Foreign countries are strange

One of the big hangups about traveling, particularly traveling abroad is dealing with the strange customs of foreigners. It is as if just living somewhere foreign gives them permission to be strange. Go figure! Some of if is charming. Who doesn’t love the idea of gondolas and seranading gondoliers? And who can resist the romance when ordinary objects get translated into Italian.

Image via Wikipedia

Ordinary stuff becomes magical in another language. Still there are risks. you can order something uneatable, like tripe, without knowing. Europeans seem to value tripe much higher than Americans perhaps because it sounds so sexy. It is hard to remember sometimes that the people eating that tripe aren’t Americans. And tripe remains stomach no matter what language you speak.

Ah, there is the problem.

Back when I made my first trip to Europe, we were only 20 years away from Wold War II and at the beginning of the Age of America on the World scene. Europe didn’t take America seriously before the war. We were the big, brash kid that knew his place and deferred to adults otherwise know as Europeans. What the war revealed was that there weren’t any more adults on the world scene and if anybody was going to lead, it would have to be us. Those Europeans never quite adjusted.

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Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Well, I missed it.

bob X 4 (Photo credit: jacob earl)

I know how much our faithful readers count on getting regular doses of cantankerosity and until now I’ve been committed to living up to my responsibilities here at COC. Heaven knows, somebody has to do it. Justin may be the grand visionary and slave driver but lets just say that he goes AWOL from time to time. Between the kids and the kettle bells, it is hard to keep his attention. Then, of course, there is Bob. You wouldn’t think that life in the wilds of rural Georgia would be so complicated but I’m afraid that every so often Bob goes all nuanced on us. Lately I fear he has his sights on Oprah and her wide-ranging network of influence. Becoming a network mogul keeps his eyes on the prize and distracts him from the mundane production of content. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he is trying to displace Justin.

Anyway, since I’m the only Indian left actually producing content here at COC, it is a heavy responsibility and yesterday I just flat out wimped. I had a post half written when I ran out of steam. The vim and vinegar necessary to season the post just turned to watery gruel and I had to stop. It sits there still, filed away in my computer waiting for future inspiration. I feel bad about that and I hate to go Bob and Justin on our faithful readers but it is not my fault. I have been distracted lately and I feel I must confess my lack of focus and offer an excuse.

It’s not much

when compared to Justin’s kids or Bob’s frozen pipes and it perhaps reveals that the strong focused mind that has carried me through life to this point may be failing, perhaps even drifting into senility but the faithful readers here at Coots deserve nothing less than the truth. In four weeks, this Coot, along with my long suffering wife are leaving the country to visit Europe. It’s been 40 years since either of us set foot in Europe so we are excited and anxious at the same time and it is hard to focus on business as usual.. more…

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Originally posted 2010-11-26 07:12:32. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Do you get caught up in the business of what has become common in these here United States and gone forth into the great unknown that is Black Friday?  You know you get a newspaper chocked full of advertisements to make your kids drool and then you head out into the cold early in the morning (or late at night) to get a “deal” on these things?

Well as I type this it is almost 7am.  decent people should be asleep or just waking up if you are one of those “morning” type people.  I am not one of those.  Still, Toys R Us opened on Thanksgiving night at 2200, sorry, 10 pm to let the sales start.  Walmart started selling stuff at 1201 am.  Sometimes I am still amazed at the lengths that parents go to to make Christmas special for their kids.  (*note, this is a stock picture and not of the toys r us I was at.  if it were, I would have started about beyond the picture at least double if not triple the people that are shown here*)

Tonight I saw some very interesting points of Humanity.  I saw grumblers and malcontents waiting in line with the placid and the comical, all hoping to get inside the store before the 12 degrees afforded to us by a doozy cold front froze parts that we would rather have not frozen.  I saw people just grabbing things, for the sole purpose that they were on sale and then proceeding to misread the 20 items or less sign and seem to see an extra zero on it.  I could blame fatigue, but it was on 0230 at that point.

One thing I didn’t see was people fighting over things.  I have always heard stories of things coming to blows over a toy or a movie, but I didn’t see any of that.  I guess the earlier times opening helped out with that.  I also saw people in relatively good spirits.  People who were forced to be together by the commercialness that Christmas has become.  But most people were nice to each other, or ignored most everyone else (like I did) while plugged into my MP3 player.  I thought at one point that there was some hope, albeit small and shrunken like the raisin you find under the stove next spring, that humanity can endure.

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Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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Who hid the road?

The rain has stopped here in the idyllic Sierra foothills. This is the first rain of the rainy season, nearly two months late. In California if it don’t rain during the winter then it just don’t rain at all because it never rains in the Summer. Down in LA, rain is irrelevant or worse, a damn nuisance because it just floods the gutters and runs into the ocean after washing the oil residue off the roads and causing chaos on the freeways. The water is all imported from elsewhere. It’s a convenient arrangement.

California Aqeduct

In the hinterlands of Northern California its different. The rivers run all year round and until recently nobody metered water service. It was all you can use for a flat monthly fee. Folks up here are resentful of Southern California who, they think, want to steal their water. (One of the three SoCal aqueducts takes water from the north to the south). More than anything else, water divides California. Periodically proposals surface to divide California into two more homogenous states but they always founder. Northerners want to cut all ties to the south and stop sending precious water south but unfortunately for them Southerners have more population. There are so many more Southerners that a single California state will always provide water to the south no matter what kind of fuss the north puts up.

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Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Originally posted 2011-01-28 06:08:53. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I hope everyone had a good break from the regular cantankerosity and enjoyed Heathers work.  She has some good rants on things us other Coots don’t think about.

Is anyone else out there getting tired of winter?  I know it has been very erratic around much of the US and still continues to be…strange weather to say the least.  Next Wednesday the weather prognosticator of all prognosticators will make his debut and tell us all whether we can look forward to 6 more weeks of winter or not.
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Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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