Sunday, August 09, 2009

Friday Crab Blogging (way later)

Due to a serious computer malfunction we have been off line for the past four days. I'll return to this at the bottom. In the meantime, crabs (and other endeavors) continue to accumulate.



That's a starfish at the bottom. This is actually a repeat performance for Sammie who figured prominently in the big Crab contest earlier this year.









I had thought that this artist had depicted a crab pot. It is a crab, but it is a hermit crab in its own little cage.




There has been some restlessness in the troops about drawing only crabs. Such restlessness occasionally breaks forth in dinosaurs. At least it is an aquatic dinosaur.




Or a butterfly.



Or, in this case, as a family scene. I had to put this in there because of the ladder. I have no idea why a ladder is in the picture. Could the teenage sister be contemplating elopement? You never know. I would of said the car was a turtle, but then, it is in the eye of the beholder. (Also, if you noticed, mom and dad are midgets. So it goes.)


We had a severe thunderstorm this week. As a result, particularly in the area where I am, there was a lot of electrical surge damage. Interestingly enough, it didn't hit the power grid (which went out, of course) but it did hit the cable network and some of the phone network. This, in turn, resulted in frying some of the ethernet cards, but not all of them. So, initially one didn't know what the heck was going on since some things worked and others didn't.

The current health care debate in America included the suggestion that doctor's offices be fully computerized (it is like virginity, once you do it you can't go back.) Our computers were down for 2 days and having to go back and put all of that work into the system when we finally got them up was a pain in the whatever. Plus that, of course, new routers and new switches cost money. A lot of money. Just imagine what a big surge in a national power grid would do to business (including physicians offices) if it involved millions of sites.

4 comments:

Felix Grant said...

I like the lightning above T Rex.

And I think you are mistaken about that hermit crab ... it's not in acage, it's in goal for a soccer game.

Dr. C said...

As in the Ballad of Reading Gaol, where we colonies first learned the proper spelling. But what does the Hermit (Herman's, I suppose) score in the football game? A gaol, a goal? Ah, these perplexities of life.

Felix Grant said...

"Jail" as a replacement for "gaol" seems a very sensible linguistic move ... I hadn't realised that it was a US invention?

The etymologuy is interesting:

Latin cavus=hollow

From which Latin cavea=cage

From which the Latin vulgate equivalent gabiola=cage

From which the Old French gaole (at which point its modern meaning and "soft g" appear)

From which the modern French geƓle is derived.

From which the English "gaol".

From which, by phonetic rationisation, finally, jail.

"The ballad of reading gaol" is, of course, a lament about a Maryland doctor who offended the gods and was condemned to forever read an inteminable etymology of the word "jail"...

Felix Grant said...

Hmmm ... note my invention, in the above comment, of the neologism "etymologuy" – meaning, a person whose business is etymology (not a half man, half ant).