November 26, 2008
For a small Christmas gift....
...Charlene recommends the Chef'n Palm Peeler:
It's a gadget that fits in the palm of your hand, with a finger through the loop. Then you peel fruits and veggies by just rubbing your hand over them!
Me, I'll keep using the old spud peeler. The old ways are best. I'd say this oddly-colored item is in what O'Brian would call a "reckless, Jacobin, democratical line..."
As Tom Pullings put it...
..."Then on her quarter, with the patched inner jib, that's the Hope: or maybe she's the Ocean -- they're much of a muchness, out of the same yard and off of the same draught. But any gait, all of 'em you see in this weather line, is what we call twelve-hundred-tonners; though to be sure some gauges thirteen and even fifteen hundred ton, Thames measurement. Wexford, there, with her brass fo'c'sle eight-pounder winking in the sun, she does: but we call her a twelve hundred ton ship."
"Sir, might it not be simpler to call her a fifteen hundred ton ship?"
"Simpler, maybe: but it would never do. You don't want to be upsetting the old ways. Oh dear me, no. God's my life, if the Captain was to hear you carrying on in that reckless Jacobin, democratical line, why, I dare say he would turn you adrift on a three-inch plank, with both your ears nailed down to it, to learn you bashfulness. The way he served three young gentlemen in the Med. No, no: you don't want to go arsing around with the old ways: the French did so, and look at the scrape it got them into....
-- Patrick O'Brian, HMS Surprise
Posted by John Weidner at November 26, 2008 3:09 PM