Quite well up

An unprompted observation by Oisín: The level crossing (in the garden) started out muddy, but it will get dry because the wind will blow across the mud, evaporating the water and turning it into water vapour...

(we assent, impressed)

...so we can have more air...

(because, as we were discussing earlier today, there's usually water vapour in air)

...so we won't die.

(He has our best interests at heart.)

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Earlier, he had us pretending to be Americans, which meant (among other things) that we had to say "freight cars" instead of "trucks", and "caboose" instead of "brake van". The term "coal wagon", I am informed, is used in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

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There are too many snippets like this languishing in my notes. I mean to start posting them sooner after they happen.

Another datum in the ignoble spreadsheet of misogyny

On the theme of Women As Possessions that's been going around my flist of late, a colleague of my sister's was reminiscing recently about her boyfriend's debs (end-of-secondary-school dance - not sure when exactly this one was, but within the past five years, say), and remembering how the unpopular boys in the class were targeted by the whimsical means of spiked drinks.

Whose drinks?

Why, the drinks of the girls they'd brought. Because clearly, spiking a woman's drink is something a man does to another man.