Peaeater

Also this tooth fairy left me a bill

2008-09-14T21:30:00.001-07:00

On Friday they tore out my teeth. It really hurt. Still does. My wisdom teeth had held their ground for twenty-odd years and they did not go easily. "Real sweethearts" said the doc. "See those roots? Like corkscrews. We're going to have to slice them up." Uh, my teeth you mean? "Yep, we'll saw them in half." Oh. Right.

After the procedure they gave me Percocet. The doc sang its praises: "Hoo-ee, you're going to love this drug," he said. The rest of the office staff delighted in describing how stoned I was going to be. It was like a freshman dorm party. I got home, popped a Percocet, and waited to kiss the sky. Oh, and oops, splashed some water onto my puffy lips at the bathroom sink.

Blood started pouring out my mouth. Bright, red, arterial blood, like I'm pretty sure the good doctor nicked the carotid artery while gouging out my ivories. Blood down my chin, down my neck, soaking into tea towels. Back to the car, and back to the surgeon's office.

The Percocet started kicking in while I sat in the passenger seat. It coiled around me like a great hairy boa constrictor and began to squeeze. I started to drown in fuzz. My vision splintered and each shard was a knife soaked in nausea. I struggled but soon I couldn't see anything but a saturated blur, hear anything but a rushing cacophony, say anything that wasn't a spluttering gurgle. Then I passed out for a while.

Rachelle and a very kind stranger, who I think had red hair and a blue military uniform, dragged me into the doctor's office. I only barfed once in the lobby, and I'm almost sure I didn't gak on the nice man's shoes. The staff gauzed me back up, but didn't take me seriously on the having-a-bad-trip front. I'm not surprised since I wasn't at my most persuasive.

On the way back home, we stopped to admire the view of the water at Gorge and Parkview while I decorated the pavement there with copious amounts of vomit and dark clotted blood. The stains were still there this morning! I checked!

The rest of the day was a dull iron ache and not worth describing, except to say that every bowl I heaved up over the course of the day boasted some new and exciting colour from Satan's Fall fashion collection.

It turns out I don't react well to Percocet.

And earlier today I found a piece of tooth in my mouth. This is NOT adding up to a positive experience.

New wax for the 'board

2008-08-06T13:18:00.001-07:00

I have acquired a new keyboard: http://www.apple.com/keyboard/. It is sensuous, sleek and dangerously thin - like an anorexic supermodel. And whisper quiet, like an anorexic supermodel sitting a physics exam.

It's built by Apple, which will make my Macophile father cackle with triumphant glee, but the plain fact is: Apple has mastered the human-to-computer experience, and this is the tool I spend the majority of my day with. There is just that extra sparkle of pleasure with every keystroke, and it was a small $50 investment.

Some reviewers complained that it did not provide enough help getting to home row, but I think those reviewers must be hamfisted trolls: "URRRRHH! ME BASH KEYS GOOD." What do they want, an usher with a flashlight? If you know how to type, this keyboard is for you.

I considered an ergonomic option with the split keyboard, but I can't stand keyboards that take up desk space as measured in acreage. Look at this thing: it's a keyboard wrapped in an armchair:

One thing I did have to do, since I am using an Apple keyboard with a Windows machine, is re-map some keys. I switched the last four Function keys (not used in Windows) to a Num- Lock and some volume control with SharpKeys. (Kinda something you'd think would be built into the OS, wouldn't you?)

The WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is high because Rachelle can sleep free from the sound of a squirrel tap-dancing into the wee hours, which is how she described the tappa-tappa-tappa from my old keyboard. The squirrel now wears fuzzy buskins.

Warning: libraries peddle electronic smut

2008-08-01T16:38:00.001-07:00

If you thought libraries were bad before, just wait. Now they lend video games: Greater Victoria Public Library is guilty guilty guilty.

That's right. You walk in looking to expand your horizons, self-educate, steep yourself in the accumulated lore of centuries, and you end up walking out with Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga.

The leering gargoyle ~~pushers~~ librarians at the desk don't help.

Is that a book cart full of Wii games? I innocently ask.

Yes, but they're not cataloged yet, responds the bespectacled book pimp, hoping to lure me into sin by not quite hiding the shameless display of naked neatly stacked video game boxes.

Oh, I nonchalantly drool. I walk around the corner and lean my head against the dependable very non-sexy Encyclopaedia Britannica M-P, breathing hard for a while. I am a weak vessel, Lord.

Two good books and the invisible snot sandwich

2008-07-28T23:17:00.001-07:00

Peter's summer reading club recommends:

P.D. James - The Children of Men

The last human being is born in 1995, Year Omega; mass infertility has doomed the human race to extinction. By 2021 the slowly dying citizenry of England have given themselves over to a dictator who promises comfort, peace, and freedom from boredom until the end of their numbered days. Peace and order are a strictly enforced illusion, but what do quiet atrocities matter in the last days of a dying species?

Everyone has seen the movie version but me. I didn't even know it existed.

David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Not actually an atlas of cloud formations, but a set of stories that contain each other like Russian dolls. Never really got the title, as a matter of fact. Each story makes it about halfway before being interrupted by the next, only to appear within it. The first story is a series of journal entries discovered on a dusty bookshelf in the second, for example. Once you finish out the final story embedded in the middle of the book, you come back to all the stories you left behind. The second half of the journal entries is found propping up the bedstead, in case you were wondering.

David Mitchell's spectacular prose is nothing short of jaw-dropping. If I could write like that, I would call myself a writer. Each novella is written in a different genre, and he masters them all. I have to single out The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish because it had me laughing like a hyena clown.

Scott Smith - The Ruins

An awfully stupid book. Clumsy writing. Moron characters. My desire for revenge on the author grew as I flipped the pages, sublimating into a murderous hatred for those one-dimensional idiot boobs he limply positioned as main characters. I couldn't wait for them all to succumb to the horrors of the (eye-roll) killer vines. Like eating a snot sandwich: I gagged all the way through.

3 things my wife thinks she knows about me

2008-07-26T11:28:00.001-07:00

Like a pudding from the sky, the meme struck: ask your significant other to tell you three things about yourself. And then some "rules" about launching the pudding at someone else.

"You are not a morning person."

Did you know we spend a third of our lives asleep? What a disgraceful waste. I am doing my level best to push the envelope past 33%. Mornings are a, if not the significant hurdle in my commitment to this lifetime goal. The discipline required to lie in while the rest of the world gets up yawning and scratching its bum is staggering. When I am forced by circumstance to arise, losing time that can never be added to that precious Grand Total of Hours Asleep, I get (understandably, I think) grouchy as I ponder the sobering possibility I may never be a Van Winkle world champion.

"You need to feed your imagination constantly."

In fact the reverse is true. My imagination needs to feed me. Books, movies, art, humour, games, puzzles, conversations, dreams (cf. you are not a morning person), stray thoughts - all are grist for the mill. Without these places to explore, life would be as dust in my mouth.

I sometimes complain about having to live in Mundania, a place name invented by Piers Anthony to describe our ordinary world in relation to his invented world of Xanth. At least I'm not alone; my favourite people in the world are the ones who have an intuitive imaginative faculty and the skill to wield it. Right, and the patience to interact with me. I married one.

"You can live on blackberries, cherries, and peas to the exclusion of other foodstuffs."

Three good things you can only get in Mundania, I grudgingly admit.

A quack ducks the issue

2007-12-18T11:41:00.001-08:00

We spent yesterday evening in Emergency because a clinic doctor couldn't decide if Evvy had an ear infection or not. After three and a half fretful hours a very nice emerg doc said she was just fine, no evidence of ear infection. What was the name of that clinic doctor? asked emerg doc. He said her eardrums were red? They're completely normal. He shook his head. Evvy smiled and squeaked at him.

I'm going back to the clinic today to shove the hallucinating clinic doctor's ophthalmoscope up his rectum to see if I can't detect some redness.

Jingle Bells

2007-12-17T18:08:00.001-08:00

By my count, I have sung "Jingle Bells" about one million times now, over the course of my life. This qualifies me as an expert, as I'm sure you will agree.

Shortly after my vocal cords ceased to vibrate with the millionth rendition of the popular carol, it occurred to me I have never set foot in a one-horse open sleigh. Or any other kind of sleigh: horsed, open or otherwise. And yet I can belt out

dashing through the snoooooow, in a one-horse open sleeeeeeeigh

with all the breathless gusto of an applecheeked farm lad fumbling to hold the reins in hand-me-down mittens on a frosty midwinter afternoon with the runners swishing swiftly over hills and hummocks of freshly fallen snow.

And no doubt you do it, too. Isn't it strange that "Jingle Bells" is so popular when it has such little relevance to modern life? It's quite magical that we continue, without prompting, to keep ritual and song that go back beyond living memory, connecting us to people and days long gone.

Christmas above all other holidays has the power to freeze the rushing river of time into the glacier of tradition. It gets one all contemplative. It is for me the True Meaning of Christmas, or TMC. Others have their own TMCs, I know, but this is mine.

Happy Holidays!

Good and good for you

2007-10-06T10:22:00.001-07:00

This morning I made coffee, but there was no milk in the fridge. There was no milk, there was no cream, there was no s'milk*, even. I had to have something.

My eyes fell on a tray of of little plastic bottles. Some were full. Some were full of freshly pumped breast milk.

My inner coffee addict cleared his throat and began to reason that breast milk is even better than cow's milk. It's all natural, after all: crème de la crème. Others in the Parliament of Brain vomited and rent their garments, conjuring scenes of cannibalism and bitty.

In the end, I grabbed one of the bottles and poured a small amount into my coffee. I admit I drank first with one eyebrow up, but my fears were ungrounded - it tasted delicious.

So there you have it. Baby formula makes a fine coffee cream substitute. To those who assumed I grabbed the breast milk bottle: you're sick. Sick!

* s'milk is what we call soy milk at our house - filthy stuff

Babies and animal motifs: a freakish modern convention

2007-10-02T12:27:00.001-07:00

Tum te tum. In my toils these past few weeks as baby slave, I couldn't help but notice (comma ponder, comma completely obsess over) the amazing prevalence of animal motifs on infant clothing. On anything surrounding the infant, actually. And I can't stop thinking about how REALLY WEIRD it is, and how long it's been the norm.

Admit it, animals are the LAST thing you want around your baby. Especially lions and alligators, which are given a lot of play in our baby's wardrobe, albeit in cutesy-poo format. It's nonsensical: the human race spent thousands of years building up civilization by hunting species to extinction so that our young could be PROTECTED from the wild.

My wife freaks if she sees a spider on the ceiling, for gods' sake.

If anything, my daughter's sleepers should sport a picture of a decapitated lion next to a lacerated alligator, because given the chance, a lion or alligator would EAT HER, and I think dead predators ought to make her feel warm and safe.

Flee into the mountains

2007-09-23T12:32:00.001-07:00

Last night, the cat committed the most heinous act of desecration I've ever witnessed. I'm pretty sure it was the abomination which causeth desolation, which means the end times are here, and no prizes for guessing the identity of the Beast.

We were in the kitchen putting away the remains of supper. I had just poured a glass of port and was smacking my lips in anticipation, when I looked down to see the cat contorted into a kind of hunched position. He was wriggling. It looked... wrong. I put down my glass.

Suddenly he scooched forward with his tail straight back, rear end pressed to the floor, and oh dear GOD, there's a TRAIL! He's leaving a trail behind! THE CAT. IS WIPING!? HIS YOU-KNOW-WHAT! ON. MY. FLOOR.

I froze, I admit it. I stood aghast while the cat left 10 foot of brown skid mark across the kitchen, until: plop! he completed his giant fecal exclamation point with a small, round poo.

That broke the spell. With a rush, my ears filled with the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth. "Feline apocalypse!" I wailed. "Noisome plague!" I gnashed. "Thou art as wormwood, bitter in my mouth!" I hopped about in a frenzy of rage and indignation. Rachelle and I ran to and fro like chickens after samurai practice, shouting obscenities and tripping over each other in an attempt to catch the cat but not *touch* the cat and find a rag and clean the floor before one of us slipped in it.

Still, after the cleanup and the cursing, I have to grudgingly admit: he does have a wicked blasphemous dark-as-sackcloth kind of style. He may be a cat out of hell, but I guess he's worth his weight in anecdotes.

Hello, Evvy!

2007-08-31T19:48:00.001-07:00

My little Evvy came this morning. We're so happy!

(Click for larger view)

the carma reward system

2007-08-07T22:30:00.001-07:00

So the roads are infested with bad drivers, it turns out. Many times hath my gentle spirit been moved to correct, oh so reluctantly, the peccadillos of my weaker brethren upon the road (the infirm, the lame, the demon possessed) with an exhortation and the indispensably expressive aid of Motorist's Sign Language.

And yet there are many fine drivers who deserve to be recognized. People who drive well. I see them once in a while. I try to push a "well done" vibe at them, but this concept is unfortunately difficult to convey in the somewhat... emphatic vocabulary of the otherwise comprehensive MSL.

I therefore propose a simple social reward and punishment system. All drivers get to rate other drivers. Your rating floats above your car in glowing block numerals. If you don't like another driver, dock them a point. If you do like another driver, assign them a point.

After a while, people will be able to see bad from good coming at them from waaaaay off. The social stigma that accompanies a low rating might pressure some to improve.

Or not. But who cares, because the best part is, if you have a surfeit of points in your rating, you can use them to buy poetic justice. Thus, when I come up behind you in the fast lane and you do not move over to let me by, I will dial up a rain of earwigs upon you, and you will turn your wipers on high, and it will avail you not. A river, a swarm, a plague of them will pour through your vents and windows, fall wriggling into your hair, teem down your shirt, seethe into your nethers, and they will BITE YOU ON THE ASS.

The accident rate will assuredly go up, but happily my sense of driving satisfaction will rise with it.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Some yucksters will no doubt jest that my own driving might rate a very low score indeed, thus inviting hilariously ironic consequences upon myself. This cannot be the case, for two objective reasons. First, my driving is beyond reproach, a fact that fuels the fierce pinprick hearts of all the myriad stars that writhe within the vast abyss of space. Second, it's MY system, and I can quickly translate that into Motorist's Sign Language for you if need be.

What I did on my vacation, the driving

2007-08-05T13:35:00.001-07:00

One of the longer parts of the vacation is the drive home. Getting to the cabin by the lake is lightning fast, but the meander back is always sluggish, hot, and nearly endless. And the way people drive: it doesn't help.

Let me first describe how I drive: I drive fast. I keep right except to pass. I use cruise control to maintain a consistent speed and make obvious, deliberate moves so you know what I'm doing well ahead of time. Stay out of my way and I'll stay out of yours.

Now let me describe how they drive: slow, in the left lane, with eyes closed and hands clamped over their ears chanting "LA LA LA LA LA LA!"

Slower traffic keep right the signs advise. Keep right except to pass, they say. MOVE OVER IBIOT says my snarling grill up their backside. Nope. Their taxes paid for this left lane, and they have a right to be there. Besides ("LA LA LA LA LA LA") they have no idea I'm even there.

And don't ever believe stupid people can't be cunning. Who do you think invented "the box"? Yes, the box, wherein the slow car in the left lane matches pace with the slow car in the right lane to create a cunningly perfect trap for unsuspecting traffic, which pattern, successfully executed, can generate up to 1.21 gigawatts of highly charged frustration: enough to power hundreds of exotic curse words at extremely high volume. I would much rather be using that energy to press the gas pedal down to GET AWAY FROM THESE NORONS, but there you are; we all have to share the road and, as it turns out, vehicle mounted machine guns are illegal.

What I did on my summer vacation, so far

2007-07-31T22:05:00.000-07:00

I have been at the Lake, trying to pack in enough physical activity to last for the next ten months. Before this vacation, strenuous physical motion meant getting up from the computer to check the fridge.

Yesterday, for instance, I kayaked solo for 3 hours with nothing but a small bottle of water and a single bar of pressed oats to sustain me. And yet I felt alive -- fully alive -- as I dipped the paddle repeatedly into the waters on either side of the bright orange plastic water craft, over and over and over again, 99000 times. Somehow, by the last kilometre and the grace of some evil miracle, the kayak was transformed as a lead-filled cement box, and my arms cruelly switched out for rubber tubes which quivered and shook and spastically flagellated until the boat bumped gently up alongside the dock. An emergency lunch was administered. "I think he's going to pull through! Anyone for tennis?" Such is the unrelenting cheery good-time lust for non-stop sport, here at the cabin.

No, really, it's been good.

I have read a couple of books while here. I can't remember which ones, but they were both memorable, I can tell you that. [After a long pause in which I stimulated memory via the never-fail act of staring out the window with my mouth open, the titles came back to me: Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay, and Infernal Devices by Philip Reeve.] And then I ran out of books. That was pretty much the first day. It's been found copies of Dr. Al's dentist-office hand-me-down Discover magazines since then. There's a used bookstore in town which needs looking into, and a library into which I might to venture to stress the inevitability of province-wide collection sharing vis-à-vis my library card, as in: hand over your books right now and nobody gets hurt.

Michael introduced me to a new game, which he brought me from The Gambia. It's very cool, but he doesn't know what it's called. [It's a mancala type game.] It's made from mahogany, and has 12 depressions in 2 rows - 6 per side. Each depression is called a "compound" and holds 4 bean things. It's surprisingly fun. Apparently there are versions of it all over the world, and have been since ancient times. I introduced him to Hive, which is one of my favourite two-player games.

Facebook status wows local grammar Nazi

2007-07-04T16:10:00.001-07:00

I am highly impressed. But then, I am highly impressionable. Probably because I go through life as does a a child: in wonderment, and with not an effing clue as to what's really going on.

I updated my Facebook status, and I stuck the word "corduroy" on the end. In quotes, like that.* And you know how Facebook slaps a period on the end of the status sentence? Well, it did. Within the quotation.

Peter is upset he had to look up how to spell the word "corduroy."

Oh, gods be praised. Somebody has been educated. I would like to find that person at Facebook, shake their hand, and give them a medal. And a kiss on the cheek. Maybe a little tongue. Because the Internet, without being prompted, has managed to pull off a tricky bit of grammar that would have thrown most college graduates.

Excelsior** to you, anonymous Facebook developer.

* Why? Shutup. I'll tell you when you *need* to know, you little twerp. Think you can knock me off my train of thought? Huh! This train's boilers are stoked, the tracks are long, parallel, and unwinding, and the passengers are sitting down to a comfortable and affordable supper with a view of the countryside spread before them like like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

** Well, blow me down. Did you know "excelsior" can also mean a kind of upholstery stuffing? Not the most unadulterated adjective of praise to use, then, but I can't be bothered to change it.

Monkey learns to point and shoot

2007-07-03T11:01:00.001-07:00

Last summer, Rachelle spent her bonus on a nice camera. I kind of ignored it. I've always assumed that I suck at photography, based on all the photos I have taken in the past that were limp and boring, or overexposed.

My parents did get me an all-manual Canon SLR way back, but I knew nothing about how to use it. And, because it did not magically create beautiful pictures, it found its way into the deep back of my closet, where it stayed for many years.

But then, a month ago, Rachelle hands me the camera, sets some settings, and tells me I'm going to photograph her belly dance recital. Which I did, from on high at the back of the theatre. And it was great! I really enjoyed myself and got some surprisingly decent shots.

But then I wanted to know which settings she had set, and why. So I started reading about photography, and how to do it. It's fascinating. I might well be hooked.

Here's a set from yesterday at the Ross Bay cemetary, where I practiced using a wide-open aperture to get that shallow depth of field thing:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ripplebliss/sets/72157600623884231/

To ward off Monday mornings

2007-06-25T20:55:00.001-07:00

A friend writes:

"I've wondered if there might be a spell to make me feel better on Monday mornings. Or perhaps just ward them off completely?"

A spell to ward off Monday mornings. You're talking about the most mournful of mornings? On the wickedest of weekdays? I am a sorceror of some note, my brash friend, but you make my adam's apple tremble in trepidation, for MONDAY is the *blackest* of evils and only the mightiest of heroes, whose heart is pure, whose clarity of purpose pierces the mists like the fiery first lance of the risen sun, whose will is as a mountain of iron, immovable! can hope to defeat the curse of that unholy hour.

Nevertheless, if you are bound and determined to this course of action, I swear you to secrecy and impart this incantation to you, and I bear NO responsibility as to the particulars of any consequences, real or imagined. On your own head be it, Mr. Coleman-Faust.

Call up the Demon of Employment. (Thou shalt know Him by the sulph'rous reek of Hell which waxeth strong at the beginning of the week but which waneth towards Friday afternoon.)

Say to Him, "It is I, Coleman! Listen thou to me, Foule Devill!"

And here is the rub. You shall say this in a weak and papery whisper, as if you had dragged yourself from the very grave to report your recent death:

"I have the flu or something."

You must, with this one utterance, convey the Black Death, the Plague of Boils upon Egypt, and a head-ache splitting your skull like a buzzsaw in a birdcage, for then, and only then, will you be freed from the Dire Pit of Darkest Monday.

Use sparingly.

A masterpiece of suck

2007-06-20T14:20:00.001-07:00

I accidentally discovered today that the first "website" I ever designed is still up.

It was a library school assignment, in 1999, and Netscape 4.6 was cutting edge. I'm pretty sure I intended the site to best fit a 640x480 screen resolution, because it doesn't do so well on my 22" widescreen 1680 x 1050 monitor:

A terrible, no-good very bad LIBR 500 website.

The library is my b*tch with LibraryElf

2007-06-19T12:43:00.001-07:00

LibraryElf is a free service that hooks you up to your library and sends you notices by email, RSS or text message about overdues before they're overdue. A simple but powerful concept, and one that I have asked of my local public library (Greater Victoria Public Library) more than once. I was told one time by a circulation clerk that it would tax the system too greatly to send out that many emails.

Uh-huh.

I actually held my tongue. I *could* have unleashed the lion-headed snake-beast of derision to bite her face off, but I have the patience of a saint. It's not her fault she had no idea of the technical grounds whereof she spoke. Or that, let's see, everyone somehow gets an email after the item's due date.

I guess we don't want to confuse the system by sending an overdue notice before the item is overdue. It wouldn't *be* an overdue notice then, would it? I can see how the system would get its knickers twisted into a Gordian wad over such a paradox in logic.

Left: Captain James T. Kirk convinces the NOMAD probe to destroy itself by forcing it to confront its own lapse in logic. You! Are! Illogical!

Star Trek Ep. 32 "The Changeling"

So, LibraryElf. Awesome! You can link in different library cards from different libraries into one account to get a consolidated list of the family's loans, set your notification preferences to any combination of email, RSS, and SMS, and adjust notification periodicity, so once a day, once a week, or whatever.

It's brilliant, it's what public libraries should already have on offer, and damn it, I wish I'd thought of it first.

Cat in recovery

2007-06-18T10:23:00.001-07:00

The cat is doing relatively well, I think. Considering.

I've seen him stand up on his own, though he prefers not to, as it is obviously a painful process. He is eating regularly and eliminating irregularly.

I am becoming adept at shooting a gluey medication down his throat every 12 hours, which prevents him bleeding out his gut. For best results: get cat between knees, grasp head firmly, and thrust syringe between teeth. When mouth opens in annoyance, fire! Then clean up the drooly glop that drips down his chin and onto his chest as he schmecks it.

I have also been charting his reckless spending habits. He started out in Ottawa, a frostbitten mangy stray brought in off the streets in the bitter Eastern winter. That cost him something. Then he snagged Rachelle's sweater in the animal shelter which led to years of pampering and relative safety. When we moved to Victoria, he somehow became very ill and just about bought it (possibly pancreatitis). There was a heavy fine levied on that transaction. And now this.

Cat may be rebounding

2007-06-15T12:11:00.001-07:00

The cat was padding along the edge of the mortal coil last night, as his red blood cell count dropped to a perilously low 15%. At 14%, they need to do a transfusion, and even then internal bleeding could just leak it all out again.

As of this morning it has climbed back up to 23%, which is excellent. The vet is very pleased, and no transfusions or exploratory surgeries will be required as long as he continues in this positive direction.

Live, you damn cat.

Cat in jeopardy

2007-06-14T11:09:00.001-07:00

Our cat Mao was hit by a car (probably). He's in the animal hospital. He's recovering and we hope he's going to be okay and able to come home in a couple of days.

Meanwhile the twice-daily status reports on his red blood cell count and his ability to bear weight on his back legs are pretty tough to bear, because frankly I love this cat more than I do most people. Not you! I mean those other people that cut you off in traffic or won't get out of your way in the grocery aisle. Those jerks.

We visited him yesterday and he was extremely stoned on narcotics, but he recognized us and enjoyed our company, and ate a little bit. I'm off to visit him again in a few minutes.

Stupid cat. Doesn't he know the car always wins?

The seduction

2007-06-06T09:48:00.001-07:00

I am a sucker for a woman who can make language dance. Or in this case*, who breaks its legs and arms and makes a dancing meat puppet out of its still twitching corpse.

I can't remove my eyes from you. You are so handsome and so interesting man, I have never met before into my life. As usual men got acquainted with me, but everything is different today.

It sure is.

Maybe I am very ordinary person from one look, and you won't fall in love from the first sight. But don't be very precipitate at coming to your decision.

Ok.

Kiss-kiss,
Mari

Mari, you horrify me. Please take your eyeballs back.

* I read all my correspondence. If someone took the time to craft a letter sharp enough to get past the kill zone of my spam filter, it deserves my attention.

Origins of a Superhero

2007-06-04T22:36:00.001-07:00

A tale recycled for Matt, the librarian.

There are a million stories in the naked psyche, and this is one of them.

Who are we, each of us, and what might we become, given the right stimulus? Bitten by a radioactive lamprey, victim of a faulty Dr. Zonk's Wacky Kemistry set, unwilling host to an extraterrestrial brain clam - any of these coincidences could mutate us into one of the Wonder Twins, with irrevocable changes to our credit rating. Once the need to wear tight 'n' bright underthings over things starts, it never lets go. This is how it happened to me.

I was working in the Manley P. Ketchwater Memorial Library, as I regularly did on Thursday afternoons, sorting piles of old rectal thermometry journals and wistfully imagining what it might be like to wear pantyhose with plenty of pepper, when a reverberating crash woke me from my reverie. Jumping up, I noticed smoke coming from the photocopier area. (5 cents per copy, please respect copyrighted material.)

Where there's smoke, there's fire! The journals! My mind raced furiously. What would Manley P. Ketchwater have done? Come up with a bold new vision statement and accompanying fundraiser campaign, that's what. Curse my weak grasp of bureaucracy!

I fell back on what I knew. I hawked up the wettest loogie my febrile lungs could produce, leapt the circ counter and hauled ass, ready to let fly at the first sight of flame.

The sight that met my eyes when I lurched to a halt was horrific. Smoke belched from a sizzling public access photocopier, its paper trays exploded outwards from the twisted wreck. The air was filled with the sound of its fritzing. Black toner had splattered in Rorschach nightmares all over the sensible oat-coloured carpet. But worst of all, and this I will never forget if I live to be a hundred, was the wild-eyed patron with his pants around his ankles, his hammy buttocks jammed into the document feeder. "What have you done!" I cried, hysterical. "Oversize materials are to be put directly onto the glass! For God's sake, get out of there, man!"

But the erstwhile butt prankster could only bulge his eyes pleadingly in my direction. He was trapped: a fleshy organ in the proverbial organ grinder. Before I even realized what I was doing, I drew my access override card from where it was holstered on my hip and lunged towards the hapless victim. Frantically I swiped the card through the slot again and again, until by some miracle the jam cleared, and Fatty rolled free.

That's when she blew.

With a deep vibrating thrum that I could feel in my teeth, the copier erupted, the blast lifting me off my feet in a purple surge of supercharged photoelectric radiation. Blackness and pain seized me, the world swam dizzyingly out of focus, and I knew no more.

I came to, days later, to a different life. Oh sure, the burns healed, the bones set, the fragments of my teeth were dug out of the nearby oak shelving units and glued back together by amateur orthodontal enthusiasts and then trashed and new ones carved from narwhal ivory, but I was never the same again. The accident changed me. Somehow the energy discharged by that dying copier must have altered my molecular structure...

...is the explanation I came up with after a solid 15 minutes in the ready reference section. I had a duty now to use my super powers for good, to help the helpless, to answer any question no matter how inane, to exercise leadership in planning, implementing and promoting the preservation, organization and effective use of society's recorded information and ideas! *

And so by day, I continue to fool the world into thinking I am a mild-mannered librarian. But at night, when the doors close and the last Sidney Sheldon book has been returned to its place upon the shelf, then I become LIBRARIAN IN UNDERPANTS! Leaping from stack to stack! Ha haaaa!

And in the morning, when the staff come in, the chairs have been magically straightened, the cookery section mysteriously weeded, the science fiction and mystery paperbacks repaired with tape and sorted by author's last name!

Yes! It was I! The librarian, you fools!

But they will never know. So Mr. Soapes the night janitor found a pair of men's trousers draped over the microfiche. What does that prove? I'm a SUPER hero. It'll take more than a chilly run home over fences and through backyards to avoid the cops to stop ME.

* The latter being perhaps the finest blandest mission statement of any library school ever.

Desist and delabel

2007-05-30T15:14:00.001-07:00

I'm right browned off.

Because. Every single of piece of fruit does NOT NEED A LABEL.

Like I need to be told that an apricot is an apricot. I know an apricot when I see one.

Trying to get the label off the apricot is tricky. Hungry for apricot... can't... catch edge of sticker with fingernail... Thrice-damned label! I will brook no delay! Curse you and all your scratch 'n' sniff cousins!

Once off, you have to put it somewhere. Find a garbage. Flick label into garbage. Oops. Label is still sticking to finger. Three or four more fruitless (ha ha!) attempts. Label has formed permanent bond with skin. Crazy-glued limpets would be easier to dislodge. Hokey-pokey. Shake it all about. Swear in technicolour.

At last the apricot has been decoupled from its label. Toss into mouth, finally. Gnash it completely up, minus the stone.

Conclusions

I think we must ask ourselves: "WTF?" The raw data in Appendix A speaks for itself.

Appendix A for Apricot

Time to eat apricot: 0.5s -- Time to delabel apricot: 3m 10s

Fig. 1A - Time taken, at non-relativistic velocities, for male hairless monkey to perform self-interested apricotacious tasks.