Does your bleug bite?
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 03/Jul/2011 01:26, 34 days ago
Sometimes blogs don't write themselves, so it's up to me to string some letters and maybe even words, together. If really desperate I have to use the letters to create new words. Somebody has to do it because otherwise our language would have no words. Words have not existed for ever and the language needs to evolve. That's my excuse.I trust that "bleug" is not an incredibly rude word in French or German, because in reality it's just an Inspector Clouseau-ism. You are reading a bleug right now. If you are still at a loss, bleug is to blog, what deug is to dog.Once again my better half is right, you can just see too many caterpillars. I only saw this one particular caterpillar in real life, but in an attempt to identify it I looked at dozens of pictures of Jamaican caterpillars on-line. I did not find it, but after a while I did start to feel myself getting grossed out. It's not an excuse that caterpillars evolve into beautiful butterflies.Yellow and black is meant to be a danger sign in bugs. True enough, no birds chose to zero in on this easily visible one. Also a cat walked by and showed not an ounce of curiosity.Fortunately the picture is slightly blurry which eases the visual impact.Now to get as far away as possible from the previous image, here is the flower of the day. I bet if I researched what its real name was I would be quite comfortable scanning through dozens of non-buggy Jamaican plants on line.I bet you did not think that tax offices are interesting, and this one on Old Hope Road does not look terrific. Interestingly though, you can pay your speeding tickets at the Jamaican Inland Revenue offices. But the really most interesting thing that I heard the other night was that you get the best deal if you pay your traffic tickets in court.It seems to be something like the way the legislation is drafted, the court may legally charge you up to the amount of the ticket but generally they don't, so you get about a 10% to 15% discount. Now if only your lawyer's fees were less than this discount, then you would be ahead of the game.You can see my theme. I was desperately short of ideas so I took some photos, not as many as I should have, and hoped I could use them later.This Internet photo below from the Lascaux Caves in France is my personal reminder to always take my camera with me. In retrospect the blog could have created a really meaningful blog out of it and the crowds of graduating primary school children on Camp Road. Unfortunately, this was one of the days that I did not have my camera. The children wore really cute little red triangles around their necks that I assume symbolized graduation gowns. The triangles were about the size of normal linen napkins that you might see at a fancy restaurants in Canada.Here is my personal reminder for me to always take my camera. Nobody expects the unexpected.The theme of the blog, that did not happen, was going to be as follows. Electronic age children who could not put their thoughts into language on a writing medium would have a real problem the day their batteries died or the electricity ran out. Far fetched maybe, but not impossible.Then I would say that they would have been less advanced than early humans who drew pictures on cave walls. However, whoever drew these pictures thousands of years ago was an incredibly gifted artist. Not many of us could draw like this, and in a world with no electricity we would not be able to side-step the issue by going the cut-and-paste route on our computers.So the bleug is coming near to its end. The star of the Pink Panther series with his immaculately clean rain coat as contrasted to Columbo's immaculately unclean coat,would agree with this although they obviously do not use the same dry cleaner. You can see Inspector Clousseau's coat if you Google-search "Does your dog bite", or short-cut to it below.Thanks to these two sites for the use of their photos - Superslice.com and Pictorialpress.com.You would be too hot wearing a raincoat in Jamaica so here are some coat-less CUSO-VSO volunteers - Helen Schneiderman and Carol Leung, along with Varun Baker (to the right as you look at the photo) at the local office on Ruthven Street.So now I am at the stage of wondering if my alter-ego, the blog, will come charging in from stage-right and painlessly work out a great closing paragraph for me. No sign of it yet. It's letting me down. If I were Prince William I could afford to pay for a full time assistant, and maybe even wear a reigncoat, but, as it is, the blog and I are inseparable.I almost forgot. It was a major public holiday in Canada but not in Jamaica yesterday. Luckily it was business as usual in Jamaica. Otherwise, I might not have been able to buy this super patriotic shirt at the last moment and wear it to the Canada Day supper at the Chez Maria restaurant.Good knight.