Beyond Lemon Tea-Cakes

Supposing that truth is a lemon tea-cake--what then?  Is there not ground for suspecting that all bakers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand lemon tea-cakes--that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a lemon tea-cake?

The Cat

The cat used to sleep on top of my chest as I lay in bed at night.  I'd go to bed and within a minute or two she'd pat into the room, like clockwork, jump up onto the bed, climb onto my chest, circle a few times, and go to sleep.  It was our quality time together and I valued it.

But recently, she's stopped doing that.  Now she sleeps way down at the foot of the bed, on the left side.  Sometimes she still comes up to have a look at my chest, as if she's considering it, but then she always decides against it and goes to lie down at the foot of the bed.

If she could talk, she could explain what's going on, she could say, e.g., "It's been warmer recently, and I don't feel the need for your body heat," or "You've changed shampoos and I don't like the smell of the new one," or "I'm still angry about that time you nearly stepped on my tail," or whatever.  But she's just a cat and she can't speak, so the change remains inexplicable and traumatic.

Disaster Strikes!

So Tilo's been playing Monopoly Junior, off and on, for a few years now, and, whatever, it's a children's game, right?  It's not very good; I don't recommend it.

Right, so we decided to get him a copy of regular old grown-up Monopoly for Christmas.  It says "Ages 8+" on the box, but he's a highly intelligent, well-adjusted seven year old--or anyway, he knows to cry when he doesn't get his way, so that all seems fine.

BUT--and this was completely my fault--when I went to the store to pick the game up a few weeks ago, I just assumed that the box with Monopoly written on it would be, you know, Monopoly, and not something else.  So imagine the horror and disgust I felt when, upon opening it up a couple of days ago*, we found this: 

That's right: it's the UK version!  Now I think I'm a pretty cosmopolitan guy, but this rankles for several reasons.

1. This is Australia!  If they're going to play on a non-standard board, why not Sydney or Melbourne or something?  Bowing down before the imperial capital is very 1950s.
2. If they're going to do London, why aren't we using pounds?  The instructions still refer to the currency as "dollars," but they use this weird M symbol instead of $.  What the hell?
3. Come on!  Monopoly has got to be the quintessential American board game.  It's the apotheosis of unrestrained robber-baron style capitalism--and not some kind of namby-pamby-Smithian-hidden-hand-of-the-market-spontaneously-maximizes-the-public-good capitalism either--no no no!  Monopoly is a game of real estate speculation, literal rent seeking.  You're supposed to run your competition out of business, drive up prices as high as possible, and impoverish your fellow citizens.  You win when the other players lose everything!  This is a game inspired by Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan.  It would have made Professor of Moral Philosophy Adam Smith physically ill.  It belongs in Atlantic City, not London.

* We were in Bali for Christmas, just got back a couple of days ago.  Santa filled Tilo's stocking in the hotel, but he had to wait to get home to open his presents.

Highbrow Allusions in Pynchon

Check this out:

        "Quickly, the field-glasses....Now, what in blazes have we here?" The [airship] in the distance was distinguished by an envelope with the onion-like shape--and nearly the dimensions too--of a dome of an Eastern Orthodox church, against whose brilliant red surface was represented, in black, the Romanoff crest, and above it, in gold Cyrillic lettering, the legend BOL'SHAIA IGRA, or "The Great Game." It was readily recognized by all as the flagship of Randolph's mysterious Russian counterpart--and, far too often, nemesis--Captain Igor Padzhitnoff, with whom previous "run-ins" (see particularly The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates, The Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin) evoked in the boys lively though anxious memories.
        "What's up with Padzhy, I wonder?"  murmured Randolph.  "They're sure closing awfully rapidly."
        The parallel organization at Saint Petersburg, known as the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, was notorious for promoting wherever in the world they chose a program of mischief, much of its motivation opaque to the boys. Padzhitnoff's own specialty being to arrange for bricks and masonry, always in the four-block fragments which had become his "signature," to fall on and damage targets designated by his superiors. This lethal debris was generally harvested from the load-bearing walls of previous targets of opportunity.
                --Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 2006.  Pages 137-38 of Vinatge version.

Okay: Russian dude dropping "bricks and masonry" from airship in signature "four-block fragments."  That's a Tetris reference, right?  Right?

Signs in Bali