some fascinating use of language evokes a thought for the Copywriter from Space - fred reads, watches television, gardens, ponders

We were at the nursery (garden centre) hoping to fill the flower boxes at Flintstone Manor without controversy and yet not with geraniums, when I looked across the rows of scrawny things with Latin names and saw:

POTTED ANIMALS

FOR BEDDING

Hopeful thoughts that the nursery had been purchased by the Animal House Guys (younger generation of Himself's old fraternity who bartend at the house during Reunion Week and are totally charming but have refused to come home with me) flashed through my bleary Sunday morning mind. 

Then it occurred to me - certain retail websites seem to have been trying a little harder lately. Could the Copywriter From Space have moved on? 

Well, I just checked, and I DON'T THINK SO.

So, back to the nursery: I had forgotten that I was wearing non-prescription sunglasses. The sign actually read "potted annuals."

Life is full of surprises.

The illustration above is shamelessly copied from a real book that was published in the UK and seems to be available on UK Kindle. I plan to take a close look at it this summer.

Meanwhile, I am re-reading An Officer and a Spy," which I described to my sister as "the book that's going to spoil Alan Furst for me."

I don't want to spoil An Officer and a Spy for you if you haven't read it, so no summary. Even though we know the ending before we even open the book, the "getting there" is gripping. The depiction of the narrator/protagonist, Col. Georges Picquart, is engrossing. He's a professional soldier, born in Alsace but refugee'd to Paris as a child in 1871, cares for his family, can't afford to marry ... and who does the right thing, not necessarily because he wants to, but because desperately and inevitably, in his stubborn soul, he has to. He's a funny kind of hero: the good soldier who is, in the end, the good guy.

In real life, after the events depicted in this book, Col. Picquart did receive promotion and ultimately became the French Minister of War. He died in January of 1914 after a fall from his horse. Later that year, shots were fired in Sarajevo... leaving us to wonder what turns history would have taken had a man who believed in good equipment, forthright communication and simple honest competence continued to serve.

At about the time I was reading An Officer and a Spy, I was watching television.

The second season of The Bletchley Circle has finished. I miss it already. I was transfixed by the first season, in which four women who worked together as code-breakers during World War II meet again in London, in the austere days of Britain's recovery from wartime. The women are bound by the Official Secrets Act, which means just what it sounds like: they can't discuss their war work with anyone. Their parents didn't know what they did, or thought they were clerk-typists or nurses, their husbands can't know... so finding one another and, before the first episode is half over, getting involved in solving a series of murders by using the skills they haven't forgotten, is really a blessing for them. And for viewers, seeing women taking action, solving problems... also a blessing. Mind you, they don't live alone and the early 1950's were not a female-friendly climate anywhere, and the realism of the setting obliges the viewer to judge these women in the context of their times.

Although it appears that the scripts for a third season had been written, there will not be a third season.

Have any of your senses - sight, hearing, touch - taken you down a rabbit hole of misinterpretation lately?