ROBUST discussion

A commonplace book is a notebook in which a writer notes phrases or quotations or events or notes, whatever he wants to remember because he thinks it could come in useful.

This is the thread is our communal ROBUST commonplace book. Any writer on ROBUST can pick up what's in here and use it, so what you put in here you've given away.

Everyone is welcome to write in here, authors, readers, drive-by shooters (beware, we shoot back!).

Tonight, in suburban street I tinkled my bicycle bell at a boy running into the street after his ball. About ten. He was startled, jumped onto the sidewalk and shouted, "Shoot the fucking driver!"

Wonder where he learned that as a reflex... And about his father's blood pressure.

[When I began reading your post, I thought you were telling us that you tinkled in the street...]

Not that much toujours l'outrage!

I remember an ad for a women's clothing store here in my part of the world that said "clever over cleavage." My reaction was "Why not both?"

Shoulda put that in my blog at the time.

I have cleavage. It's just not in the right places.

LOL!! Patricia, why does that happen to women?? I gave a birthday card once to a very good friend when he turned 50 - a little old lady flashed a man at a bus stop...by pulling up the hem of her dress.

Muscles have a genetic tendency to redistribute themselves around the waist.

Yes, yes they do.

My 7-year-old in a large shopping centre in the city today (we're country bumpkins) looked around her in awe and then pointed very excitedly. "Look, Mum, that shop sign has used the Harry Potter font!"

Katie wrote: "My 7-year-old in a large shopping centre in the city today (we're country bumpkins) looked around her in awe and then pointed very excitedly. "Look, Mum, that shop sign has used the Harry Potter font!"

Encourage her. Graphic designers are well paid and can find work in every country in the world.

Found on Willie White's blog:

"Three weeks ago a thought visited me as i lay in the bath ... i should write some small stories . Something i had never done before ... I`m really glad i didnt have a shower ..."

http://williewitssmallstories.blogspo...

"It's no use drinking out of empty cups."

If anyone can tell me where that quote came from, I'll eat my hat. Though, I never wear a hat.

My grandmother used to say,
"Idleness is the devil's ear cushion."

Don't ask me. I was never permitted to be idle.

Christopher wrote: ""It's no use drinking out of empty cups."

If anyone can tell me where that quote came from, I'll eat my hat. Though, I never wear a hat."

I love a challenge. It will be my constant goal until I find it, unless of course you wrote it.

Andre Jute wrote: "My grandmother used to say,
"Idleness is the devil's ear cushion."

Don't ask me. I was never permitted to be idle."

I heard this from my Mom and Dad almost daily, "Many hands make light work." To this day its hard for me to just sit still and relax.

Andre will understand this one better - Dom donners moet swaar kry. Loosely translated to if you want to be an idiot then face the consequences. My fil loves saying this, especially when someone, anyone, makes a decision which everyone else knows will backfire including the person making that decision. Since meeting him for the first time in 1988, this has been the one constant thing he keeps saying.

A comment from my University student niece after her 21st party, at which very little alcohol was consumed -"Music students don't need to be drunk to enjoy themselves."

Except the viola player.

She is a viola player!

Some of my best friends are viola players!

"Nobody loves a genius child.
Can you love an eagle, tame or wild?
Wild or tame, can you love a monster of frightening name?"
-- Langston Hughes

Sounds like the name of a fictional character: Viola Player

Violet Trefusis, a real writer's name, d1972.

There's also an author named Andre Jute. Any idea how his last name is pronounced? Jew-t? Jew-tay? Jew-tee?

There is? Good golly. That's my name too!

***

Jew-t.

Watch the accents: André Jute.

***

Great minds think alike. Half asleep in my bath this morning, the voices in my head were taking a comic turn in phonetics. I can't remember the words they were making literal play with--

Hey, hang on. I was thinking about the mispronunciation of "umbilical" that is common among veterinarians and civil service health inspectors, who're often vets too.

Tell us more about the voices in your head.

I once knew a fellow whose name was Mbopo Oscilloscopo.

Unfortunately, I wasn't the only writer who knew him. By the time I met him, he was dining out on being in so many books.

I shall devote today to figuring out how to pronounce his name.

Practice this.

Imm-baw-puh oss-sillo-scoh-puh. A Boston accent would be good. Mbopo sounded just like the BBC before they let Yorkshiremen be announcers.

Mbopo was a good man with a rifle and even better with a cocktail shaker. My most enduring image of him involves me sitting on the cab of truck floating down a dispiritingly large river in flood, keeping my head down because my brother Johnny and Andrew McCoy were shooting from behind me at the crocodiles eating the tail-end porters. And through this carnage, out of the curtains of tropical rain, waltzed Mbopo like a mirage, jumping lithely from truck to truck even as irate hippo bit chunks out of the cabs right at his heels, his little round steward's tray balanced on his fingertips, his other arm out for balance like a unicyclist, the bullets of the "army" of Lobengula V (a local tyrant whose dad a couple of years before terminally misjudged Andrew and Johnny when he tried to take a few million bucks worth of crocodile skins off them -- check your Louis Vuitton -- Johnny and Andrew brought you those croc skins out of the Oubangui) plucking at his white shirt. Mbopo held out his tray to the women (besides some nurses catching a ride with us from the refugee camp where we delivered food before the flood caught us, there was an Italian journalist and her photographer with us, and the immediate cause of Lobengula V declaring war on us was the ladies' refusal of his offer to practice his droit de seigneur on them) and then to the men. The martinis were chilled; Mbopo dived for ice to the refrigerator truck before it sank!

Having handed out the drinks, Mbopo said to me, in his fruity received pronunciation, "You can't shoot after your spectacles fog up, Major. Let me have your rifle for a moment, if you please." And Mbopo in two shots killed Lobengula and his "general" riding in jeeps on the tracks on either side of the river, then with two more shots tried for the captain and the pilot of the gunboat manoeuvering into position to bring the side-cannon to bear on us, but they were behind armoured glass too thick for the firing power of my light hunting rifle. This was very fine shooting, because I couldn't even *see* any of them through that downpour. But what Mbopo did next topped it all. After I finished my martini, I taped together some dynamite sticks my batman brought from the next truck along, lit the det cord and threw the concoction up on this really beautiful bridge the Belgians built smack in the middle of nowhere in this godforsaken African country, hoping that flying rubble would delay the gunboat until we dealt with the crocodiles and pulled the porters (the ones the crocodiles were snacking on, who were our primary interest) up on the floating trucks. Mbopo, seeing my dynamite lying on a strut, waited three seconds, an eternity when heavy machine-gun bullets are creeping closer to you across the water, until the gunboat was just under the bridge, then with a single shot popped the dynamite into the gunner's nest a millisecond before the det cord burned down. There was this really satisfying double boom out of the mist as first the gunner's ammunition and then the whole gunboat blew up and a wave came out of this floor-to-ceiling water-wall to rock us. "Ducks in the bath," Andrew said (this was before he became such an important novelist that he made only considered, pre-polished remarks), raising his glass to the women.

Mbopo gave my rifle back to my bearer, saying, "Make sure you clean it well. The Major is very particular about his property." Then Johnny spoilt it all, handing over his rifle, saying, "D'you think I could have my goddamn steward back so I can have another martini."

Johnny and Andrew each gave Mbopo a fifty-cow bonus for those martini, with twenty of which he bought two new young wives (he already had several, and more than a dozen strapping sons, one of whom I sent to college in Bristol, and I found one of his daughters a job as a graphic designer with a London agency, altogether a fine family) and shortly after that he turned 50 and Johnny pensioned him off with a little transport business of his own. Whenever I was on my ship he sent a son to sail with me, serve drinks, and so on, and when I threw a party in that part of the world he would come supervise the staff. He carted Andrew's animals, and after all the brush wars he'd been in, died of an impacted tooth within a 100 miles of reaching a dentist. He was 72 years old and I heard that in his coffin he looked not a day over forty.

At 40, I didn't look a day over 72.

You earned the distinction.

Andre Jute wrote: "Practice this.

Imm-baw-puh oss-sillo-scoh-puh. A Boston accent would be good. Mbopo sounded just like the BBC before they let Yorkshiremen be announcers.

Mbopo was a good man with a rifle and eve..."

At this exact moment I am speechless...

Margie wrote: "At this exact moment I am speechless..."

Africa has that effect on people. It's bizarre. You either laugh or you become very angry.

Margie wrote: "At this exact moment I am speechless..."

LOL, Margie, and here I was blaming my inability to think of anything to say in reply to Andre's story on the dog days of summer...

After reading that story, I shall never leave America - well - maybe go to Ireland.

No wonder they talk about 'mad dogs and Englishmen.'

After reading that story I more than ever want to visit Africa (without the shooting of course).

Makes me wonder, though, when and where Andre first published the story...

Those parts of Africa aren't safe for strangers, Sharon, less for white people, even less for women. Only mad dogs and Englishmen go there. Much of Africa is pretty sad these days, what with AIDS and famine and corruption.

I published my memoir of Mbopo first a couple of days ago, here on ROBUST.

Yeah I know a bit (heavy on the bit) about Africa. A Brit I befriended a couple of years ago told me TROTW had written off Africa. I've never forgotten that. I wouldn't travel alone and though East Africa is what draws me, Tanzania is where my heart leads me. Not going yet anyway, visit to Ozz at Christmas first.

#Mbopo. Well if you're that good a storyteller within a forum, I guess I better dust off the copy of Iditarod I downloaded and place it nearer the top of my TBR pile...

Sharon wrote: "#Mbopo. Well if you're that good a storyteller within a forum, I guess I better dust off the copy of Iditarod I downloaded and place it nearer the top of my TBR pile... "

Don't do that! You'll have to postpone your dream of going to Africa because you'll want to go to Alaska first...

Here's Margie's review:
http://librariansquest.blogspot.com/2...

Nope, no worries there. The upper end of my province abuts the Alaskan panhandle, that's close enough for me. I don't like mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds.

Actually a cruise to Alaska rests on my bucket list... but it's a very big bucket.

Sharon wrote: "I don't like mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds."

Nah, the big fat ones are harmless, you can see them to swat them. It's the little malaria-carriers, almost too small to be visible, that divebomb you.

Before you even get to Africa, be sure to take the shots and the tablets like they're your new religion. And, even if you take a good tan, wear a wide-brimmed hat all the time. That sun is deceptive; there's malignant melanoma in the air.

I shall have all the necessary shots and tabs and will cover up, just like I did for my trip to Thailand, though I know the precautions will be different and more severe. I will travel like all good colonialists and no doubt not touch the places I'd really like to see.

Malignant melanoma is to be watched for in Ozz as well, as you'd know...

Out in Oz, playing poker with some people, one of them a doctor we called Poppy and an insurance agent, J. The insurance agent says he has a whole new market, Irish immigrants. Poppy says, "Unless you want a reputation as an insurance agent whose clients die, don't touch them." Oh yeah, why? Poppy, a cancer specialist, says, "The Irish are crazy. They get off the plane, they see the sun for the first time in their lives, they rip off their shirts and never put them back on until they are referred to me, far too late to save them, melanomas the size of your fist on their backs. Don't insure them, J." Years later I heard that J was having trouble with his bosses for having insured too many people who died of skin cancers.

One reason I know all about it is that I'm extremely fair-skinned. Even in Ireland I wear a hat and gloves when I leave the house (it comes naturally, because most of the time I'm on my bike, in cycling helmet and gloves).

I'm not Irish, and I only remember being badly sunburned once after we came to Australia from England at the age of 9. I had a malignant melanoma at the age of 22. Keep wearing the covers, Andre!

Andre, I know you live in Ireland, but I would have guessed you were of Belgian descent.

Me, I have some Irish in me too, and extremely fair-skinned so I know whereof you speak. Mossies like me better than darker skinned friends too, they always make a bee-line for me and leave me scratching and swatting and the others peaceful and welt-free. And I'm probably a client in the making for Poppy, because I only properly do the slop part of 'slip, slap, slop'.

Poppy and J. What did they call you? Because I never know someone's given name over there, everyone is always immediately nicknamed and not necessarily for any obvious reason. I am called Shazza, but I understand all Sharons are.

Whoops, Katie, missed your post, delayed I guess while I was posting mine. (that's actually quite weird, after I posted, it appeared below Andre's post, but later yours showed up between them - it's happened before).

Sorry about your melanoma. I am so grateful that my daughter and her family all inherited the dark skin of her Hungarian dad's. But they have also learned to be very careful, we are in such a moderate climate here melanoma is not nearly as much an issue.

My father's people went from Galway, on the other side of Ireland from were I live, to South Africa about 200 years ago. My mothers family were Dutch and French Huguenots, hence my name. I inherited my "Irish skin" from my father.

The Jutes came to Ireland in 440AD. Apparently there were Jutes in the village in which I live, the last, one Alphonse, dying in 1972, not too long before we arrived around 1980.

Nobody ever calls me anything but Andre, not even Australians. Poppy was Popodopoulos, a bit of a mouthful. J was just me shortening the man's name so as not to do commercial damage.

Ah, Huguenot, hence the Calvinist connection. Huguenots came to the Maritime (Acadian) provinces of Canada to escape persecution. Many of them were subsequently deported to the lower colonies in the US as the Brits felt they posed a threat to their newly won peace. Many New Orleans Cajuns descended from those.

I was once told by a very nice Irishman that I must be of Irish descent because my surname (my maiden name) was Irish (there was an Irish soccer player with that name at the time). Unfortunately it's also an English surname and there's no sign of any Irish as far back as we know - all north of England.

What is it about the Irish, that so many people would like to be Irish?