Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

An offhand comment in a phone conversation (actually hearing a retelling of a conversation with somebody else) culminating in the phrase, "It's not blue!" got my brain going in one of those sometimes-I'd-rather-it-didn't-go-there directions that's probably a symptom of being a filker or something, because I then started thinking about something I'd never considered before: Vulcan menstruation. (Has it even been established how often Vulcans menstruate? One the one hand, opportunities for reproduction must be relatively infrequent if the males only go into pon farr every seven years; on the other hand, female Vulcans must be fertile more often than that, because it would be problematic if the female of a couple were not ready when her mate went into pon farr, right?)

I was thinking about cats earlier, and a general statement about them (about cats' opinions about free fall versus negative g-forces), and it occurred to me that "cats are like guitars" ... in the sense that (like humans as well I suppose) for any nearly any general statement you can make about them, exceptions can be trivially found.

Cats don't like spicy food (except for two I've met who eat chili peppers). Cats don't go for fruit (except that I've met one who liked avocados and one who would go absolutely berserk for a chance to eat a nectarine). Cats don't like getting wet (except for the ones who like to swim or don't seem to care). And so on. Similarly, guitars have six courses of strings (except ukeleles and bass guitars which usually have four, and seven-string guitars, and harp-guitars), have flat backs and soundboards (except Ovations and deutshlauts which have vaulted backs, and archtop guitars that have carved tops and backs), have solid necks (except Hawai'ian guitars), are played with the neck slightly elevated and the thumb of the fretting hand behind the neck and the fingers approaching the strings from below (except lap-steel guitars, and conventionally-shaped guitars set up for bar-slide playing, which are approached overhand), and have a lower range in the bass clef (except for most ukeleles, renaissance guitars (or am I thinking of Baroque ones?) and tenor guitars).

Yah, the first thing my mind reaches for to make comparisons is the guitar. Surprised? (And yes, ukes are considered a subcategory of guitar, the last time I looked (as guitars are considered a subcategory of the lute family (except that occasionally, just to confuse things, the lute family is referred to as the guitar family even though it contains members that aren't guitars (and I must not have gotten as much sleep as I'd thought if I'm getting this deep in the nested parentheses (whoops)))).)

Feeling creaky and headachy, have things I need to do but am already behind. Going to try to pry myself out of the house to take care of those things, and get back to writing later.