You're liable to cough, you might very well fall off

[austin_dern]

My brother is very allergic to cats. Nevertheless, he has one in his house, because he loves his wife and she is kind enough to keep it down to one pet at a time. I would comically exaggerate his allergy, except that it's not possible; he's more allergic than any exaggeration I could provide suggests. It's severe enough the house can be vacuumed only when he is out for the whole day, so there's time for cat fluff to settle after its stirring up. So. As people arrived for the gettogether, my brother issued the warning that no one was to pet the cat under any circumstances. He made this in a simple imperative tone that encouraged everyone to superficially agree while snickering with one another about it, although we were willing to not pet the cat if that meant he wouldn't break out from touching hands that had touched the cat.

As you can imagine, the ruling left people happy to strictly speaking obey. It wasn't until I pointed out we could use one of the extra plastic spoons to pet the cat with that my brother finally explained the point of his ruling, which he should have done at front. He doesn't particularly care who touches the cat, but stirring up dander would result in him having several miserable days, and he did not want that. If he had said that to start with then we could have all gone right to the ultimate solution instead of wasting several hours approaching the answer.

Toward the end of the night when the cat wandered out from the bedrooms, she could count on several people putting out their hands and brushing a few inches above her head and back. The stroking was in line with the fur -- no sense rubbing the cat the wrong way -- and was just precisely as successful in keeping both cat and brother satisfied as you might have imagined.

A lingering thought about that 1898 book I just read: it mentions L Frank Baum, of course, and that in the 1890s he had a career selling plate-glass window fronts for stores and of necessity teaching store owners how to make attractive, attention-gathering displays instead of jamming as many products as possible into whatever space was available. (The lesson for web page designers might be learned within the next forty years.) I just ... would like better backing for the claim that L Frank Baum invented attractive store window-displays. Someone had to, yes, but the guy who created The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? It seems like the world should be bigger than that, regardless of how strange the world deep-down is.

Trivia: French King Louis XIV's court grew to include ten thousand participants. Source: Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud, Peter Watson.

Currently Reading: The Viking Rocket Story, Milton W Rosen. And signed by either Rosen or a Rosen impersonator, too.

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

There are coatings you can put into their fur to minimize or mask the allergens..

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of such, but then I've been lucky enough to live without discovering any allergies of my own.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Plate glass windows for large stores date back at least to the Civil War. I'm sure Baum may have spent time teaching people how to arrange their displays, but that doesn't mean that he invented the practice.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Right, but, what the book gets at is in the 19th century you get store window displays that consist of show as many items as you can in as compact a space as you can -- the visual equivalent of those old ``advertisements'', I suppose, in which they try to fit 20,000 words into a quarter-column of newsprint and leave the text unchanged for a two-year run. Whereas in the 20th century you get a selection of fewer things, generally more tastefully arranged, often with some feature to attract interest and gets passers-by to stop and attract a crowd.

The book does quote Baum writing on how to make these more interesting displays (including anything that moves is always a good idea, particularly if it isn't obvious how it's being made to move) or how to get crowds to assemble at the windows (like paying someone to stand outside and seed a crowd), and mentions the problems of convincing store owners that attractive window fronts weren't an offense to public morality. So I can accept that he was among those turning window displays into the things you see in movies of the 1930s and 1940s, but crediting him for the whole trend ... well, that needs a demonstration of other people following his lead specifically.