Peascod’al Activity

The “Forgotten English” for today was the phrase “peascod wooing,” which means…well, let me just give you the quote from W.C. Hazlitt’s 1870 book, Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles:

If a young woman, while she is shelling peas, meets with a pod of nine [peas], the first young man who crosses the threshold afterwards is to be her husband. In Scotland it is, or was, a custom to rub with peastraw [fodder made from pea stalks and leaves] a girl to whom her lover has not been true.

If I’d known it was that easy… This afternoon, my mother suggested I join a singles’ bowling league advertised in the events calendar of a local marketplace newspaper. But apparently I just need to start hanging around women who shell a lot of peas, perhaps surreptitiously walking in and out of thresholds as they do so. I’ve actually been to the “rock ‘n’ roll” bowling this group participates in, not as part of any singles group, but just with friends. It was fun, but as a few people pointed out when I mentioned this earlier on Twitter, if I joined the group, I’d almost certainly find it populated by a bunch of guys and maybe one scared, or more likely bored, girl. And I’m not sure paying to hang out with a bunch of dudes who’d rather be meeting women is really what I want to be doing.

It doesn’t help that the advertisement also suggests, for more information, that one visit the group’s Geocities page.

Beyond that, it was just a really nice day here. The weather was more like early summer than spring, so I went for a nice walk around the neighborhood after lunch. Along the way I listened to Ken Plume’s “A Bit a of a Chat with Bill Corbett, of MST3K and Rifftrax fame. It was a decent interview, and I think Corbett offered some decent writing advice.

When I got home, I discovered I had received an early birthday present in the mail. Heather sent me a really great assortment of Canadian literature, a box full of neat looking books I’m eager to dive into. I may take one of them with me on my trip next week to San Jose, since I’m likely to have some down time during the conference — and plenty of it on the plane trips from one coast to the other. (I’m about halfway through Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, and I don’t expect the remainder to last me through the rest of next week, much less to next Sunday.) Heather also included a Moleskine notebook, for my own writing, which I neglect a whole lot more than I should. She’s a really good writer herself, and inspiring, so I’ll have to make damn sure I make use of the notebook. The whole package was an unexpected delight — you can’t really go wrong sending me a box full of books — and I don’t feel quite so bad about turning thirty-three next week.

Beyond the walk and the weather and the books, I spent some of the day playing episode three of Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures, once I could actually get the installation file to download. And then this evening I watched Paranormal Activity, which I guess was effectively scary to a point, especially on what was clearly such a low budget, but also a little disappointing. And I say that having been a pretty big fan of The Blair Witch Project, to which this movie has inevitably been compared. I think A.O. Scott said it best in his review:

By any serious critical standard, “Paranormal Activity” is not a very good movie. It looks and sounds terrible. Its plot is thin and perforated with illogic. The acting occasionally rises to the level of adequacy. But it does have an ingenious, if not terribly original, formal conceit — that everything on-screen is real-life amateur video — that is executed with enough skill to make you jump and shriek. There is no lingering dread. You are not likely to be troubled by the significance of this ghost story or tantalized by its mysteries. It’s more like a trip to the local haunted house, where even the fake blood and the tape-loop of howling wind you have encountered 100 times before can momentarily freak you out.

It’s effective, and probably was a whole lot more so in the midnight movie screenings the studio promoted it with, but it’s not particularly clever or memorable.

Though there is one moment in the film I really liked. Horror movies of “found footage” like this — like Blair Witch or Cloverfield or Quarantine — often have to make excuses for why a character persists in filming events rather than, you know, running in terror from them. There’s plenty of that here — lots of “put down the camera” and “we need a record of this” talk — but there’s one moment where one character says, “Turn off the camera,” and the other character just does. It’s not an important or eventful moment in the movie, but it’s a nice, realistic little detail that’s often missing from movies of this ilk.

Anyway, that was my Saturday.