Mammaries of Irene

Cruising the academic interwebs looking for back-to-school wisdom? Forgetaboutit, sweet peas. Click elsewhere, immediately if not sooner. We had us, like, a triple-dip disaster here in Roxie's World in the past week: Earthquake on Tuesday, hurricane on Saturday, power outage stretching from 4 a.m. Sunday to 4 a.m. Monday (and we got off easy compared to a lot of our neighbors!). Classes start tomorrow at QTU, and my typist is in her usual state of Holy crap, where did the summer go and do I really need a syllabus and why the heck can't I just keep thinking about peaches? and yoga? and other happy things?

Yeah, it's like that, so in lieu of a post, we offer a picture, taken by our dear Candy Man, to show the weird havoc wreaked by Hurricane Irene on one Baltimore row house. (Point of clarification: We are not making light of Ms. Irene. It was a scary, destructive storm, and we're glad it had lost some of its power by the time it smacked into lower Manhattan. We exercise the privilege of mocking something that we lived through because, well, because we think this picture is hilarious, and we want to share it with you. It will appeal to your inner 11-year-old. It will make you think up punny captions while you are standing in line waiting to copy your syllabus. [You could go paper-free on that, you know. Give trees a chance, why don't you?])

Anyhoo, here's Candy Man's pic of the damage to his home and his ingenious way of dealing with it. We call this photo The Mother of Invention:

Moose is going to remember this photo the next time she is doing battle against ice dams. Geoffrey has already left a witty, Irene, thanks for the mammaries! comment up on Facebook. The picture also brings to mind the revised version of "The Way We Were" Moose's late father was prone to sing after a few beers: Mammaries light the corners of my mind, misty watercolor mammaries of the way we were . . . .

Top that, PhysioProf. And have at it, lit critters. Ten points if your response combines a pun, a literary allusion, and an esoteric reference to whatever fountain in, probably, Rome Moose thinks of but can't quite recall when she looks at this picture.

G'night, lovelies. And may all the disasters that befall you -- and us! -- this week be small, unnatural, and not likely to lead the evening news.