Stealing My Ideas?
Yesterday I was happily working in the project room. The Qatteri Cat, feeling neglected, came yowling back a few times, then went and got his baby and came back to be with me, and went to sleep. He looked so sweet. We don’t know what the baby is all about. Maybe he is lonely? Maybe we all need something small to comfort us when we are feeling neglected? All we know is that wherever we are, the QC will bring his baby back to be with us – and then, often he will leave it, as if we are the baby sitters or something.
So here is the Qatteri Cat and his baby:
You know when your cat – or your child – does something so sweet, you kind of think he’s the only one in the world that has ever done something that cute?
When I checked in with I Can Haz Cheezburger? this morning, I found this:
Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!
I think they must have plucked the thoughts out of my brain. 
While You Were Sleeping
It’s not that I’m that good, that obsessive, that I would get up every morning to photograph the sunrise. No, AdventureMan has to get to work, I have projects I am working on – AND there is the Qatteri Cat.
His little pea-brain doesn’t know it’s Friday morning. All he knows is that his food dish is empty. He goes around the house, pulling over the trash bins (they are small, they don’t make a lot of noise) and then he scratches at boxes and closets, thinking somewhere there might be food. I am guessing it goes back to some deep instinct, looking for food, from his street days.
I had forgotten to fill his dish last night.
I was so tired, I kept falling asleep over my latest Donna Leon book. Finally, around nine, I turned out my light. When the Qatteri can started sniffing around, pulling over trash cans, opening cupboards (what you hear is thump. thump. thumpthumpthump as he tries to paw it open) and scratching at boxes, I was mostly ready to get up, even though it wasn’t quite six.
Good thing! Cold, clear morning, no sand, not a cloud in the sky and just look at that sunrise:
It is 46°F/8°C this morning. There is a wind, and it feels colder.
Phase Me
AdventureMan and I were having one of those conversations we love so much – why we say what we do. This time, it was on the word phrase “phase”. We have a collection of words you use one way but not the other, and we are adding to it all the time.
Like with “phase” – we never say “Oh, man, I was so totally phased.” We never say “that phased me.”
We MIGHT say “I sort of phased out when he started talking about molecular electronics and phased back in as he summed it up,” but that is a phrase – phased-out / phased-in. I’m not sure they are related.
No.
We say:
That didn’t phase me.
I wasn’t the least bit phased.
We got throught he entire procedure unfazed. (It’s the same word.)
I’ve been searching the internet for any kind of explanation as to why we use this almost exclusively in the negative, and I can’t find much.
I did find a website, Urban Dictionary which asks for audience participation to define what words and phrases mean. Very interesting:
1. phase
(Votes) 132 up, 17 down
(Verb) To disturb, perturb, deter or intimidate. Usually used in the negative.
“They swore at me, but hey, I’m not phased.”
“You can’t phase me by talking while playing chess.”
This entry brought to you by Mrm who used the phrase in a recent comment and it was just too much of a co-incidence, so I had to write about it.
Update:
I just couldn’t let it go. Finally I discovered the problem. Me and Mark Twain have the same problem, thinking phase and faze are related. They are not. From Wiktionary:
English
Pronunciation
fāz, /feɪz/, /feIz/
Homophones: phase
Rhymes: -eɪz
Verb: to faze
third-person singular simple present: fazes,
present participle: fazing,
simple past: fazed,
past participle: fazed
To frighten or cause hesitation; to daunt, put off (usually used in the negative)
Jumping out of an airplane does not faze him, yet he is afraid to ride a roller coaster.
Related terms
unfazed
Translations
to frighten or cause hesitation; to daunt
Usage notes
Citations for faze in the OED start in 1830; usage was established by 1890.
The word phase is sometimes used incorrectly for faze; such notables as the New York Times and Mark Twain have made this error. This sometimes leads to the supposition that faze is an uneducated spelling of phase; they are distinct terms.
The Purg’s Not-Tag
The Purg has non-tagged us to link to The Purgatorian Blog with things that fascinate us.
It fascinates me that thirty year olds are sounding like really really OLD people, criticizing the young people just the way the adults used to criticize them, their choice in music, their ideas of fashion and I wonder how we change from young people who explore new ideas into old people who criticize new ideas?
It fascinates me that although we became “human” so long ago, we find the most amazing reasons to beat up on each other, kill each other, torture each other, and if you just step back a step or two, you begin to see that all the reasons to fight one another are flimsy compared to the great miracle of our creation. I wonder if we are really civilized? I wonder just how thin the veneer of civilization really is? How little it takes to turn us back into beasts?
It fascinates me how the things we own really own us. I have a horror of being forced, in the afterlife, to carry all the THINGS I consider important in this life on my back, like a turtle with it’s shell.
It fascinates me the trivia I give my attention to, the time I WASTE when I have things I really need to do.
I am fascinated by the darkness we all carry within us, and the heroic people I know who strive on a daily basis to overcome that darkness, to give their best in every situation, with earthly good humor and humility.
The Purg sent out this not-challenge to anyone interested to write a post on the sorts of thoughts that fascinate you.
Just Bad English
I am adding a new catagory today called Just Bad English.
No, I am not going to troll your blogs looking for grammar mistakes or misspellings or unusual use of English. I have noticed that I am blogging in English, and that many of the Kuwaiti bloggers are blogging in their second language – that is tough enough without the Language Police lurking in the background, and that’s not my point, nor my interest.
If, however, you are writing for a newspaper, you are held to a higher standard, even if English is not your native tongue.
So tell me, in this article from the Arab Times Kuwait Crime News, how many people were arrested? What were they arrested for?
Meanwhile, a team of securitymen has launched a surprise inspection campaign in Ahmadi resulting in the arrest of two Kuwaitis wanted by law for various criminal charges and 105 jobless expatriates. The arrested individuals were referred to the concerned authorities.
I have another complaint. In the Kuwait Times, we often read of the police “suspecting” a car and pulling it over, or
“suspecting” some individuals and chasing them.
We don’t use “suspecting” that way.
There is suspicious behavior. People are suspected OF something – you can’t just look at a car and “suspect” it, you have to suspect it OF something – erratic driving? What made the police suspicious?
examples of good usage:
Police suspected him of being under the influence of drugs, and pulled him over.
He looked nervous, and police suspected him of being an illegal resident, so they asked to see his papers.
Police received a tip that a brothel was operating in Farwaniya, and based on that suspicion, raided the apartment, breaking down two iron doors in the process which gave the occupants enough time to escape through a hidden hatch in the back of the apartment.
A sharp eyes policeman spotted the car, which appeared to be one stolen a few nights previously. Suspicious that the driver was not the legal owner, they stopped him and interrogated him, and demanded to see his registration and residency papers.
(I made up all the above. Any resemblance to a case you may know is purely coincidental.)
I have also noticed that almost every suspect gives up his drug accomplices, pimp, fellow thieves, smugglers and drug stash after interrogation. I suspect Kuwait police have some extensive experience in encouraging these confessions. Most of these confessions seem to result in other valid arrests. Sometimes, I can believe, these confessions are made by people who are very very afraid. On the other hand, sometimes a confession elicited by fear of a lot of pain might be totally false.
How do you know the difference? What if someone experiences a lot of pain and confesses to a crime they did NOT commit? This means that an innocent man suffers and the one who committed the crime skates. This happens in every country in the world. (That is just a rant, not a language criticism, just a general question in my mind; how do we protect the innocent?)
Kinky
My apologies to all the bloggers / commenters who got sent to SPAM last night, even regular, known commenters. I think WordPress is trying out some new things in the background (just my guess) and I am sure the situation will improve, but meanwhile – my apologies! I have noticed when you get sent to SPAM, it doesn’t even show up for maybe 24 hours – AAARRGGGHH!
WordPress Summarizes Referrers
I was just roaming around, and discovered that the Summarize feature is also working on Referrers, in WordPress. What an eye opener – see where the majority of your visitors have come from through the entire life of your blog!
You go to your Blog Stats page, click Referrers, and you will see a range of options, including Quarter and Life Time of the Blog. Click any for the summary of all your referrers. Amazing.
Oh wow. I just checked Search Engine Terms – it’s there, too, and they also have a summary by year! And in the Clicks section! (The all-time top click is for my niece, Little Diamond, followed by I Can Has Cheezburger.
Weekly Stats
The WordPress week goes from Monday to Monday, so I try to check my stats on Mondays, see how I am doing on a weekly basis. Now that I have learned how to take photos of things on my desk, I am a moster! I can do anything!
I was totally on a roll up to Christmas. Huge drop between Christmas and New Years, and then back up – and FLAT! Four weeks, each with almost exactly the same amount of readers. Have I hit my plateau?
StatCounter
A week or so ago, fellow blogger Macaholiq8 mentioned StatCounter in his entry, and how much fun he was having with it. I had a couple minutes, so I took a look, and signed up to give it a try.
Oh, what fun.
It doesn’t work on all WordPress functions – or maybe it would if I knew how to tell it to, but the things it doesn’t do for me – analyze key words, most viewed pages, etc – WordPress does just fine.
UPDATE: THANKS TO YOUSEF at Some Contrast who rescued me with the key key command to take a photo of my visitor map:
What StatCounter does is something else. My very favorite part is looking at where the viewers are coming from, they divide it up, give you percentages. I can see that a lot of schools in the United States follow the blog, but also, people in Australia, China, Iran – oh, it is so much fun to see all the drops show up on the map.
You can get an idea what StatCounter can do for you at their website demo:
And it’s free. You can buy upgraded service that gives you more, but for me, and for right now, the free service is just fine, fascinating, really.
Thanks, Mac, for a great recommendation.
Scattered Clouds
At seven this morning, it was already 50°F/10°C – BIG change from last week. At seven in Kuwait, it is 8 PM in Seattle, where the temperature is 49°F/9°C – almost exactly the same, just a little warmer in Kuwait as the day gets started.
Weather Underground Kuwait tells us today we will see scattered clouds, and that right now we have “mist.” I am seeing a while lot of mist. I am a little shocked, because my balcony was all misted this morning; that doesn’t happen often. But “scattered” clouds? Right now, there is a thick cloud cover, but it may dissipate as the day warms up.
This is what the scattered clouds did to the sunrise this morning:
You might wonder why I do this every morning. It all started because I really love sunrises, and every sunrise has something that makes it special from the others. (Well, not every single one; you will see some mornings I miss sunrise or skip it.) Also, my friends and family like being able to see through my eyes, to see a little of the world I live in. As an additional bonus, there are Kuwaitis all over the world who miss home, and who like to see a glimpse of what today looks like in Kuwait. I get e-mails in the background from expats who lived here as children, and are shocked by the changes.
Now you know all the reasons for the morning report.
The clouds are for my blogging buddy Fonzy who photographs clouds the way I photograph sunrises.
Recent Comments
intlxpatr on Shampoo Ginger tigerbutterya0c5ff1d… on Shampoo Ginger intlxpatr on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… John on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… intlxpatr on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 