A Balcony For The Blogroll
I Adore Competent Women
While adoring competent women has proven gloriously rewarding, it is not without cost.
For example,
When a comment on one of my posts last week by Helen led me to an especially enjoyable web site, I composed a succinct yet thoughtful, sincerely appreciative, and, because I can’t help myself, thoroughly charming note of thanks only to discover that she had not left an email address.
Helen did however provide a URL which delivered my browser to her blog, Blogger On The Cast Iron Balcony. It seemed tacky to just grab the email address & run, so, I decided to read the most recent entry – just to be polite, you know.
Over the next four to five hours, I found myself perusing posts containing, among many other wonders,
- A casual reference to Godwin’s Law
- A simile based on the Amish quilter’s tradition of creating minutely flawed work
- The disclosure of a fondness for the music of Nick Cave.
- A recipe for ham hock risotto, which she improvised after reveling in the “silky, smoky, melt-in-the-mouth flavour explosion” of the dish at a fancy-schmancy restuarant
- An irrelevant digression1 that describes the same Excel 97 Easter Egg that I mentioned in The Google Calculator Easter Egg, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, & The Answer To Life (AKA “42″)
Cavalierly dispensed esoterica? Exquisitely good taste in underappreciated pop musicians? An intimate acquaintance with the Amish (or, alternatively, a deep knowledge of quilts)? Irrelevant digressions? Gratuitous presentation of the 97 Excel Easter Egg? It’s as though we were twins separated at birth – except for that ham hock risotto thing, the preparation of which inexplicably did not require a dishwasher or a Ziploc bag.
On the other hand, in Helen’s past two years of blogging, she has never used the word, “kinky,” she has had nothing to say on the art and science of ketchup pouring, and it appears that she has not accepted Leonard Cohen as her personal savior.
Further,
- She’s an unrepentant liberal; I’m just unrepentant.
- She ridicules intelligent design, the political right, and pompous sorts; I see no reason to restrict my ridicule to deserving targets.
- Her blog has a category called “Meaningless Twaddle;” my entire blog is … well, never mind.
While four hours may seem a suspiciously long time for me to spend doing anything, let alone reading a blog, regardless of its merit, I will point out that
(1) Helen’s blog adheres to the old school custom of link-heavy posts, and I’ve never met a link I didn’t like or which, it seems, I didn’t follow.
(2) Helen writes in Australian, a fact which forced me to decipher references to magazines, political issues, food brands, locations, etc to which she persists in alluding despite the fact that these items do not even exist in the universe of Crystal Lake, Illinois. 2
Conclusion #1
Helen and I are exactly alike except we’re completely different. This would perhaps seem a mystery (or just plain stupid) to the uninitiated but to those steeped in cosmology, Jungian archetypes, theological systems, string theory, and 1960s American sitcoms, the solution to this conundrum is precisely as obvious as it is inscrutable: Helen and I are the cyber-version of Patty and Cathy from the Patty Duke Show.
Yep, we’re Identical Cousins
Meet Cathy, who’s lived most everywhere,
From Zanzibar to Berkeley Square.
But Patty’s only seen the sight.
A girl can see from Brooklyn Heights —
What a crazy pair!
But they’re cousins,
Identical cousins all the way.
One pair of matching bookends,
Different as night and day.
Where Cathy adores a minuet,
The Ballet Russes, and crepe suzette,
Our Patty loves to rock and roll,
A hot dog makes her lose control —
What a wild duet!
Still, they’re cousins,
Identical cousins and you’ll find,
They laugh alike, they walk alike,
At times they even talk alike —
You can lose your mind,
When cousins are two of a kind.
Conclusion #2
Helen clearly meets the criteria for certification as an Adored Competent Woman, and her Blogger On The Cast Iron Balcony is hot stuff that is well worth the trip down under to read. Check it out.
Footnotes
- I know it’s an irrelevant digression because Helen labels it an “Irrelevant Digression” ~back~
- I also found myself affecting a pseudo-Aussie accent. Given that I grew up in the Ozarks, that six years of speech therapy were required to correct a childhood defect in my mumbling, and that my knowledge of Australian speech patterns is completely based on movies and TV, it should not have been a surprise that I sounded like the moderately demented love child of Paul Hogan and Mammy Yoakum, but I’m certain this exercise will come in handy should I ever feel the need to announce that I’m throwing a whole mess o’ shrimp on the barbie. ~back~
