Julian Fantino - Minister of Veterans Affronts

Emergency Meeting Minutes: 2009-09-19 [H1N1 and how to insult the ESIs]

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Hand Kissing

Last Spring, I was kissed on the hand by three different men - a family friend, a taxi driver, and the doorman at a tavern all within a week of each other.

I was surprised by these unsolicited kisses, and I wondered if hand kissing was back in style. Why had no-one warned me?

I mentioned these incidents to the Word Wizard, who seems to know something about every topic. He quickly responded with questions, "Did you offer your hand to be kissed? Did they touch their lips to your hand?"

No, I had not offered my hand to be kissed, and in all three instances I was tricked into receiving the kiss. And, yes, all three had touched their slobbery lips to the back of my hand.

I have since become a little wiser about hand-kissing, and so, gentlemen, if you want to kiss my tiny tender nymph hand

• I must be the one who initiates the gesture by offering you my hand palm down;
• I must know you;
• You must be of equal or higher mythological standing than I am;
• You must slip your fingers under the palm of my hand and gently rest your thumb on my knuckles;
  
• You may either quietly air kiss the back of my proffered hand, or kiss your thumb;
• You must kneel at my feet as you kiss my hand to show that you are in awe of my charms, and
• be forewarned that, according to W.J. Bethancourt III, should you offer an unsolicited kiss I am in my right to eviscerate you on the spot!

Say it ain't so, Pho. . .

Oh my... chagrin (deep) and despondency (utter). How could they? Post-last-call gourmets, gourmands and fur-bearin' varmints alike among the ESIs demand to know the meaning of this! For goodness' sake!

After we waxed all exuberant about Mr Pho on Elgin Street's felicitously diverse menu, they deleted poutine from the sign.

If this was the other side of the Ottawa River, perhaps we could see the twitchy hands of the infamous Language Police. But those particular officious bureaucratic twits do not patrol here. Yet. We have plenty of others.

And anyhoo, if I recall my colonial-era geopolitics correctly, Viet Nam and France once had a close relationship, such that decades later, the (heh...) lingua franca of that country is still pretty much French. It's a French Fact.

So why is there not room on Mr Pho's shiny new sign for peaceful coexistence, a diplomatic detente for the two great solitudes of Pho and Poutine? Tasty, tasty solitudes.... I digress.

One hesitates, in these benighted times and in this context, to stir up the currently-loaded term 'reasonable accommodation'. Yet it seems to my dust-glazed approximately-amber prairie eyes that, indeed, nothing on that sign replaces the deliciousity that is poutine. Except, well, a sad, sad blank space, pretty much exactly the right size for the word 'poutine'...

Why can't they all just get along again? I mean, it's not like the remaining Pho (...well, 'noodle soup'...), Pad Thai and Shawarma are exactly kissin' culinary cousins. So what happened? Enquiring minds need to pho... ummm, know...