Friday, August 17, 2007

Back-in-the-old-routine haiku

Dazed brain a victim
Of obstinate sleep cycles;
A timezone prisoner.


I don't usually get jet lag. Not usually..... but this time.... it sucks.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

First in First in (Tulsa, I'm not dead, just busy)

Anonymous said...

I never get jet-lags either, but then I always have the opposit day rythm to all other people where ever I am living!!

Anonymous said...

Earthling!!!!

Froog said...

Oh, this is all getting a bit "Cathy!" "Heathcliff!!" now. Stop it!

Anonymous said...

:)

Oi!! Froog!!! (come on, admit, you just wanted your own set of exclamation points.)

Anonymous said...

by the way, "heathcliff" -- i immediately thought of the comic strip cat. especially since you started with "cathy", which is also a comic strip. and i didn't quite get it.

then I figured heathcliff must be so very Brit... I've never met a Heathcliff, have you?

oh, and earthling, i met not one, but three (!!!) people from denmark tonight. one of them I'd known for a while without realizing his background and the other two were completely new to me. of course I thought of you.

Froog said...

Cathy and Heathcliff are a famous pair of doomed lovers, the protagonists of the classic Victorian novel Wuthering Heights.

For me, the iconic representation of them was in a series of comedy sketches on the 1970s BBC TV show 'Dave Allen at Large', where they would catch sight of each other at a great distance out on the wild North Yorkshire moors and run eagerly towards each other, yelling their lover's name over and over again. Of course, it would take a very long time for them to reach each other, and all kinds of things could go wrong along the way - it was a seemingly never-ending succession of comic variations: when they finally reached each other, they'd be too exhausted to make out; one or other of them would fall into a bog; it would be an embarrassing case of mistaken identity; etc., etc. Actually, I think my very favourite one was where they decided it was too much bother to race across the moors, and simply signalled to each other with semaphore flags (sub-titles for the audience: "Cathy!" "Heathcliff!").

Dave Allen was a great, great Irish comedian; he died a couple of years ago.

Anonymous said...

Yes, after the comic strip images I did think of Wuthering Height's Heathcliff, which is what made me think it was oh so Brit. (though i didn't recall that her name was Cathy. was I too focused on the male characters or is that how it is written? Or is Cathy just too common an American name to stick in my head the way Heathcliff stuck? it's been at least a decade since I read it and I simply don't remember.)

And while Dave Allen at Large doesn't ring a bell, the skit you described sounds very familiar. I'm sure I've seen clips of it on PBS or some Friday night watching Brit comedies on the VCR at a friend's place (yes, I had Brit friends even in the US).

Froog said...

I am becoming a little bothered about the recollection now. I have a feeling that Monty Python also had a semaphore skit that might have involved Wuthering Heights. The long-running series of Cathy/Heathcliff skits was, I'm sure on Dave Allen, but I wonder if I am wrongly attributing the semaphore gag to that.

Anonymous said...

okay. you got me curious. I sent you an email with some info I found about it.

Anonymous said...

youtube has a skit. i couldn't watch it from my office, but here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0vgZ2UNS54

and wikipedia comments on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore

and i found this comment elsewhere on an austen blog:

"...the old Monty Python skit, 揟he Classics in Code,?where Cathy and Heathcliff stand on opposite cliffs with semaphore flags..."

Finally, here's the script to a semaphore version of wuthering heights for the Flying Circus TV Show, Episode 15:
http://www.orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/semaphor.htm

Froog said...

Tulsa has some time on her hands today, obviously.

Anonymous said...

That was just what I was thinking Froog. What is happening in China since you guys have so much time to just blog??