Phicosis

This one time, at Banjo Camp...

2011-08-13T13:22:00.004-04:00

Well, Dear Readers, it so happened that last week I was at the Appalachian String Music Festival, known to those in the know as "Banjo Camp". Now, just to be clear, there were fiddlers and guitar players, and five verified accordions (I was one of those, God help us), but Banjo Camp is a much more compact and satisfactory moniker, so that's the one we used, and is therefore the one that I am going to use.

Now, this blog is sort of an amalgamation of Facebook statuses that I was unable to post, because there was no cell reception at Banjo Camp. Well, that's a lie. In previous years, there has been no cell reception at Banjo Camp, but there was at least some this year, because I saw people walking around with cellphones in their ears, showing no respect for the music, the bastards.

In any case, I turned off my phone before we left and didn't turn it on again until we got back. Probably even if I tried to update Facebook it would not have worked; maybe there was voice reception, but data reception I sincerely doubt.

So one fine day (I have no idea what day it was, and that condition will persist throughout. I'm absolutely terrible with dates.) we arrived at the campground, and immediately began to add to the tent city that was rapidly forming. There are no assigned camping sites; it's strictly catch as catch can. And, once one catches, one immediately begins to lay things out on the ground, trying to save as much space as possible for one's friends. The result is a layout that is both crowded and frenetic, as vehicles, tents, screen rooms, and canopies all vie for a few more square feet of precious real estate.

Having set up with our friends, we naturally proceeded next to have a drink. There is no alcohol allowed on the camp grounds, but in a de facto sense that was far from true. The reality of the matter is that the "no alcohol" injunction is meant to make it easier for the sheriff to haul you away in the paddywagon if you become a drunken and disruptive idiot. We, of course, were perfect ladies and gentlemen, and decanted our wine and whiskey into iced-tea bottles, the less to be obvious. I will of course deny all of this if pressed on the issue, literary license and all that.

And then Banjo Camp started in earnest, our having set up and had our libation. The format is simple. There are contests for banjo pickers and fiddle players and string bands going on all the time, with the finals for these contests being held generally rather late at night. In proliferous addition to these events, jam sessions are going on everywhere all the time.

(For the uninitiated, a "jam session" is an ad hoc musical event in which at least two and possibly as many as twenty musicians gather together to play various and sundry songs, or "tunes". These have been known to go on for hours at a time. There are famous names in the old-time string-music world that you have never heard. To jam with one or more of these is a very prestigious honor.)

My Banjo Camp buddy was my beloved Aunt Barbara, and we ran around together most of the time, having similar interests and philosophies concerning what it's all about, so to speak. Every morning, we would wake up around seven and immediately have a Beefeater's Instant Breakfast (again, for the uninitiated, a gin and tonic; of course, I hate tonic and won't drink it, so we just pass the opened bottle over my cup in the name of Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook) which we would enjoy until our friend Rosemarie emerged. At that point, I would make up some coffee (she liked to call me her "Coffee Minion"), which she would have black and I would have Irish.

And pretty soon it was time to go and make baskets. In retrospect, I find it amazing that I spent sixteen or seventeen hours of a music festival making arts and crafts projects. Of course, the baskets we made really weren't what you would call arts and crafts; we didn't use any macaroni or glitter. They turned out looking quite nice.

I will admit, I was really struggling with basketry. It wasn't until the fourth day and the final project that I really began to get with the program, and I had the help of Aunt Barbara and this great kid named Ollie who we met to boot. It is a humbling experience when some kid is just going to town on something about which you are writhing futilely.

But wait! While we're making baskets, aren't we missing all the great fiddlers and pickers and bands and jams? Along comes Paul, riding a white horse.

Who is Paul? (Who are any of us? A deeply existential question for another time.) Paul is the man with the recording machine who went around making field recordings of all the music he could find. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Paul was a recording machine. The man was up at the streak of dawn, went out recording, and didn't stop until he had found and recorded some of the really great jams at two or three in the morning. And the next day, on four or five hours of sleep, he was up and at it again. It's thanks to Paul that we'll all have old-time string music in our cars and on our stereos until the angel blows his trumpet.

As a complete aside, we noticed an abnormally large number of redheads in attendance. So large, in fact, that it inspired us to take some random samplings of individuals passing down a road. We included strawberry blondes in the redhead group, and of course we had no way of knowing who was naturally of that color, so we counted the doubtfuls as well. Our results were staggering: based on several random samples, we calculated that between ten and sixteen percent of the population of Banjo Camp were redheads.

To put this in perspective, only two percent of the population of the United States are natural redheads, and only about twelve percent of countries like Ireland and Scotland are natural redheads. We have yet to come up with a satisfactory explanation for our results.

I will add, just in case someone was wondering, that there were people from all parts of the Eastern Seaboard, the Upper Midwest, and the eastern provinces of Canada in attendance. So if you're coming up with an explanation (which I would love to hear), take that into account.

Finally, after a solid week of dirt camping (camping in tents, pitched on the bare ground, as opposed to RVs or cabins) it was time to go home. And with tears in our eyes, we rode off into the sunset (fine, sunrise, but it lacks the same poetic force) to spend another year away from the chaos and drinking and music and fun that makes Banjo Camp so worthwhile.

Meanwhile, we watch and wait. Many of our Banjo Camp friends we will see again: Paul, Keith, and Rosemarie, for starters. Some, like Mike who just happened to pitch his tent too near too our compound and got sucked in, we may never see again. And we will always have the memories of the times that Banjo Camp luminaries like J.C. stopped to jam with humble little old us.

But, until we meet again, and paraphrasing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the circle will be unbroken, by and by (Lord, by and by).

(The end. The enlightened will understand.)

Try This At Home!

2011-06-22T14:13:00.004-04:00

Well, dear readers, I haven't put anything up for a while. So, just to keep things rolling, I've decided to depart almost entirely from my usual format and pretend to be one of those food blogs you hear so much about. That being the case, here's a recipe of my own invention. Caveat: alcoholics and little children stand clear; the reason for this will be readily apparent.

Collin's Margarita Jello

Note: this recipe was inspired when Jello actually made a margarita-flavored variety. I don't think they do anymore, but this is very damned close.

Ingredients:

2 cups margarita mix (the kind you buy in a bottle)
1 cup of the cheapest tequila you can find (I paid nine dollars for a fifth.)
3 packages of lime jello (3oz per package)
2 packages of lemon jello (also 3oz per package)
Sea salt, coarsely ground (I recommend buying one of those salt-with-grinder-included things)

Directions:

1. Combine margarita mix and tequila in a saucepan; bring to a full boil.
2. While waiting, combine all 5 packages of Jello in a heat-resistant mixing bowl.
3. Pour boiling liquids into mixing bowl, very carefully.
4. Mix well.
5. When all of the Jello power is dissolved, pour mixture into a baking pan. The size of the pan really doesn't matter all that much, but I recommend a 9" by 13" for a good Jello thickness.
6. Mix the contents of the pan around to get rid of all the bubbles. If you don't, you'll have a gelatinous scum on your finished product. I recommend using a slotted wooden spoon for all your mixing.
7. Place pan in freezer, allow to freeze overnight. You could put it in the refrigerator, if you really want or need to.
8. Immediately before serving, grind a conservative amount of salt over the Jello. Be aware that the salt will disappear into the gelatin if you leave it for too long.
9. Slice and enjoy!

For a bit of further commentary, I would like to add that this recipe packs a punch. For those of fainter heart, it's okay to use a higher ratio of margarita mix to tequila. Do not use a smaller ratio. One third tequila is the maximum you can use and still have the gelatin set up properly when chilled.

Also, make sure to keep this Jello as cold as you can, circumstances permitting. It will begin to melt alarmingly in the heat. I generally keep most of the batch in the freezer (don't worry, it won't freeze with that much alcohol in it) and take out smaller portions to set on the food table or buffet.

And that's it, kids. I'm planning on experimenting with other libation-based Jellos, and you can too! Just remember that putting alcohol in Jello means you need more Jello packages to get it to turn jiggly.

Well, there's my food blog.

Bon appetit.

Of Churches and Cats

2011-04-21T16:31:00.004-04:00

Well, this is a first. A few firsts, actually.

For one, this is the first time I'm writing my blog in OpenOffice Writer (yes, I use OpenOffice and you should too) rather than online on the Blogspot editor. This is because I do not have an internet connection. Which leads us to another first.

This is the first blog I've written in church. During an actual church service, no less.

Now, granted, it's not my church service. It is, however, my church building, and I've been tasked with making sure that the visiting/renting worshippers here behave themselves. Or something like that. I've never been quite clear on what we call “babysitting”. I've done babysitting for this church-group, Breath of Life, and I've done babysitting for Narcotics Anonymous that meets here, and aside from being on the premises, I don't know what are my other duties. Am I supposed to make sure they don't make a mess of the bathrooms, or start breaking up the furniture when the Spirit is really upon them? Prevent defilement of the altar or the Paschal Candle or the processional cross?

Your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, since there seems to be none of that bad stuff going on right now, I'm sitting in a quiet, dark room where I can see them but they can't see me, blogging away.

Now, the room I'm in is labelled “Library”, but what it really is is the “Cry Room”. In the Cry Room, parents who wish to remove themselves and their squalling offspring from the sanctuary (I am misusing this term; we'll get to that later) can enjoy a small room where they can see and hear the service by the expedient of cleverly arranged cinderblocks and a modest PA system.

Before, I was hanging out in the balcony, but the balcony is not sound-suppressed, so I, after due deliberation, chose the Cry Room. The balcony has a much better view of the proceedings, but having to be so quiet just isn't worth it.

I'm sure that at this point someone must be thinking... isn't is sacrilegious or blasphemous or at least disrespectful to blog in a church? After doing some light research, I have determined that I am not in fact in church proper.

Church architecture is really a fascinating subject, and in my brief study thereof, I have determined that our church, while lacking such finery as arcades, and having no architectural need of a transept, has more or less the same pieces as larger and fancier churches. And, having hunted through descriptions of narthexes and naves, and of chancels and sacristies and choirs and quires and sanctuaries, I have yet to find cry rooms and balconies listed as parts of churches.

So, I think I'm pretty safe from being struck by the lightnings of divine wrath.

Of course, I'm being pretty flip about it, so maybe I'm not all that safe after all.

But we soldier on, and if we soldier long enough, we may yet get to the real subject of this blog, which I have arbitrarily decided will be feral cats.

Now, some of you remember a while back when I made a mockery of the different colored ribbons which signified as many as a dozen causes apiece. I was especially derisive of the orange ribbon for feral cats, which seemed among the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.

Since that time, I have learned that there actually exist orange-ribbon people, and that they have formed orange-ribbon organizations, the better to put forth their orange-ribbon agenda.

I provide as evidence Alley Cat Allies, a fine example of such an organization. While other orange-ribbon feral-cat organizations are at least faintly committed to reducing the feral cat population, Alley Cat Allies seems to think that things are fine just the way they are.

Well, that's not quite true. You, yes you, should be taking decisive action to care for and protect the fragile rights of feral cats. If you visit their website, you will find excellent information on how to provide these misunderstood animals with food and shelter.

They call it “colony care”, I believe. Now, call me an alarmist, but a colony of feral cats in my near proximity scares the bejesus out of me. And the fact that there are people, my neighbors, in fact, who are taking steps to preserve and defend said colony... this fills me with a vague sense of dread.

I'm not going to be too harsh with the organization itself, really. Even though they advocate a trap and neuter program. Oh... what's that? They they trap cats, neuter them...and then just release them back into the wild! Of course, this is the only morally right thing to do... Alley Cat Allies also raises awareness that cats that end up in various sorts of animal-lockup facilities get euthanized.

Which is just atrocious, of course, because all feral (and let's not forget that “feral” means “wild”) animals, birds and squirrels and all of that ilk included, have a God-given right to die of cold and starvation in the winter, and of injuries from turf and mate disputes in the spring, and of predation just any old time.

That being said, I harbor no real ill will against feral cats. Yes, as previously stated, the notion of feral cat colonies that are supported by my friends and neighbors scares me nigh on to yesterday. But, in the words of our Lord and Savior, in the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew...

“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.”

I suppose that applies to the cats of the yard as well.

Amen.

(After all, I am in a church. Sort of.)

Travels, the New York Edition

2011-03-20T21:52:00.005-04:00

Well, Dear Readers, I travelled to New York City this past weekend, and it was an eye-opener. Not a huge one; I found most of New York to be mostly like Chicago, and a little less like Philly. Of course, there are redeeming factors for the Big Apple, as it seems there are for almost everything, everyone, and everyplace.

Let's start with my accommodations. Unfortuntately, I didn't get a picture of the actual room, but that's not a problem. Take a look at any small bedroom setup in the IKEA catalog and you'll have a spookily accurate likeness. It was also a room with a view:

I thought at first that this would be a great suicide spot, but then considered that there are a bunch of breakable air-conditioning units at the bottom, and someone would eventually find you, down amongst the heat pumps. Let me insert the caveat here that I am not thinking about offing myself, by jumping off things or otherwise. It's just hard to look at that view and not think "what a great place to jump".

But, moving out from the hotel into the real world (inasmuch as any highly stereotyped city can claim real-world status), I have to say that I really admire Times Square. I love Times Square because its only function is to be Times Square. Other than that, it serves no real purpose. Yes, you can argue that it serves purposes like advertising or commercialism. But these things go on in far less ostentatious fashion throughout the city and throughout the world. You don't need Times Square to pull those off. It's the geographic analogue of Hello Kitty.

But before that, I'd better throw in the obligatory photo of Dearly Beloved and me in Times Square:

Now, where were we...? Oh yes.

Wait... what? Times Square is Hello Kitty? Yes, it is. Consider the following.

Hello Kitty is a purely merchandising phenomenon. There were no TV shows or comic books (although some have spawned after the fact) to give rise to the character of Hello Kitty. The owners of Hello Kitty have just put the image on everything that stays still for more than forty-five seconds or so. So, you can reasonably claim that Hello Kitty exists by, for, and of Hello Kitty.

Now, Times Square is a place where a lot of businesses have locations and billboards and suchlike. But, I think we can agree that those locations and billboards could exist and yet not be Times Square. Times Square is something special... it exists for the sake of its own existence, and it is where it is because if it were not, there would be a hole left in the world. Times Square exists by, for, and of Times Square. That picture of my wife and I would never have been taken at any other intersection in the world. That's how Times Square just is itself.

Adventure in Times Square: Dearly Beloved decided that she needed to eat some Sno-Caps. It's a kind of chocolate disk candy with white nonpareils on it. You get them at the movie theater. Now, Aunt Barbara and I were pretty sure that we could find these at any drugstore, and drugstores are not in short supply. But Dearly Beloved had seen a chocolate store down in Times Square, and so therefore we had to go to that one. Aunt Barbara and I weren't sure we had seen it, or could find it. "It has a big sign," quoth Dearly Beloved. On we went.

And, of course, upon entering Times Square we realized that everything in Times Square has a big sign. Well, Aunt Barbara and I had realized this before, but the realization was really ground in like a boot to the face when we stepped across into Times Square Proper. Long story short, we found the chocolate store, it did in fact have a big sign, it did not in fact have Sno-Caps, and so we bought some at a drugstore and cracked jokes about big signs for the rest of the weekend.

We also, of course, took care of my three things for a city. For the uninitiated, whenever I go to a new big city, I choose three things that I want to do that will make me feel my stay has been worthwhile. Anything else is lagniappe. So, for New York, we had a Manhattan (the drink) in Manhattan (the island). We also went for breakfast at Tiffany's (this is my idea of a joke, and if you don't get it, there are a book and a movie to help you along). And I saw a show (Wicked) and it was, as they would say a little further north, wicked good.

I actually recommend this tactic to those who find themselves willing or unwilling tourists. Pick any three things, the more modest the better. Once you've done those three things, your vacation is automatically a success! How easy was that? As a side note, I recommend at least one of your three picks involve food. Chicago deep dish pizza in Chicago, Philly cheesesteak in Philly, you get the idea. Try it out.

And now, before I finish up this post, I have to take the mood to a lower level.

You've seen (I think everyone has seen) the pictures of the homeless people in New York sitting on the steam grates to stay warm in the winter? I noticed, as one notices things, that the steam coming up through the steam grates smells like vomit.

I find it almost unspeakably sad that there are people who have to endure the smell of vomit for hours on end just to glean a little bit of warmth from the crumbs that fall off ConEdison's table. I wonder how many just freeze to death in the winter, vents or no vents. It's Andersen's little match girl all over again, and how many times?

I'll leave you with that sobering thought. I suppose I'm doing what I've always rather mocked, "raising awareness", without proposing any action to be taken. Well, so be it. Think about those men and women on the grates. There but for the grace of God go we all.

O Brave New World, That Hath Such Products In't

2011-03-06T20:37:00.004-05:00

I've been watching the good old television rather a lot lately, because it's easy to do when you're heavily sedated. Sedation notwithstanding, I've noticed an interesting trend in a certain class of consumer products. I would actually call it a distressing trend, or a disturbing trend, or some kind of trend that has an ominous d-word as its' adjective. Why the alarm? We shall see.

Now, consumer products have been touting themselves as "clinically proven" for years beyond count. I can only presume this means that Suave Shampoo has their very own Suave Shampoo Clinic that they use for clinically proving things that they want to have clinically proven about their shampoo. Maybe this is a bit paranoid of me, to be so damned certain that they would never use an independent lab to prove out these things.

Actually, I have heard commercials claim that independent labs have verified the claims that they make. I just wonder if those independent labs are remembering who's paying the bills. And I also wonder what happens when the lab results are not flattering. File 13, I'm sure.

But that's all in the past, said and done, old news.

What I find really delightful and chilling are all the amazing new technological breakthroughs our scientific community is rolling on out to an ecstatic world. Amazing new breakthroughs in the field of...

Cosmetics.

You'd hardly credit the things they're coming out with these days to keep us all young and beautiful. Let's start with one of my very vague favorites: Proactiv solution has what they call "micro-crystal medicine" to take care of your zits. On the TV commercial they show a sort of pinkish pocket which I suppose is supposed to represent a pore, and then they manipulate the graphic so that some white angular grains pour down in there. Witness the miracle of micro-crystal medicine. Nobody really knows what it is, but it's white and crystally and gets into your pores. Sounds like a solid buy.

Now, the Aveeno company has some very interesting stratagems in the use of "active naturals". It's fascinating what plants and suchlike they manage to use in their various hand creams and lotions. Feverfew makes a big appearance, so big, in fact, that they have to say that it's related to chamomile. I suppose people might be distrustful of it otherwise. Everyone trusts chamomile. We put it in tea and drink it, so how dangerous could it possibly be?

Some of the more adventurous ingredients? Well, you have your salicylic acid, for one (this is obtained directly from willow bark. Why don't they just say so?), also your olive leaf and shitake complex. Now, the shitake is a mushroom. How do they get a complex out of a mushroom? Who knows. And let's not forget soy. Soy and soy extracts and soy complexes are a vital part of all of this.

Shea butter and cocoa butter are not in short supply either.

But there are far more esoteric ingredients than mere plants. For example, Olay Regenerist Advanced Anti-Aging Eye Lifting Serum (and yes, that is the full product name, no stops and all) boasts of its amino-peptide and b3 complex. What is that supposed to mean?

Well, before the question of what it is supposed to mean is tackled, let us first, in good philosophical fashion, address the question of what is it supposed to be. This is an easy answer.

It is supposed to be confusing. And therefore, what it is supposed to mean is that one should take faith in that which one does not understand and buy the product. After all, if I can't understand it, it must be really good. Hence amino-peptides and B3 complexes.

Along the same lines we find Top Care Exfoliating Detoxifying Daily Regenerating Cleanser for Face. Yes, that is the name of one product, as seen on the front of the product label. One wonders, what with the detoxifying and regenerating, what it can't do. Perhaps is will make me a sandwich next. And the sandwich would be rich with oxygenated derma-beads (your guess is as good as mine) and that good ol' amino-peptide complex. A perennial favorite.

But I have yet to get to the really terrifying one... L'Oreal Youth Code.

Yes, the name itself sounds like it should denote a French street gang (hard to imagine, but I'm working on it) or else one of those secret societies like Skull and Bones or the Masons or the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elk.

But, sadly, it is neither of these. L'Oreal Youth Code is simply the scariest thing on the cosmetics aisle. To put it in their own words: "after 10 years of research scientists have unlocked the code of skin's youth by discovering a specific set of genes that are responsible for skin's natural power of regeneration."

Apparently, this twiddling around with your genes "reduces signs of stress, fatigue, and aging".

They also were good enough to clarify that their 10 years of gene research were an in vivo study. Which pretty much means - no, which exactly means they were experimenting on live stuff! Live people, even!

And, of course, this product, along with countless others, comes in the form of a "serum". This is somehow different from creams and lotions and gels and I don't know what else. I know that it sounds more convincing than any of them, like something you might get from a doctor. And yet you get it off a shelf in the grocery store, fork over your forty bucks, and head on home to mess around with home-made gene therapy, which probably works just as billed.

Until your face melts off.

But, then, we probably have a serum for that, too.

Long May She Wave

2011-02-06T20:43:00.002-05:00

This blog will, a fortiori, be a short one.

I was recently watching all of the opening lead-up to the Super Bowl... they said the game was at six, but it was half past and I was still not watching burly men colliding with one another.

There were a couple things that struck me as odd. The first was that "America the Beautiful" has reached a level of reverence in American culture equal to the national anthem itself. As it was being sung, the camera focused on various individuals, most of whom had their hands or ball-caps over their hearts. Being a purist, I cannot of course say outright that "America the Beautiful" makes for a better national anthem than the original penned by Francis Scott Key, but people certainly seem to think it is.

And then there was the part of any major sporting event that just makes me cringe... the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner". For some reason, those performing this song feel that they have absolute artistic license to alter the melody any which way they want. With any other song, this would be unacceptable, for the simple reason that we would not be able to discern which song was being thus rendered.

You can experiment with this at home using "Silent Night". Just go wild with the tune, and see where that gets you.

But, with our very National Anthem, singers like Christina Aguilera (I hope I spelled that right) feel that they can just sub in whatever trills and warbles and upped octaves (by which I mean 8va for you musicians out there) that they wish, and get away with it. And they do get away with it, because everyone knows the song so well that they even recognize it mangled.

Now, as a Marine vet, I stand to attention whenever the national anthem is played. (Also for "Anchors Aweigh" and "The Marines' Hymn", but that's beside the point.) And to tell the truth, when I'm listening to one of these pop-music garbled versions, I feel a little bit silly, standing there, trying to render respect to music that is being disrespected by the very person singing it.

What's the point of all this? I haven't the foggiest clue. Maybe I just want you all to share my disgust. All of you Americans, that is. If you're one of my readers in Great Britain or Canada, I sincerely hope that you can't relate to what I'm talking about.

In any case, God bless America. And as for our Star-Spangled Banner, long may she wave.

Good night, dear readers all.

And To All A Good Night

2011-01-06T20:47:00.004-05:00

Once again, beloved readers, the holiday season has come and gone. In a move that was as unexpected as it was completely out of character, I decided this year to be the sort of person who likes Christmas. It worked surprisingly well.

Now, as you may have gathered, I have never been a big fan of Christmas, at least not since I was a little one and the whole world revolved around it. Many people decry Christmas because of the crass materialism, the tasteless lawn decorations, or some other excellent reason. I have always disliked the season most because of the crowds.

Crowds in department stores. Crowds in the supermarket. Crowds in the parking lots of almost everywhere you ever want to park. I dislike crowds mostly because they slow everything down and get in the way of whatever I'm trying to get accomplished. I also dislike crowds intrinsically, but there are pills for that sort of thing.

Anyway, I decided to be very cheerful and hail-fellow-well-met when dealing with the crowds this time around. Being wished a Merry Christmas at random by complete strangers used to rather discomfit me, but this time I was that complete stranger. And, to my surprise, "Merry Christmas" substituted rather well for "Get The Hell Out Of My Way".

Raise curtain, the neighborhood grocery. Two women with shopping carts are blocking the entire pasta aisle. Enter me, stage left. "Merry Christmas, ladies," I exclaim. The two women move along, clearing my passage to the rigatoni.

It's like a Christmas miracle. In about a year, I strongly advise that you try it.

Of course, as with any Christmas, I ended up spending a significant portion thereof in the company of my in-laws. Let me make clear again that I really love my in-laws. They're great. However, I still feel that I'm in trial mode, and minding my p's and q's for days and days running gets quite exhausting. However, I did get the opportunity to use arcane vocabulary words (pintle and gudgeon) while repairing a door. Also, my brother-in-law and I got to take down the Christmas tree.

And by "take down" I mean haul out into the backyard and systematically dismember. Nothing quite says that the Season of Joy has come to an end than turning your beloved tree, focus of so much happiness and goodwill, into fragments acceptable for yard waste pickup. It's right up there with giving away all of those thoughtful gifts you received but really don't want. I get to do a lot of that, what with living in a tiny apartment with no storage space to speak of.

Besides, it gets better and better. Later on this month, I get to go to a wedding... and not just any wedding. At this wedding, people will be wearing kilts. At least the wedding party, that is. The invitation makes it clear that everyone is welcome to wear kilts if they wish. Provided that they are male, of course. The invitation didn't seem to mention that wearing someone else's tartan is hideous bad luck, but that's okay. I don't believe in bad luck, faeries, demons, or North Dakota.

While I'm on the wedding invitation, I have to say that I was really embarrassed on the happy couple's behalf; I doubt they would have the technical knowledge to be embarrassed about it themselves. What they had done was put their own little coats-of-arms on the invitation. Now, this is considered really bad form, unless you have some really incontrovertible right to bear those particular arms.

What's more is that there are only three appropriate arms for a woman: the lozenge, the escutcheon of pretense, and the husband's arms. The lozenge is just a diamond shape that has the heraldic elements on it. The escutcheon of pretense is for engagements; the woman's family arms are placed inside the future husband's family arms on a sort of miniature shield. They didn't use either.

And that is entirely beside the point, although heraldry is really rather fascinating. They have strange and different names for the colors and everything. It really makes one wish that one were some sort of aristocracy. But I digress.

So, more later on the wedding with kilts. If it lives up to its billing, it'll be a hell of a show.

And in the meantime, have the happiest New Year you can legally have in your municipality. I know I will.

A Halloween and Guy Fawkes Double Feature

2010-11-06T13:59:00.017-04:00

Well, Dear Readers, it's been a long time. I seem to keep saying that. (By the way, if you're looking for Bedtime Stories, it's been moved to Classics of the Form.) But here I am again, and I wouldn't for the world miss my Halloween or my Guy Fawkes' Day (Bonfire Night, I'm told, to the initiated), so I've combined them into one glorious post.

For Halloween, I still like to dress up every year to pass out trick-or-treat candy. My family decided long ago that once you were in high school, you became a "halloweenie" if you continued to go trick-or-treating. So, since that time, I've made it my business to dress as something that amuses me. You really only get the chance once a year, so why waste it?

This Halloween, I went as a Communist.

Fortunately I had the Russian hat from my wife's study abroad, as well as the Soviet star to go on it. I rounded it out with a Navy peacoat that I stole once, gloves, jackboots, and a beautiful fake beard. I also put a rolled-up bath towel under my coat to make me fat and jolly.

"Trick or treat," the little kids would say. "Ho, ho, ho," I replied. "Death to Capitalism."

The kids were about five or six and didn't know what I was getting at, but the parents knew all right.

I gave them their candy. "Here's a handout from the State," I said. "Ho, ho, ho." You see, part of the reason for the towel is to pull Santa Claus into the picture a bit. After all, Santa gives free handouts from the State every year, one might contend.

"Thank you," the parents would say as they began to walk away. "Forth the People's State, in the name of Great Lenin," I would reply.

This was all great fun, but the best thing that happened was when a little girl and her daddy were walking away. "He was a pirate," said the little girl. "No, he wasn't a pirate," said the daddy. I would have loved to have been in on the rest of that conversation... how exactly did daddy explain the whole communist situation to his five-year-old daughter? Had I been in his shoes it would have been "Yes, he was a pirate, and a jolly one indeed," and leave it at that.

Of course, Guy Fawkes' is where the real fun is. On Halloween, you don't have an excuse to set anything on fire. But, before the fire must come arts-and-crafts time. So, even though it's rather too late for this year, I'm going to provide you with the knowledge to make a homemade and inexpensive effigy to burn. I call this one the "Yarn Guy".

And off we go.

Start off with a ball of yarn, the thicker the better.

Next, make a squiggle, as shown. These will be the limbs of our Guy.

Do the squiggle several more times, until the limbs start to bulk out nicely.

Now we're going to tie off the limbs at all the major points of articulation: wrists, ankles, shoulders, and so on.

Now, get one of those tomato pincushions.

Cut off the little strawberry thing, and all of the green threads. Then, take a Sharpie marker and draw a scared face on the pincushion. Not a scary face, mind you, but a scared face. Here's mine.

For some reason that keeps coming out sideways, and I can't figure out why. Oh well.

Anyway, next we sharpen a stick at both ends, just like in "Lord of the Flies".

Tie the body of the Guy to the stick.

That came out sideways too... very mysterious.

Take one end of the stick, and impale the tomato-head on it. Be careful, it's easy to accidentally go through the tomato and stick your hand.

And there's the Yarn Guy. All that remains is to ready the necessary implements...

...and burn him.

Well, I'm all Martha Stewarted out. So everybody have a safe and happy Halloween and Bonfire Night in about a year. And one more thing...

Death to Imperialist Pigs, in the name of the mighty Stalin. (Ho, ho, ho!)

Bedtime Stories

2010-06-03T03:11:00.003-04:00

Well, Dear Readers, it's a few too many minutes past midnight here, and I'm not ready to sleep yet. To be perfectly accurate, it's a few too many minutes past three, but who's counting? Anyways, the time being what it is, I thought we might give some consideration to bedtime stories.

Now, when it comes to the stories we tell our children to lull them off to sleep, we are a badly twisted culture. Pig-eating wolves with the power to destroy the safety of our homes. Evil dwarves that steal children when you can't guess their ridiculous names. In Rapunzel, there's even a fellow who gets his eyes put out with thorns.

So, since this is the way things seem to go, I've come up with a nice children's story of my own. I won't write it out here like I would for a book, but I'll give the play-by-play.

Mama Ladybug is out gathering aphids when a sweet little child comes up and tells her the rhyme about ladybugs: "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home; your house is on fire and your children's (sic) alone." Mama Ladybug flies away home in a blind panic, and is struck forcibly by the windshield of a schoolbus enroute. Meanwhile, back at her house, which is not in fact on fire, her children are very much alone until they starve to death.

The moral of the story, if you must have one, is "don't hurry".

Since we're on the subject, does anyone know how the story of the Little Dutch Boy ends? It's the one where there's a leak in the dike (Dyke? Who cares.) and the Little Dutch Boy puts his finger in it to stop the water from coming in and destroying all of Holland. And that's all the story I know. I even called my Dear Mother to find out what happens, and she didn't know either. This is, for me, pretty incontrovertible proof that nobody knows, because I know everything and Mommy knows everything else. Or so we would have you believe.

But, to stay true to form, I would propose that the Little Dutch Boy realizes after about five minutes that he can't keep his finger in the dam forever, and actually doesn't really want to. But, with the well-being of all Holland at stake, he can't take it out. Eventually he dies of dehydration (Ha! Irony!) and the city fathers have his finger amputated from the rest of his body, which they then bury in potter's field. The body, that is; the finger they leave in place, considering it's doing such a fine job.

That seems more or less in keeping.

At this point you're thinking that I'm a rather macabre individual, and you're probably right. I'll even furnish you with another example of such. Until recently, I genuinely believed that the plot of Disney's Dumbo ran something like this:

All the elephants make fun of Dumbo because of his ears, but he meets a friendly mouse. The two of them get drunk by accident. The circus makes Dumbo look really stupid as part of the show, and he's very upset and runs away. Some crows teach him how to fly. He goes back to the circus and becomes the star of the show as he swoops over the audience. But, during his triumphant flight, he realizes that everyone still thinks he's a freak, and their applause galls him.

That's as far as I thought it through, and it wasn't until my beloved and sensible wife made me look up the plot on IMDB that I realized that the whole part where Dumbo becomes disillusioned with his stardom was my own contribution to the story.

And I suppose the moral of this blog, if you must have one, is that I seem to prefer stories that end in tragedy and despair. I'll leave you with one more; this is one of my favorites from Herodotus' Histories, though in my words, not his:

There are two large armies that are preparing to fight to the death. But, the commanders get smart, and decide that each army will send a small band of picked men, and the small bands will fight to the death: last man standing determines which army is victorious. So the small bands fight, and eventually there are only three men left, and it's getting dark. The three men agree to knock off for the night and come back in the morning to finish up. Morning comes, and instead of finishing up, the two men from the one army say that they won because they had two men instead of one, and the fellow from the other army says that he won because he was the last one to officially leave the field of battle. So, because of this bout of indecision, the two armies decide to fight to the death after all, and there's carnage and all that.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's entertainment.

Sleep tight.

The Blog of Revelations

2010-05-09T17:18:00.003-04:00

I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the title this time around, because it bugs me when people talk about the Book of Revelation, or even just Revelation. That's incorrect; there's an "s" on it. Always has been. And now, for your reading enjoyment, and to set the stage for the rest of this post, I present to you the Book of Revelations, the eighth chapter, verses 6 through 13:

And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets
prepared themselves to sound. The first angel sounded,
and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and
they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees
was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. And the
second angel sounded and as it were a great mountain
burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part
of the sea became blood; and the third part of the creatures
which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part
of the ships were destroyed. And the third angel sounded,
and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a
lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the
fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood;
and the third part of the waters became wormwood, and
many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun
was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part
of the stars; so as the third part of the was darkened, and the day
shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise. And
I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst
of heaven, saying with a loud voice, "Woe, woe, woe, to the
inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices
of the trumpet of the three angels , which are yet to sound!"

Okay. that was a bit lengthy, but it's always a mistake to get the Good Book out of context, so I made sure to include enough that we can be very sure of what's going on in this little corner of the Apocalypse.

Now, the reason we're talking about Revelations at all, Dear Readers, is that I was watching the History Channel the other day.

There's a lot of good that can be said about the History Channel, as long as they stick to history, and shows like Modern Marvels. But, as odds would have it, they do some damned silly things as well, and my pet annoyances are the Bible-as-science specials. (The alien ones are a close second.) So, as I was riding home from church this morning, I had a very minor epiphany:

These guys want to believe in Biblical destruction without having to believe in the Bible.

Consider, if you will, the following:

When you watch one of these Apocalypse shows (the Plagues of Egypt shows do just as well), you find a lot of men and women who have written whole Apocalypse books. In these books, they propose perfectly empirical, scientific explanations for how the waters could turn into blood. In fact, they'll tell you it's not really blood, but actually some sort of fungus or contaminant that would give the appearance of blood. And as for the star falling from heaven the name of which is Wormwood, they'll tell you that it's not really a star, but instead some sort of comet-asteroid-meteor-thingy. (Probably its name is really George, instead.)

It's really quite amazing to see how far some of these folks go to scientifically explain Biblical plagues and disasters. I actually don't remember how they scientifically explained the Angel of Death killing the firstborns of the Egyptians, but I'm sure it was very clever.

It's also interesting to ask oneself what these Bible-scientificizers would have to say about other non-disaster parts of the Bible. For example, what clever explanation could they provide for the feeding of the five thousand (plus women and children; can't forget them)?

They couldn't. And they really wouldn't even try. The reason they wouldn't even try is not because they couldn't come up with some clever theory; they wouldn't try because they find the topic mundane and uninteresting.

So ultimately, we have a group of people who study the Bible extensively. But, they only study certain parts. Revelations, little bit of Isaiah, little bit of Daniel: basically, all the Apocalypse bits. But they don't believe in the Bible; well, not really. They believe in Biblical disasters. Well, not really that either. They believe that disasters are going to happen, and that those disasters will go down looking a lot like the ones in the Bible, and that those disasters are going to happen around about the same time.

My question for them, and in fact my question in general with which I will end this over-long post, is this: why not just believe in the Apocalypse as written? If God is going to destroy the earth with all of these horrendous things, does there really need to be a scientific explanation for them all? Remember Occam's Razor, my friends, and listen out for those trumpets.

2010-04-02T00:18:00.003-04:00

Well, dear readers, I fell out of love with my New Year's blog topic, so I'm not going to write it after all. Maybe next year.

So, instead, let's talk about "raising awareness". I'll say it right up front: I have a low opinion of "raising awareness", and I have my reasons. Let's talk about some awareness-raising activities...

While I was taking classes at the University of Florida, I witnessed any number of activities intended to raise people's awareness of something or other. I remember relatively few of them; they have a tendency to run together. One example I recall quite clearly was an event where a few hundred (or a few dozen, whatever) students had a camp-out on one of the quads. They did this to raise awareness of homelessness.

I can't really say whether or not they were particularly successful. I, personally, was very aware of homelessness due to frequent incidents in which one of our homeless citizens would petition me for spare change.

My favorite of these incidents took place outside of a jiffy-mart. In response to the homeless individual's request for money, I replied that I had none. That was true, of course. But, to be charitable, I offered to use my bank card to buy the homeless individual something from the jiffy-mart to eat. He declined my offer, stating that he did not want anything from the jiffy-mart, but instead wanted something from the Burger King across the way. I politely told him that he must not really be hungry after all, and in turn was politely told to go and copulate vigorously with myself.

To return to the point, I was aware of homelessness. Apparently, the university police were also aware of homelessness, and did not appreciate awareness of it being raised at night on a school-owned quad. Short story short, the hundreds (dozens) of students were evicted unceremoniously at two in the morning. Did they raise awareness of homelessness? Perhaps. They certainly raised awareness of the perils of unlawful assembly.

There was also the Underwear Run. This took place either every year or every semester, and (exactly as its name indicates) involved hundreds (dozens) of students running from some Point A to some Point B wearing nothing but their underwear. There may have been some significance of Points A and B, but if there was, I don't remember it. I'm sure the Underwear Run was intended (at least initially) to raise awareness of something, but I'm sure that I never knew what. Maybe nobody knew, and just participated out of a combined feeling of exhibitionism, voyeurism, and contributing to a good cause (well, some good cause or other, at least).

Now, I am building up to a point. The problem with doing something to raise awareness of something-or-other is that it has to signify that something-or-other to those who are to witness the doing. An example of an awareness-raising organization doing this well is the breast-cancer racket.

Now I mean "racket" in a very respectful way. And I am certainly fully in support of efforts to treat and cure breast cancer. The awareness-raisers for breast cancer are doing one hell of a job, and a large part of the secret to their success is the color pink, especially the pink ribbon. Especially during Breast Cancer Month (they have their own month... impressive) you see pink-ribbon stickers everywhere, and even more than that you see pink-ribbon consumer products. Cups, t-shirts, blankets, dog toys. (I swear I am not making that last one up.) And does all this raise awareness? You're damned right it does.

The awareness ribbon is actually a big thing, if you stop to think about it. It arguably started way back when, in the dim ages, with the tying of a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree. This, of course, has developed directly into those yellow ribbon stickers you see on cars for Support Our Troops. The problem with the awareness ribbon is that they are mostly too prolific, too ubiquitous, and too obscure to actually raise awareness of anything.

I was walking through the grocery store parking lot one evening, and I happened to pass by three cars displaying awareness ribbon stickers. The first one was pink for breast cancer (feeling the power again), the second was red and white and proclaimed itself to represent Donating Blood, and the third was a sort of puzzle-piece pattern signifying Autism Awareness. These ribbons made me wonder... how many ribbon colors are there? And what do they all stand for?

Initially, I thought I would just keep my eyes open and use a notebook to record all the ribbons I would see. Then I thought that that would be an extraordinarily stupid idea, and that I would just use the internet instead. What I found was surprising.

For one thing, every color you can think of has been spoken for. Further, an astonishing number of color combinations are also in use... including truly awful combos like maroon-and-teal. That's not the truly astonishing thing, though. The real shocker is that there are about twenty different awareness-raising causes laying claim to each color.

So we all knew that pink was for breast cancer, but did any of us know it's also for birth parents and cleft palate? There are about a dozen orange ribbon significances, ranging from the noble (cultural diversity and racial tolerance) to the practical (underage drinking) to the outright ridiculous (feral cats).

Now, to be fair, many of the colors have some sort of rhyme and reason connecting at least some of their many significances. For example, the green ribbon apparently signifies mental illness in general, and the full gamut of individually listed mental illnesses in particular. But there are also a couple dozen other meanings in the mix, from neural tube defects (whatever those are) to Cornelia de Lange Syndrome (whatever that is).

The only color that seems to have one unique meaning is the brown ribbon for colorectal cancer. I swear I'm not making that up. Nor, for that matter, was I making up the feral cats.

And therein lies the problem for awareness-raising ribbons, and for awareness-raising in general. If you don't already have an awareness of the problem or issue in question, then your awareness isn't raised by the colored ribbon or the Underwear Run. If I see a purple ribbon on someone's lapel or someone's car, but I don't know that the purple ribbon stands for domestic violence or Pagan pride or macular degeneration, then my awareness isn't raised. The ribbon has just failed to do its work.

Even something fairly obvious, like the homelessness sleepover in the quad, can easily have its point missed. Of course, I knew the point of the sleepover, but that's only because it was well-publicized. That's question-begging, though... why not just raise awareness of something by flyers and newspaper columns, rather than using flyers and newspaper columns to raise awareness of an event to raise awareness of that same thing?

Ultimately, it seems that there are two things to be said about awareness-raising. The first is that often the target audience has to have raised awareness about the cause in question in order for the awareness-raising to be effective.

The second, and more important, is that the efforts made to raise awareness about an awareness-raising activity could all too easily be turned to just raising awareness about the issue directly. Write your columns directly about the homeless and stay off of the quads at night.

Keep the campus police happy. After all, they're here to help you and me.

You might even consider putting their blue ribbon on your car.

Global Warming, My Ass

2010-02-07T23:28:00.003-05:00

Well, beloved readers, I wish you a very belated Happy New Year. There is a reason for this: I have been preparing a very special 2010 New Year's Blog, and it's been taking a lot longer than I suspected it would. Lots of pictures to take, and some of them not so easy to come by. Oh well, you'll see.

However, I'm breaking in early to report on the abominable state of the weather here in the Great State of Maryland (the Honorable Martin O'Malley, Governor). I know that many of you, Dear Readers, live in the Great State of Florida (the Honorable Charlie Crist, Governor) and other milder climes, and I would like to briefly (ha) hold forth about the horrors of the Frigid North.

A young friend of mine, Mr. Keith Norman, was telling me recently that he would like to live "up north where there's snow". Mr. Norman, of course, is a Floridian, and has no idea what terrors he wishes upon himself. So now, a photo gallery of sorts, with pertinent paragraphs included, the better to illustrate the way that it really is.

(I would like to comment here that if anyone from Minnesota or Vermont or someplace where it gets really, obscenely cold happens to be reading, please have a good time reading about what a nancy I am for complaining about only three feet of snow and ten degrees Fahrenheit. I know you have it worse. I too have been told horror stories.)

First off, let's talk about transportation. We'll start with transportation on foot, I think. Our apartment complex has mechanical implements I call "snow mowers", because they look and operate a lot like lawn mowers, but instead of cutting grass they clear paths in the snow. You can see here that they haven't brought them around our building (yet? I can only hope). Instead we have this path, worn into the snow by many pairs of boots, much as a path in the woods is worn through the underbrush.

My own front walk I dug out by hand with a bucket (more on the bucket later). It has now become an icy flume of Death, almost impossible to negotiate without slipping even while wearing combat boots (my Chucks are right out). I did, however, get the opportunity to build this snowman. His name is Frank. Semper Fi.

Moving right along to transportation with vehicles. Regrettably, I am unable to furnish the sort of vista of cars each buried under two or three feet of snow, but I don't get up very early in the morning and most people had already begun the laborious process of shoveling out their cars by the time I got out to the parking lot. Here's the best I can do to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

And here are my two vehicles. You'll notice that each of them is clear of snow (except, of course, for half of the Cooper), and has space enough to walk around and open the doors. Also notice that between eight and twelve feet of snow separates them from the narrow snow-plowed alley in which we're intended to drive them. And there's the bucket! I'm proud to say that we are indeed recycling our snow, to provide pure drinking water for the people of Haiti in this their hour of need. (I could be using an actual snow shovel for the task of freeing the cars of snow, but I would need to own a snow shovel first. Poor preparedness... I'll be lucky if they don't revoke my Eagle Scout over this.)

And road conditions are really quite deplorable, in a general way. I have heard people spinning their tires with squealing engines trying to get out of their parking spaces - even after they had purportedly been dug out! Also the scene of three men pushing a car while the driver tries to move it out from a "dug out" spot did not inspire my confidence. The fumes of overwrought engines and the shoutings of "Give it a little more! Stop it, stop it, stop it!" filled the air like the effluvient of a battlefield. Which, of course, it almost was.

Even the streets that have been plowed are treacherous at best. I walked down several of them to get to the grocery store that is mercifully only a mile or so from our house. The best of them were covered in an icy slush; the rest in a patchy hard shell of ice and rime. I had trouble even walking down them (fell and hurt my hip a bit, but no whining), and the only alternative was to slog along through snow up over the knee where the sidewalks used to be. If you ever have the misfortune to try this, you'll find how exhausting it can be. I know. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

This, however, is no joke. I almost put my eye out yesterday evening. I walked out of my front door, and ended up with this two inches from my left eye:

Pretty frightening. I avenged the near-loss of my precious orb by knocking down all the icicles, great and small, with a shovel. It was especially satisfying to kill the baby ones.

Well, I'm pretty much winded. The time has come to tackle that eight to twelve feet of snow standing between me and vehicular freedom. I can say, very truthfully, that I would not wish this upon anyone.

And those of you in Florida... please don't wish it on yourselves.

(I'm talking to you, Keith Norman.)

The Married Life

2009-11-03T16:44:00.003-05:00

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned.

It has been seven months since my last posting.

But, before I say my Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, allow me to explain my unforgivable lapse.

I have probably the best excuse, save being dead, that it is possible to have: I got married.

It's interesting, by the way, that being dead should come up. I learned at my wedding that marriage is death. My wife has been attending Holy Cross Lutheran Church for quite some time, and thus we were married by the pastor, Rev. Stephen Mentz. However, my very own uncle, who some time back decided to stop being an architect and to start being a Lutheran minister, was good enough to grace us with a brief sermon as part of the service. The topic of the sermon, naturally, was that marriage is death.

I don't remember a lot of it, because I was spending the time wondering "what the hell is he doing?", and almost all of the attendees were doubtless wondering the same thing. Still, it was ultimately a comforting sermon; because now, whenever I'm feeling a bit rough about married life, I can remind my self that marriage is death, and therefore not a fate worse than death.

All sorts of interesting things have been happening; marriage really turns your outlook on life onto its ear. I was noticing the other night, while I was folding laundry, how drastically one's point of view can be altered.

Most nights I stay up until an obscene hour, because I find it impossible to get to sleep at a reasonable time. This gives me a lot of time to turn on the TV and shut out the lights, so to speak. However, the other night laundry was riding instead of Roy Rogers. (Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" album, for those who have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Now mostly my lovely wife and I do our own laundry. This is a sensible division of labor, because I like to have my shirts folded in sixths, and she likes hers folded in quarters, and neither of us really wants to have someone else fold our laundry the wrong way. Still, the other night I was folding her laundry because it was quarter to one and she wasn't going to get any sleep until it was done. I gallantly volunteered to do it for her, and thus it was that I ended up folding her underwear.

When you are a single male, women's underwear is a very exciting sort of thing. It holds a great deal of interest when it's on, and perhaps a great deal more when it isn't. And no matter how much women's underwear a single guy encounters, the novelty seems still to be there.

When you are married, women's underwear is not an exciting, exotic, titillating thing. When you are married, women's underwear is laundry. Not something to ogle, not something to try to remove. Something to fold.

This motif is repeated, of course. Eating at a restaurant with one's girlfriend is a date; eating at a restaurant with one's wife is something that happens when I don't want to cook dinner that night. When I buy her flowers, they come in pots instead of bouquets.

Ray Bradbury wrote, in his immortal "Martian Chronicles", that "marriage makes people old and familiar while still young." I think he's absolutely right, although I don't agree with the tone in which he wrote it. Bradbury was talking about a young wife who thought that all the love and spontaneity had gone out of her life; I'm asserting that familiarity is a form of stability. And I think that stability is something we should appreciate, not rebel against.

Travels

2009-03-17T19:46:00.002-04:00

Well, dear readers, it's been awhile since I last put anything up. But here I sit, alone again in a strange hotel room, and I feel it's time for me to create yet another edition of Travels, the most-used post title (in one form or another) in the history of this, my humble blog.

And when I say a strange hotel room, I mean a very strange one.

I am currently staying at a Candlewood Suites, an interesting little chain that has about 130 locations nationwide (or so the in-room literature tells me). I would recommend it highly, especially to travellers with a culinary bent.

There is a kitchen in my room.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Collin," you're now saying to yourself (feel free to think along), "most hotel rooms have a kitchen in them nowadays. Ah, but you'd be wrong. Allow me to expound.

This kitchen has cabinets. And in one cabinet is a toaster. In other cabinets are actual dishes and glasses, made of actual ceramic and glass. In a drawer are metal utensils, as well as a carving knife and various spoons and spatulae.

You'll need them, in order to use the set of pots and pans on the two-burner range-top.

Of course, if you want to, you can use the microwave. If the microwave you have in your home kitchen is like a TV set, this microwave is a wide-screen plasma, almost three feet wide.

When you're done, you could wash your dishes in the sink, with garbage disposal, using the dishwashing detergent provided.

Or you could just use the dishwasher.

No, I am not joking.

About any of it.

I must also enthuse about the room's "master switch", which allows the turning on and off of all the room's lights with a single flick. Also the intelligent thermostat, which somehow knows when I am in and out of the room and adjusts the air-conditioner in an energy-saving manner.

I also have a lovely view of I-4, through the louvered shutters on my window. Considering my habit of not eating out when I am on the road alone, but instead of obtaining sandwich-making materiel, and of course beer, from a local market, I will conclude this post with the highly-appropriate lyrics of a classic song by the immortal Paul Simon.

I met my old lover on the street last night
She seemed so glad to see me; I just smiled
And we talked about some old times, and we drank ourselves some beers
Still crazy, after all these years,
Oh, still crazy, after all these years.

I'm not the kind of man who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on old familiar ways
And I ain't no fool for love songs which whisper in my ears
Still crazy after all these years,
Oh, still crazy, after all these years.

Four in the morning, crapped out, yawning
Longing my life away.
I never worry, why should I?
It's all gonna fade...

Now I sit by the highway, and I watch the cars
I fear I'll do some damage one fine day
But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years,
Oh, still crazy,
Still crazy,
Still crazy, after all these years.

Good night, Lake Mary.

Chewing Gum Proselytization

2009-02-20T13:35:00.004-05:00

I'm going to have to start this post with a disclaimer. This is serious business, because the last time I used a disclaimer like this I got kicked out of the Boy Scouts. Granted, that was a far more extreme case than this one, but I want to make sure you're taking it seriously.

DISCLAIMER:

If you are a sensitive or easily offended person, THIS POST IS NOT FOR YOU.

If you cannot handle having your faith or religion poked fun at, THIS POST IS NOT FOR YOU.

If you are overly upset by irreverence, blasphemy, and heresy, THIS POST IS NOT FOR YOU.

Okay. If you're still reading, I'm going to assume that you answered "no" to the above items. If you didn't, well, you have been warned.

Moving right along, then. I was at the Hobby Lobby the other day picking up some paint for a model airplane that I'm building. Building model airplanes is rather a strange pastime for a perfectionist with hand tremors, but then, I am a rather strange person.

As I'm going through the checkout line, I see these:

That's right... Testamints! What won't they think of next? I remember the days when evangelical folks distributed tracts (for more on this, see "I Was Mugged By Jesus This Morning") but this has taken things to a whole new level. Granted, a pack of gum is much more enjoyable than a little postcard that tells you you're going to go to Hell and burn for all eternity in the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth...

Whoa. Deep breath. My train of thought just derailed.

Right, anyway, gum is more fun than a postcard from Jesus. The difference here is that the postcard is free, and the pack of gum cost me about a buck fifty. Of course, this is America, bastion of capitalism in this communist world, and I can see no reason why an outreach ministry shouldn't be able to turn a profit.

But it gets better. Oh, yes it does. You probably can't see it in the photo, but that print at the very bottom reads as follows:

POWERFUL FRESH BREATH POWERFUL MESSAGE

There is nothing I can say to augment that phrase. I won't even try.

On the back of the package, there are even more interesting things. For one, the only thing in the nutrition label is "sugar alcohols". Of course, Jesus and the disciples drank wine at the last supper (even though many don't want to be reminded of that), so I guess it's okay.

There's also a Bible verse, Jeremiah 29:11: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Not exactly a gum-chewing bit of scripture.

How about: "And Rehoboth the king of the Midianites saith unto his kingdom, Even so shall ye chew even as chews the cow, each upon its own cud, and thou shalt not share thy gum with any other, lest ye be slid down a razor-blade and be then soaked in a bath of the juice of the lemon."

The final thing I'd like to point out about my pack of Testamints is that there's some ickyness going on with the name, as follows. (By the way, this is real etymology; I'm not making this stuff up.)

Obviously "Testamints" is a play on "Testament", as in the Old and New ones. Making a testament is also what one does when one gives testimony. And the word "testimony" is derived from an ancient custom of the Romans. When we give testimony here in the good old U.S. of A., we put our hand on a Bible. Well, the Romans didn't have a Bible, so they put their hand on their genitalia instead. Testicles. That's where we get testimony and testaments and any other good "testa-" words you can think of.

As I was saying... kind of icky for chewing gum, don't you think?

Maybe they should have gone with "Sacramints".

I would go with Bibulgum, myself.

Concerning Toothbrushes

2009-02-06T18:53:00.002-05:00

Well, beloved readers, I have returned from my extended winter vacation, and can now continue to amuse and amaze. Wipe the tears of sorrow from your eyes, and replace them with tears of joy. I'm back.

So, without further ado...

Consider your toothbrush. In my estimation, your toothbrush is the most personal thing that you own.

Notice I said "most personal", not "most private". I'm sure we all have more private things than our toothbrushes, as evidenced by the fact that we leave our toothbrushes out in the open, rather than hiding them underneath our mattresses. Or something like that.

But "most personal"? Really? Sure... consider the following.

Have you ever let anyone else borrow your toothbrush?

Of course you haven't. I know I never have. I've shared underwear (clean, of course) with my brother when we would run a pair short right before laundry day. I've shared my car on numerous occasions, even to people who aren't even blood relations. (Okay, I've never lent my Cooper to anyone, but that's beside the point. One day I might. Maybe.) I've shared soap and bath towels and shampoo and toothpaste. But never my toothbrush. Never.

Not with my own family. Not with any of my various significant others. And when I get married at the end of May, I won't share my toothbrush with my wife.

Ever.

Not that she would ever ask. She knows my toothbrush is too personal to be shared. Everyone's is.

I'll even pull a really excellent example from our popular culture. Probably it's inappropriate, but it's not my fault if you're reading this anyway.

So let's imagine Johnny and Suzy, who are two fictitious people who are in a pretty serious relationship. So serious, in fact, that Suzy invites Johnny to... well, a sleepover of sorts.

"Hey, Johnny," she says. "Why don't you come over tonight? Bring your toothbrush."

Ha! Toothbrush! We all know what that means. (And if some of us don't, thenn perhaps I won't burn in Hell for as long for corrupting tender young minds. Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes...)

Ha! Toothbrush!

So, let's consider a moment. Johnny and Suzy are sharing their saliva. And possibly other bodily fluids of a far more personal nature. But what are they not sharing?

Toothbrushes.

Elegant proof of the personal nature of toothbrushes, isn't it? I thought so. Even those of us who are the most obsessive about our dental health won't share someone else's toothbrush. If we forget ours, then we just don't brush our teeth that night. I bet this happens even to dentists.

No, not really. Dentists are the reason that Wal-Mart sells toothbrushes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Because they'll go buy another toothbrush at three in the morning rather than use... well, you get the idea.

Anyway, if you remain unconvinced, or perhaps if you are convinced and want to try it anyway...

Walk into a bathroom that you share with others. Find a toothbrush that isn't yours. Pick it up. Take a good look at it, and summon up a mental picture of the person to whom it belongs.

Now put it in your mouth.

Can't do it, can you?

Of course not.

And, if you happen to be one of those sickos who actually did put someone else's toothbrush in your mouth, don't you feel dirty now?

Of course you do.

Toothbrushes are sacred. Violate my toothbrush, and you have violated me. I'd rather you dropped it in the toilet... from that I might recover. I might even forgive you one day.

Of course, I won't say anything as strong as that I wish you burn in Hell for violating me and my toothbrush.

But I might be thinking it.

The South Fails To Rise Again (Again)

2008-12-08T09:36:00.003-05:00

Well, beloved readers, I've just spent the weekend at a Civil War re-enactment. I return with an annoying sniffle, a smell of wood-smoke I can't wash out of my hands, and a sense of a historical job well done.

Now, many of you may be wondering, "just what is a Civil War re-enactment?", and for you I have prepared a bit of an explanation. I will presuppose that you are familiar with the American Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, also known (among Southern post-reactionaries) as the War of Northern Aggression. For all my friends from abroad, I would respectfully direct your attention to some highly accurate and reliable information source, such as Wikipedia, for the answers to all the questions you may well now be asking yourselves.

But, presupposing that you are familiar with the Civil War, a re-enactment is an outstanding example of how the dedication of individuals can translate into a wonderful educational opportunity for the public in general to learn vivid and lasting lessons about a fascinating epoch of American History.

That is in general terms, of course. Broad, sweeping, highly complimentary general terms, no less.

Let's start instead with what actually happens. A bunch of guys (women also, but mostly guys) get together one weekend and put on authentic 1860's clothing. They arm themselves with Enfield rifled-barrel muskets, which they load with blank black-powder charges, and they march around over a field and make loud noises at one another. (Some of them do a variation of this riding horses. Also there are cannons.) At some point, they call it a day.

There are other facets, such as building a giant tent city out of period-correct canvas tents. Also shopping. Lots of shopping. But those are the basics.

Now, what's it all about? For some, it is precisely the broad, sweeping, grand and glorious educational opportunity previously mentioned. These are few.

For others, it is the chance to make a lot of loud noises with guns while playing army in a satisfyingly death-free fashion. These are many.

For some (and these are the really scary ones), it is a frighteningly real extension of a war they feel has never really ended. These, of course, are the ones who feel quite fervently that The South, will, in fact, Rise Again at some point.

If they could really put on uniforms and shoot Yankees with guns, they would. But until that day comes, they will put on pretend uniforms and shoot pretend Yankees with guns (real guns, but only loaded for pretend).

Now, these are not all re-enactors. They are not, I hope, even most re-enactors. Most of the fellows out there just find it to be a good time to be had of a weekend, or perhaps are among the ranks of the Educationals. These are good people, and not worthy of the sort of aspersions that are occasionally cast their way by the political-correctness set and the tolerance set.

But when one hears an authentically re-enacted rebel yell go up from the field, one is given pause, and wonders.

This past weekend, of course, the South once again neglected to Rise Again, fortunately for all involved. After all, the Yankees aren't even real Yankees. It's not like they're imported down for the occasion. And, as previously discusssed, most of the rebels aren't real rebels. They're schoolteachers and construction workers and paralegals.

But some. And because of that some, sometimes one wonders.

All in all, it was a good weekend. And almost certainly it was worth the annoying sniffle.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

2008-11-15T18:29:00.003-05:00

Well, Christmastime is here again.

For the record, today is the fifteenth of November. Twenty-two whole days from Thanksgiving. Seems like it just gets sooner and sooner every year.

It probably seems that way because that is exactly what is going on.

Now, I don't have a lot of warm fuzzy feelings about Christmas to begin with. I flatter myself that my lack of gemutlichkeit derives from different reasons than the ruck of my fellow-men.

Many people make the objection that Christmas "has become too commercialized". These tend to fall into two groups: the religious group and the non-religious group. Members of the religious group feel that the commercial nature of the modern Christmas detracts from the worship of Jesus Christ. Members of the non-religious group feel that the commercial nature of the modern Christmas detracts from the worship of Santa Claus.

I'm not thrilled about Christmas because I find it really annoying.

My father and I went to the grocery store this evening to purchase large slabs of beef. Saturdays around here are a chance to take the time to be thankful for being carnivorous.

(Aside: the grocery store in question has been pushing the hard-sell on pineapples for maybe the last three weeks. Certainly the last two.

I'm talking about a table full of pineapple that you walk past on your way into the store. I'm talking about end-caps and displays hawking canned pineapple and pineapple soda. I'm even talking about a pineapple displayed at each cash register.

Instead of saying, "did you find everything alright?" the cashiers were saying, "good evening, would you like to buy this pineapple?". They've stopped now, but it was absolutely ridiculous for a while there.)

And at the entrance of the grocery store (remember the grocery store? Dad and I are there to buy meat) there was the Salvation Army guy, with kettle and bell and tired-looking Santa hat.

And the ringing of the bell drove into my ear like an icepick, and I cursed that man, and the poor, and Christmas to boot.

You see, I don't want to be cursing strangers and the destitute and Christmas itself because I'm annoyed by a man with a bell. I want to curse strangers and the destitute and Christmas itself because I damned well feel like it. With every painful note issuing forth from that bell, a little bit of my right to be a bastard - by my own volition - was siphoned away.

And it's not just the bells. It's the Christmas songs coming across the speakers up in the ceilings of every store you're forced to go into to buy some of that commercialized Christmas fodder. When I catch myself unconsciously singing along under my breath, I die a little bit.

The houses with their over-the-top decorations, as well. Remember about five or six years ago when absolutely everybody had those icicle lights? That was bad enough, the little hive-drones. Now there are those giant air-inflated lighted Santas and polar bears and ghastly spindly-legged elves.

I especially love the one that's a giant snowglobe with stuff spinning around inside and snow-like particles circulating. I have a beautiful mental image of taking a shotgun to one of them. I refrain from doing this, because the amount of electricity they're adding to their monthly bill to keep the air going to inflate it is probably punishment enough.

And, before anyone gets an irreversibly wrong idea about me, let me say that none of these things I have said should indicate that I hate Christmas, or that I despise any show of Christmas spirit.

It's just all really annoying. I would be annoyed by these same things no matter what holiday they marked. Am I too sensitive to annoyances? Probably.

But don't think that's my problem. It is everybody's problem. If you all would stop annoying me, then you wouldn't have to deal with the consequences of my being annoyed.

Take some responsibility, people.

Oh, and Merry Christmas. Merry Very Early Christmas.

Why I Love Airplanes So Much

2008-11-08T14:03:00.005-05:00

Well, beloved readers, I take up pixel and keyboard once again. It's been a long while since I've made a post, because I've had actual direct contact with human beings to discuss the sort of things I tend to discuss in this particular venue.

Of course, now that I know I have an audience, I'll make sure to keep up to date here.

So, background information: I'm getting married, and my affianced happens to live in Maryland. As such, it seems that I've spent more time on airplanes during the past five months than I have in the entirety of my previous life.

And this is how I came to realize how much I love airplanes.

Now, I'm not talking about the Cessna variety of airplanes. While they are undoubtedly a wonderful place in which to vomit, they simply can't stack up to the marvelousness of the Boeing 7-something-7's that I've been using so frequently of late.

There are an awful lot of things that you aren't allowed to take on an airplane anymore. Everybody knows about the prohibition on liquids and gels. But just in case you're not a part of everybody, you aren't allowed to bring more than three ounces of any kind of liquid or gel on an airplane. See? Now you're part of everybody! Feeling special? You should be.

Of course, there really are some liquids and gels that are allowed on planes in amounts greater than three ounces. Quoting from the TSA's website, here are the highlights:

Breast milk
Vaseline
bone marrow
blood products
transplant organs
prosthetic breasts

Also from the TSA, here's the weekly report of disaster they've averted:

23 passengers were arrested due to suspicious behavior or fraudulent travel documents
31 firearms found at checkpoints
3 artfully concealed prohibited items found at checkpoints
18 incidents that involved a checkpoint closure, terminal evacuation or sterile area breach

Let's give them a big pat on the back. Especially on finding those artfully concealed items. That's a true achievement.

Whenever I travel, I only take a carry-on bag. I have one that's quite small, but I can still fit whatever I need for about a week and a half inside it. My fellow-travellers, on the other hand, seem to bring whatever size luggage they like.

Ever seen one of those size-checker things for carry-on bags? Apparently, if your bag can't fit into it, you have to check the bag. More apparently, those size-checker things are just for show.

It might be amusing if one were required to smash one's bag into the size-checker box with a baseball bat or sledgehammer until it fits. People can always be counted upon to do the right thing if you make them suffer enough when they don't.

I always do the same thing on an airplane: I read a book, and I drink a cup of tea. It's nice to have a routine. Especially a really solid routine. When the stewardesses come around to ask what I'd like to drink, I tell them I'd like a cup of tea.

"Hot tea?" they ask. This is an interesting question, because there is no other kind of tea on the drink menu.

"Yes," I reply. "Two creams, two sugars."

A short while later, I receive a cup of hot water with a still-wrapped teabag floating in it. (Okay, so that only happened once. Still...) I also get one packet of non-dairy creamer, and one packet of that saccharine sugar substitute.

It's so nice when people listen carefully after they've asked you a question.

Now, there are other interesting uses for saccharine and non-dairy creamer. Saccharine, for example, is wonderful if you want to feel as if someone punched you in the stomach five minutes ago for the next three hours.

Non-dairy creamer is much more fun. Next time you have access to some, put it in a tablespoon. Hold the spoon four to six inches above a cigarette ligher. (Sorry. A butane lighter. Smoking is bad.) Light the lighter, and gently tap the spoon so that a light shower of dust falls down onto the flame. Pretty cool, huh?

It's even more fun if you take a fistful of non-dairy creamer and throw it into a campfire.

Also, next time the opportunity presents itself, burn a ping-pong ball. Use one of those long-handled barbecue lighters, though, if you have one.

And if you take those styrofoam packing peanuts and add them one by one into a small container of gasoline, stirring frequently, you can make napalm. It's a lot of fun to play with. Just remember that it creates a resin-like substance that will never come off of any surface on which you burn it. So don't be like me and burn a permanent black spot on your parents' driveway.

I also burned the outline of a sponge on their driveway last year on Guy Fawkes' Day, but I won't go into that here. You can find the post from that event in the "Classics of the Form" section.

And the moral of the story, apparently, is "airplanes bad, fire good". Sounds reasonable enough to me.

Stay Off The Turnpike

2008-07-18T14:34:00.002-04:00

It's about seventy miles of construction. I know. I drove on it Wednesday night.

It was like descending the nine circles of hell, except Virgil and I had to pay for the privilege. I saw no fewer than 15 state troopers with their bubble lights going, and that was just the ugly beginning.

There were also work trucks with their work lights that are like highbeams in your face simply by virtue of being eight or ten feet off the ground. There were veritable mazes of cones, barrels, sawhorses, and whatever else they might have been able to find to put in the lanes to befuddle their victims.

There's nothing quite like getting off at an exit which you're not quite sure is open. And there's nothing quite like that sick feeling that you get when you've been on an exit ramp for a long time and you begin to wonder whether you're about to meet another car coming the other way.

And all of this at night. And in the rain.

Maybe in the day it's different.

Maybe in a few days it'll all be back to normal.

But I wouldn't count on it.

Stay off the Turnpike.

Different Travels, Part 2

2008-06-28T19:02:00.002-04:00

Well, here we are again. And, surprise surprise, it actually is the very next day from the last post. It must have turned out that way because I didn't promise a next-day turnaround in my last installment.

Let's have first things first. My African-American friends carried on until at least eleven o' clock. I don't know how long they went after that, because being tired and sleeping trumped out being incredulous and staying awake.

I actually, at about a quarter of eleven, was out in the hall and bore aural witness to a woman issuing shrill, half-heard injunctions for them to sing louder. Sing louder?

Whiskey tango foxtrot, dearly beloved. Whiskey tango foxtrotin' foxtrot.

This morning at the hotel breakfast, I saw something I've never yet seen. It was a make-your-own-waffles setup. There were cups of batter, and a waffle iron, and one dumps the former into the latter, waits, and then pries out their waffles. Rather an amazing idea. I was going to try it, but there were too many kids around. Maybe tomorrow.

The training class was a good class, as these things go. I was pleased to see that my classmates were a steady set of fellows, and presented as not caring about Rangers or RECONs or any of that idiocy. (Remember, why it's idiocy I explained yesterday.)

On the other side, I was disappointed. These grown men were behaving like a group of third-graders with ADD. Little personal conversations always going on, and the guys at the back jumping up and hijacking the training schedule to tell their war stories, and to talk about all their vast and multiplicitous experience, covering everyone and everything toward which the inciting comment pertained.

And then there was the "Why the Hell" guy. It seemed that his whole purpose in life was to miss the point in a disgruntled and adversarial manner. For example, during a session on how to take good pictures while on a reconnaissance mission, we all saw a picture taken of the Hendry County Courthouse after a storm. All of us looked and saw it was a good shot: emphasis on the subject, good framing, properly exposed, well focused. That was why we were being shown the picture.

"Why the Hell would anyone take a picture of a courthouse? I don't see that there's any benefit to that." That's what we heard all day. It made me want to stand up and shout that that doesn't matter at the moment. It's a good picture, is what it is, and we aren't talking about why we photograph things. We're talking about how to photograph things well.

He pulled this same jive at a picture of semi trucks being staged at an airport. They were blocking off a runway. Still, you can see easily in the photo that there's another runway that they're not blocking. Even that wouldn't stop the "What the Hell" guy.

The root reason why his quoutbursts (that's a portmaneau word, hope you can unpack it right) were so annoying and ridiculous was his failure to recognize that it's far too late to fix these "errors" he perceives. We can't unphotograph the courthouse, and we can't unstage the trailers.

That realization does not touch him.

I think he's upper management material.

And now we come down to the real reason I'm writing all of this. Yes, it is interesting, and full of the bizarreness of human behavior. But I'm really bored. Can't wait until tomorrow, when I have more stuff to do, and then I get to leave and go home.

On the turnpike on the way down here, I passed through three tollbooths. The attendant at every single one of those tollbooths made a comment on my car:

First guy: Nice car! Me: Thanks.

Second woman: Is that a MINI Cooper? Me: Yes, it is. Her: Ethel, come look at this boy's car!

Third guy: Damn, man, you got a sweet ride there. Me: Word.

And you have to figure these people see thousands upon thousands of cars every day. And yet they found mine to be remarkable. Of course, everyone has always said nice things about it, but I expected toll attendants to be more jaded. Apparently the car is just that awesome.

And the African-Americans are starting again. I can hear that tambourine. I was wondering the other night whether they were just hyper-Jesus, or perhaps some kind of voodoo or Santeria. If they take a watermelon, fill it with honeybees, strip naked, rub themselves in Crisco, and carry the melon out into the ocean... definitely Santerias. I'm not making all that up, by the way. They actually do that stuff. And also things far stranger.

I don't really want to know. Last night, I thought about going over to the front desk and enjoining them most strongly to go over to those people and telling them to quiet down. Of course, it's a delicate issue. We don't want anyone to go saying that we abridged their religious freedom.

My take would have been that I have respect for their beliefs, and that they need to respect that I need quiet to be able to sleep.

Of course, I'm too far away from them for the majority of the noise to pass my walls. But I was thinking of the unfortunate souls staying next to and across from them... don't they deserve some intervention?

Of course, I decided "hell, no". If they're too chickenshit to make a necessary confrontation, they deserve to suffer.

I'm such a humanitarian sometimes.

And once again, it's going to be a long night.

Different Travels

2008-06-27T20:15:00.003-04:00

Well, dearly beloved, it seems that I can't be home for more than a few days at a time. So I find myself once again off on the road. This time, I'm staying in Ft. Pierce.

The reason I'm here is for a CAP training thing: in order to be in the first wave in the event of a hurricane-related disaster, one apparently needs to be specifically trained for such. That's fine with me (otherwise I wouldn't be here), but I think the name of the program is a bit goofy. They've decided to call it "RECON", just like that, all caps. I haven't met my classmates yet, but I dearly hope they aren't there because of the name.

To explicate: there is another program in CAP called "Rangers". This originated with a comment made by a piece of brass, upon observing the hard-chargingness of the participants in the Hawk Mountain school back in the sixties or seventies. He made some statement or other, using the word "rangers" to express how hard-charging he thought they were.

Now, as you may have guessed, the ranger-types consider themselves better than the rest of us. In addition, as you may also have surmised, their ranks are swollen with individuals who never in a thousand years would ever have gotten to be called "rangers" in any other way. I'm talking obesity, mostly. Just gross obesity. It's disgusting, and the way they waddle around with their man-boobs outthrust calling themselves "rangers" is more disgusting.

Anyway, I hope that I don't have a bunch of wannabes in my class tomorrow.

For tonight, I have my own immediate problems.

First let me say that Ft. Pierce is really nice. Everything is bigger here, like in Texas. My hotel room is huge. When I went to the local Wal-mart to get a jug of chablis (after my last trip, having a hotel room without a jug of chablis just seems wrong) and some stuff to make sandwiches, it was at least thirty percent bigger than any super-Wal-mart I've ever seen. I could have comfortably driven my car down most of the aisles in there. I also saw a bank that was still open at eight in the evening, and the place where they're installing a liquor store.

It's just an amazing place. (How sweet the sound... ha ha. Couldn't resist.)

In spite of all that, it's full of the same people as anywhere else. I would say "full of the same trash as anywhere else", but that would sound too judgmental. I don't loathe or despise them, but I do look upon them with a sort of polite disdain. Let's try this: it's full of the same hoi polloi as anywhere else.

For example, there is a raucous group of African-Americans just down the hall from me. Mercifully, they are all the way at the other end of the hall. Else, we might have some trouble.

They are shouting and clapping their hands, and driving a herd of elephants around in their rooms, for all I can tell. I am absolutely positive that they have a tambourine in there. The strangest thing is that there are at least two older African-American females with them, and yet this craziness goes on. On my way to the ice machine, I witnessed one of them stick her head into one of the rooms, and then close the door; the noise level was unabated.

I have this crazy idea that they're doing some sort of tribal dances in there. The fact that the older females are dressed in their Sunday best only contributes to that idea.

Maybe that's why it started raining.

Oh, Jesus. I can hear them again. And quite clearly.

Clap clap, stomp stomp, jingalingalingaling.

It's going to be a long night.

Travels, Part (null)

2008-06-24T23:15:00.003-04:00

Well, dear readers, it's a little bit later than the "tomorrow" promised in my last entry. About a week and a half later, to be vaguely precise.

And why? For a number of excellent reasons. One is that I was busy.

Busy smoking and drinking B&B in my Uncle Ken's basement. Maybe that's not such an excellent reason.

Let's try this one: I didn't want to use the wireless networks in all the motels in which we stayed. Using a motel wireless network makes me feel dirty. The same way in which taking a shower in a motel bathroom makes me feel dirty.

If I had one of those UV lights like they have on CSI, I would have to make sure to leave it at home any time I would be staying in a motel. My imagination was quite sufficient to conjure up all sorts of disturbing images of the splatter residue that was mercifully invisible to my naked eye.

Yeah, that's a good reason. Whew.

So, other than drinking, smoking, and staying in motels, what did I do? I'll mention riding in a car for hours on end now, so as to get it out of the way.

I rode in a car for hours on end. Done and done.

We also went to Philadelphia, which is a nice sort of place to go. Pretty much the whole place (at least the whole area which has in it the things you want to see when you go to Philadelphia) is owned by the national park service, so you get into everywhere for free, and you're allowed to take as many pictures as you like.

The exception to this is the Betsy Ross House, which is privately owned and operated, and where they charge you to get in, and you can't take pictures of anything. Of course, it might not even be Betsy Ross' house, and there are all sorts of myths (or at least apocryphal stories) that are shamelessly promulgated by the people that run the shack.

The thing that really stands out to you in sharp relief on a visit to Philadelphia is the whole prohibition on flash photography that seems to be in place whenever you visit somewhere you want to photograph. All day long during my visit I was cursing flash photographers: for being careless and using flashes for no reason, and for not having the right equipment for the job of taking pictures in low light, and for any number of other reasons.

I actually saw a woman using a flash to take pictures off of a tour bus. Sorry, my love, but your little flashbulb will avail you not at ranges of twenty and thirty yards in broad daylight. I also saw a man using a flash on the lawn in front of Independence Hall, with the bright sun shining full upon him. Idiots.

But now, I'm beginning to shift my ire to the people who put up the signs saying "no flash photography" or even "no photography (period)". As I was going through the pictures I took, I noticed the following things in them: eighteenth century furniture, original paint on the walls of historic buildings, and a whole portrait gallery worth of original 1780's paintings of the movers and shakers of the time. And what do they give as the reason you're not supposed to use a flash?

That's right... because your flash is damaging to wood, metal, paint, and for all I know, human flesh. But if that were so, why would the national park service be okay with setting anyone with a camera loose around all their stuff?

They wouldn't. Which means all that tripe about flashes being dangerous to old things is a lie. And the people who put up the signs know that they're lying.

But all disillusionment aside, I am home and glad to be back. Even though I have two weeks' worth of bills, invoices, and unpleasant news fresh out of my mailbox. Even though I have to pay for my cat being boarded in a kennel (or whatever finishes DOG is to KENNEL as CAT is to ___) when I feel she could have done as well to be set loose in the yard. Even though my house is a wreck and my car needs washed.

Tune in next time... current happenings show that there's at least a 60% chance that it'll be a rant against the Department of Veterans' Affairs. And with that, thank you and goodnight. Remember to tip your waitresses, and I also to weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Travels, Part One

2008-06-12T18:19:00.002-04:00

I am on the road again. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be enriched by photographs, because my camera is in the trunk of the car, and I have absolutely no desire to lug the whole operation in here to take some pictures of a hotel shower.

There are benefits to having a wonderful photographic apparatus, and point-and-shoot-ability is not one of them. Besides, I might get digital ick on one of my lenses.

Today we travelled from Ocala to beautiful, exotic Lumberton, North Carolina. Lumberton, among its many distinctions, is listed on exit signs over no fewer than fifteen miles of highway. "Lumberton, here!" they all say. So, to be specific, I will specify that we are at Exit 20 Lumberton, just in case there are other, separate Lumbertons out there lurking.

Small world, today. In the brochure rack of the Days Inn where we will be lodging tonight, there was a pamphlet advertising Gainesville as someplace people might like to go. That's right, our Gainesville, on a brochure at a motel five hundred miles away, being touted like it's Mount Rushmore or something. All of you G'ville residents, this is how some of your tax dollars are being spent. At the next City Council meeting, someone should ask about how the proposed revenues are looking for advertising in Lumberton.

Anyway, road travel is an ordeal. A bit of a comedian's patter caught by chance over the radio as we drove brought to my mind that children today may well grow up never knowing what a thousand miles with five people in a sedan is like. Now they travel in SUV's with room for a dozen, with DVD movies, video games, and fountain Coca-Cola laid on in every seat.

Our trip was not hellish, certainly not as hellish as the ones of my youth, when my brother and sister and I all shared the backseat for interminable hours. Four adults in a sedan is completely tolerable, except for minor factors which need hardly be whined about.

But whine about them I shall. You get dirty riding in a car in a way in which you seldom get dirty in any other way. When we got to the motel, the second thing I had to do right away was take a shower. (The first thing is between me and the motel.) You see, I was feeling absolutely filthy.

Fortunately, the shower at the Lumberton Days' Inn is set up just for filthy people. It employs a variety of speckled tile I have never before seen: the tile is the normal institutional white, and the speckles are the color of bodily filth. It's essentially bathroom camouflage, and one wonders how many of the speckles are actually speckles and how many of them would come off if scrubbed.

As I felt the filth rush off, and down the drain with the soap from the tiny bar, I forgot my disgust and began to be happy again.

I dried myself with the floor mat out of sheer ignorance. It was shamming being a towel, waiting for me to come along and be a schmuck.

Now, we go to find food. More tomorrow.

Why I Dislike Helen Keller

2008-05-02T10:10:00.003-04:00

Yes, you read that right. I dislike Helen Keller. I severely dislike her.

But how? Isn't she an American Icon, a Symbol of Triumph over Damned Near Everything?

Of course she is. I still can't stand her.

The first reason is Anne Sullivan. She has always gotten the short end of the stick in the poignant drama that is the life of Helen Keller. Let's remember... Helen Keller was blind and deaf at the same time (this is, of course, why she's famous, more or less) and Anne Sullivan managed to put her in contact with the world of physical stuff.

Yeah, and who's on the state quarter for whatever the hell state she's from? Helen Keller.

Which is pretty much my second reason. Provided I were in the right mood, I could see how Helen Keller deserves some acclaim. The amount she gets is vastly out of proportion. After all, what did she ever do?

I would say nothing, on the following reasoning: what she did all her life was be who she was. She made speeches and made appearances and was a Symbol of Triumph over Damned Near Everything. She was basically Paris Hilton with the redeeming virtues of being inspiring and a worthy role model for the deaf and blind.

Okay, so she's closer to Princess Diana than Paris Hilton. It's still a step skipped: generally, one has to do something before hitting the lecture circuit, and learning to talk doesn't count.

Which brings us to reason number three... philosophy. Yes, philosophy. I find Helen Keller epistemically unfeasible.

Stand by, big words... what do I mean by that? In terms of the sensory knowledge of the world to which she had access, I find some of the feats she pulled off questionable.

Big example: she learned to talk. Now, we're talking about a woman who has never heard a word spoken (except for early childhood, but that's beside the point). Somehow, she manages to produce sounds which fall upon the ear as words. While it sounds not quite credible, there are in fact a lot of people who are deaf and have learned to speak by linguistic rote, as it were. And, since they can see to read, they can expand their vocabulary of spoken words to encompass whatever their lexical needs might be.

Helen Keller doesn't fit this model. I'll certainly admit to her being capable of making an audible noise. I'll less readily admit to her forming such a noise into a word. I find it quite off the wall to think that she managed to develop however many thousands of words are required for fluency in the English language by shaping mouth-noises gradually into word sounds.

This is the point where someone says, "Yeah, but look. She did it, even if you don't think she could have. She did."

I know. That doesn't mean I have to like it or feel all nice and fuzzy-comfortable about it. In a philosophical sense, it gives me the shrieking chibbers.

So, bring on the hate mail, dear readers. I think I've managed to insult enough people today. And, if you feel like your personal hero, minority group, or self has not been insulted, I'm always open to requests.

Poetry Corner

2008-04-26T12:55:00.006-04:00

Sometimes I think of very odd things.

This jiffy-mart was the latest venue. So, without further ado, a little poetry.

Some say the world will end in fire;

Others say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire,

I hold with those who favor fire.

"Fire and Ice", by Robert Frost

Sorry, sir.

A Day Without Blood Is Like A Day Without Sunshine

2008-04-18T21:45:00.003-04:00

And today was a bright, sunshiny day.

You see, dear readers, we've been having problems with a raccoon in our backyard. This particular raccoon has been known to come onto the back porch and eat the cats' food. It walks with a strange gimpy gait, and comes out in broad daylight. It shows no fear of humans, nor even any regard.

Well, its life ended today. I had to kill it myself.

But don't think that I didn't try other options first. I called Animal Control, where a woman told me she had no idea how a raccoon was supposed to act. My reaction to this was "What? And you work for Animal Control?" She gave me some other numbers to call, including Marion County Animal Control, and the Fish and Game service.

Long story short: Marion County Animal Control does not actually come and capture animals with that noose-stick we've all seen. They set traps. Problem is, this raccoon was being fed bread by our neighbor, and wasn't going to take the bait for a trap.

The folks at Fish and Game were even less helpful. They informed me that with increased development and diminishing habitats, wild animals are being forced into urban and suburban areas. I'd seen the PBS documentary on this, so none of it was news to me. Anyway, they weren't going to do anything either.

So as I sat on the back porch today, I caught the slight suggestion of a gimpy gait over at the edge of the yard, where the neighbor puts out the bread. Also, I heard a rustle in the bushes. I went over to investigate.

Sure enough, I found that raccoon behind our woodpile eating bread. He didn't seem to care about my presence either. So, naturally, I went back to the porch and got my air rifle.

Now, when I say air rifle, I'm talking about a serious piece of equipment. It has the muzzle velocity of a .22, and this particular air rifle is more like a sniper rifle. Nice scope on it, and a baffle silencer at the end of the barrel.

I loaded this instrument of destruction and went back to find my quarry. He was right where I left him, which made it simple to shoot him at point-blank range.

All hell broke loose. The raccoon was dying, and was doing it in a very animated fashion. Now, as we all should know, if you wound an animal you are hunting without killing it outright, you are compelled to track the animal down and finish the job. This I did with a baseball bat.

So, the moral of the story is that Animal Control is useless, and that the only thing that will get rid of your yard-varmints is brutal vigilante justice.

See, psychotic Marines will always be useful.

Today I Vomited

2008-04-03T22:37:00.003-04:00

I'm okay. Really. In fact, I was okay immediately afterwards. You know how sometimes when you're feeling sick, you throw up and then you feel all better? This was one of those.

Actually, I had to blow my nose to get some vomity mucus out, but after that I felt all better.

I think it was because I hadn't been drinking carbonated things for a while, and then I went and drank quite a few carbonated things in a fairly short time, because I was thirsty.

That turned out to be a bad decision.

But, of course, I'm not making a post just to report that I threw up. I'm not even making a post to brag that I threw up spectacularly. Which I did. I calculated 19 square feet were tainted, not counting of course the parts that made it into the toilet. Imagine a rectangle three feet across, and six feet long. That's 18 square feet. That's a lot.

I even managed to get it on a wall four feet away from the bathroom door, and three feet high on that wall. To clarify, this wall was not in the "line of fire" in any way. I have no idea how the hell I pulled that off.

But, I'm not making a post to brag that I threw up spectacularly. That's why I'm not going to describe texture and consistency in all their glory. This is about what happened right afterwards.

I called my Memere. (That has two accents in it, but this typing instrument has no accents in it. Sorry, Memere.) I had to call her because I didn't know how to clean up vomit. I had never cleaned up my own vomit before. There were always other people for that.

(Once I did get forced to clean up my own vomit on a schoolbus by a fascist bitch busdriver. She made me use newspapers. This was completely wrong of her to do, because there was no place for me to vomit that would have been okay.

She would not pull over the schoolbus, nor would she provide a suitable container into which I could vomit. I could not vomit into my schoolbag, because it was full of valuable assignments and expensive textbooks that were not mine.

I was out of options. I did not deserve what she made me do. I hope she burns in Hell. Maybe not eternally, but just for a while. Then they can move her to the part of hell without burning, but with the itch that makes the inmates tear their flesh.

But I digress.)

So, I had to call out for help to find out how to clean up my vomit. Memere was very helpful, as was the fact that I have a very dark green carpet which I imagine would be impossible to permanently blemish except with bleach or ink.

I won't go into the details of the operation. Those who want an idea of how it went can think of Jules and Vincent cleaning up Marvin in the Nova in "The Bonnie Situation" vignette of Pulp Fiction. That should do nicely.

My point, at which I had to arrive eventually, is that as we become fully-fledged adults, we realize there are things we do not know how to do, because we have never done them. I'm not talking just about cleaning up vomit, although that is a fine example. I recently had to ask my mommy how to do my taxes.

It's very humbling to have to ask these things, because one would think "since I am an adult, I should know all this adult stuff, having learned it from somewhere or someone or just through diffusion".

It's almost embarrassing. You take on that embarrassed posture: rounded shoulders, toes together, one hand on the back of your neck, and say "Dad, what's an escrow? The guys I'm buying my new house from keep talking about it." You know what? It's not almost embarrassing. It is embarrassing. Come on, you're buying a house and you don't know these things?

Your parents, or at least one of them, have said at least once to you, "you know you can always ask me anything." I'm pretty sure that the sorts of questions we've been discussing aren't the ones they mean. I won't give examples of the kind they mean, except to say they are about reproductive processes and fluids.

Back to my own vomiting incident (the one from today), I have to say that I made my 19-square-foot mess because I faltered at the moment of truth. I was midway between my two bathrooms, and two feet from the linoleum part of my floor. Instead of just bolting for one or the other bathroom, I took a moment to consider of which one I'd rather make a mess. I chose the guest bathroom, too late to make it there. In retrospect, I should have stayed put and hit the linoleum.

My mom always made the same split-second decision whenever one of us kids was going to spew it. She stuck her hands out to catch it. I have always viewed this as one of the true marks of motherhood: the instinct (yeah, instinct, it was too fast for a considered decision) to catch the vomit of your child in your hands.

She says she always did that because it's easier to wash your hands than the carpet.

I refuse to believe there was any such thought process going on. She did it because she was a mom. I didn't even do that for myself today. I tried to use one hand to hold it back for a few precious seconds. That doesn't really matter.

So, morals for the story. Be careful when you drink things that are fizzy. When you are absolutely ready to chuck it, forget bathrooms and go for the linoleum. Some schoolbus drivers need to go to Hell, but all Mommies who will catch your vomit in their hands will go to heaven.

And most importantly, even as you move from being a "young adult" (read "empowered idiot teenager") to being a slightly older and more experienced adult, you are still an idiot. Go ahead and ask your folks all your stupid questions. You'll always find it mortifying, but they'll always find it so cute.

How You Know My Name?

2008-03-24T16:32:00.005-04:00

This post is devoted to names of all sorts, especially the strange ones and the ones that pop up surprisingly in otherwise mundane circumstances.

I shall begin with an anecdote. Many of you, dear readers, may have heard this one already, but I still think it's a good place to start.

I was at a McDonald's recently (by which I mean 3 or 4 months ago), and was purchasing some Chicken McNuggets to put my raging hunger into remission. McDonald's food is crap, but it is consistent crap. You always know exactly what you're going to get, across the whole continuum of McDonald's franchises. What you're going to get is not really anything good, but at least it's a certainty.

But I digress. I was being helped at that particular McDonald's by a young woman of color named Ashley. (Her name may not actually have been Ashley, but it was certainly a good, standard, six-letter name.) It should be noted at this point that Ashley was not wearing a nametag of any kind.

She was very helpful, and upon receiving my fried pressed-and-molded assorted chicken parts,
and having paid for same, I said, "Thank you very much, Ashley."

At this point things got a little odd. "How you know my name?" inquired Ashley. It was then I realized how I knew her name. "I read it off your teeth," I said. And indeed, across her six front teeth, done up in the metallic veneers known colloquially as a "grill" (or "grille", I'm not sure), were the six letters spelling out her name.

"Oh," said Ashley.

I really felt I should say something more. "Your grill (grille?) is bangin'," I said.

Yeah. Bangin'.

Now, on to Strange Names Abroad in the World. Once again, I present photographic documentary evidence that I'm not just making this stuff up.

Yes, that's correct. The Shalom Christian Center. With crosses and everything. The goyim are stealing all our best stuff. It started with kosher salt and kosher pickles, but now they're using "shalom" to label their goyishe Christian Center. At least they have Betty's Beauty Salon right next door to keep their complexions and coiffures as clean and squared-away as their souls.

I don't know who did this or why. Now, while it looks to have been done with plastic cups, the way one normally makes a sign in a chainlink fence, this sign has actually been done with squarish bucket-like things made of heavy-duty plastic. This is a fence sign for the ages. I can only suppose that these three letters are someone's initials, and that the someone in question is blissfully unaware of the additional meaning appertaining to those selfsame three letters. Either way, it's really weird.

And, of course, the Crossword Community Church. One wonders if the pun is intended. Either way, all I can think of when I see this sign is an itinerant country preacher, mounted on horseback, with his severe black broad-brimmed hat just above his severe black-bearded face and his severe black suit. He has a folded newspaper on his knee, and is chewing meditatively on the eraser of a hand-sharpened pencil.

"What's a five-letter word for the Good Shepherd, Lamb of God, Wonderful, Counselor, Immanuel, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace, the Alpha and Omega, the Author and Finisher of our faith, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Lily of the Valley, Bright and Morning Star, Light of the World, Messiah?" he asks.

Sometimes those crosswords are brutal.

Preach Me The Gospel

2008-02-26T16:57:00.004-05:00

I had to visit the VA hospital today. This has never been an easy thing to do, but it's somehow worse now that I've worked there. Today I ran around acquiring pills, and first I had to go to the VA and talk to a pharmacist because I forgot to re-order some of the extra-important ones, so I couldn't get them in the mail.

The pharmacist really couldn't speak English, but I was really glad to be in his little pharmacist-in-a-box office, because I had been sitting in an uncontrolled location near where they dispense all the pills. This was especially bad because I was also out of my chill pills, and was therefore dangerously far from chill.

Afterward, I had to sit around watching for my name to come up on a TV screen telling me I should go to the pick-up window and retrieve my little bottle of mental health. This, again, was sitting in an uncontrolled location, with my back to a hallway and a couple elevators off to the side. When my name came up, I was happy. The sort of happy that isn't really happy but is a reduction of panic combined with a vague feeling of relief.

I got my pills from the pick-up window, and everything was fine, before I was Jesussaulted.
As I'm making my wheelchair way back to the elevators that will take me to the basement where I can safely top 10 mph on my way to the parking lot, I get a hand placed upon my shoulder.

It was this elderly lady of color, and she had some news to share with me. Good news, no less.

I mentioned right off that I'm Jewish, but I don't think that registered.

We went all the way through the whole Gospel shpiel. Apparently I needed to, in some order, pray to God, repent my sins, pray to Jesus, feel Jesus residing somewhere around my xyphoid process, feel really good, and rise up and walk.

I made my way through this by dint of "yes, ma'am", and "yes ma'am", and on certain occasions, "yes, ma'am". Bear in mind, this woman is feeling me up the entire time. The left arm was fair game, all the way up to the neck. Furthermore, if I were a woman, she would definitely have fondled by left breast on at least three occasions.

Fortunately, I made it whole and nominally-sane through this particular Good News-flash, and went to go get my chill pills. That wasn't easy either, but I've gone on long enough about today's trials, travails, and tribulations. I will only say that the people at the CVS pharmacy are blithering idiots.

And so, properly medicated once more, I leave you, dear reader. Keep alert, dearly beloved, because anyone, anywhere, can be a victim of Jesussault.

Valentine's Day

2008-02-04T18:49:00.000-05:00

Only ten more days and it will be over.

I hate Valentine's Day, in a perennial but circumstantial manner. Every damned year, I get to see the second-worst sort of commercials... I don't watch a lot of TV, but Valentine's Day commercials are so ubiquitous that one can't get through an hour of the telly without getting slammed by them. They're like a giant ocean wave, the sort that slams you down into that muck-sand you get in the shallow parts. The sort that makes you suck kelp and pray to Jesus. (Everybody prays to Jesus in that circumstance, Jews and Muslims included.)

I was watching House, which usually makes me feel pretty good about myself. The diamond commercials all through the show left me feeling frustrated and socially impaired. They ruin everything.

As I just mentioned, albeit in a roundabout fashion, I find the diamond commercials to be the worst. I can't stand to see happy people in love. I don't want to watch them on TV... God knows I see enough happy people in love wherever I go. I hate them all, with the sort of hate that flares up, like a pile of phosphorous shavings set to a match, out of nowhere for a few brief moments. Afterwards, I am bereft, left with a pile of dusty ashes.

Diamond commercials are like all the pith of a chick-flick compressed into a slingshot pellet that nails me right between the eyes like a ball-peen hammer.

All Valentine's-specific commercials aside, most commercials depress me. They all show people being happy, and I can't help but notice that they all are happier than me. Even the ones you expect wouldn't be, like the overweight ladies in the Weight Watchers commercials, or the people with chronic illnesses in the prescription-drug ads.

I get the uncomfortable feeling that one day I'll see a commercial for a funeral home, and everyone in it will seem a lot happier than me.

Upon due consideration, Valentine's Day is only one of the holidays that I hate. I hate New Year's Eve for much the same reasons that I hate Valentine's Day: it's a day to feel particularly lousy about being single.

I also hate Christmas, because of all the people who are nice to me. Truth is, they're only being nice because it's Christmas; during the rest of the year they'd just as soon spit on you. It's hard to keep the sneer off my face whenever I hear that same old tripe about keeping alive the Christmas Spirit all the year long.

Actually, I'm thinking that the sum of all this is that I just hate people in general. Those I perceive as doing better than me I hate because they seem to be happy and successful in all the ways I feel I am not. Those I perceive as doing worse than me I hate because they are simultaneously a blight upon the earth and a potential person who would be doing better than me if only I were doing rather worse than I am.

Anyway, I hate Valentine's Day.

Ten more days until it's over.

And then only one hundred forty-one days until the Fourth of July, which I hate because of the loud noises.

Some people are just never happy.

Or at least not as happy as damned near everyone else seems to be.

Happy Martin's Day

2008-01-21T12:30:00.000-05:00

Well, it's Martin's Day again, and time for me to have my annual Martin's Day rant.

Has it ever occurred to you that there are only four holidays in these our United States that are dedicated to one person only? Even more, three of these four holidays are in honor of gentlemen who were not even Americans: Chris Columbus was Italian, and Jesus Christ (who has two of those four holidays) was (is?) either Israeli or Kingdom-of-Heavenese.

And the third person to have his very own holiday is, of course, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior. Call him Martin, for short. Makes things easier.

The tone thus far should have alerted you to the fact that I think giving Martin his very own day is somewhere between a mistake and a farce. After all, we have Founding Fathers that either have no holiday at all, or else have to share one with somebody else.

But, if we're dead set on giving a holiday to a single person, and not a dead President, I say that individual should be Nicolas Copernicus. And the reason why?

We all know Mr. Copernicus was the man responsible for proposing the heliocentric theory of the solar system. An important tenet of this theory is that the planets revolved about the Sun. What's more, the heliocentric theory caused quite a stir, an upset, the casting down of one school of thought to be replaced with another. One might even call it a revolution, and indeed they did, the etiology of the new meaning of the word derived from the revolution of the planets about the Sun.

And that's where we get the common term revolution, as in a political revolution. Prior to the time of Mr. Copernicus' big idea, the best term for a political revolution we had was the French coup d'etat.

Therefore, if not for Copernicus' being such a bright fellow, there would never have been an American Revolution. There would have been an American Coup d'Etat, and we'd be referring to a sacred part of our national history using the language of those damned Frenchies.

Intolerable.

But hey, happy Martin's Day, everyone. Let's all keep the Spirit of Kwanzaa alive for another couple weeks.

Shock and Horror, Again

2008-01-16T17:50:00.000-05:00

More strange goings-on at the hospital.

As time goes by, it seems that all the really good hospital war stories derive from events that occur in the outside smoking areas. It seems reasonable enough that they would... inside the hospital there are confidentiality issues, patient information to be protected.

Just outside the door, though, all those concerns seem to evaporate. When I'm outside, I don't know anybody's name, nor yet anything about their health which isn't either obvious and visible, or else is shared with me and everybody and therefore okay to relate to my readers.

After all, you could have been there, and seen and heard the things I saw and heard. So... what did I see and hear at the hospital?

I saw a man carrying around a urinal. For the uninitiated, a hospital-issue urinal looks like this:

This is a male urinal, and its use is very simple.

One, open the cap of the urinal. Two, point your urethra into the mouth of the urinal. Three, void your bladder. Four, close the cap of the urinal. Five, hand the urinal to the nearest nurse or orderly.

The gentleman I saw apparently neglected to complete all the steps of this procedure. The urinal he was carrying had perhaps 200 milliliters of fluid in the bottom. The fluid was a reddish-pinkish color; if I were the person who comes up with names for different colors of paint, I would name this color "Soothing Watermelon".

This scene admits of two interpretations, each of which is rather horrifying.

First interpretation: the urinal-man (as I came to think of him in my mental nomenclature) neglected to perform Step 5 in the urinal-use procedure. Therefore, there are two problems:

There is something seriously wrong with this man's health, because his urine is Soothing Watermelon in color.

And he is carrying around a container of his diseased urine around with him, openly, in public.

Second interpretation: the urinal-man has neglected to perform Steps 2 and 3 of the urinal-use procedure. Therefore, there are two problems:

There is something seriously wrong with this man, because he has decided that a urinal is a fine choice of container in which to carry his soda or sports drink.

And he is carrying around a container that looks like it contains his diseased urine. The urinal cannot be divorced of its association with urine, no matter what it contains.

One can only hope that, in the event the second interpretation is correct, the urinal-man's urinal had never been used for its intended purpose. (This brings up another interesting situation... how did he get an unused urinal? "Excuse me, nurse? May I please have a urinal to carry my Gatorade in?")

I'm just waiting until I see a patient in the smoking area eating a double-chocolate sundae.

Out of a bedpan.

Shock and Horror

2008-01-02T17:49:00.000-05:00

Well, dearly beloved, the time has come again when I can use something that happened at work for one of these blog posts. As I'm certain all of you are aware, I work at a hospital, and there's not a damned lot of things that happen at a hospital which can be related to the general public due to privacy concerns.

But I can certainly get away with this one.

So, I'm out front of the hospital in the designated cancer-stick burning area. I am burning a cancer-stick there. I'm away from my telephone, and away from my computer, and away from all the lousy bastards who make my workday difficult.

(My job now pretty much consists of talking on the telephone. It's not a bad racket, all things considered, but there are a goodly number of people wafting around my work area. At least four times a day I get the desire to perpetrate some mild physical harm upon them in the interests of poetic justice.

Example: while I am talking on the phone, two or three or five of them are having a boisterous conversation right over my head. My mind spins back to the heady days of my youth... I am three years old, and Mommy has one hand over the telephone receiver mouthpiece and is hissing at me, "BE QUIET. MOMMY IS ON THE PHONE." I want to duct-tape their chins to the tops of their heads, Jacob Marley style.

People also keep stealing things out of my pencil cup. I'd dearly love to electrify it.

Okay, digression over. At this point in the story, I'm pounding in a coffin-nail and enjoying being away from my desk for a while...)

And as I sit, calmly indulging my Freudian desire to place white tubular things in my mouth and suck on them, I am approached by a man.

This man fits the VA demographic perfectly. He is between the ages of 67 and 75, wide in the shoulders, and wearing a flannel shirt and some manner of "I Was In Nam" or "Air Cav Rocks The Hizzy" baseball cap. He approaches me in a determined fashion, which immediately suggests to me that he is going to bum a smoke off me.

This is par for the course. Happens all the time. I've never yet seen one of our brothers-in-arms fail to get a cigarette from at least one of us out there in the nicotine zone.

As he comes up to me, he stabs himself in the neck.

Not with a knife, though. He stabs himself in the neck with something that looks like an oversized plastic bullet. Actually, we can dispense with the "oversized plastic bullet" euphemism. It looked exactly like a dildo. A purple dildo with holes in the bottom, like a salt shaker.

There are some highly questionable directions we can run with that description. But we won't.

Anyway, he rams this thing into his neck, and starts talking to me in this computerized-sounding Darth Vader voice. Truthfully, it sounded less like Darth Vader than it did like the guy making the ransom call on CSI or something. However the sound may be characterized, it was definitely harsh, digitized, and completely unexpected.

Doesn't matter, really. Darth Vader was my first impression.

That's a lie. My first impression was "oh dear GOD!"

This is an unusual reaction. I've gotten very numb and world-weary about the various unpleasant-looking medical conditions that the patients in the hospital exhibit. Another day, another disfigurement. I don't even blink anymore when I see some poor fellow with half a Freddy Krueger face, or a lady whose elbows and knees are overlapped by bags of flesh drooping from her upper arms and thighs (making her look like she once had eight limbs, like a spider, but had four of them amputated to pass easily among humans).

I sort of imagine to myself that out in the main lobby, or perhaps in the auditorium, Rob Bottin is doing free face-painting. A fifth-birthday party gone terribly wrong.

Point is, no matter how seen-it-all-don't-care I was about people having stuff wrong with them, this guy shocked the hell out of me. The swift movement of slapping his voice-dildo to his throat, followed immediately by Darth Vader-speak pouring forth from the salt-shaker holes in the bottom, was sudden enough to be a complete surprise.

And Lord Vader said to me, "CAN I GET A SMOKE FROM YOU SON" (I'm rendering it in all capital letters, because that's the way it sounded to me... no real inflections, just a digitized monotone.)

Of course, I told the man sure-no-problem-here-you-go-sir-need-a-light?

Would have done that anyway, but it was a little bit different. I'm quite sure that even if I were the sort of stingy bastard who won't spot a smoke to a fellow nicotine-leper in need, I would still have given this man a cigarette simply because I was in a full head-spin and unable to do other than to comply.

All that was just preparation. Now comes the part where this story gets really freaky.

I give the man his cancer-stick, and I make to give him my lighter to light it with. He doesn't reach to take the lighter, though. Instead, he says "YOU WOULDN'T MIND HELPING ME LIGHT IT WOULD YOU."

Of course, I say sure I will, and no problem.

That was the point where I just about freaked.

Some background: certain people, especially those who have developed cancers or other serious diseases of the throat and/or upper respiratory tract, have to undergo a treatment called a tracheotomy. The reason for it is that they can't get air properly into their lungs via the normal nose-and-mouth routes we all use. (Yes, this is the same thing that TV doctors and MacGyver use a ballpoint pen to do in TV-MacGyver emergencies.)

The net effect of the procedure is to provide the patient with a breathing hole in his neck, thereby bypassing all the air-intake routes that aren't working properly. In the medical business, this hole is called a "stoma".

Darth Vader takes his speeching apparatus down from his neck, and I have the briefest of instants to experience the horror of realizing that he has a stoma.

The reason I didn't get much time for that horror was that the potentiality that provided the impetus for it quickly resolved itself into a reality as the man put the damned cigarette up to his stoma.

Now just three thoughts constitute my entire awareness. To wit: "this crazy bastard is going to smoke a cigarette through his stoma", "wow, that's really ironic", and "OH MY GOD, I AGREED TO LIGHT IT FOR HIM."

Which, true to my word, I did. At that point the creepiness was pretty much over, although I did have to watch him smoke most of that cigarette through his stoma. The really freak-out part of watching the man smoke was that he not only inhaled through the stoma, but exhaled through it as well.

I remember having a crazy thought about whether he might be able to blow smoke-rings.

To my credit, I didn't ask him. Although, after all the rest of it, I was probably afraid of what the answer to that query might be. Maybe a demonstration.

It's almost enough to make you decide to quit smoking.

Almost enough. And when you don't quit, at least you can look forward to one day being able to exhibit the sheer shocking panache of smoking through a hole in your neck.

I have to admit... after all he's been through because of it, smoking still made the man look cool.

This Year's Holiday Greeting

2007-12-23T13:56:00.000-05:00

MMORPG

2007-12-03T20:12:00.000-05:00

For the uninitiated, the acronym stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game. As I was answering phones at work today, the concept of the MMORPG formed a sizable portion of the trademarked Bipolar Flight of Ideas which I experience whenever the slightest bit of noise or motion distracts me from my phone-answering.

To be quite frank, this rarely makes the slightest difference to my job performance, because I answer phones like a computer. But that's a digression in which I will not be indulging tonight. Instead, I'm going to do something completely unprecedented and stick to my stated topic.

If you don't want to be on the world when it explodes, better to get off now.

So, off we go.

The MMORPG moniker is only half true. And, conveniently enough, it splits right down the middle. Are they multiplayer? Indeed they are; it can hardly be disputed that there are not multiple players on the servers of any given one of them. Are they massively multiplayer? Considering that the number of multiple players is in the tens of thousands or so, I think we can agree that they are indeed massively multiplayer. And, of course, they are online. That at least is obvious.

Of course, the other half, the RPG half, is a damned lie. Role-playing? Don't make me laugh... I'm drinking Dr. Pepper, which hurts the most of all sodas when making a hasty improvised exit through one's sinuses. Now, granted, there are roles to be played. The trouble is that nobody really bothers to play them. Furthermore, those that do play them are mocked relentlessly and ostracized by all.

Let's face it: if there are thirty thousand people playing, and you are one of the dozen who actually chooses to play the role of the magical elf swordmaster, you will be condemned as a freak.

Ironically, we on the outside can condemn not only the dozen but also the rest of the thirty thousand as freaks. Because the one noun in the nomenclature, the "game" for which stands the G, is a cold falsehood as well.

Why? Because a game is something that one plays for entertainment, an enjoyable activity in which one engages for amusement, or as a substratum for a good time with friends, or something along those lines.

Show me the pasty-faced slug-man, his eyes fixed unblinkingly upon his computer screen. Show me his sweaty palms, scrape off for me the salt that has crusted beneath his fingernails from the evaporation of the pungent ichor he perspires. Count for me the hours upon hours spent playing his "game", to the exclusion of social interaction with his friends and family... the hours during which he neither sleeps nor eats, the hours during which he urinates into a jar so as not to waste precious minutes of playing time to relieve himself in the toilet.

And upon consideration of this fleshy pixel-burned lump, tell me that I have just described an individual playing a game. These are not games. They are obsessions, manifestations of an inner sense of worthlessness and incapacity that drive flesh-and-blood humans to make their online characters rich and powerful in all the ways that they themselves are not.

(You may be wondering at this point why I have used exclusively male pronouns to talk about our game slug. I have done this because of the nature of any online gathering of online persons, from chatrooms to text-based games to the slick games with the blisteringly good graphics. On the Internet, the men are real men. Also, the women are really men. The children are FBI agents.)

I actually inflicted one of these games upon a roommate of mine. My rationale was partly driven by malice, and partly driven by an intense hatred for video-game music. My victim was the sort of fellow who not only plays games until he has beaten them, but also plays them until he has "mastered them". This "mastering" is his own term. In short, it means expanding or strengthening or leveling one's character to the point where it can knock out the Big Boss with a flick of its finger.

Naturally, this meant hours and hours out of each day spent playing whatever was the current game to be mastered. And, therefore, hours upon hours spent listening to the same old video-game music. This drove me insane.

So I turned him on to an MMORPG... a text-based one. All I heard then was the clatter of keys... soothing, like rain on a tin roof. I watched with amusement as his relationship with his girlfriend began to stutter and die. I smiled quietly to myself as he got suspended from the university for lack of academic progress, and then disenrolled for continued lack of academic progress. I got a little warm fuzzy feeling in my appendix every time he surfaced from his game-world to make a half-hearted attempt to put together an appeal to the Faculty Senate to let him back in.

So soothing. Like rain on a tin roof. And the sweet smell of burning lives, like pine incense. It was worthy of haiku:

Keys fall, blue needles,
flurries of ash to the sea.
Snowflakes by moonlight.

He even brought out the most ironic part of these games: the screwed up economics of it all. Here he was, spending real money in order to get items that really don't exist: solid chunks of legal tender in exchange for the rearrangement of some ones and zeros on a server somewhere in Canada.

Furthermore, he was paying the people who owned that mystery Canadian server even more real money every month for the continued right to pay them real money for virtual stuff. I watched him work delivering pizzas to get the money he needed to pour into getting his virtual fix. And he only delivered the bare minimum of pizzas needed to cover his game costs; the rest of the time he called in to ask his managers "do you really need me to come in tonight" and suchlike.

So, what's the moral of the story? Well, we have two.

The first moral of the story is that the Interwebs are a system of pipes and the Devil lives in them and destroys lives using his Warcrafts and his Everquests and his Consecutively Ordinally-numbered Lives.

The second moral of the story is that if you overplay your video games and piss me off, I will ruin your life.

But I will ruin it in a way that is evocative of beautifully clean images, like the stark blackness of a cherry tree in winter, a few ice-cased blossoms clinging to the branches as if in hope of a sudden spring.

Doesn't that sound nice?

A Tribute to Manhattan Clam Chowder?

2007-11-27T18:26:00.000-05:00

I swear this is not photoshopped in any way. Besides, who would even think to fake this? If you need independent corroboration, go to your nearest jiffy-mart and look in the single-serving beer section.

Budweiser, the King of Beers, introduces an exciting version of the Great American Lager.
Now with the bold, refreshing tastes of clam and tomato,
This Bud's for You.

The Least Verbose Blog You'll Ever See Here

2007-11-16T19:54:00.000-05:00

I have always thought those rear-window
gravestones were an annoying habit of the proletariat.

This one trumps them all.

Some punk with a shotgun
Killed young Danny Bailey
In cold blood,
In the lobby of a downtown hotel.
Killed him in anger;
A force he could not handle
Helped pull the trigger
That cut short his life

Sir Elton John
"The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-34)"
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

My Guy Fawkes

2007-11-06T19:48:00.000-05:00

Remember, Remember
The Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I Know of no Reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be Forgot.

As I made perfectly clear at the beginning of the post about my Halloween, Guy Fawkes just beats Halloween until it wets itself and prays to Jesus. Both wetting itself and praying to Jesus are extremely embarrassing things for a quasi-Satanic holiday to be doing.

What is Guy Fawkes? Well, let's start with who is Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes was a fellow who tried to blow up Parliament many years ago. Like a few hundred years ago. If you want to know exactly how many, try an encyclopedia instead of a blog entry.

Anyway, he didn't get as far as blowing up Parliament, because he tipped off some of his chums in Parliament that they might not want to be in the building on a certain day. His chums thought this highly suspicious, and in the name of King and Country (or Queen and Country, whichever one they had then) sent some chaps to capture him. And poor Guy Fawkes was hung and drawn and quartered for treason.

So, naturally, all loyal Englishmen would want to have a commemorative celebration of this historical footnote from back in the dim ages. The standard Guy Fawkes festivities run something like this (keep in mind that my major source of information for this is the Paddington Bear series of children's books): the neighborhood lads and lasses cart around a wagon, in which rides a partially built effigy of Guy Fawkes. To passersby, they say, "Penny for the Guy," in hopes of getting some loose change to buy things to improve their effigy. And with night come upon the world, and their labours of effigy-building being done, they burn their Guy Fawkes, either at the stake or by casting him into a bonfire.

So now you have the general gist of Guy Fawkes. I'm sure you'll agree that it's a much better holiday than Halloween, as it includes history, fire, and the multiple symbolic destruction of a fellow who pretty much had the worst punishment England could think up for his non-symbolic destruction.

Unfortunately, a truly traditional Guy Fawkes cannot be carried out here in the Colonies. Imagine with me a moment... the curtain rises to reveal Yours Truly pulling a wagon with an effigy-in-progress therein.

Yours Truly: Penny for the Guy?
Passerby: What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Exeunt Passerby, stage left. Enter a Policeman.
Yours Truly: Penny for the Guy?
Policeman: Clear off, there's no panhandling allowed here.
Yours Truly: I'm not panhandling, I'm soliciting donations for my effigy.
Policeman: What the hell is an effigy, and why do you need one?
Yours Truly: The effigy is for symbolically burning Guy Fawkes later tonight.
Policeman: You're under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder, and I'm getting this Fawkes
guy under protective custody.
Exeunt Policeman. Exeunt Yours Truly, in handcuffs.

I think I've made my point. But all this Colonial ignorance was not going to deter me from having my Guy Fawkes. Thus, I made a trip to Wal-Mart. I had the damnedest time finding anything there, from appropriate garments to something round and flammable to use for a head. But, I did receive cheerful customer service.

The fruits of my labor? Some clothes,

and a head.

Sadly, this tomato-strawberry pincushion was the best thing I could find for a head. Let me add some emphasis: in an entire Super Wal-Mart, this pincushion was the best thing I could find for a head. Don't worry about Wal-Mart taking over the earth... I don't care how many products they have. If I can't find them, I can't buy them.

In any case, the pincushion makes a pretty good head with some slight modifications.

Now, traditionally the Guy would be stuffed with hay and straw. Well, I couldn't find any hay or straw, even in this podunk town. (Ocala. Yes, I'm amazed too.) Instead, I decided to use all the junk mail I received on Guy Fawkes Day as stuffing.

My expedition through Wal-Mart and all that shredding and tearing will build up a mighty hunger. I took a minute to eat a traditional Guy Fawkes dinner of meatball subs and Dr. Pepper.

Also I took a moment to read the funny-paper. Oh, that Garfield.

Well, time to start assembling my Guy.

I decided the best method to hold him all together would be some sort of stick, to form a kind of spine or backbone. I decided to use an arrow.

Okay, so it was less of a backbone insertion than an impalement. Weep not for the Guy... he's going to suffer much worse.

And here he is, all ready to go. Poor little guy. I especially like his sad little hat.

And now, burning pictures. No commentary will be necessary, nor will any be provided. Enjoy.

That's pretty much when the bucket and the driveway and all started to catch fire. So we called it a good burning and went inside to watch V for Vendetta, which is actually a movie about Guy Fawkes.

So... what did you do with your Monday night?

My Halloween

2007-11-06T18:04:00.000-05:00

First of all, a cultural fact: Halloween is not worthy to tongue-polish the boots of Guy Fawkes. Much as the Spanish birthday song beats the hell out of our pitiful little ditty, Britain's morbid fall holiday kicks our morbid fall holiday's ass. Kicks it hard.

Halloween drives me up a wall. Little kids ring your doorbell at odd intervals, and you have to go to the door and give them candy. Net result: me getting extremely torqued off because the little brats are rewarded for being insufferably annoying.

But that's enough of a diatribe about Halloween. Actions speak louder, right? So here's what I did for Halloween.

I live in a condo complex, which is more or less like an apartment complex plus a smallish suburban neighborhood. I've seen kids here and there playing or getting into and out of cars and trouble, and I am therefore uncertain whether trick-or-treating goes on in this locality.

Not that I give a damn. I'll be violently buggered before I sit in my own home rewarding pushing a doorbell button with processed-sugar pellets. It's like some god-awful Skinner box. So, for all the little kiddies, I set up the Bastard Bowl.

What is the Bastard Bowl? The concept and construction are very simple, and using it requires no effort. First, one makes a sign on the following model:

Then, modify the sign along the following lines, for which I used a red Crayola crayon:

And now the part which works best if you have neither a love for children nor a conscience. Attach the sign you have made to a bowl, and place the bowl outside your door, like so:

I put three chewy Jolly Rancher candies in the bowl, and two on the gravel surrounding the bowl. The rest of the bag I actually ate at a sitting a couple of nights ago, but that's beside the point.

The point is: you set up the Bastard Bowl, and a number of amusing consequences ensue.

First, you have evaded the "treat" part of trick-or-treating, because the Bastard Bowl requires only a modicum of actual candy.

Second, you have evaded the "trick" part of trick-or-treating; even the most hardened child hooligan will not deface your house upon seeing the Bastard Bowl. He'll just wish that he had gotten to it first.

Third, you are liberated from your house. Go anywhere you want, and those damned doorbell-ringing kids will just have to suck up their tears and go to the next door.

And finally, you will have brought about in your neighbors the discomfiting knowledge that somewhere in this neighborhood live some very naughty children. People start mistrusting each others' kids: they might be the daemon spawn who did that awful thing on Halloween. People start mistrusting each other, for that matter, for what kind of parent (or what manner of person, for that matter) produces that sort of evil child?

Ah, domestic tranquility.

Coming up next in this two-parter... my Guy Fawkes!

Sherlock Holmes as an Anachronism

2007-10-14T16:05:00.000-04:00

Everyone who is even passingly familiar with literature should have a decent grasp on the character of Sherlock Holmes. As a refresher, here is the overarching facet of Sherlock Holmes which makes transplanting him out of his own little corner of time: Sherlock Holmes makes amazing deductions about people by dint of exceptional observational skills.

There is a point in one of the Holmes stories where, after one of Holmes' stunning deductions, Watson makes the comment that if Holmes had lived a few hundred years ago, he certainly would have been burned at the stake as a witch. I agree with Watson there; that is probably exactly what would happen. The point of it is that Sherlock Holmes can't be displaced from his time without disastrous results.

This idea struck me yesterday evening, as I was positing a rather stunning series of deductions about someone. I considered for a bit whether it would be a good idea to present this person with those deductions, that is, whether such a performance would get good results or not.

I decided against revealing my astounding deduced facts, on the grounds that it would be at least a bit creepy. And, of course, my deductions were of a far lower order than the Holmesian variety. This train of thought led me to consider how Sherlock Holmes would make out in these our modern times.

I even thought of a little dialogue, which I think illustrates my point nicely. As the curtain rises, we find ourselves in the sitting room of 221B Baker Street. Holmes and Watson are sitting by the fire; Watson is smoking a very Freudian cigar, and Holmes is injecting himself with a seven percent solution of cocaine. There comes a knock at the door...

Holmes: It seems that fortune has favored us with a bit of excitement this morning, Watson.
Watson: Quite, my good man, pip pip cheerio.
Enter an attractive Young Lady, in obvious distress.
Watson: Cor blimey!
Holmes: Please, miss, sit down before you fall down. Here is some brandy to steady your nerves.
Young Lady: Oh, Mr. Holmes, you have to help me! My situation is all over the papers, I'm certain that everyone knows all about it...
Watson: Crikey!
Holmes: Miss, other than that you are a waitress at the Hog Bottom Inn, that you live in the East End, that you ride the Number 17 bus to Charing Cross and then take the Number 12 to get to work, and that you use Garnier Fructis shampoo every other day, I know absolutely nothing about you.

(This is the part where, in a normal Holmes Story, the Young Lady gives a visible start, and Watson says something along the lines of "but, Holmes, this is astounding. But this is also the part where the script takes a different turn... remember, we are in modern times, now.)

Young Lady: And just how the hell do you know all that, Mr. Holmes?
Watson: Yeah... do you know this girl or something? (Zounds!)
Holmes: Of course not. I merely observed peanut shells ground into the soles of her shoes; customers shelling their own peanuts and tossing the shells on the ground is a trademark of the Hog Bottom Inn. As for her residence in the East End, you can quite plainly see traces of the peculiar sandy soil of that district upon the cuff of her left trouser leg. Furthermore, she has several bus tickets protruding from her right jacket pocket, and I must say that any criminal expert should be able to identify from fragrance the forty-seven common brands of hair products.
Young Lady: Oh, pull the other one. Like I'm supposed to believe you know all those things about me from dirt and smells?
Watson: It is a bit far-fetched, Holmes. I'm not sure I find your "deductions" all that credible. You do know her, don't you?
Young Lady: I bet he knows all about me, even though I've never seen him before in my life. I wonder just how he does it, hmm?
Watson: You know, Holmes, the only way you could really know all that is if you'd been following her around. Wait a second... have you been following this girl around?
Young Lady: You stalker freak. You've been following me to work and my house and everything... oh, dear God! You knew about my shampoo, you sick bastard!
Watson: Oh, bloody hell, Holmes, you've been looking through her bathroom window, haven't you?

I think everyone gets the point by now. What makes me really curious is why the actual persons-in-distress in the Holmes stories never came up with this sort of thing for themselves. All suspension of disbelief notwithstanding, is it at all sensible to believe that a stranger knows all sorts of personal things about you by the ash from your cigarette or the length of your fingernails?

It's also worth noting that all the victims of this sort of Holmesian deduction express absolute astonishment at his knowing all about them an instant after their supposed first meeting. I do seem to recall just one or two persons-in-distress accusing Holmes of stalking them, but being quickly mollified by his explanations just the same.

Further still... why did Holmes never get arrested for the crimes he investigated, not even once? Consider this: you're a police detective, and you find yourself confronted with a man that inexplicably knows all the details of a crime. A solid assumption would be that this fellow, who knows things somehow that probably only the killer would know, is in fact the killer himself.

So, the moral of the story is... don't make clever and astonishing true statements about strangers, or about crimes under investigation.

You will be served with restraining orders.

If you escape a prison sentence, that is.

And now for something... serious?

2007-10-12T22:58:00.000-04:00

Deep breath, everyone... I'm going to write a paragraph-sentence, like James Michener Light (fewer consonanhydrates, same smooth taste).

Well, dear readers, I've decided I'm going to chime in on something serious and political, like all of those self-congratulatory purveyors of blog-born stultification that get such great play on 60 Minutes and in USA Today or wherever boredom-junkies gather together to talk about the allegedly brilliant political discourse going on in the blogosphere or whatever made word we're calling this amalgam of the collective thoughts of the windy this week.

Deep breath again. You made it. Give yourself a big hug, and make a self-affirmative statement.

The topic which compels me to venture into the socially-relevant is (of course) the late brouhaha over the death penalty.

We are stretching the definition of "cruel and unusual" well beyond all credibility. Let's take a walk down Execution Memory Lane, shall we?

In the ancient world, we had a grab bag of ways to kill people, some relatively merciful (beheading), and others truly awful (having a red-hot poker forced into your rectum). More than that, there was that whole "eye for an eye" deal that Hammurabi fellow came up with. I'm going to lump the medieval British in with the ancients here, just because of the hanging-drawing-quartering they were so fond of fits in so well with the grab bag of pre-modern ways to kill those who were deemed to deserve it.

That being said, let's think about what I consider the first modern execution device: the guillotine. Exceptionally humane, that guillotine... never misses, never fails, angled blade to slice the head off neatly instead of chopping it. The French brought to perfection the age-old practice of beheading. (They also torpedoed Greenpeace's "Rainbow Warrior". Other than that, they've done nothing worthy of mention.) Why don't we use it anymore? Well, separating the head from the body is one of those things we regard prima facie as barbaric, and never give a second thought.

Next in the parade... hanging and the firing squad. Hanging actually is a pretty good way to kill someone; the trick is to drop them far enough to make sure the neck breaks cleanly on the first try. The strangling bit is rather unpleasant (although the victim will almost certainly pass out from a lack of blood to the brain within mere seconds), but if properly done, a hanging need never come to that. The firing squad is also quite effective, and don't give me objections about what if they miss. Half a dozen men trained to shoot are not going to miss either a head shot or a chest shot at a range of only a few yards. Why don't we use these anymore? Squeamishness.

And that's where the parade of innovative execution methods starts, dearly beloved. We don't like hanging and the firing squad, so we come up with the electric chair. We don't like the smell of burning flesh, so we come up with the gas chamber. We can't stand pumping poisonous fumes into a fishbowl with a felon in it, so we come up with lethal injection. We don't want to hurt anyone by sticking them with a needle, and here we are.

Let's have some perspective. If you kill someone, it is going to hurt. At least a little bit... can't get around it. None of the methods mentioned above (starting with the guillotine, of course) are going to hurt for very long. Seriously, folks... we stick our children with all kinds of needles. It hurts, then it stops hurting, and you get a Power Rangers band-aid and a lollipop. Drawing and quartering is cruel. Head-chopping is cruel when done improperly, and there's always the risk of human error. Needle sticks are not cruel.

But I digress, if only slightly. The pattern I'd like to point out is this: the more we try to find ways to decrease the alleged cruelty of executions, the more we manage to increase how unusual our execution methods are. Just imagine how an average late nineteenth-century member of society would react if shown an electric chair. That individual would have a very appropriate and sensible reaction... a reaction to the effect that the electric chair is foxtrotting bizarre.

Of course, I'm aware that the current debate on lethal injection is not really about needle sticks; it's about the condemned being in awful, terrible pain, but unable to communicate that because they've been paralyzed by other drugs.

Philosophy to the rescue: Charles Foster Peirce (pronounce that like "purse") came up with a very sensible theory to the effect that if there is no difference in the sensible effects of two items or events, then there is no difference whatsoever between said items or events. He made the Catholics very irate by making the claim, in accordance with this theory, that the doctrine of transubstantiation is epistemically unsustainable; if the wine is wine (and thus has all the sensible effects of wine, color and taste and whatever), and then a little later the wine is claimed to be the literal blood of Christ (but it still has all the same sensible effects as it ever did), Peirce would claim that there really is no difference between before and after, and hence no such thing as transubstantiation as specified in Catholic doctrine.

But that's just an example, not the reason I brought Peirce up in the first place. Let's apply what we've learned, shall we? If we have a fellow being lethally injected who is in no pain and makes no signs to the effect that he is in pain, and we have another fellow being lethally injected who is in agony and makes no signs to the effect that he is in pain, then there is no difference in the sensible effects between the two cases. Ergo, there is no difference between them at all. Simple, right?

Prediction: if the ladies and gents who are gunning for the death penalty in its latest guise get the Supreme Court ruling they so desperately want, then the death penalty is going down, period. We've run out of creative and unusual ways of killing those deemed to deserve such by a jury of their peers, sentence imposed by a judge in good standing in this state. (Something truly, innovatively bizarre will now be done to you until you are dead, in accordance with state law. May God have mercy on your soul.) (Roll on two.)

My suggestion? It's rather obvious. Have the party to be executed kneel down, preferably facing a concrete wall of some sort, and shoot him point-blank in the head with a handgun of fairly large caliber. Simple, inexpensive, hurts maybe a little but not for long, utterly foolproof.

There's a reason why they call that kind of shooting "execution-style" in the news and police reports and all: because it's a good way to do it.

And certainly a better way than whatever unusual-for-the-sake-of-not-being-cruel wack-ball method the execution engineers might think up next.

Requiem for a Bird

2007-09-28T16:59:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-19T20:49:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-15T21:11:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-14T21:46:00.000-04:00

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.

Why it's been so quiet...

2007-07-08T17:18:00.000-04:00

Bless me, Internet, for I have sinned.

It has been twenty-six days since my last confession.

And frankly, you probably don't want to know the details of exactly what I've been up to all this time. It's a whirl of hospitals and hot dusty fields, of midnight car trips and tequila, of pills and sunglasses and knives and ATM cards.

I spend a lot of time laughing. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that's a good thing.

I play the radio too loud. I execute brutally underhanded verbal assaults on unsuspecting waitresses. I burn, I pine, I perish. I tell a man that I'm going to stab him in the kidneys, and chuckle along with everyone who hears because I know that they'll never be able to say they had no warning if I actually do it.

Four days ago, I stuck a couple dozen tiny foil guitar-confettis all over my face using my own saliva as an adhesive.

Three days ago I made a phone call which may amount to throwing myself back under a bus.

Yesterday I body-blocked an entire ELT mission.

I am tired, but I don't really sleep. I am sick, but I don't really want to be well. I am lost, but I keep moving so that I can never be found.

Don't be alarmed, dearly beloved. This is par for the course. Making poor decisions is a habit, and acting in inexplicably bizarre ways is a trademark.

Calm down. All will be well.

It had better.

It has to, right?

I Was Mugged By Jesus This Morning

2007-06-12T17:30:00.000-04:00

The moral of the story is never enter a house through a garage unless you're bringing a car with you. That's what I did yesterday when I forgot my ancillary keys. They're either in my car or in one of my other pants pockets, and I just didn't feel like walking all the way back to the car to get the keys.

It was probably fifty feet away. I am full of disgusting sloth, apparently.

So instead of going through the people-door, I used the keypad to open the car-door, and went in that way. Turns out that nobody actually used the front door at all yesterday.

That's how I ended up getting attacked by Jesus Christ this morning as I left for work.

I opened the front door, and there He was. He did not look happy. Not even a little. Perhaps the Messiah stands at the door and knocks, but if you don't let Him in all night, He gets a little pissed off.

I recoiled in fear and shock. From the wild look in His eyes to His beetling unibrow, Jesus was a sight to make the bowels of strong men slosh and seep as though filled with lukewarm bathwater.

It's about time I explained this whole situation. Don't everybody start getting ready to be caught 'way up in the middle of the air. Stop listening for the trump of the archangel. Unseal your doors: the locusts with the faces of men are not coming with the authority to destroy one third of all that crawleth upon the earth.

Someone stuck a religious tract in the doorframe yesterday. The tract had a picture of Jesus on the front. And nobody used the door all day long.

Now, usually, a piece of paper stuck in the door falls down when the door is opened, immediately drawing one's attention as it wafts towards the ground. But a piece of paper left for a day and a night exposed to the elements in such a position follows a completely different set of rules.

It sticks to the door when the door is opened, having been fastened thereto by the action of becoming damp and then drying.

This is what happened to the tract. When I opened the door this morning, it did not fall, but remained stuck to the door, still folded in half, like a tenacious piece of savior mache.

The face of Jesus was folded down the middle. Everyone knows that when you take half of a face and mirror-image it to make a full face, the result is very creepy.

And, with half a face of Jesus two inches from my left eye, and my right eye still directed into the house, I had the distinct and unmistakable impression that the King of the Jews himself was lunging at me from out of the bathroom.

At this point, it would be nice to say that I took down the tract, read it, and repented of my sinful ways.

In fact, I took the Lord's name in vain repeatedly, in combination with a lot of other rather salty language. And then I went and made a snide joke out of the whole incident to various people all day long.

That's probably the best time I've ever had with a religious tract.

Please, Lord, may I have another?

I Am A Right Bastard

2007-05-28T13:49:00.001-04:00

I should feel much worse about all of this, you know. The problem is that I don't.

How do I feel? Relieved, mostly. That's not exactly complimentary.

It's not very complimentary of me, for one thing. If ever there were a time to show a smattering of basic human emotions, now would be that time. And yet, here I sit, not wondering "why?" or "what can I do to fix this?" or even "what could I have done differently?", but instead "well, what am I going to do next?"

That's not "what am I going to do now?", mind you. There is no element of hopelessness here. Perhaps a tinge of regret for months wasted out of my life, but no regrets over the person involved.

Which brings me to the second uncomplimentary bit: one would think that there would be a bit more unhappiness here, if only as an affirmation and tribute to that which is gone. One would think, and one would be wrong.

It's almost too much of a change-over: I cared very much when she was here, and therefore I should care very much that she is gone, now. But I don't. I guess getting kicked in the face for a month or so was enough to burn though my supply of grief for this relationship. I had mourned for it before it was even over, and now I have nothing left for it.

How does she feel about all this? Well, I wish I cared.

I wish I cared about any of it.

But I don't.

And maybe that is the saddest thing of all.

A Special Irony Installment for Friday, 18 May

2007-05-24T22:45:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace on 20 May, 2007, at 1147 EDT, and is the final posting on that site. Onward to the future, then; the past has caught up to us so we can all move on. (Tangle.)

Well, the day before yesterday (yestereve, actually if one wanted to be as pretentious as possible) was a day for irony, apparently. I encountered not just one but two outstanding instances of irony within the space of two hours.

Now, I'm not talking about the normal variety of irony, about which I could easily consume all my time writing if I chose to document all of it, everyday. Of course, it really couldn't consume all my time in that way, because if I wrote about all of it, I would spend all my time writing about irony and none of my time actually experiencing it, which would quickly lead to my having nothing about which to write, and I would have to stop. That in itself is actually ironic, but that's not what I wanted to talk about here today. I will, however, clean up this train of thought neatly by pointing out that if one wanted to solve for

24 = [((t1 + t2 ... +tI) / I)] I + WI + (E + S)

in order to maximize I (where I is the number of instances of irony in one day, t is the time expended experiencing each instance, W is the average time spent writing about an instance of irony, E is the time expended eating, and S is the time expended sleeping) then you would be able to calculate roughly how much irony I could handle and write about, as long as nobody would care how I would smell.

But enough of that. Example number one involved me going to a shopping mall, which is fertile ground for irony to begin with. This one was especially good, because I went to the most ironic store in any shopping mall: Hot Topic.

Now, why is Hot Topic the most ironic? Simple: it is a store which specializes in catering to a clientele which by and large hold a philosophy approximating "foxtrot the system". And yet, here they are, purchasing licensed merchandise in what the clerk called "the mecca of corporate-sponsored consumerism" (I forgave him for not using a proper adverb), and of course that licensed merchandise constitutes advertising for entities (bands, usually) who are proponents of the notion that corporate-sponsored consumerism is the very mark of the Beast upon our society.

It is a price tag in the amount of six dollars and sixty-six cents that we all wear upon our right hands and foreheads.

And yet, what else are you going to do if you need a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt? Apparently, in order to properly rage against the machine, one must become one of its cogs.

It is worth noting, largely because this makes the whole story different from any other time I've been to a Hot Topic franchise, that the clerk in question was aware of the level of irony inherent in his vocation. He got it. He understood.

Every day, this young man laughs at the neo-goths and emos and punkers and God knows who else who drift through his store, feeding their life's blood of time and money into the greedy sucking maw of that which they claim to despise, in order to acquire the appropriate trappings of the hatred they so fervently claim.

They really should go and shop at the Salvation Army. But then, the Salvation Army doesn't have the System Of A Down shirt from the the Staples Center show. Charity bites, man, because the foxtrotting haves never throw away anything good.

(In case anyone was wondering, I got a Black Parade shirt, and also a Mindless Self Indulgence one with the squid and the rabbit, and it totally rocks with my black Chucks with the pink laces. Am I a consumer whore? Yes, I am. And admitting that you have a problem is the first step towards getting help. Do I want help? Hell no. That's the second step.)

Then, thus nattily attired, I betook myself to the house of my progenitors, and spoke to my sister, who was playing an electric bass. She rocks. And of course, in a situation like that, saving Darfur could hardly fail to come up.

Now, what exactly (or who exactly) is Darfur, and why do so many people have such an interest in saving him/her/it? I have no clue.

That is a lie. I have some clue, that it's perhaps someplace in Africa or somewhere and some really wicked bad stuff goes on there. People have told me this, but I tune them out. The truth is that I don't think the Save Darfurs have much more of an interest in saving Darfur than I do. I think they have an interest in protesting. This is a selfish desire, and they are exploiting the suffering of the poor Darfurians in order to serve that desire. Shame upon them.

Anyway, Maggie mentioned to me that she was pretty sure that this year in school everyone was supposed to be really interested in saving Darfur. That struck me as an odd way of putting it... supposed to be? As in some external party had established an expectation that they would be, and intended that expectation to be filled? That's not the way important social-justice causes work, is it?

Apparently it is.

Apparently, every school year, the kids at Vanguard High School (SHOUT OUT TO MA LIL SIS IB CHICAS, Y'ALL IS SUPAFINE) receive a mandate from their teachers or administrators or principals or what have you to pick a social cause to be interested in that year. Or perhaps they pick one for them.

Doesn't really matter, because whether they pick the cause themselves or someone picks it for them, nobody seems to care about it anyway. It's very strange... I have heard that in the distant past (like the sixties and seventies) nobody wanted their kids protesting and crying out for change in schools. They really didn't want that. I mean, tear gas was deployed against crowds of students, right? That's pretty clear.

The really blistering irony is that the school is enjoining them (as in issuing an injunction, of course) to take up a social cause. Encouraging them would be a different story, because there's nothing fundamentally wrong with saying "you kids ought to find something you believe in and make some posters and crap to pretend to be fighting for change".

There is something very wrong with saying "you kids are going to find a cause, and you are going to believe in it, and you are going to be motivated to campaign rabidly for change, because you are going to think that this cause we told you you had to choose is really important for reasons independent of our mandate." It's ungrammatical, in a way; it doesn't add up.

With that, I will leave you all with one final comment on irony: the Alanis Morrissette song "Ironic" really is ironic, despite the fact that none of the situations in it are ironic. That is why it is ironic. And that in itself is ironic. How's that for rain on your wedding day, dearly beloved?

(Alanis, I want to have your baby.)

(Let me know if you ever feel like selling one.)

And, by way of signing off this morning, I would just like to say:

SAVE DARFUR!

And for all your officially-licensed Darfur apparel needs, be sure to visit Hot Topic, where they have "everything about the music (tm)".

I don't like being made to look at this

2007-05-24T22:42:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace on 2 May, 2007, at 2117 EST.

It's just shameful, to be quite frank.

Yes, I understand that advertising is what allows all of us to have OurSpaces for free. And I also understand that simplest of all advertising truisms: "sex sells".

But seriously, folks, this is getting out of hand. I feel like a bit of a perv whenever I quite innocently log on to MySpace to see if my girl or my sister or my dad or anyone has sent me anything, and just out of the blue I have some ad that looks like a chat window or something propositioning me.

I really didn't want to look down the cleavage of some random advertising girl this evening, believe you me.

Your Response: Leave me alone, stupid hooker. Peddle your libidinous wares elsewhere, you painted Jezebel, for we want none of it here. I am not naive enough to believe that you are actually conducting a video chat with random people in your underwear, you foolish whore of Babylon.

And of course, it's that last bit that explains why it's a waste of time to put in Your Response. Well, it's a waste of time to respond there. I'm responding here, of course. Oh well.

I don't even log out of MySpace anymore. I finally got sick of hearing that apparently it's Girlfriend Season, and that this is supposed to mean something to me.

Girlfriend Season sounds like something you clean your shotguns for out in the Ocala National Forest. Get your hunting license endorsed for blondes before the tax collector's office hikes the rates.

Maybe you would have a bag limit, even. Or a special at your friendly local taxidermist.

But, that's not what Girlfriend Season is about, I'm sure. As much as I can gather, it's about wearing a lot of brightly colored eye makeup, and the color of this eye makeup should match both your too-tight tee-shirt material dress and your glass bead necklace.

Sometimes, I've gotten the ads telling me that it's Boyfriend Season. This is rather disturbing, since we all know that I'm thin and neat.

They've even started having happy little video bits that play when you load up your welcome page. The ones where it attempts to create a staged webcam feel are bad enough, but I almost wet myself when I innocently crossed one of these ads with my mouse-pointer and the harlot pictured therein administered a swift animated hip-bump to the two-point line frame in which she was contained. Creepy.

And let's remember, this is all stuff that the good folks who run the company that provides MySpace and YourSpace and all of TheirSpaces puts up with full knowledge and intent.

I can understand, to an extent, that I'm going to get some smutty friend requests and inbox messages. Perhaps that can't be helped without crippling the system.

(Side note one: if you send me a friend request, and it has a picture of inappropriate expanses of skin, it's getting denied. Sorry, ladies, but this is just another instance of men curtailing your personal freedom of exhibition, I guess.)

(Side note two: this is hilarious. I got not one but two inbox messages today which purported to be from random females who have acquired a burning need to act on the crush they have developed upon me by reading my profile. These random females even had different names. The thing I found amusing was that each of them apparently felt the need to have as their profile picture a photo of their posterior in a string bikini. And, as near as I can tell, these two misguided young ladies not only frequent the same beach, shop at the same swimsuit store, and enjoy standing in the same positions when posing for photos, but also have identical butts. What a coincidence... maybe they're twins?)

But we're not talking about random people exploiting something free to flaunt their prurient desires or products to a large audience of computer users. We're talking about the people who run this system putting this stuff up right where I'm going to see it whether I care to or not.

Is it okay to put advertising on your website? Absolutely. Are various sex merchants (read that as online matchmaking firms) useful and valuable clients? Sure they are. Is it okay to put up pictures of pretty girls to trick me into thinking that their dating service is going to set me up with one (rather than, say, someone as homely and desperate as I am? Okay, online daters, you know where to send your hate mail, so bring it) of them? Go for it, that's what capitalism is about.

But this is excessive. If my dear sweet grandmother, or Jesus (what would He do, I wonder?), or even some random passerby were to see this low-intensity smut on my screen, I think I would feel rather compromised. Actually, it happens all the time, and I do.

And that's my gripe today. I'll sign off now, because I really have some other things I urgently need to get accomplished.

Like cleaning out the pump-action Remington.

After all, it's Boyfriend Season. Lads, if you know my little sister, I'll be the one wearing orange.

I Love My Keyless Entry Remote

2007-05-24T22:39:00.001-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted at 2301 EDT on 20 April, 2007.

It's just absolutely foxtrotting awesome.

Wait a second... foxtrotting?

This requires some explanation, and I'm going to explain it right now for the uninitiated, because in expressing my feelings for my car remote, I was seriously tempted to use the F-word.

Now, in everyday speech, I use whatever kind of words I want. Of course, I don't use them in a context-independent fashion. I have levels of salty language, so I won't just out with serious profanity in front of Memere, or Mama and Papa McGinnis, or any members of the clergy of any credible religion.

Actually, I won't use anything stronger than "heck" or "gee whiz" around Grandma, but that's a rare exception.

But, I use "damn" and "hell" pretty much anywhere I want, including in these blog entries. But I'm reluctant to use anything stronger. This is largely because bad words are worse when you read them. If you want to know what I mean by this, I suggest you choose a movie which is rated "R" by the Motion Picture Association of America for strong language, and watch it on your home DVD player with the English-language subtitles turned on. I did this with "The Rock", because I wanted to listen to the dialogue in French and still keep up with what was being said. After five minutes or so, I realized that I could listen to Sean Connery say almost anything, but I couldn't stand to read it.

Anyway, when I'm curbing my language for various audiences, but I still want to at least imply a stronger level of language than I'm willing to use, I have two devices. Saying things like "effing A" sounds indescribably stupid to me, so I don't do that. Instead, I use a glottal stop (linguistics geekiness in action) in place of the questionable word. If you've ever listened to a radio station where they just sort of blank out the words you can't say on the radio, then you have a good idea what my glottal stopping of curse words sounds like.

Abbie put it elegantly and eloquently at Celeborn's dance show. "Did you just censor yourself?" Why yes, I did.

The other method I like is to use the phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet is a way to say letters that makes them sound different. Let's face it: B, and G, and C, and V, and a lot of others sound very much the same... it's that high-front tense vowel (you probably call it a "long e"). But "bravo", "golf", "charlie", and "victor" sound different. You can tell them apart over a radio or a phone, which is more than can be said for your lame-o civilian alphabet letters.

There's an ancillary benefit to this for my cursing behavior, though, which is that you have an actual word to use. So if F is "foxtrot", and S is "sierra", then when I want to say that this is some foxtrotting sierra, I have something to work with. I mean, Juliet Charlie Almighty, kids, it's pretty Golfdelta obvious.

So, back to the real reason I'm writing this: I really love my keyless-entry remote. It's wonderful. I can lock and unlock my car without having to touch the car. I can do that from ten, even twenty feet away in the right weather conditions.

This is a big thing for me, because I worry a lot about locking my keys in the car. And when you're all OCD like I am, the way you deal with worrying things is making up elaborate rituals that need to be followed perfectly in order to complete the most mundane tasks.

For example, when you worry about sticky residues from sweat and oils and soaps and all kinds of stuff that might be even slightly greasing the surface of everyday objects, you want to get them off your body when you take a shower. And so you end up counting how many times you rub your soap over each individual limb of your body just to make sure it gets done right.

Right arm. One, two, three, four... seventeen. Why seventeen? Because it's prime, of course. That makes it a good number. Not like six. Six is a crap number.

It sounds funny, but it isn't.

The upshot of this for automotive purposes is that you find yourself counting out getting into and out of your car. And of course, because you know that you're reluctant to lock the car, because you might lock the keys in it, you worry as you walk away from the car that it isn't actually locked, which is also worrisome.

And you oscillate back and forth, many times, relocking the car, just to make sure. This is bad.

But the remote fixes this. I get twelve feet from the car, and I'm pretty damned sure I didn't lock it. Do I walk back to the car to check? Hell no. I hit the button again, the lights flash, I feel better. I do this three or four times on occasion as I move away from the car. But I am moving away from it. So it's all good.

But I love the remote even more than that. I catch myself trying to lock and unlock non-car things with it. Just now I tried to lock the front door at Casa McGinnis with that remote. Yeah, I had just locked it by hand, but I had my keys in my hand too, and I hit the button. Why?

Rampant insanity is a simple explanation.

Especially when you consider that I once tried to open a can of spaghettios by hitting the unlock button on the car remote.

It's one of my favorite things in the world.

I used to have two of them. But I hit one with a two-pound sledge. I wanted to destroy it, so that only I could have the source of power over all locks and closed items.

I mean, if the Lady of the Lake had given King Arthur a backup Excalibur, he would have smelted the damn thing without delay. It's just not good to have more than one of that sort of thing floating around the world. You never know who might get their hands on it and use it for evil.

I'm going to wrap this up, now.

And I'm going to resist closing out this post using the remote.

I Want To Play With Adult Toys

2007-05-24T22:36:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted at 1949 EDT on 18 April, 2007. On MySpace, if you hadn't gathered that that is a common feature of all of these so far.

Okay, so the other night I have this great idea for a store they should have. Well, it's not so much the store that's wonderful and revolutionary, but the stuff that would be sold in it. Of course, this store could never be, and the reason it could never be is that our society is perverted and disgusting and sick in its soul.

My idea is for a store where you could buy adult toys.

Now, the worldly among you have already seen the problem with this. And those of you whose minds are in the gutter are shocked and astonished, because when you hear the phrase "adult toys", you think of all sorts of debauched orifice-appliances.

I'm thinking of toys that would be of unimpeachable moral value. But at the same time, not for children.

Like a toy dragon. European-style dragon, Asian-style dragon, I don't really care. But, like all self-respecting dragons, this one would be a fire-breathing dragon.

And it would actually breathe fire. Real fire. No more making that mouthbreather noise to indicate that your dragon is torching something... press the button or lever or whatever, and flammable compressed gases would be spewed from the mouth of the beast and ignited, letting plumes of blazingly hot flames pour forth to create an amazing visual spectacle and a hell of a good time.

And a severe fire and burn hazard. This toy is not for kids. It is an adult toy.

And now you begin to follow me. I am not ashamed to admit that I still like to play with toys. I suspect that there are a lot of adults who play with toys from time to time, and a lot more who would enjoy playing with toys if only the only toys available weren't lame-o kids' toys.

If you don't have to worry about kids dealing damage to person and property, there's all kinds of completely awesome stuff that toys could do.

Like the Night Stalker Ninja 12-inch action figure. Yeah, he's got his black ninja suit and some ropes for climbing buildings and his plastic nunchakus (or however you spell that word). But he also has a katana, and it's razor-flippin'-sharp.

Hell yeah, baby.

And he shoots out shurikens from his wrists like any self-respecting fully-featured ninja doll, but these will actually stick into the damned wall.

You can't give that to a kid. But now that I talk about it, don't you want to have one?

Of course, even the Night Stalker Ninja is helpless against Master Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Headshot, who can take out enemies at ranges of up to 150 feet with his authentically scaled modified M2 heavy-barrel machine gun, converted for single-shot sniper fire. He can take out his enemies with the devastating power of an actual .177-caliber lead pellet, fired pneumatically at 550 feet per second.

Let me tell you, ladies and gents, when Master Guns shoots another G.I. Joe with that sucker, the poor mo-fo just dies. Just dies.

Same thing goes for neighborhood cats, of course.

Now, right now you're thinking one of two things.

Maybe you're thinking about SNL and Johnny Switchblade. The difference here is that I wouldn't want to give any of these toys to kids. These are adult toys. Hell, kids shouldn't even be allowed to know they exist, anymore than kids are aware that the filth that currently passes for "adult toys" exists.

It's not right to bum the children out by letting them know about things they just can't have.

Or maybe you're thinking that adults would hurt themselves with these toys just the same as kids would. Burning houses and dead hamsters and seventeen stitches in your eye. And you're right, of course. These toys are dangerous.

But simultaneously cool. Very very cool.

And while we have to protect the children from self-injury, there's nothing that says we have to extend ourselves the same courtesy. After all, who's going to be paying the emergency room to remove the real rocket-powered ejection-seat from your James Bond Aston Martin from your nostril?

When you pay your own medical bills, there are so many possibilities.

But, of course, this whole plan is doomed to failure... fated to be banished to a dusty matte-gray filing cabinet in the dank storerooms of my mind.

Because there is no term to describe the objects I've been talking about except "adult toys".

And if you put a sign on the front of your store that advertises that you sell adult toys, then you're not going to attract the kind of clientele that you actually want.

You will miss your target audience, and instead get an endless procession of swinging singles and unsatisfied housewives. Not to mention the huge hairy guys who ask you for something I blush even to think of in the same matter-of-fact tones they would use to ask for a pork roast at the butcher-shop.

Damn society. Your filthy carnal desires have foiled me. Your prurient lusts have denied twentysomething males everywhere the good wholesome fun of accidentally setting fire to the drapes.

Damn ye, all ye sodomizers and whores of Babylon. I pray for the day when the hosts will gather at the Fields of Megiddo, just before you are cast into the outer darkness by the right hand of the Father.

You will perish in flames.

And my Amazon Spear-Fishing Barbie will poke your eye out.

Don't Talk To Strangers

2007-05-24T22:34:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace at 2101 EDT on 17 April, 2007.

I started the day by getting seriously weirded out. And here's how, of course... I wouldn't leave you in suspense like that, dearly beloved; you know that.

So, I wake up and I get dressed and shave my face and brush my hair and teeth and get all prettied up, because today is the first day of my new job that I'm going to have for a whole two weeks.

(Aside: I have a job at the Veterans' Administration hospital. Those of you to whom I whine and complain (yeah, that's everyone, I know) know that I hate the VA and I hate their hospital. And now I work there.

We have seen the enemy, and they is us.

This is the kind of delicious irony that motivates me to get up in the morning. But I digress, quite on purpose. On with the real story.)

And after I'm all ready to go work, I get in my car, and I start to drive to the VA hospital, because that's where I'm going to work, of course. But then tragedy strikes, because my car is dangerously low on gasoline.

This is because I've been running my car on fumes a lot lately. And I've been doing that out of a misguided desire not to spend money, and a misguided belief that the price of gas will go down soon. I am misguided in these ways largely because I am an impoverished college student, and that is of course the reason why I'm going to work at this point in the story.

So, as I leave my place of crashing on someone's couch, my rice-rocket begins to lurch alarmingly, signaling me that it is getting ready to just quit running and strand me on the side of the road in my hour of need.

I hasten to the nearest gas station. I make it there just fine.

Jesus smiles, as do I.

I put gasoline in my car. A whole half a tank. Big pimpin', spendin' cheese.

As I finish recapping my gas tank, I am approached by a friendly gentleman of color. He is well dressed and polite, and he asks me if I would be so kind as to transport him to his place of employment, which is the International House of Pancakes on south 13th Street. He tells me some bullshit about being stranded because a taxi didn't come to get him or something, but I'm not really listening to that part, because I don't really care about his personal problems.

Nonetheless, I decide that he doesn't look like a killer hobo rapist, and I invite him to hop in the rice-rocket and we'll get going.

Let it never be said that I don't got the soul to help a brother in need.

We proceed along our merry way, exchanging some meaningless pleasantries about the weather, and then, after a long silence with which I was entirely comfortable, things get strange.

Understand my mindset: I'm pretty damned sure that this guy isn't going to assault or rob me, or he wouldn't be in my car. I'm quite confident that he does need to get to the International House of Pancakes restaurant for work, or I would have told him politely to get tied and stop hanging around gas stations to hitch rides from vulnerable fully-stopped motorists. But, in good quasi-paranoid fashion, I'm waiting for the trick, the game, the hustle. I'm waiting for the extra bit he didn't mention, the ulterior motive, for something to happen that will remind me that this is not 1957 and that there's nothing so simple as a man who just needs a ride to work anymore.

That's what I'm thinking, more or less, when he shares this intensely personal anecdote with me.

He tells me that last night, this friend of his got a couple of girls and brought them over. Pretty girls. And not just any pretty girls, but the kind of pretty girls that are apparently okay with having sexual relations with people they've known for scant hours.

This becomes apparent when he tells me that even though one of them was supposed to be for him, he found himself unable to obtain and maintain a suitable erection.

ED can strike anyone, apparently, just like the commercials say.

"I've always been shy that way, I guess," he confides to me.

Many thoughts are going through my mind as I sit there.

One of them is something like "why are you telling me this, you crazy random man? You don't even know me... you just met me, and you're never going to see me again."

Another of them is more like: "right, and this is the part where you tell me that you're a homosexual or bisexual man."

I begin wondering whether he thinks I'm cute. I expect that in the next few seconds he will either propose that I pay him money to perform a sexual act upon me, or that he pays me money for the privilege of performing a sexual act upon me.

Maybe he'll just ask me for a date.

So, naturally, I say "Hm."

It's a good all-purpose response, and I feel clever for having thought to employ it.

Things get quiet again. I begin to think that everything will be okay. I'm getting closer to the International House of Pancakes with every twitch of my eyebrow.

He breaks the silence once more. Dialogue resumes.

"She was really offended."

"Was she, now." (I mentally kick myself for having responded in more than one syllable. Those extra two will cost me, I can feel it.)

"Yeah. She was really upset that I couldn't [have sexual intercourse with] her."

"Hm." (I try to recover, but I can feel that I'm in a deadly spin already.)

"My friend [had sexual intercourse with] both of them. I mean, he [had sexual intercourse with] mine right in front of me, man. She was [quite upset]."

(I maintain silence, in a last desperate bid to make it all stop. I accelerate.)

"Yeah, and the whole time he was [having sexual intercourse with] her, they were both looking at me."

(I'm sure he's not going to make an indecent proposition to me, now. I don't know why he's telling me this, but I'm more and more certain that it's not to seduce me.)

"It wasn't right, man. She got no right to be [angry] at me just 'cause I couldn't get no [erection] so I could [have sexual intercourse with] her. And them lookin' at me like that wasn't right either."

"I think you did the right thing." (I am so lame.) "A lot of these young girls, they don't have their heads in the right place anymore." (The speed limit is forty-five miles per hour at this point in the road, and I could not possibly care less about that.)

He nods. I turn into the parking lot. I am going to survive this.

I stop the car. "How much do I owe you?" he asks me.

I tell him not to worry about it. For some reason I don't want to touch anything he has touched. Especially not money. I think about prostitution. "Just have a good day at work," I say.

"God bless," he tells me.

I get the hell out of there, and I go to work.

Never talk to strangers, boys and girls. Never ever talk to strangers.

And don't let them talk to you.

You don't want to hear it.

Chillin' at the Library

2007-05-24T22:31:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace at 0122 EST on 13 April, 2007.

I don't know what we're teaching kids in schools these days.

I only bring this up because I never realized that it was possible to get through 18 or 20 years of your life, all the way through grade school and high school and even some college, and not have learned what to do in a library.

Do you know what you do in a library?

You shut the hell up, that's what you do.

Yes, ladies and gents, America's youth do not understand one of the simplest social protocols in all history. A little bit of etiquette so simple that I learned it in nursery school, and have remembered and followed it ever since, with a bare minimum of effort.

Shut the hell up when you're in the library.

I've had a lot of papers to write lately. And today, while I was trying to get some work done, I was unable to pay attention to putting my deep thoughts down on paper, because there was too much noise in the library.

Now, just so that we understand each other, I'm not saying that it was not silent as the crossroads at midnight in the dark of the moon. I'm saying that it was nowhere near silent. It was not even quiet. I had some johnny and suzy sitting right next to me having a bloody conversation about nothing in particular. I had a girl whose phone kept ringing and playing some ghetto-blaster music every five minutes.

There were even guys walking on stilts up and down the escalators.

Yeah, stilts. Surreal. And they kept shouting some rather coarse words all the while.

As I am sitting here writing this, some jackass just sent a twitch through the entire place with a sudden bout of yelling. And he's behind a closed door in one of the group study rooms. It's almost one in the morning, and still not that quiet.

Whatever happened to the days when I would sit in the Quiet Reading Section of some little public library and I would be filled with absolute mortifying embarrassment because I sneezed? I even tried to turn the pages of the book I was reading as quietly as I possibly could to avoid any distracting rustling noises. I could hear those noises, too, and they sounded loud as I turned the pages of my book, because it was quiet in there.

Damned quiet.

People were shutting the hell up in the library.

Because we just rolled that way. Old school, boys and girls, old school. Representing the quietude, brothers and sisters.

And if you can't respect that, you can shut the hell up.

In the library, of course.

Strangers in a Strange Land

2007-05-24T22:28:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally published on 9 February, 2007, at 1539 EST. Actually, it was posted at 1439 CST, if you want to be completely correct.

Greetings, dearly beloved, from the frozen North. I'm currently enjoying the sights and sounds of exotic Vernon Hills, Illinois. It's funny, but if you look out the window, the snow looks at first glance very much like beautiful white sand beaches. Almost creepy, because it requires a double-take every time I catch a glimpse of the white stuff out of the corner of my eye... I have to look twice, because I know there isn't any sand up here.

To be absolutely truthful, I'm not impressed. It was one degree this morning. One lonely degree. It was cold, sure. But was it the marrow-freezing, screaming-for-mercy, bits-of-your-face-freezing-and-dropping-off-in-seconds cold that I was really expecting (and perversely hoping for)?

No. It was not.

When I get back to Florida, I will not be able to brag about how cold it was. I wanted to have war stories about how cold it was.

Or at least a really good frozen-snot story. "Yeah, so as we were getting out of the car, I sneezed, really hard, because the air is so dry, right? And the snot just went everywhere, and I went to wipe my face, and it had already frozen. I ripped off skin, man." A story like that... all I wanted. A souvenir.

Dreams die hard.

But otherwise, a rather uneventful day. My brother is doing quite well, and I have been astonished and chagrined at the differences between Navy boot camp and Marine boot camp. I don't mean to downplay his accomplishment, of course; he kicked ass and took names, by all accounts. Still, I haven't been able to stop making this little face whenever he says something that makes me think "in the name of all that is good, right, and holy... that's what -normal- boot camp is like?"

Also rather disappointed with the Navy's grasp of protocol. For those of you who aren't familiar, there are times during military functions when it is appropriate to stand. These include not only the playing of the National Anthem, but also events like the passing of a formation, and, for the Navy and Marines, the playing of Anchors Aweigh. Well, there was this sailor boy who kept wanting me to sit down when I stood up for these things.

They couldn't find their protocol without a proctoscope.

I'll survive. Don't mind me, just a jarhead ranting about the squids.

Anyway, I'll round out this installment of Travels With Collin. Tomorrow, tune back in for a recounting of my adventures in Chicago, the Windy City itself. We'll be going there because there's not much else to do in Vernon Hills.

Actually, I can only think of three things to do in Chicago at this point, which is not too good considering that one of them is basically eating lunch, and one of them was a handout from my girl. The other one I could satisfy in about two minutes.

I can always hope to get caught up and swept along by the manic pulse of the city, right?

We shall see. Good night, my darlings, and get your words in to St. Christopher for me when you pray the Lord your soul to keep tonight. And a special message for all of you in warm, sunny Florida...

I hope your snot freezes.

Going To See Squid Squidley

2007-05-24T22:26:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace at 0729 on 7 February, 2007.

Well, this afternoon I get to take the first leg of my journey to the frozen wastes of Illinois. I will be going there to see my brother James, who is graduating from Navy boot camp at Great Lakes. For some reason, he decided to go to boot during the dead of winter; that's his business, of course, but really... it's not very considerate to drag Florida people up there in the middle of February.

My weather module reads 32 degrees Fahrenheit outside at the moment. Up there, at the moment, it's probably 32 below.

And that's not counting the windchill.

I am going to freeze. It is a little-known fact that the name "Illinois" is taken from the Native American "il - hoy`o - NO - ay'ist", which means "abode of the ice devil". Fortunately, I will not be freezing until tomorrow, because all I have to do today is go to Ocala and stand by to catch a plane from Orlando to Chicago tomorrow morning.

It's going to be a wild and crazy trip, dearly beloved, and I shall of course keep a running commentary going here, relating all the dumb stuff that happens in airports and the crazy guys on streetcorners and the latest innovations in baggage-trolleys.

It'll be like Wagner's Ring... my own little Rhine journey. To Illinois.

By the way, I lied. "Illinois" is not derived from "il - hoy`o - NO - ay'ist", meaning "abode of the ice devil". It is derived from "AY - o - lon - no - HOI'S", which translates roughly as "place where one's spittle hits the earth like a hailstone". You lose some shades of meaning in the translation.

So, I'll go ahead and sign off now. I'll be flying and driving and missing my girl and missing my cat and eating regular, well-balanced meals under the watchful eye of Mommy Dearest. Updates to follow... tune in tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-station.

One more thing... I lied again about the name "Illinois". It's actually not from a native dialect at all. It's from the Welsh "rwlhinn-owris", meaning "witch's [mammary protuberance]".

My search for the giant squid continues...

Farewell to Old Ironsides; Welcome to The Juggernaut

2007-05-24T22:23:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace on 2 February, 2007, at 0122 EST.

The Juggernaut has arrived. And it is really massively overbuilt. That's sort of the idea.

I buy computers the way other people buy cars. I expect them to last for a very long time. All of this planned obsolescence is well and good, I suppose, but I want no part of it. The only way to thwart the onrush of technology, it seems, is to have one's new computers be so hugely massively beefed up that they are still pretty good years later.

Old Ironsides, my old IBM ThinkPad, turned eleven years old recently. It was struggling and dying, unable to keep up anymore. Eleven years is a very long time in service for a computer, and we can none of us deny that Old Ironsides had a hell of a run. But all good things must come to an end, and now it is time to bid Old Ironsides a fond farewell.

The Juggernaut is, quite simply, ridiculously overdone. Right now, you'd be hard pressed to find a better laptop... it's actually more like a portable desktop. In a few years, the Juggernaut will still be pretty darned good. In a few years after that, it will be okay, but definitely outclassed. A few years after that, it will be just barely hanging on. But that's the plan, after all. All good things must come to an end.

But right now... well, it is the Juggernaut. Many will salivate, but all must tremble.

We must not forget that all good things must also have a beginning.

A Catwork Orange

2007-05-24T22:20:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace on 31 January, 2007, at 1937 EST. Apparently that was another day I just couldn't lay off the damned keyboard.

My droob Alex and I were hanging about the Rocky Point Milkbar, drinking milk-plus. Milk plus chocolate, in this case; just the thing to sharpen a malchick up for some of the good old cat-bathing.

When we got out into the old living-room, we found Felix and her three droobs. They were performing a bit of the old "scratch-scratch" on some young devotchk-sofa they'd found someplace. We decided it was time for some cat-bathing with plenty of the good old ultra-violence.

"Hoy, thou mangy felines," I said. "Come and get kicked in the yarbles. We'll cut your nails, for you, thou cat-faced buffoons."

And we set in on them, o my brothers, me with my rubber glovesie-wovsies and Alex with his good cut-throat britva to chop their nails. And, o my brothers, we slooshied well to the yowling and the screaming as we washed all the wee malankey loose hairs off of their plotts.

And, o my brothers, it was a real horrorshow time for your humble narrator.

Photographic Memory?

2007-05-24T22:16:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted at 1611 EST on 31 January, 2007. If you want to see all the pictures referenced, tough. Go find them yourself. I'm here to write for my own amusement, not to be your step-and-fetch photo bitch.

Well, I've been putting up a lot of new pictures... it reached the point where I realized I had no really good reason not to do it now as opposed to later, and so up they went. Looking at the overall gestalt of the photo album, I had a sudden realization.

Almost every picture of me in that album is a CAP picture. Actually... I think every single picture in that album is a CAP picture. Although there's at least one, I'm sure, in which I'm not wearing a uniform. It was rather a shock when it hit me... I was forced to ask myself a very difficult question, to wit:

Do I have any kind of life outside of CAP?

Well, let's think about that. It's possible that I do, but that I just never get my picture taken elsewhere. Or perhaps that I do get my picture taken elsewhere, but I just never get ahold of the pictures. I must do something else with myself, from time to time, right?

It was at that point that I realized that nobody else seems to have any non-CAP pictures of me either. I can think of two, right now, such that I could find them right away.

But perhaps, still, it is just that the only picture-taking people I know are C. A. People. It's possible. Sure, that must be it, right? I mean, if all I ever did was CAP, then there would be some sort of indication of that, right?

And that was when I realized just how many of the pictures of me doing CAP stuff are of me in a uniform passed out from sheer exhaustion. Or of me in a uniform doing bizarre giddy things due to lack of sleep and a surfeit of KGOVERINIOSSOKERT.

I have no life. I'm heading straight to an early grave, no doubt, and when I get there, I'll find that the grave is somewhere in the backwoods of rural Florida near a false-alarm 121.5 beacon. I wept. Well, not really, but as a figure of speech, you can't beat a good "I wept".

There is some hope, though. There are two pictures, as I said, in which I am neither in uniform nor engaged in any kind of CAP activity. Both were taken very recently, which is promising. Also, there's a pretty girl with me in each of them, and that's even more promising.

Get a life? Hopefully, I am.

In the meantime, enjoy the pictures, my darlings.

They're caparific.

Domestic Anger about FedEx and Lettuce

2007-05-24T22:13:00.001-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace on 2 February, 2007, at 008 EST.

I am rather ticked at the moment, in a mild way. I am annoyed because of FedEx and lettuce. FedEx was supposed to deliver my new computer today, and even though I tried to arrange things so that they would bring it when I wasn't in class, that obviously didn't happen. I missed them by a scant twenty minutes, and now my parcel will be riding around in a truck until eight or nine tonight at which point it will be way too late to just go down to the FedEx office and pick it up myself. So I can't get it until tomorrow.

One day is not all that long in the grand scheme of things. I'm still disappointed.

And, of course, I came home from school in the middle of the day just so I would be here for a couple more hours to increase the probability that I would be home when the delivery guy came. I gave up a perfectly good parking space on campus in order to do this.

What a waste.

I did, however, get to make myself a sandwich since I'm here anyway. Liverwurst and cream cheese on white bread, little bit of pepper and seasoned salt. And some lettuce, of course. Looks like one or the other of my roommates got into my lettuce that I use for my sandwiches, so there were about three wilted leaves remaining when I went to the fridge for sandwich fixings today.

They probably used it to make a salad. They were probably out of their salads-in-a-bag. My sandwich-making lettuce is not for making salads. It is for making sandwiches.

It would never occur to them that since they were out of salad-in-a-bag, that means that they just couldn't have a salad this time. Oh no, here's some lettuce, we'll just use bloody well near all of it. So now I have the stuff to make maybe three or four more sandwiches, but I don't have lettuce to put on any of them.

Guess I'll just have to go out to the store if I want lettuce on my sandwiches. That's what happens when you don't have something you want to eat, right? You go to the store.

But not if you want salad. No, then you just grab whatever happens to be around, regardless of the intention for which it was purchased, and you decimate it. Let someone else run the errands, if it's so important.

Also, it would absolutely kill them to just answer the door when the FedEx guy comes. I wasn't here, of course, but everyone else was. But, after all, it's my computer, and it's my delivery, and there's no reason why anyone should be expected to wake up at the crack of noon and walk all the way to the front door just to accomodate me.

I'm a little peeved. Just a little.

They have an aphorism: "If you want something done right, you had better do it yourself." That's a crock. It should go more like, "If you want something done AT ALL, you had better do it yourself." And then, of course, you had better stick around to make sure that nobody comes along and undoes it.

Well, it's about time I cut short this tirade. Especially because now I need to help my roommate fill out some paperwork.

That's what friends do for each other. Little favors, small considerations. Grease on the wheels of domestic tranquility. I scratch your back, you scratch yours. Do unto yourself as you would have others do unto you.

I'm a bit testy right now.

Just a little.

Life Is Beautiful

2007-05-24T22:09:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace at 0128 EST on 31 January, 2007. And of course, it was printed by my father and shown to everyone he knows, apparently. I guess it's a pretty good bit of work. (That's almost funny, now.)

Ever had a period in your life where absolutely everything was going right? One of those impossibly blissful times where the sun was bright in a blue sky and the whole world smelled like roses and moonlight and it seemed that you could do no wrong and would just live forever in a rapture of joy?

Oh? Well, me neither.

But at the moment, I'm feeling pretty close.

Details? Who needs details, anyway? Besides, it often pays to exercise some discretion... discretion is, after all, the better part of valor. I am not exercising the better part of valor, of course, I'm exercising the sort of discretion that is the better part of not airing all sorts of personal stuff in a public forum. It's not prudent. It's not wise. It's certainly not gentlemanly.

Which is not to say I don't feel like shouting from the rooftops.

As you may have gathered, it's been quite a day. Quite a week, really. Indeed, quite a month. Those who know me would certainly think that I'm a in a rare mood. Why... it's almost like being in love.

Actually, that's a terminological inexactitude. It's not almost like being in love. It is absolutely being in love. I just couldn't resist the opportunity to paraphrase Brigadoon lyrics. The bluebird of happiness has returned to my dreary existence, driving out the chicken of despair with mighty tweets and furiously beating wings.

If it were daytime, the sun would be shining merrily and the sounds of laughing children and jubilant birds would pervade the air. But it's one in the morning, so the moon is beaming like a silver spoon and the air is full of the ribbiting of the happy frogs in the drainage ditch and the spiffy looping of bats. It doesn't matter... I'm a happy guy, and the world had better conform to my rosy and romantic view of it.

Ah, l'amour jeune. C'est magnifique, ne c'est pas?

Beep Beep, Gimme Sleep

2007-05-24T22:06:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace at 0105 EST on 25 January, 2007.

It is now thirty-eight minutes into the witching hour, this twenty-fifth of January in the year of your Lord two thousand and seven.

I want to go to sleep. I wanted to go to sleep three hours and seven minutes ago. I wound down my activities. I finished my little IM-chatty conversations. I said good night to my girl... she was very pleased that I was going to get some sleep. So was I, for that matter. It just didn't turn out that way. I don't know why, though... I'm pretty sure I did all the right things, and yet here I am, typing.

It is now forty-two minutes into the witching hour, this twenty-fifth of January.

I want to go to sleep. Instead I just pounded in a coffin nail. If I had gone to sleep when I wanted to, it would have been ten cancer-sticks for the day. Now it's thirteen. Still not too bad, but I'm resenting those additional three. I should be sleeping, not damaging my health and ticking myself off.

It is now forty-nine minutes into the witching hour.

I want to go to sleep. I wanted to go to sleep nine hours and thirty-four minutes ago. I came home from school and I decided to take a nap. My eyeballs felt sticky, and I was pretty much running on caffeine consumed during class. You see, I didn't want to fall asleep during the phenomenal part two of Jason and the Argonauts. It would have been a pity if I had missed the guy fighting the claymation hydra, and hitting the rubber hydra tentacle prop with his wooden sword (it didn't work too well). I was fading fast. But I didn't take a nap. I tried. It just didn't happen.

It is now fifty-six minutes after midnight. Just four witching minutes left today, now.

I have to wake up rather early tomorrow. Actually, I have to wake up rather early later on this morning. Dr. Ray will be having his philosophical writing lecture, and will no doubt come in acting like a rock star of the David Bowie or Elton John stripe. I'm pretty sure he starts his day with a healthy dose of pure Colombian. (Everybody knows the best coffee comes from the South American nation of Colombia.) Dr. Ray is a fine professor. I am not a truck. I'm a steamroller, baby.

It is now four minutes after the hour of one, ante-meridian.

I want to go to sleep.

I need to go to sleep.

I am not gay. I am thin. And neat.

2007-05-24T22:03:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace at 1803 EST on 25 January, 2007. It makes reference to a comment posted by my sister, saying "you are a gay man"; this comment was made because I had set up my profile background to be pink.

I am not gay.

I am thin. And neat.

There is a difference, even though it's a subtle one, and often difficult for people to grasp. I'm going to spill the beans here, in an act of massive treason to men everywhere (I'm giving away the game, you see):

It is perfectly possible for a heterosexual male to be other than a slovenly Neanderthal. They can dress well. They can even make shift to shop for the clothes in which they will thus dress themselves. They can appreciate such topics as art, dance, the theater, music, and even interior decor. They can not only appreciate fine dining, but many can actually prepare such meals themselves. In short...

Straight guys can, in fact, do all the things most straight guys call "gay". Surprise, gents, the cat is out of the bag. Surprise, ladies, they've been fooling you for years, I bet.

Yep, me lads, I've finally been pushed too far. My curtains that match my bedspread have been mocked for the last time. Enough snide snickers have been directed at my color-coordinated towels and my objets d'art to tip me over into a treacherous state of umbrage. I kept your dirty little secret for many years, fellows, covering up for your unshaven sweaty-t-shirted corndog-greased belching ways. I let them all think that that's just the way men naturally are, and that I was some kind of abnormal effeminate nancyboy.

Have fun, boys, next time you're watching the game and she informs you the two of you are going to a wine-tasting before you hit the new musical that's opening at the local repertory theater.

Because the old standby of "what, am I some kind of sissy queer?" has now gone the way of all things. Oh, gentlemen, gentlemen. What fun you'll have.

I know I would.

Because I'm thin. And neat.

Ask anyone.

(Oh, and Maggie: this is what happens when you call me gay. I hope you're proud of all that you've accomplished.)

ORANGE: The MySpace Learning Curve

2007-05-24T21:57:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on 19 January, 2007, at 0017 hours EST. It makes reference to a MySpace survey posted at a bulletin to which I wished to respond in a less-than-subtle fashion. As with all bulletins, this one was gone forever ten days after it first appeared. As best I recall, it said that one ought to repost with ORANGE if one were in love, or something similarly... well, PURPLE.

What about the learning curve? It's steep, that's what about it. And pride gets in the way, because when I ask questions, they tend to be really stupid questions.

My niece Heather laughed at me because I wasn't aware that there's no way to post comments about my own pictures. That was a dumb question, and I therefore justly fell victim to the righteous hubris of 13-year-old competence.

But that was days ago. Well, at least a couple days. Maybe it was yesterday, though... well, let's just say that it was hours ago, and that the number of hours in question is certainly in the double digits. So, why am I thinking of this now?

Because I was beginning to think that I was getting this whole thing under control. Silly me... every time I start to think that, something happens to remind me that I'm not even close. (Charles Dickens would be talking about phantoms dancing a gavotte at this point, because he's snooty. I'm not that snooty, but apparently I am snooty enough to toss in a Dickens reference.)

This time, it was bulletins. Now, I've never been prone to the chain-letter variety of superstitions. I've lost count of how many injunctions to forward something to twelve people lest dire ill luck befall me I have ignored over the years. Granted, it's not like I can hold up my life as a shining example of all the good luck I've enjoyed nevertheless, but still...

So anyway, YaVonne puts up this bulletin that enjoins the reader to "repost" it. And I, still all fluffed up because I managed not only to put up a really nifty-o pink background but also to fix the way it made my photos all hazy, realized that I had no idea how to "repost" anything. Nor even exactly what "repost" means.

Cluelessness is cyclical. If they hang around long enough, even Interstellar Admirals end up restarting their careers as Space Cadets.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering A) what was the bulletin asking, or B) what's the deal with the subject of this post, the answer to the bulletinized question is, of course, orange.

I mean, seriously, folks... how hard is that to figure out?

(I probably wouldn't have gotten it.)

Be Careful What You Wish For

2007-05-24T21:53:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted at 0108 hours EST on 19 January, 2007. The photograph mentioned is not available at this time, but will be added as soon as I can track it down; it never even made it up on MySpace.

Well, I wished that all hell would break loose. All hell was very obliging and timely, breaking loose scant minutes after I made my wish.

Of course, I can't go into details of the ELT mission that came up right afterwards, but it did keep me not-bored for a whole thirteen hours.

It's surprising how long thirteen hours are. Especially when the hours in question are the ones between eleven at night and noon the next day. The harsh thing about that particular timeframe is that you're getting ready to go to bed, but then you end up not going to bed. Instead, you run around in the cold dark scary woods of Dixie County.

The realization really struck when the alarm on my cellphone that usually wakes me up to go to school started going off. At the time, I was eating some hashbrowns at the Rockbluff General Store and trying to get my head together so I could drive back to Gainesville.

"Beep beep beep," said the alarm. "Wake up, Collin," I said to myself (aloud), "it's time to get ready to go to school." Then I laughed for a little bit too long. I was definitely a truck at that point. (Beep beep, gimme sleep.)

I'm going to try to get the team photo for the mission and put it up for your enjoyment. I think it really shows the sort of overwhelmingly glamorous places that CAP emergency-services can take you.

I Wish All Hell Would Break Loose

2007-05-24T21:51:00.001-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace at 2022 hours Eastern Standard Time on 17 January 2007, which really was a very prolific writing day for me, in retrospect.

I'm bored.

Not that my being bored is the point of any of this, just the point of origin. I certainly don't expect anyone to care. For the most part, if you were bored, I wouldn't much care... except that I would probably be bored myself, and hearing how someone else is bored is at least -something- to do.

Misery loves company.

It's times like these I wish all hell would just break loose in my life. If the phone were to ring, and the person on the other end were to say to me that I need to spend the next fifteen hours mucking around in the woods...that would be great. If the house caught fire. If I got an e-mail from some sadistic professor telling me that I have until tomorrow at nine in the morning to turn in a 5,000 word paper. If I started having convulsions and had to go to the emergency room.

Something.

It's funny how, if you think back over your life up to the present, you don't ever think, in retrospect, "wow, I spent an awful lot of time being bored." Of course, you wouldn't remember boredom, because there's nothing to remember about it. Still... do we think the past actually exists somewhere? Of course not. That means that the only place the past "exists" at all is in our memories. And we don't remember periods of stultifying dullness.

That's why every time you're bored, it's really a fresh, brand-new experience.

But not, of course, an exciting one.

(I think perhaps I'll cover my head with a plastic bag and call up my ex before I play with matches. That'll stir things up around here.)

Where That Photo Was Taken

2007-05-24T21:37:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This was originally posted on 17 January, 2007, at 1756 hours Eastern Standard Time. Here is the photograph which generated the comment which inspired the post:

(I apologize for the lousy image quality, but I feel I'm being very kind indeed even to include it.) On with the post, then.

Since I can't post comments on my own photos even to answer questions posed by other people's comments, I'll be explaining here where that photo of me in the uniform on the cellphone was taken. YaVonne wanted to know. And perhaps others will be wondering in future, and I'll just be able to tell them "read the blog".

The picture was taken on a back road to nowhere down near Lake Panasofkee. We were on an ELT chase, and at the moment the picture was taken, I was on the phone talking to Dan Brooks about where exactly we were supposed to be going, because I could not for the life of me find the road he was telling me to turn down.

All the roads looked like private driveways. And I didn't want to turn down any private driveways. As I said to Dan, not sure who might be listening from the front porches and windows of their doublewide homes while looking suspiciously at the group of mysterious uniformed individuals swarming their quiet country lane, "it's beautiful country out here."

"Ah," he replied. "Shotguns."

Clever man.

Turns out the road that we turned down near this place wasn't a private drive. It wasn't even a road. It was a sort of wide spot between some woods and a fence, and I got to back the guvmint van all the way out of it because there was nowhere near enough room to turn around.

This was, incidentally, on the same mission where we found the monkey in the tree. Perhaps I'll put that picture up as well at some point.

Entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death

2007-05-24T20:46:00.000-04:00

Editorial note: This post originally appeared on MySpace on 17 January 2007, at 0427 hours Eastern Standard Time. It was the first post for that blog. Looking back, the final quote has turned out to be quite appropriate.

Well, after all these seeming years of shameless mockery of MySpace and everything for which it purportedly stands, here I am. Just thought I would say a few words to mark the occasion, to wit:

I'm afraid.

If anyone finds themselves wondering what brought me to this particular pass... well, they should ask themselves why Greece got into a war with Troy. Or, they might ask themselves what is it that is allegedly behind every great man. Or, they might even ask themselves to what group to gentlemen generally refer as being impossible to live with and impossible to live without.

A word to the wise is sufficient. That was a hundred words or so, and if nothing has clicked yet... well, I digress.

Final quote: Play the man, Master Ridley. We shall this day in cyberspace light such a candle as I trust by God's grace shall never be put out.

Historical: the Television Rant

2007-05-24T20:41:00.001-04:00

Editorial note, 24 May: This segment initially appeared on my profile page on MySpace, in the box marked "Television". The segment also contains an editorial note, which should be read as being nested inside this note. At the end of the post, you may close both the parentheses and the brackets.

A Note to the Reader: this section is no longer precisely true, as I no longer live in the residence where the situation described hereafter obtained. Still, I think it's a lovely piece of writing, and I worked very hard on the links, which are quite funny, so I'm leaving it for historical value, and for the entertainment of the masses. Enjoy, dear readers, as you always have.

I don't own a television.

Actually, in point of fact, there are three televisions in my apartment, one of which is mine, one of which is not mine, and one of which we salvaged from a dumpster. None of these televisions are attached to any sort of television-delivery device, though.

I have a rabbit-ear antenna (if anyone still knows what that is) sitting only a few feet from all three of these televisions. It is not attached to any of them, even though attaching it would require about two minutes of mild effort.

Why do I have these televisions, then? For watching movies, of course. Also because we needed something to put on the TV shelving unit we pulled out of the dumpster just before we pulled out that one TV, and just after we pulled out the sofas. (The Goodwill Store is just a middleman.)

The New Phicosis: an Introductory Note to The Reader

2007-05-24T20:24:00.000-04:00

Welcome, all, to this next iteration of my blog.

First, let's have some grammatical notes. I hate the word blog. It is the bastard child of a made word, and the made word in question was ill-made from the start. For those of you who are unclear on the etymology, "blog" derives from "weblog", which itself is a run-together version of "web log". "Web", of course, is a colloquialism for "internet", which is itself a made word. "Log" is used in the sense of "logbook", which is entirely undescriptive of what actually occurs in any blog (I shudder again) of any quality of content. A log runs thusly:

0500hrs: Alarm clock sounds. Snooze button hit.
0505hrs: Alarm clock sounds. Snooze button hit.
0510hrs: Alarm clock sounds. Sense of guilt sets in. Bed departed.
0512hrs: Activate coffeepot. Stumble towards shower.
0513hrs: Trip over cat. Take Lord's name in vain.

And so on, ad nauseam. You get the idea. This is not the same thing, but is more a collection of extemporaneous ad hoc essays about spontaneously inspired topics. That is to say, a "diary", or "journal". I have ranted enough. I hate the word, and my reasons are solid.

My second point about English usage is briefer: I capitalized the word "the" in the title of this post as an exercise of literary license. For future reference, you may assume that any such infelicities of usage are supported entirely by my most recent poetic and literary licenses. (My poetic license is even endorsed to permit me to dispense poetic justice on a discretionary basis. You are duly warned.)

Now, to the point. The next few posts are directly copied, with minor contextually-mediated editorial changes, from my former blog on MySpace. Why is my blog no longer there? Either you know me well enough to be able to figure out the answer to that, or else it is none of your damned business. Why is there one here? Because I have enjoyed having one, and I can't keep the one I had. Aficionados of the vicious circle may ask themselves at this point why I can't keep the one I had, and may then redirect themselves to the sentence before last.

Without further ado, then, here are the old MySpace posts. Those of you who have read them already may skip directly to the post entitled "I Am A Right Bastard".

Enjoy.