Tiny Money Land

TODAY'S TRUE STORY: It was an early day today, so I found myself driving home in non-rush traffic, which gave my mind a bit more real estate on which to roam around. I've always been a big proponent of "mind over matter", so I decided to put it to one of my periodic tests. I fixed one thought in my mind on the way home: When I get there, there will be a check in the mailbox. Not one of those fake junk mail checks, friends; this check fixed in my mind was going to be a real check that could be taken to any bank and cashed, without bank examiners calling me up to tell me there's a problem as they clear their throats nervously. This check was going to be the real deal.

Hell, the check is going to be there? What kind of thinking is this? Let's refine that thought. The check is already there. All I have to do is drive home with this unshakable conviction in my mind, open the mailbox, and pull it out.

I pulled into the gravel driveway, cut the ignition, and went straight for the mailbox. I opened the flap and looked inside. There was one letter only.

With trembling hands, I pulled it out. Through the address window, I saw those magic words: PAY TO THE ORDER OF...

(dramatic pause)

I looked at the address. It was made out to my mother.

As it turned out, it was a check from a long-distance company. If you cash it, you'd change your long distance service.

Next time I try that, I'm being a bit more specific.  

THE DEAD ZONE: (as crossposted from the Tiny Money forum) It's painfully obvious at this point that the Tiny Money Land forum has been a nonstarter...

I blame two things: first, there's the fact that I haven't really talked up the room. Naturally, there's a very good reason for that. We've had a lot of people who've started a message board/chatroom combo on Delphi and basically ended up talking to themselves. Some have ended up to this way due to community apathy, others becasue they're a bit overzealous in their moderation. Either way, I blame the "talking to empty walls syndrome" on the strict rules that don't allow pet ownership in some apartment complex...that and bad hygene. Either way, once it became obvious, I've been taking my general chatter to where the people are.

The other, of course, is due to the fact that everybody on the face of the earth and their brother has a forum on Delphi. Hell, just in our little subcommunity (if you're a Delphi drifter, just check the pulldown list...then check THEIR pulldown lists) we're smeared all over with microfocused forums.

Either way, it was all about me, and I'm very easy to find in other places.

Still, I'm going to leave the forum up as a tribute to the notion that they'll let ANYBODY be a "wizard" on the Internet, even if the only spells a would-be Merlin has are a few lame card tricks that don't work properly because he can't force the 2 of Clubs properly. Also, it'll be a good staging ground for putting up blogcentric polls. Hell, somebody might even post again.

So, once again, I cordially invite you to the house where nobody lives (officially, anyway). Please try not to step in the authority on the way in.  

INSOMNIA FOR THE GOOD OF THE COMMUNITY! For two nights this week, I actually got a full, uninterrupted night of sleep, instead of waking up about six times in the night and conking out in the afternoon. It's a weird turn of events; if this keeps up, it'll completely hose our group dynamic. If the fine natural balance between personalities is destroyed, they'll probably all stop drinking! Time and space will scream in agony at the perversion of the natural order if such a thing is made so! Do we want that? Comments, as always, are welcome.

 

A TRULY RANDOM RAMBLE (mercifully brief, but revised and expanded from my regular chat) follows.

If there's one nugget of wisdom I can take away from my years on the internet, it's that there's ALWAYS somebody ON the Net that's worse off than you...

and if you ARE the worst person on the Net, there's always somebody worse than you on the street, and the only reason you don't know about them is that they can't get Net access...

...and if you're the worst person on the street, there's bound to be somebody living in the sewer whose life sucks worse...

....and if you're the guy in the sewer, think about THIS: there's a guy on a desert island somewhere drinking coconut milk and sucking algae off rocks in ocean to survive...

...and if you happen to be that guy on the desert island? Well, at least you're not the algae...

(At this point, Sven chimes in: " I dunno... the algae lived a long, full life.")

(A sour look crosses Eric's face.)

DAMN YOU, SVEN!  

I SHOULD'VE SAVED THAT LAST HEADING for this story, which somehow I completely missed when it was originally posted. Six British schoolboys took a Viagra on a dare during their lunch break, and by the time the afternoon lessons began, "there was no hiding what they had done," according to a statement issued by the local education authority.

Apparently it never occurred to them that if you take a boner pill, you're gonna get a boner. That's a logical gap usually connected with American school children, so it's very reassuring (or frightening, take your pick) that stupid kids are not exclusive to Yankee culture. This story also speaks to the primal fear of the schoolboy in all of us to not only get an erection that won't go away during school hours, but to have the school board tell the papers about it. Don't get me started on the six boys being taken to the hospital for observation. "It's not going to go away if you keep looking at it like that!"

Between this story, all that spam trying to sell me Viagra, and certain chatroom transcripts from recent nights (cryptic comment), hard-ons seem to have been a...ach-HEM...solid topic lately. It all makes me think of last week's Wrestlecrap entry on Sean Stasiak's unfortunate sidetrip in the WWF as "Meat". If you've blocked it out, Meat was a bizarre semi-sex slave character and sort of mascot for a group of women that got off on humiliating him. R.D. Reynolds covered the bases pretty well, but he left out the most disturbing image of the entire angle, when Terri Runnels spiked Stasiak's drink with Viagra before a match, with the result that he had to wrestle the Big Bossman sporting a woody. That by itself was very, VERY bad, but leave it to the Bossman to make it worse, because at one point when Stasiak was flat on his back, Bossman stomped on the erection hard. Brrrrrrr...

I'm sorry, I had to take a moment to curl up into a ball and quiver uncontrollably after dredging up that memory. I wasn't sucking my thumb this time, though. I need a soothing beverage now, so we'll have to pick this up another time...or preferably not.  

HAVE YOU DONE THE "STIFFY" JOKE YET?: What the diddley-hey is going on with my inbox lately? I've received at least two spams every day in the past month trying to sell me Viagra. I don't know if this ties in with the two dozen graphically illustrated porn ads that seem to find my address whenever I breathe wrong, but I have my suspicions it does.

To the junk mailers of the world worried about my erections: that's not my major dysfunction, thank you. On the other hand, if you have a pill that will make me rich, thin, and irresistible to the opposite sex, I'm willing to try a free sample.

I never said all of these entries would be winners...  

HIATUS HERNIA: "Business in the front, no party in the back" is how Zap2It.com put it. The Mullets aimed low and got exactly what it was targeting by becoming the least watched series on the six "recognized" broadcast networks since the new season started (we'll get to those "recognized" quotes in a moment, don't panic). If you remember, our chatroom discussion on the topic ended with the "how many weeks do you give it?" debate. Therefore, I'm happy to announce that the winner of the Unofficial Mullets Deadpool is Josh Mann, who called it at six weeks ("any other network, 3 weeks"). If he took those bidding skills to The Price is Right, Bob Barker would pay him $100 out of his own pocket, but as it is, we're just stunned that one of our own nailed it with such accuracy.

I can express only a guarded optimism regarding this hiatus, since there are 13 episodes either in the can or still in production, so a fresh spate of Mulletude could theoretically spring up to plug a scheduling gap when UPN mercy kills Rock Me Baby (which I still haven't worked up the nerve to watch, but see its mediocrity in every advertisement I've seen) before the New Year. We're safe from the Mullets, but for how long?

Back to the "all six networks" statement for a moment. Apparently, when Zap2It counts broadcast networks, they leaving out PAX in the tally, thus disappointing low-powered UHF TV station managers across the country who thought they'd gone legit. Of course, that would set an unnaturally low standard for the Nielsen basement, so we're letting them slide for the moment.  

AO(H YOU BASTARDS)L: I've been casting darting, suspicious looks at a tin container that came in the mail during the day. Metal boxes of its size remind me of Altoids, so in spite of the fact that it clearly says "TRY ALL-NEW AOL" on the outside, I always hope against hope that they've put some mints in as an added incentive to not throw it away unopened. Somehow, "Antivirus Protection Included" just doesn't fire my imagination as much as "FREE MINT". I'd even take that flat, cardboard-like chewing gum they used to pack with trading cards.

I always open it like the sucker I truly am, and it's always a crappy CD with the latest version of America Online, which I swore off after a brief peek several years ago, along with a few scraps of paper to sell me on the AOL idea again. I think I was put off by the idea that everything is represented by big shiny buttons, nothing but well-lit and clearly marked streets, whereas raw Internet has that element, but also has innumerable sideroads which can be a destination in and of themselves. Not everything is worth visiting more than once--the Something Awful "Awful Site of the Day" brings stinky evidence of that every day--but in theory, everything is as easy to find as everything else if you have the right entry point.

As important as that is, AOL also removed me from the gears and the tweaks that I get into. The Internet, when you break it down, is a collection of interconnected transfer protocols, a whirring mass of partially exposed gears, motors, and pulleys hooked together in a hodgepodge that somehow does what you want it to (most of the time). AOL is a hermetically sealed box; the only things that get into the system are what's put in at the head end. The raw Internet is the for the online equivalent of people who like to customize cars; AOL and MSN are for people who never look under the hood. Some of them would probably rather not pump their own gas if they had a choice, but that's their call.

In short, AOL wants to hold my hand everywhere I go, while I feel I can cross the street my own damn self.

There's a place for both groups, of course, but people who train themselves in a variety of approaches to information are more likely to find what they need than those who stick to a strict, enforced itinerary. When their preferred path chokes, the first group can figure out a detour; the second just keeps clicking that same button and watching the beach ball roll around in vain. The second group has some smart people in it, to be sure, but it's usually group #1 who figures out how to slip around the institutional firewalls of repressive governments to make the average tech do above average things. It's not something everybody has to know, but it's comforting that somebody can.

Back to the issue of the CD-ROM in the tin box, I think puttting that thing in a sheath of metal is a waste of resources for something I'm just going to throw away. That might be their plan to get me to not throw it away ("HEY! IT'S IN A BOX! IT'S REAL SOFTWARE, DUMBASS!"), but as always in a case like this, I can tell a plastic flower from a real one.  

MEANINGLESS DRIVEL: Chaz's position on the sidebar has been adjusted to reflect the fact that whatever he's up to at this link, it's not a blog anymore, and may eventually involve credit card numbers and hot chicks. As that great poet-philosopher, Porky Pig, once said, "You've buttered your bread, now sleep in it."  

SHE OBVIOUSLY THOUGHT ELVIS HAD A GOOD POINT: Here's a heartwarming story about a 25 year old woman in Berlin, Germany, who, enraged over yet another night of crappy television, picked up her TV and pitched it out of her fifth-floor apartment window.

I hope she doesn't take this the wrong way, but that's almost an American thing of her to do. The scene I picture in her house is reminiscent of the original opening to SCTV, maybe accompanied by a curse of "Dammit, not more David Blaine coverage!" Or maybe it was a Yanni concert; that always seems to put the trouble into me.

Anyway, this is why I've been trying to read more. When you pitch a book out a window, you don't have to pay $100-200 to get a new one.  

WINK MARTINDALE: There was another thing I forgot to mention in the random bits below; Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons of Something Awful came up with the most amazing bit of prose poetry Friday on Wink Martindale. If you haven't checked it out, you should read it all.  

THE SLASHDOT EFFECT: So I was reading this article from Slashdot to the collection of outstanding individuals that is the Thread aPa Friday chat, since it was about a computer glitch that may very well leave the state of Mississippi in the dry next week or longer, when Doom asks me if they were running their distribution system off of Windows ("If it's windoze based, they is screwed"). So I say to myself, "hmmm, that should be easy enough to check," and clicked on one of the main links from the original Slashdot article.

Some of you are way ahead of me on this one, so I'll just cut to a half an hour later when I was still waiting for the page to load, presumably because it was choking on a Javascript control that got stuck in the pipe. Now take just a second to look at the page right now, if you already haven't. It's THREE SENTENCES LONG, gang. I can understand the evil ogre known as the Slashdot effect visiting a webpage with a lot of complicated elements and balloon juice, but three sentences? That's just not right

RANDOM WHATNOT: In an attempt to pretend to be productive today, and to pad this entry enough to make people question my sanity, here are a few thoughts we ran across in the early chattin' hours last night.

--Ska tells me that Evel Knievil turned 65 years old the other day. His take: "Depending on your point of view, this either proves or denies the existence of God." He also found some interesting quotes about the famous Snake River Canyon jump:

Jim Rome: "What did you think your chances were of surviving the stunt?"
Evel: "50/50."
Rome: Are you kidding me? If you knew there was a coinflip's chance you were going to die doing this, why did you go forward with it?
Evel: "Do you know who the hell I am?"

I'm old enough to remember Evel doing his Evel thing on ABC's "Wide World of Sports" back in the 70s, and all the Evel toys that came in the wake of Snake River Canyon, including one that my brother had of the famous Kinevel motorcycle. You'd mount that sucker on a platform with a side-mounted hand crank, wind the crank as quick as you could, trip the trigger, and let Evel go, scaring the house pets in the process. If you lived in a house as small as we lived in at the time, the next step would invariably be trying to fish him out from under the sofa with you spindly kid arms as he ricocheted off a few walls and slid under the furniture. Still, it was a great way to kill a bit of time.

--The #1 story on MSNBC's Countdown yesterday was the study which "proved" that tall people made more money than short people over the course of a career. Their "expert interview" to go with this story? Mickey Rooney, which was who I expected, except that he also slipped in a few plugs for his new CD with his wife. Oddly enough, it was called "One Man One Wife Show". Think about it for a minute, if you will; in his prime, Mickey would've been the all-time marriage record holder if Liz Taylor hadn't been invented. Maybe "One Man, Last Wife"?

--There were two (count 'em, two) hepatitis-C support chats on Delphi last night, and what's more, there are actually THREE hep-c chats active as I type, probably excluding any private forums on the subject. I'm a bit confused as to how this many hep-C communities have sprouted up in the Delphi community. Was there a schism at one point? Did a few, inspired by Martin Luther, nail their complaints to the virtual door and stomp off to meditate in secrecy before dedicating a new forum to their radical new approach to whole-patient care and general existence? Or, God help us, is one of these chats dedicated to hep-C flirters? It's the Internet, it's a chatroom, so the odds are very good. All that I know is that there was one hep-C sufferer alone in one room, unwilling or afraid to join two other sufferers in the other room, and that's just not right. Unless the one was asleep, since it was 4:30 in the morning.

--I also taunted the select few that the latest Kobe Bryant case developments might set off a new "is it news?" rant, which is a subject I haven't really treated in this forum (although I did give it a half-assed writeup elsewhere). Consider this statement your only advance warning.  

ANOTHER CHILDHOOD MYTH DIES HARD: Jillian Clark, a student at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, has proved that the "five-second rule" for dropped food is not true. Of course, as a world-class slob, I'm shocked and stunned, but as someone who could never find anything in the microscope, let alone did a proper job in science class, I have to defer to superior knowledge.

My new trick for the next week, therefore, is to unlearn this lifelong bad habit without backsliding. It will take long hours of reeducation to teach myself how to adhere to the new style of doing things. I'm thinking of hiring somebody to kidney punch me when I'm tempted, althoug a course of electroshock may not be out of the question. I might just automate a pattern interrupt system, an intricate system of hinges and pins where my pants bite me in the ass when I bend at the waist (as I invariably do) to pick up the tainted goods.

If that doesn't work, then there's no two ways about it, I'll have to wear a trough on my belt so the cookies never hit the floor. It sucks, but my health is important to me, and I'm not going to mess mine up. GOD BLESS AMERICA! (scratches ass, picks ears, eats a big bag of Doritos with a 1 liter Mountain Dew)

AMPLE PARKING DAY OR NIGHT, PEOPLE SHOUTING HOWDY NEIGHBOR: If you weren't watching VH1 tonight, you missed a great hour on South Park, featuring a lot of people who were involved with episodes of the show as contributors (Robert Smith of the Cure, Les Claypool from Primus, Norman Lear) and victims (Bob Saget and Brian Boitano(!)). If you missed it, you blew it, buddy. It's not like they're going to run it 15 more times in the next week...

Oh, waitaminnit, it's VH1...they ARE going to run it 15 more times this week. Mmmmkay, check your listings, because I'm too bitter to do your homework for you tonight.  

TOTALLY UNNECESSARY COMMENT ON NOT GETTING A CUBS/SOX WORLD SERIES THIS YEAR: Oh well, at least I can stop caring about baseball again. Gives a guy time to catch up on his reading, or his porn.

Of course I meant just reading. Every time you read porn, the angels cry, and don't you forget it.  

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE (again): Finding out I get another "long weekend" because of an overly light workload leaves me with too much free time, and in spite of my best efforts, I can't sleep ALL day. What to do...what to do...AH, here we go!

ALL "LOVE", NO "SEXY"?: Have you ever wanted to meet a pop star, but never wanted to go out of you way to actually find one? Well, if you live in the Minneapolis area and see a Watchtower-toting guy at your door, it could be His Purpleness. Numerous reports are telling us today that Prince, who became a Jehovah's Witness in 2001, turned up at a couple's house along with ex-Sly and the Family Stone bassist Larry Graham and, when they were let in, leaned into 25 minutes worth of the pitch for salvation. At first they thought he was scouting locations for a video or something, but once the situation sank in, they informed the Purple One that they were Jewish and weren't interested in what he was selling. He left literature anyway.

Prince's music has always had an element of God wrestling the Devil anyway, but this is a new surprise. I thought Michael Jackson was a Witness, too; maybe they can do a multiplatinum tag team? Or are they still claiming MJ?

HUGE STORMS ALWAYS HAPPEN!: I thought that some of the Soviet-era propaganda was bizarre, but the stuff that's coming up from North Korea takes the cake. I speak of these two clips from robpongi.com, which snuck out from North K television and through to the Japanese media. While "F***in' USA" is all scorn and vitriol, the Kim Jong Il song got me laughing right away for reasons I'm not about to spoil.

The rest of the site is great stuff, and you should spend far too much time there, of course.  

I DON'T RATE IWPs: Welcomes are due (I'm sure) to Scott Keith, who is doing his bit to cut the clutter at the start of his 411 columns by offloading some of the off-topicness to his own blog. If you read that heading and are one of the few readers who have no idea what an IWP even is, you're probably better off that way.

AWWWWWW, CRAP: Just heard from MSNBC's Countdown that a new Pink Panther movie is in the works, with Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau. While I'm sure that Steve will do the best he can under the circumstances, when a person is as inseparable from a role as Peter Sellers was, and considering MGM/UA's abject failure to keep the franchise going (TWICE!) following Sellers' death, it make you wonder why the hell showbiz doesn't learn from its failures like the rest of us occasionally do. It took US television at least 10 years to get the hint after the variety format stopped bearing fruit.

But then, there are moments of shocking lucidity in the entertainment industry, the ones that make me think maybe the cranial-anal insertion syndrome isn't as universal in Cali as I thought it was. It was a stirring moment when Hollywood, after one movie, just said no to Carrottop. It's days like those that I feel proud to be an American. At least until I see that damn phone ad.  

JUST FINISHED: Pluck and Luck by Robert Benchley. Oh, how I bemoan the lack of drive of the current generation. The man who wrote tonight's book didn't touch a drop of alcohol until after his thirtieth birthday, and despite that handicap early in life managed to drink himself to death by cirrhosis of the liver by 1945. Sure, heroin overdose or death by E is trendier these days, but that only shows you these lazy kids aren't patient enough to build up to anything truly memorable. Lazy punks.

Now that I've alienated any new readers I might've gained, here's a quick trip through a quick trip through another book by a member of the Algonquin Round Table. Pluck and Luck is a 1925 collection of magazine pieces, and since we don't have the typical list of printings and reprintings on the copyright page, I would've said this copy was an original...if it wasn't inscribed "Christmas, 1948" inside the front cover. Ah, the joys of buying secondhand.

There are two main types of Benchley writing in Pluck and Luck, genre parody and slice-of-life humor. The former are the most unhinged bits of the book, in which popular literary styles of the day and various types of stuffed-shirt academic writing are folded, spindled, and mutilated. The best way to let you know what to expect from these pieces is to think of those monologues Groucho delivers in most of the Marx Brothers movies, then drop Goethe references into one. That's Benchley in a nutshell. While some of the more specialized literary parodies would work better if I actually knew who the authors were (and they're namechecked via subtitle in a few cases), you can still get enjoyment at how Benchley twists the language into pretzels.

The other pieces take us through more prosaic concerns, without nearly as much punishment to the language, but without losing the wit. Here Benchley bemoans the plight of married couples roped into visiting the neighbors, the one day of summer vacation of which no pictures exist (i.e. the day you have go through the misery of packing up), and that evergreen favorite of humorists since time began, travelling with children. It's not as weird as the parodies, but closer to the heart, so still good stuff. The Everyman angle was one that he would more fully develop in his series of movie short subjects, usually in a sort of mock lecture format, so he managed to get a decent blend of the two styles in the end. That's a hell of a trick, if you can pull it off.

A few favorite pieces: "Editha's Christmas Burglar" is the best of the numerous holiday travesties within; from the beating the season takes, Benchley obviously enjoyed an "Old Fashioned Christmas". If you don't remember, that would consist of having a few Old Fashioneds on Christmas day and spending the evening heckling the various versions of "A Christmas Carol" that are on the air. "French For Americans" is apropos even today, with the "phrases most in demand by Americans" including such useful things as "Of all the goddamn countries I ever saw!" and tips on how to convert French currency depending on what day of the week it is. "Whoa!" is a very short political humor piece, and great for a webpage (which is why somebody put it on a page, I suppose). Finally, don't miss "Ask That Man", whose topic should be fairly obvious from the title, even if the resolution (thankfully) isn't.

Unlike Woollcott, you shouldn't have too much trouble finding Benchley if you feel the urge; just about every book he put together in his lifetime (as well as several posthumous collections) are still in print somewhere. If you don't want to tie yourself to one particular book or period, Benchley Roundup is a respectable "best of" volume, and probably the easiest to find in a real-world bookstore.  

DON'T MESS WITH THE PROS, BUDDY: Hey, remember how Comedy Central's first roast without the Friars was the saddest thing Denis Leary was connected with since Two If By Sea? Well, here's how well the Friars have done without the network. (Note: This link is work-safe, unless your boss has a habit of reading over your shoulder.)

I NOTICE THESE THINGS SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO: I know that a little bit earlier in the week I mentioned smelling alcohol on a coworker's breath, but why does the "related searches" box at the top of this page keep pulling up "body odor"? Come on! I only said it once! Or does my aroma offend?

I also note this ad currently comes up, too: REMOVE URINE STAINS/ODOR: Eliminate human and pet odors and stains with Urine-Erase." Why, oh WHY, have I arrived at this state of affairs? The worst part of it is that by talking about the situation, I've guaranteed another week of ads about "that rotten egg odor". Damn.  

OTIS STILL GOING STRONG: At this writing, Otis Fodder's 365 Days project, during which he makes an MP3 of a recording available every day in 2003, has reached day 282 with a 1963 recording of a 4th grade class. Very often, what his contributors dig up are thrift store LPs, 45s and home recordings, and as you can imagine, there's a lot of interesting and/or utterly bizarre things in there. Here's a scattered few of my favorites:

--From San Francisco, the Space Lady's utterly memorable version of "Major Tom"

--Elvis Casio's utterly inept karaoke medley.

--"The Eight Seasons of Chromalox", whose entry is worth it for the notes alone.

--Gen Orange "Thunderstorm". Is it just me, or does this vocalist sound like Arianna Huffington?

--Bob Vido "Boo-Bah-Bah" and Mar-tie "Tribute to Beethoven". Indescribable.

--Kit Ream "Introuniversal Jam/Don't Be So Holy Poly Over My Souly". What happens when rich kids take too much drugs.

--William Shatner's "Rocket Man". If you've never heard it, get it now.

--Ashfordaisyak "Leper In A Tumbledryer". An interesting thing to find in a public area, to be sure.

--J & H Productions, looking for "stoz aftah stoz aftah stoz" from the "label industry".

This isn't all of my hit picks, but I've fallen a bit behind in my listening to these...they still haven't hit on the strangest record I've ever heard anywhere, but they've still got several months left in the year.  

THE GREAT DEBATE (or "An Easy Entry To Ignore"): To work or not to work, that's today's question. On the pro-work side: A full week's worth of downtime means the next paycheck is going to be a bit on the small side. To help alleviate that, the study I'm currently working on is one where nobody gets sent home, meaning I'm almost guaranteed a full seven hour day.

The cons consist mostly of the people I was working beside yesterday. A number of people at the survey job show up with the sole intent of getting sent home. The girl I was sitting next to--I'm not calling her a "woman" because that would indicate a level of maturity I wasn't seeing--was just going through the motions, and yet seemed genuinely surprised why nobody wanted to work with her over the phone, so she was wishing out loud that she was heading home. By lunchtime, I was wishing she was heading home, too. When you're sitting next to somebody who says she wants to go home once or twice, sometimes you can sympathize. When she says it over and over for seven hours, you want to strangle her.

She was also unreeling an endless stream of profanities between calls, and I wouldn't be a language Nazi about how people express themselves if it wasn't for the fact that my telephone was less than six inches away from her, so if I stopped talking, she's dropping F-bombs over my phone. I like to breathe, so occasionally I have to stop talking.

On my other side was a young guy. Since the university fall session came back, I seem to be the "buffer zone" between a guy and a girl who are intent on talking around me. On top of that, he came back from lunch smelling like a liquor store, which is a good way to get booted out of the building during business hours if you get caught. Since stale coffee breath is a hardcore distraction, you can imagine what Mister Cocktail Hour did for me.

Add it all up, and you get another day that makes me wish I'd have taken that library job after high school.

On top of all that, in spite of the fact that I called it an early night, I've been up since a little bit before 4 in the morning thanks to my goofed-up internal clock. At the moment, I'm really feeling the gears shift into neutral, which has the potential to be a bad thing. Besides having to be alert to be effective on a telephone survey job, I've almost fallen asleep at the wheel at red lights after insomnia nights, and at least once I've blacked out at the wheel while in motion...only for a second, but that's long enough to scare the hell out of me.

Should I commit or should I blow? There's a devil on my shoulder telling me to skip out, and the Masturbating Bear is filling in for the angel today, so it's not a fair fight by any means. I'll let you know how it comes out.

(UPDATE @ 11am: The devil won. Go figure.)  

IF YOU'RE BUMMED BY THE LONG DELAY about everything, you should've woken me up over the weekend. I'm always good about meeting everybody's deadlines except the ones I set for myself. More later today, but for now, MOVING ON...

RECENTLY FINISHED (last Wednesday, in fact): If I May by A.A. Milne. I've mentioned this book at least once before, but now that I've actually made my way through the entire thing, I just have a few words to add.

Although he's best known today as the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, the bulk of A(lan) A(lexander) Milne's work was actually for adults. Apart from the two Pooh books and two books of children's poetry, he wrote over twenty five plays, as well as several novels and essays. This collection, which was originally published in 1921, collects a few of the essays. While most of the topics are necessarily tied to the mundane real world (there are a few bits on the topic of gardening, for instance), they're carried off with a light touch that a even a modern reader should find pleasant enough.

Although he served in France during World War I, Milne was a noted pacifist, and a few pieces in this collection reflect that conviction. The idea of universal peace, which many in the western world felt was attainable between the wars, isn't quite as distant as the Victorian idea of the perfectability of the human race (we'll get to that eventually unless you stop me now), but it's an idea that we seem to move further away from. Peace as an idea, though, is something that's very much on everyone's minds right now, which makes Milne's thoughts on the subject that much more interesting. Especially considering the perpetual motion machine that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "The Honour of Your Country" is an especially interesting read, even if the "solutions" put forward don't track as well with an internal conflict.

This one is hopelessly out of print, so the Project Gutenberg version is the only game in town.