Requiem for a Bird

Anne is dead. The cat that was once mine and is now my sister's killed her, but my dad is the one who decided it would be a good idea to save her little feathery corpse in a plastic bag. And I, of course, am the one who thought it was a good idea to take a picture.

Apparently, being morbid is congenital, or contagious, or both.

I got Anne from one of those big-box pet stores sometime during 2002. I was living in the barracks at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, and I decided I needed some less institutionally depressing surroundings. So I bought a Persian rug and a black-lacquer screen, and I pasted some Van Gogh prints on various flat surfaces.

I also covered the inside of my window with multiple layers of tin foil and cardboard, but that was less for aesthetics than for keeping the space aliens from breaking into my thoughts.

I also decided I wanted a pet, so I went out and got the little yellow bird. The reason I opted for the bird was that parakeets are small, and I needed a pet small enough to hide from the fascist barracks-management people, because you aren't allowed to have pets in the barracks.

I kept the bird in my wall-locker. I named her Anne after Anne Frank, hiding in the closet from the Nazis.

Now, it may have struck the more astute among you that close, dark spaces are not the natural environment of birds. I had plans for this difficulty as well. It's fun to look back in retrospect and consider that I actually thought my ideas on how to keep a bird in a closet would work.

First, I figured that as long as I kept a lamp on in with the bird, it wouldn't really matter to her that it was a desk lamp with a sixty-watt bulb instead of something rather larger. Like the sun, for example.

Second, I thought that if birds like to have little mirrors in their cages, and they think that their reflected image in such mirrors are really other birds, then I should be able to duct-tape a few mirrors to the sides of the locker near the bird to create the illusion of not being in a closet.

Of course, neither of these stratagems worked. Eventually, the bird just went insane, and I took her home to live with my brother's bird, Joe. (Joe got very confused in his old age and started laying eggs. Dementia is a terrible thing.) I got a small rodent as a replacement pet, and the rodent did not care at all about being kept shut up in a cabinet.

Shortly before Anne's death, I discovered that she really loved to hear the drill-instructor voice. Any of you who have been around me in person for long enough have heard the drill-instructor voice: "yeah, look at you, freakin' nasty, you disgusting pus-sucker, aaaagh, aaaaagh, recruit." Say that kind of thing to this bird, and she would just start whistling and wiggling her little feathery butt around, and bobbing her head, and all that kind of "I'm a happy birdie" stuff.

She was really very sick.

And now, she's very dead. Mommy used to use the bird as bait to lure the cat out from under the sofa when the cat would sneak inside the house. It always worked. The cat always came out to get the bird, and the bird always flew away and lived.

We grew complacent. We ignored all the warning signs, like all the little dead frogs and lizards that would show up to decompose on the back porch. We thought that it would work out just fine to have cats and birds living together.

We were wrong.

Dead wrong.

The Crazy Price of Gas These Days

A warning to the squeamish: there is severe and confusing philosophy and math geekiness contained herein.

A note for those who will understand: this is like rain on your wedding day.

All of that being said, I have to say that the prices of gasoline these days is just getting ridiculous. And beyond boring statistics, and price breakdowns of how much profit per gallon everyone and their brother is making, and long tedious line charts and bar graphs and those idiotic pictographs with tiny little images of oil barrels...

I have photographic documentary evidence. It's just getting purely ridiculous. Feast your eyes.



Now, your average Joe, and for that matter anyone who's not a dangerous esoterica-obsessed psychotic, will look at that picture and say:

"That doesn't make any damn sense. I have no idea how much a gallon of gas costs at that BP."

As for the dangerous esoterica-obsessed psychopath (of the logico-mathematical variety, of course), will interpret the odd content of the sign as follows:

The leftmost character is, of course, the integer 2. The two rightmost characters are obviously Z to the ninth power.

The remaining symbol, second from the left, is a Schaefer-stroke.

Here it comes... you have been warned:

>>>DANGER OF EXPLODING BRAINS<<<

>>>HAZARD: GEEK CONTAMINATION<<<

Okay, you asked for it.

In symbolic logic, there are four operators which are commonly used. Together, and along with some P's and Q's and other letters, and a handful of parentheses, you get a language to which we affectionately refer as "Curly F". Of course, we actually write this as a curly F, which I don't have as one of my characters, so we'll have to do without.

Two of the operators are "and" and "or". "And" looks like a small letter A without the cross-stroke. "Or" looks like a small letter V, or more to the point, like the "and" symbol upside-down. These are called Boolean operators, and they are named after a fellow named Boole. The F in Curly F stands for Fitch, who's the fellow who came up with a whole bunch of stuff about the language and how you use it.

Incidentally, Boole and Fitch make a great spoonerism.

Other than "and" and "or", we have "not", which looks either like a tilde or a hyphen that turns sharply down for a bit at the right end. And, of course, we have the conditional, which looks like an arrow that points right. We read the conditional "If...then...". The rest we read just like their names.

Now, there's all kinds of rules about how these things work together, and I'm not going into all of them, because people have written textbooks about this and I'm only writing a really long blog. So when I say that something is so, you'll either have to just believe me (it's okay, I'm right) or figure it out yourselves, because it is kind of intuitive.

So, we can say something like "If (not-P and not-Q), then (not-(P or Q))". But, after all, we have four operators here, and it's a fun thing to do for freaks like me and Schaefer to think about if we really need all of them.

Well, we don't need the conditional. "If P, then Q", says just the same thing when it comes out in the wash as "Q or not-P". Scratch one.

We can get rid of either the "and" or the "or", too. Pick one... I can say "not-P and not-Q", but that's just the same as "not-(P or Q)". For that matter, I can say "not-(not-P and not-Q))", and that's just "P or Q". Vice versa. Let's keep the "or", because it's more useful for getting rid of the conditional we already killed off.

But, it turns out we can get down to just one operator, and that operator is called the Schaefer-stroke, and it looks like this: |

Yep, just a straight vertical line. Kinda tall, but a line.

And what does it mean? Well, "P|Q" means "neither P nor Q". Whoa... hold on! How can we get everything we need from that? We need the "not", we know that.

Guess what? "P|P", which reads "neither P nor P" is just the same as "not-P or not-P". Which is just... "not-P". That's one.

Now, we want the "or" back, or the "and", either one will get us the other. But the Schaefer-stroke is kind of an "or" already. After all, look at what we did to make our "not". So, if we say "P|Q", it means the same as "not-P or not-Q", which is the same as "not-(P and Q)". So if we want the run-of-the mill "and", we just toss a "not" in front of that last, like so: "(P|Q)|(P|Q)". Beautifully symmetrical, no? And you can get your "or" out of that. And your "if-then" from that.

Gotcha.

So, to the enlightened (read: freaks), the gas sign

(Remember the gas sign? This blog is all about the gas sign. Let's see it again.)



reads "Neither 2 nor Z to the ninth power". This leads them to comment:

"That doesn't make any damn sense. I have no idea how much a gallon of gas costs at that BP."

Sound familiar? If you skipped the whole explanation of the Schaefer-stroke (except for the spoonerism, which is worthwhile for those who did skip and those who didn't alike), then it should. It's what the man-on-the-street said when he looked at the same damn sign.

Yeah. So basically your freaks and your non-freaks:

("(freak|(freak|freak))|(freak|(freak|freak))")

reach the same conclusion. Except the freaks make it a lot more complicated.

This is why philosophy majors are so much fun at parties.

As much fun as a black fly in your Chardonnay.

Potpourri

And I mean Potpourri in the same sense in which it is used as the most idiotic category in Merv Griffin's seminal gameshow "Jeopardy!". It's essentially a category whose unifying feature is that all the questions therein come from other categories on other boards from other nights that ended up not getting used because of that little time's-up noise that Alex Trebek always points out right before we go to a commercial break.

It's a category whose unifying feature is that the questions therein have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. And we call this a category, straight-faced, on a show that allegedly caters to the intellectual elite of the pre-prime-time television watchers.

Nevertheless, this post is made up of items which I just needed to put up at some point or another, and which don't really fit under any heading but "stuff Collin has found ironic or amusing or both".

First off, we have strange and ironic photographs:



This was taken at a franchise of whatever's that shoe store in shopping malls that's not Foot Locker (you know the one I'm talking about), in the Paddock Mall in Ocala. I was there following up on a girl my mother said I should look up and possibly ask out. She turned out to be one of the butchest lesbians I have ever seen.

The interesting postscript to this photograph involves the conversation I had with the lesbian in question, who, sexual preferences aside, is someone I knew in high school and with whom I would have enjoyed having a nice bitch about old times. Pursuant to that, I made the suggestion that we eat something sometime.

Whereupon she asked me what I like to term a "one-answer question". This is not a loaded question, nor a trick question, nor a rhetorical question. It has features of these, but it is an infelicitous question in its own right. An example will serve best both to explain the concept and to continue the story:

"Are you asking me out?" (Remember, this is her response to me suggesting that we eat something in company sometime. Remember further that she is the lesbian former high-school classmate I met in the shoe store. Just wanted to make sure we hadn't lost the thread of the anecdote.)

Now, of course, this is a one-answer question. What can one say? Only something in the affirmative: either a strong affirmative, such as "Yes, my love, of course I am," or a weak affirmative, such as "Sure, why the hell not." I opted for the weak affirmative, because the question precluded my answering anything like "Certainly not! Pshaw!" without being outright rude.

Incidentally, she followed my response, which was of necessity an affirmative one, with a second one-answer question. This second was of a sneakier sort: a declarative statement to which one must give a certain response. That is, a one-answer question which is not even a question proper at all.

"I have a partner," she said. Of course, I was obliged to answer along the lines of "So what?". To have answered otherwise would have been tantamount to stating outright that my earlier purely social invitation to mutual food consumption had in fact been a romantic overture, which it wasn't, but which possibility I had been forced to leave open by the previous one-answer question which had been posed to me.

Does your head hurt yet? I know mine does.

In conclusion: women are devious by instinct. Even those women who enjoy sexual activities with other women are devious by instinct. They don't intend outright to do these brilliantly coercive things any more than a fish intends outright to swim. (We can tell that they don't intend outright to do them because they can't possibly be intelligent enough to formulate something so devious in a mere instant. Hell, I would have a hard time doing that... a woman? Ha. Flame away.)

It is a funny picture, by the way. Mix and match indeed.

This one is also a lot of fun:



It's hard to see because of the cellophane, but you can tell that this vision chart was manufactured by Lighthouse Industries. If you're familiar with government office supplies, you probably know that Lighthouse Industries is the commercial arm of the Lighthouse for the Blind. Ah, irony. I always knew there was a reason I kept waking up in the morning.

To finish up this mishmash, I'd like to express my contempt for the soon-to-be-premiering reality television program about kids creating and managing their own society or whatever.

Any such experiment in child-generated society without adult interference must necessarily result in the sort of behaviour detailed in William Golding's classic work of literature, "Lord of the Flies". The only reason that this little television program will not end up with animalistic death-worship cults and the blood-sacrifice of littluns is because the children will know they are being observed, and observed by adults.

I imagine it'll turn out looking rather like "Animal Farm", instead. Heartwarmingly communist, with a dash of John Lennon's insipid "Imagine" tossed in for good measure. I'm quite glad that fellow shot him, really. There is justice in this world for godless limey nihilists.

And with that, I bid you all a good night, but not before the following obligatory comment:

Sucks to your ass-mar, Piggy.

Hunting the rare Work-Related Anecdote

It's very difficult to come up with good blog material when you work in a hospital. Due to those pesky privacy act laws, I can't really say anything about the great stuff that goes on.

All of the truly hilarious names that one runs across... cannot be said. The ongoing healthcare sagas, perhaps involving men, and maybe involving mammograms, cannot be revealed at all. Everything is off-limits, job-losing, federal-indictment stuff, which makes it tough to come up with new and amusing things for all my friends and readers.

But, I have at long last found something that can be blogged without any danger of terrible things happening to me.

I had a phone conversation the other day by a man we'll call Mr. Jennings, because Mr. Jennings was not the man's real name. Neither, for that matter, was Mr. Allardyce his real name. I just wanted to get that perfectly clear. The man's name was not Mr. Hastings.

You also need to understand something about the way in which optometrists become optometrists. First, they go to optometry school. Then they become "externs". This is exactly like medical doctors becoming "interns". The optometry people just call them something different, I guess, because they're so special.

After the individual is done being an extern, he or she then serves a one-year residency, during which they are a real doctor for all intents and purposes, except they have to have someone sign off on all their work to make sure they don't screw up.

That being said, we just recently had our last two residents leave, and concurrently had two new residents arrive. So, now that two doctors who were around for a year are no longer around, we naturally have a lot of patients calling and asking to speak with them.

At this point, the caller has to be informed that Dr. Williams is no longer working at the clinic. Or, perhaps the caller has to be informed that Dr. Sabin is no longer working at the clinic. (These are, in fact, the doctors' real names; I don't think their privacy needs protected. Besides, they're getting free advertising.) One of these conversations went brilliantly, the other day.

Here it is... see how long it takes for you to figure out what's going on:

Me: Good morning, Eye Clinic. This is Collin; how can I help you?
Mr. Jennings: How ya doin', there, young man.
Me: Just fine, sir. How can I help you today?
Mr. Jennings: I need you to let me speak with Dr. Williams.
Me: I'm sorry, sir, but Dr. Williams isn't here any more. She was a resident.
Mr. Jennings: A resident? What the hell was she a resident for, son?
Me: Well, when they start out, every doctor has to be a resident, sir.
Mr. Jennings: They all have to be a resident? Why the hell does every one of those docs have to be a resident?
Me: Well, it's so they can learn to be a better doctor, sir.
Mr. Jennings: So to make 'em all better doctors, they lock 'em all up?
Me: No, sir... they don't lock them up, they're free to come and go as they please.
Mr. Jennings: Well, if they aren't locking them up, then what the hell's the point in arresting them?

This was the point where I realized that we had been talking at cross-purposes for a very long time. If you're confused, pay extra-close attention to Mr. Jennings' last line, and read over the whole dialogue while keeping the concept of "being arrested" in mind.

We've also had numerous incidents of asking a patient if the doctor had violated his eyes today (perhaps as part of a violated fundus exam?). And, of course, the old standby of "have a seat, sir, and someone will call you out in a minute." That's right, pilgrim. You want ta have yer eyes examined? Well, I'm'a callin' you out.

Unfortunately, that's about the best I can do as far as funny stuff that happens at work. Write to your congressman today, and tell him you think all of those protection-of-health-information and privacy-act laws should be done away with so you can know about all the crazy stuff that goes on in hospitals.

Until then, that's the best I have. And stay tuned... bizarro pictures will be forthcoming as soon as I figure out how to get them off of my telephone and onto my computer.