Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year

2011 has come with a vengeance. i have a cold, have to go to college again, and i don't want to be here. sigh...oh well.

i miss you 2010, a face can't be made out of 2011. i shall have to find another means of amusing myself with this new number. i'll think of something.

one thing i am looking forward to is a tom baker scarf. yes, THE scarf from the fourth doctor on DOCTOR WHO!!!! well, not the exact one, mind you. one that my gramma is knitting with similar colours and 15 feet in length! She is AMAZING! so happy, being a scarf enthusiast and a lover of all things interesting, it makes the world ok :D <-- soo happy :)

i have found out that hair dye is aggravating because it costs an arm and a leg, and then goes and washes out in a week. the hair dye makers need to look up the word permanent. alas, my hair is slowly turning from half purple to all blonde :( ah well-what can you do? by the way, do you know where the phrase "an arm and a leg" (in the context of something costing a lot of money) comes from? well here you go:

An Arm and A Leg

Meaning

A large, possibly exorbitant, amount of money.

Origin

This is one of those phrases for which it isn't difficult to come across a popular explanation. In this case the tale that is told is that portrait painters used to charge more for larger paintings and that a head and shoulders painting was the cheapest option, followed in price by one which included arms and finally the top of the range 'legs and all' portrait. As so often with popular etymologies, there's no truth in that story. Painters certainly did charge more for large pictures, but there's no evidence to suggest they did so by limb count. In any case the phrase is much more recent than the painting origin would suggest.

It is in fact an American phrase, coined sometime after WWII. The earliest citation I can find is from The Long Beach Independent, December 1949:

Food Editor Beulah Karney has more than 10 ideas for the homemaker who wants to say "Merry Christmas" and not have it cost her an arm and a leg.

'Arm' and 'leg' are used as examples of items that no one would consider selling other than at an enormous price. It is a grim reality that, around that time, there are many US newspaper reports of servicemen who lost an arm and a leg in the recent war. It is quite likely, although difficult to prove conclusively at this remove, that the phrase originated in reference to the high cost paid by those who suffered such amputations.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/arm-and-a-leg.html

Interesting stuff :)

i have become something of an insomniac upon occasion. it isn't fun, yet it's adventurous in a sense of the word. maybe because it's something new to me. then, i decided that it can't be insomnia, but nocturnalism. i, my friends, am a nocturnal animal. sweet! ;)

l8er