Sunday, February 27, 2005

P2270004


P2270004
Originally uploaded by wordnerdy.
hamsters 50, 51, and 52. there are now too many for the keyboard-drawer on my desk, and i am trying to figure out where to put them all to best display their adorable-ness.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it needs to be said that cuteness cannot explain the accumulation of 52 hamster tchakes. I may be cute, but 52 are not. Why doesn't the memory of the last hamster or the last dozen hamsters or the hamsters beside the computer mouse forestall against the click that orders yet another hamster tchake. What we are seeing documented here here is an obsession and/or a plot to take over the world by some means I have not yet deciphered. Trust me, however, I will figure it out. Yes indeed.

Alicia K. said...

several points:

1--i didn't order the hamsters. someone has been giving them to me anonymously for over a year. therefore, the obsession is not mine.

2--the usual transliteration of the term is "tchatchke." you're missing the crucial "tch" sound in the middle of the world.

pinky pinkerson said...

That is fascinating - do you have no idea who the person is, who is leaving these for you?

(and tchatchke, or tchotchkey - as I've seen it - is the perfect word for such a thing)

Anonymous said...

Why, is that Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel I see in the background? I was sort of sad that this was required reading for virtually all Canadian english courses, and yet Robertson Davies was nowhere to be seen until university.

MIke!

Alicia K. said...

pinky--NO! i have no idea!! i've been getting them in my box at wxdu since june or july 2003 (i forget the exact date). my suspects have all denied being behind the hamsters, so i'm really at a loss when it comes to figuring out this mystery.

mike--good eye! i have all five of the margaret laurence books. meanwhile, the fact that you get to read anyone remotely contemporary in school is impressive, so don't complain. the closest we had to a contemporary author in high school was edith wharton . . . oh, actually we once got to read a toni morrison book (but i didn't get a lot of the symbolism of song of solomon then, being jewish and all).

Anonymous said...

haha! No, I wasn't complaining! I have to admit that my favorite novels fromschool weren't Canadian though. I enjoyed Huxley's Brave New World and Wyndham's The Chrysalids most of all. Yeah, my jr. high (for all of grade 8-10!) english teacher was pretty hip. Maybe too hip. People called his class Espionage 101 because most of our creative writing assignments usually had some spies or stuff going on, and he got fired for living with one of his students for like 8 years. Ah, the memories.
MIke!

Anonymous said...

err, just in case I need to clarify that final wistful comment -- he lived with a female student, NOT ME.

Anonymous said...

okay, at the risk of clogging up your comments (at least this is book-related!) I should add that the Chrysalids was SET in Canada. haha. ;) Mustn't lose my threads of credibility.

Alicia K. said...

hahaha, mike, i've never even heard of the chrysalids, so it's not like your canadian street cred was going anywhere.

Anonymous said...

John Wyndham, the guy who wrote The Chrysalids, also wrote Day of the Triffids!

Alicia K. said...

i'm sorry . . . i don't even know what a triffid IS! do butterflies come out of those, too?

Anonymous said...

awww, you need to bone up on your cheesy 1960's sci-fi movies!

Tagline: Beware the triffids... they grow... know... walk... talk... stalk... and kill!

Anonymous said...

"Tchatchke" Thank you. I was saying it right in my head but when the moment came to type it I guess my unconscious rebelled at the thought of all those consonants and took me on a short cut. A hamster planter. Interesting. How and where do they arrive? Or is that a detail that should be kept quiet while the FBI is rounding up suspects?

Anonymous said...

BTW I believe what we're discussing is the inverse Maltese falcon problem.

Alicia K. said...

i don't know when they arrive--i'm only at the station on sundays, and so the hamster-planter could put them in my box anytime before then. there was some mostly-joking talk of hooking up various webcams, but i don't really know how well that would work.

if anyone knows anything, they're keeping mum.

ps--oliver, do i know you?

Anonymous said...

Not really. But you might remember I made you a "contact" the other day on Flickr when I saw you were part of the Triangle contingent into which I thought I'd try insinuating myself. I guess the jig is up.