Prenez du chocolat

Prenez du chocolat afin que les plus méchantes compagnies vous paraissent bonnes // Take some chocolate so that the nastiest companies look good to you.

Today’s quote, by Madame De Sévigné, brought to mind a picture of the cat enjoying his hot chocolate while a brawl was raging about him. Then I decided that maybe a scene in a bar while a football match is going on will do. Not sure why the cat went to the bar, he should have gone to a nice quiet pâtisserie, but I guess he was overcome by an attack of acute chocolack and decided to take his chances in the nearest place he can find.

And the chocolate is working its magic on him. Look at his pleased face. He doesn’t even mind the guy on the left, clearly angry about his team losing, leaning on his shoulder. Long as the cup stays full, he stays happy.

Je peux résister à tout

Je peux résister à tout, sauf à la tentation // I can resist anything except temptation

The quote by Oscar Wilde naturally lead me to all sort of cake-related things. Cats normally are not much into cakes, but the cat is. Btw, the cake in the pic is "медовик", Russian honey cake, as I remember it being served in Parunāsim cafe in Riga — except that now I see they make rectangular pieces, not wedges.

More stuff related to cats, cakes and temptations on shutterstock.

La plus belle courbe

La plus belle courbe sur le corps d'une femme est son sourire // The most beautiful curve on a woman’s body is her smile

Yesterday, local and national TV stations were showing a "virtual" carnival show in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Its equivalent in Las Palmas this year had the carnival spirit diluted to the point of being insipid, not to say homeopathic. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that Santa Cruz managed to keep at least some of the normal exuberance. It was just one show instead of many, and there were no public in attendance, but at least the costumes were beautiful. Maybe not as huge and expensive as normal, but still, quite impressive, very feathery.

Yesterday's quote by Bob Marley from Citation Célèbre got connected in my head with the show. The costume of the croquis is loosely based on number seven in yesterday's list.

Why God invented cats

Dieu a inventé le chat pour que l'homme ait un tigre à caresser chez lui // God invented the cat so that man could have a tiger to stroke at home.

 

 

 

When Victor Hugo wrote this, he probably had in mind fluffy cuties who indulgently allow themselves to be stroked in exchange for food, cushy bed and other necessities. 

I wonder what breeds of cats were around in his times. Perhaps unstrokable cats, the hissing balls of fury, all claws, teeth and glowing eyes came into fashion later and he simply wasn't aware of their existence.

Deep and profound brain things inside my head

La meilleure façon de se venger d'un ennemi, c'est de ne pas lui ressembler. // The best revenge is not to be like your enemy

 

I am sure Marcus Aureluis meant something much more profound than the lack of resemblance between the cat and a chihuahua, but well, it serves as an illustration, n'est-ce pas?

Two observations:

 --  A chihuahua en face looks very much like Yoda. Same goes for fennec fox. 

-- As you probably know, chihuahuas are "hate and tremble" type of dogs. I first read this definition in Russian - "дрожь и ненависть". Now, just for the heck of it, let's translate it into French. Google Translate comes up with "haine et tremblement" as one of the possibilities. But a search on these words plus "dog/chien" doesn't bring up photos of chihuahuas, as it does with Russian and English versions. So I probably got the translation wrong. Surely the French have made the same observation. 

Well, three observations, actually. The word "chihuahua" replaces but perfectly the first line in the chorus of "Que sera, sera".

 

There is no winter without snow

 

Il n'est pas d'hiver sans neige, de printemps sans soleil, et de joie sans être partagée // There is no winter without snow, no spring without sun, and no joy without being shared

While the Canary Islands are being slowly getting covered by a thin reddish layer of calima dust, Moscow is blanketed by a record-breaking layer of snow. My sister is sending me snowy pics of the beautiful, if very cold, winter they are having. 

Some of the photos show a small boat on the river Moscow. It stayed there for a few months already, caught in the ice by the first big frost. Now, with all the snow around it, it positively looks like something that belongs to a book on polar exploration. 

The phrase above is a Serbian proverb. Going by it, I didn't have a single winter in the last few years, if we discount the snow on Teide. No shortage of sun, though.

Vivrais-tu un siècle ...

Vivrais-tu un siècle, apprends toujours. // Should you live a century, always learn.

 

Today, the  Citation Célèbre site  came up with a Russian proverb. As usual in these cases, it took me a few seconds to figure out what they meant. Well, I say "as usual", but I admit there were cases where I failed to figure it out. Not this time though.

So. The Russian proverb in question exists and looks like this -- "Век живи, век учись". All nicely didactic. To bring the tone down a bit, it must be noted that on hearing or reading it, an addendum "дураком помрёшь"//"you will die a fool" immediately pops up in the heads of most Russian, even if they are too polite to voice it.

concentre ton esprit

 

Ne demeure pas dans le passé, ne rêve pas du futur, concentre ton esprit sur le moment présent. // Don't dwell in the past, don't dream of the future, focus your mind on the present moment.

Doesn't he look perfectly balanced and poised? It's because he is.

Today's quote comes from Le Parisien's Citation Célèbre section. They call all their quotes "citation de célébrité // celebrity quote", leading to Buddha being bundled together with, say, Groucho Marx or  Sophia Loren. Very democratic. 

Balance pic on shutterstock - here.

quatre ans onze mois et deux jours

Il plut pendant quatre ans onze mois et deux jours //
It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days

Yesterday, all of the Canary Islands were expecting a rain - nay, a deluge of biblical proportions - to happen today. The weather warning was issued, and everybody was advised to take various measures of self protection. It being 2020, the warning was taken quite seriously. The rain was supposed to fall with the maximum force between nine in the morning and midday.

It is now 1 pm. I haven't seen any rain yet, although I am told it drizzled some early in the morning.

Anyway. The quote in the caption is from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and it is the first thing that comes to my mind whenever Big Rain is mentioned.

The illustration is not, of course, related to the Márquez's epic. It refers to one of the episodes of our life on Fuerteventura. 

The ground level of the development in which we lived was, and still is, I imagine, about a metre lower than the level of the street behind it. I am not sure what is the reason for that, some of those unfathomable architectural decisions or plain stupidity. Anyway, when there was no rain - which is almost 100% of time of Fuerteventura - it didn't matter. But one day it suddenly did. A Big Rain came our way and it kept raining hard for a few hours, well into the night. The little passages within the development were flooded. The underground parking was flooded. The water level was just a couple of centimeters below the ground floor level of the houses. Our manager, who lived onsite, was running around in her wellies (pictured) trying to figure out what to do. Fortunately, her husband was a trained diver, and he passed in front of our houses with all his diving gear, on his way to fix the pump which was there for just such an occasion, but not working properly. He fixed it, of course, and it all ended relatively well.

Se tourner les pouces

Le chat bureaucrate se tourne les pouces // The cat bureaucrat is twiddling his thumbs

After a few soul-destroying experiences with Spanish bureaucracy I felt a sudden urge to draw a pic dedicated to this excellent subgroup of the population — governmental workers in public admin. Those of you who don't know anything about it — those are guys and gals who get a contract for life and are practically impossible to get rid of. I will stop here because the rant could be endless.

Anyway, some goodish while ago a symbol of such a person in Russia was a specific item of clothing — black oversleeve (protège-manche in French), protecting the sleeves, mostly in the elbow areas, from being worn out.

Short research by Kirill showed that at least in Germany the oversleeves have a similar connotation. Not sure about France, but we are not trying to be accurate here, just following the string of associations.

One of the things that public servants can't be fired for is doing nothing, or, of course, twiddling their thumbs. To our delight, the expression proved to exist in French too.

Of course, there are at least two incongruencies in the pic above. First, the cat doesn't have elbows, so there is little to protect. Second, he doesn't have thumbs either, so there is nothing to twiddle.

Three, actually. The cat is way too cute to be a bureaucrat in the first place.

Vote for Meow

Good news everyone ©.

My one-drawing-per-day challenge, from 14 March to 11 May 2020, is out as a full-colour book, Vote for Meow (ISBN 979-8-6667-1099-9). It includes some unpublished drawings and some interesting, I hope, non-drawing extras.

It’s kinda cute, even if I say so myself. And it is available from your nearest Amazon store.

The book is named after my post from 23 April.

We (I and Kirill) had fun putting it together.

I hope you have fun reading it.

On s'engage et puis on voit

On s'engage et puis on voit // First we engage, and then we'll see

Yesterday, I don't remember why, this supposedly Napoleonic maxim came up in our conversation. That is, I said it and Kirill didn't remember it. I did a little research on the topic and came up with interesting results: it looks like in my case I knew it because Lenin ascribed it to Napoleon in one of his written works, and gave an exceptionally loose translation "Сначала надо ввязаться в серьезный бой, а там уже видно будет" (First we engage in a serious battle, and then we'll see).

In Kirill's case he probably blocked his knowledge of anything to do with Lenin more successfully than I did.

Did he, that is, Napoleon, say something of the kind? The answer is probably yes, except he was not the first to say it. Some researchers found these words used in Napoleonic times in the same context as Napoleon himself. It is easy to see how tempting it is to associate the guy with the maxim.

Anyway. The cat has the right shape to pose as Napoleon, I feel. He cuts a very fine figure, as always.

Pictures related to posing on shitterstock

Mes Bonnes Résolutions

Mes Bonnes Résolutions // My New Year Resolutions

The last prompt I am going to use is “resolution”, résolution.

It has many meanings of course, but on this occasion I liked the idea of the cat trying to write at least one “New Year Resolution”. As you can see, he is having difficulties. And that’s because he is pretty perfect already. You can’t imagine how difficult it is to improve on perfection.

In the last issue (I hope) of quarantine news, today is the first day we can go out and have something in a street cafe. That is to say, only the outside bits of the bars and restaurants are open. In a little while, we will try to venture outside and find ourselves a free table somewhere. Wish us luck.