DVDs were even dodgier and looked all vaguely pirated with low quality printed covers etc. And unfortunately the books were equally disappointing. How can you have a book sale and not have a single non-fiction book in the place? I thought book sale? Yeah…. watch out Visa here I come, but wandering the stacks of novels, novels and more novels… I was quite safe from hitting the credit card.

So while, yes it did get me out of the house and I had a gentle stroll around for a few hours, if it was books I was after I should have stayed at home and taken advantage of the Met sale online.
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Said the Spider to the Fly…

Posted on December 29, 2007 by borysSNORC

Went to my biweekly torture session this morning (read physiotherapy appointment) and felt suitably loosened up and mobile enough for a while that I decided to brave the shops for a little poke around the post Christmas sales…. actually I was supposed to be popping into the shops to buy something for dinner tonight and some ham – normally Equinom brings me a Christmas ham, but with her being in South Korea this year I was ham-less and actually had to purchase one from the supermarket. I bought a half leg ham that cost about $40 and which must have come from the most unhappy porker ever as it was positively awful… dry and tasteless. I’ve never taken smallgoods back before but that one went back along with a demand for a refund. But I digress…. I went to Carindale and left there with neither the requisite dinner victuals nor the aforementioned ham!

I got happily distracted by manchester* and a booksale 🙂 As an early birthday present to me (and in no small measure a blatant attempt to cheer myself up) I had purchased a new quilt cover to try and make my bedroom a little lighter and more feminine. I found the perfect thing and bought a lovely Sheridan Milla vanilla coloured (not cream mind you… vanilla 😐 ) damask quilt cover that goes with some lovely Sheridan vanilla damask sheets I bought last summer in the sales. So today I found some absolutely essential but admittedly useless throw pillows to match…. and you don’t get any girlier than that!

Before After

I also stumbled on a book sale at DJs… 30% off! How excitement! 🙂 Picked up a couple of unusual tomes to add to the collection of books I can’t concentrate enough to read right now :S ‘Orgy Planner Wanted’ by Vicki Leon and ‘Left Handed HIstory of the World’ by Ed Wright.

*(thought of Dr Nick throughout entire manchester shopping experience! 🙂
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Starts with books of the dead ?!?!?

Posted on December 22, 2007 by borysSNORC

What’s today? I think it must be Saturday, Mr K didn’t go to work. Feels like I am rapidly losing track here, and I think we can safely blame that on the medication. Nothing quite like feeling a little fuzzy round the edges, which is fine if there was tequila in the equation, but not so fine if there wasn’t. I’m trying to remember what I did today and am totally coming up blank. I know we did something this morning… (several minutes later). OH that’s right…. we went out to breakfast in Balmoral this morning and then went for a bit of a stroll around Oxford Street and cruised through the bookshops.

I bought a the Taschen’s 25th Anniversary Edition of “What Great Paintings Say” which I can’t wait to get stuck into. I studied analyzing art when I was at Uni and always found it fascinating to see what we miss in paintings because we don’t see them with contemporary minds, or just because we’re not familiar with the content.

Blurb – Masterpieces under the microscope: from ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls to 20th century works Did the Greek gods play tennis? What is the ambassador from the land of Alchemy telling us? What secrets are being told on the shores of the Island of Venus? What is a monk doing on the Ship of Fools? What Great Paintings Say has the answers to these and many other burning questions asked about the most important and famous paintings of all time. In two volumes, a selection of history’s greatest masterpieces is presented chronologically, including works by Botticelli, Breughel, Chagall, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, Dürer, Goya, Monet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Tiepolo, Titian, and many others. Each chapter focuses on one painting, with enlarged details and in-depth texts describing their significance. Taking apart each painting and then reassembling it again like a huge jigsaw puzzle, the authors reveal the history of art as a lively panorama of forgotten worlds.

I got a couple of other books as well…. think I better check my purse for random receipts to see how much I spent given that it’s taken me a while to remember I even went. :S Other than bookshopping this morning, I’ve done diddly.
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