Jenifer > Recent Status Updates

“When does a cucumber become a pickle? …When does change occur? Change that is irreversible.”

“Le beau risque. The great risk. The beautiful risk. To climb out of the hole and start again.”

“While Jean-Guy Beauvoir explored the tangible, what could be touched, Armand Gamache explored what was felt. He went into that chaotic territory. Hunting. Searching. Tracking. Immersing himself in emotions until he found one so rancid it led to a killer. Beauvoir stopped at the door. Gamache went through it.”

“Our experts on Mexico say that members of DFS are just as likely to join the drug lords and their criminal enterprises as investigate them—and often they play both sides…In some cases, former DFS agents have started their own criminal operations including drug trafficking, kidnapping, murder-for-hire, and car-theft rings.”

“Well, of course no one else knows about this. No one except you. And I’m only telling you because we are so much the same, Lester. We are way smarter than most people. We are like Freud, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Sherlock fucking Holmes! We can control our shit. It doesn’t control us!”

After buying the [Cuchara] property in the fall of 1977, Moreland used his hospital connections—and his department’s budget—to order all the lab equipment and chemicals he needed to produce his own fentanyl.

“There would be no drug cartels slaughtering their own people in Mexico if it wasn’t for the huge market for narcotics in the US, which is where eighty-five percent of the world’s overdoses occur,”

“Sixty percent of our murder cases are linked to drugs. There is no such thing as a victimless crime when narcotics are involved.”

She’d sold heroin cut with Doc’s painkiller drug to only two customers, who also happened to be her friends—Buck Medina and Airman Peres. They had died within hours of each other. Both from overdoses.

I have learned in my life that it is dangerous when people think that you have money. That is why people with real money never talk about it.

When people who have next to nothing lose it all, when they have nothing left to lose, glorified street gangs like Abu Sayyaf find themselves swarmed with new recruits.

Several recipes included, e.g., Clafoutis aux fruits, crème pâtissière, tarte aux pommes, sablés

Will-o’-the-wisp and jack-o’-lantern name the same phenomenon of mysterious lights that lure travelers into bogs and marshes in European folklore and fairy lore. J.R.R. Tolkien’s character Old Man Willow and the Harry Potter books’ Whomping Willow attest that willow trees (genus Salix) are also associated with magic, spirits, and gates to the underworld.

OED defines “drumming up” as a way of making tea in cans. A better definition might come from medieval times, when itinerant peddlers (“drummers”) announced their arrival with drumbeats to attract business.

“Spitting image” was originally the MALAPROPISM, but it has now replaced “spit and image” as STANDARD USAGE in America. Spit has meant duplicate since the 1600s.

“Pneumatic device” - A mnemonic device, from the Greek mnēmōn (mindful) rather than from pneuma (wind), helps one remember things.

“Parrot-phrase” - Usually a PUN. To parrot is to imitate slavishly; to paraphrase is to convey something’s meaning with different words.

Lover, land (Landlubber) - A lubber was originally a stupid lout, the word deriving from a French word for a crook. ‘Landlubber‘ was sailor slang for someone unused to the sea and its ways, though some landlubbers grow to love the sea.

Another odd and amusing example:
Heartship (claim heartship, financial heartship). Confuses hard and heart, perhaps influenced by hard-hearted • “Family Members taken on a non-command sponsored tour will be faced with financial heartship due to no logistical support.”

Entertaining discussion of English language malapropisms; cf misheard lyrics (Excuse me, while I kiss this guy)
I liked blackmale entry. OED = male or maile was medieval Scots dialect for rent. Blackmaile referred to raids by highland Scottish warlords demanding protection money from lowland farmers they threatened.

She’d made some of the most momentous choices in her life before she had any idea of consequences.

From now on, she would always know there was a fragility in her and no matter now strong she became, she would have to guard against it.

‘The naive, idealistic girl who volunteered for war is gone. In a very real way, she died there.’

‘We’re both the walking dead.’
He’d seen her in a way that cut to the bone, saw what she was trying so hard to hide.

Why should she care that no one remembered the women?

Vietnam would forever hold a piece of her heart. Here, she had found her place in the world, and she was afraid that ‘home’ was no longer the place she wanted it to be.

The Stars and Stripes called it the Tet Offensive: a massive coordinated attack across the country by the North Vietnamese in the early hours of 1/31/1968, the bloodiest day of the Vietnam War so far. It blew the doors off the secret side of the war. Walter Cronkite reported — on air — ‘What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.’

‘I don’t know what I’ll do now. It’s hard to go from red alert sirens and saving lives to pantyhose and heels.’

‘I should have…” What? Love mattered in this ruined world, but so did honor. What was one without the other?

‘Seymour keeps constructing his owls, night after night, smuggling them into the object code, unweaving some of the lies he has spent the day weaving, and for the first time since finding the severed wing of Trustyfriend on the side of the road, he feels better. Calmer. Less frightened. Less like he has something to outrun.’