Flowers and beads are one thing

I have the suspicion that I'm going to have to make a backup of my computer soon. This morning I was having some weird problem where a touchpad button click would jump to the wrong menu item, and in the Terminal window there'd be repetitions of ... I guess it was some control code, but it came out on screen as endless ``~3'' repetitions. But giving the computer some time to sulk and setting it down on a solid surface instead of my squishy lap seems to have helped, so perhaps I can put off making a backup for a while yet.

I'd been in the mall -- where coincidentally the nearest Apple Store I know of is, so I know where I'd take my computer if it did turn seriously ill -- and wandered around considering things like did I really need a DVD of Curse of the Were-Rabbit, even if it was an auspicious US$8.88?, and spent some time looking at the various cute little animals in the pet store. Ages ago there was one mouse who had picked up the trick of doing backwards somersaults in his food dish, earning enthusiastic admirers among humans and I'm sure discreet kicks from the other mice when nobody was looking. This time around none of the animals had worked out any particular tricks, although two ferrets were each trying to lay on top of the other, and were making pretty good progress at it.

One man was there with, I assume, his children or else a child and friends. He was happy to identify all the various animals in the rodent enclave: there were the hamsters (which were hamsters), and hamsters (which were gerbils, admittedly mostly a marketing difference), and giant hamsters (infant guinea pigs), and really giant hamsters (adult guinea pigs), and long hamsters (ferrets). Either he wasn't all that interested in rodents or he was giving in to the near-irresistible temptation to mess with young kids' heads. He did correctly identify a rabbit as a rabbit, but with ears like that they're hard to pass off as anything else. One of the kids blurted out, ``I hate rabbits,'' but he didn't explain in detail, and from the way he looked I think he just wanted something to say. One of the rabbits was on top of a little wooden sub-hutch, and the adult said he was ``Just like Snoopy. Maybe he's a rabbit who thinks he's a dog.'' The kids didn't seem much worried about it anyway.

Trivia: By 1902 German municipalities had built 327 monuments to Kaiser William I. Within a year of Otto von Bismarck's death in 1898, 470 municipalities had decided to build monuments to him. Source: The Invention of Tradition, Edited Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger.

Currently Reading: One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, Witold Rybczynski. This isn't a bit book, but I'd bought it for my Dad as a Christmas present, with the thought that it'd be just the sort of thing for him to read on the cruise, since he doesn't actually do much reading on cruises anyway. (It turns out he spent much more of his time learning to play bridge.) But he was worried about whether I was ever going to get around to reading it too.