| April 11, 2003 - Smilla and her lack of sense |
| Dear Friends, JOHNNYLEEN has been avoiding Ye Olde Watering Hole like the plague, because he is sooooo tired of all the unfantabulosity there and the customers' dreary, dreary lives. So last night, he sat at home and watched a movie on Bravo called "Smilla's Sense of Snow". At first it seemed interesting, but as it stretched into 2 1/2 hours, I thought I was going to go nuts! I quickly looked it up on the Internet and found that it was 2 hours and 5 minutes long, but because Bravo inserted 55 minutes of commercials, it lasted 3 hours! Not only that, at the end of it there were all these loose ends that never got explained. For example, how did the captain of the ship know that the thug had killed his son, when Smilla was the only one there when the son died? Smilla was supposed to be from Greenland, so she knew a murder had been committed because of the way footprints appeared in snow. Her Inuit language has about 5,000 words for different types of snow and she could tell just by looking at snow whether someone walked, ran, hopped, or even passed gas in it. Then while trying to pursue this little boy's killer, she suffers all this angst about being a Greenlander away from Greenland, blah, blah, blah. At one point she tells her boyfriend/mechanic/spy/lover that in Greenland a person who has learned to upright himself in an overturned kayak is called a "qxyloptiqqqq" or something like that, but that she feels like a "upo111qqquiiixxx", someone who never learned how to upright his kayak, in other words a "shipwrecked person". When it was all over I wished in a way that I had gone to Ye Olde Watering Hole after all and listened to Baby Huey and the others whine. "Who is Baby Huey?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you. There's this guy, I'll call him "Danny", who hangs out at Ye Olde Watering Hole and I cannot stand him. My dislike for him stems from an incident a couple of years ago that I'll relate to you at another time. Anyway, Danny used to be overweight but shed the weight off about 1 1/2 years ago. He actually looked pretty decent. He had lost the weight because he felt that he wasn't meeting any women. So what did he do when he finally got a girlfriend? That's right, not only did he put the weight back on, he added even more to it. So Danny always used to sit and whine about how he didn't have a girlfriend. Now that he has one, all he does is complain about how she doesn't treat him right. On top of that, he's constantly saying, "I hate it here. I wish I lived in Florida. I wish I lived in Connecticut. I wish I lived in Vegas. I hate my job. I have sleep apnea." It's like a PBS whine-a-thon! So a couple of weeks ago, when I was at Ye Olde Watering Hole, his name came up and I said he reminded me of that Warner Brothers' cartoon character, Baby Huey, because he is so big and so infantile. If you don't know who Baby Huey is, he's a big white duck in diapers and a little blue baby bonnet. Here's a link to an Internet page about Baby Huey. Everybody started laughing, because they realized the image fit perfectly. So now everyone refers to him as Baby Huey behind his back. Now back to the topic of Smilla. Remember I said she was from Greenland? Well, JOHNNYLEEN just purchased tickets for a fantabulous trip to Iceland and Sweden this summer. One of the things I've always wanted to do while in Iceland is to make a side trip to Greenland, but I somehow never got around to it. This year I definitely plan on attempting it, even though the flight from Iceland is a bit pricey even for just a few hours stay. You get to visit an Inuit village and have lunch. If you really want to dole out the dollars you can stay overnight in a hotel in a town whose name is made up primarily out of consonants. I'm not too keen on that, so I'll probably just do the day trip. Maybe the Inuits can teach me all those different words for snow! That would be a real conversation starter at dull cocktail parties, wouldn't it? Someone could say to me, "You know, my job is just so important and I meet all these wonderful people and I only read novels by Michener", and I could answer, "Did you know the Inuit word for loosely packed snow that you can't use to build an igloo with, but that's good for making snowballs is 'quqklakkqquu'?" Next entry Previous entry Go to diary entries Go back home |