Thanks to , , and I now own..

the fearful device

I’m revelling in my youth with Spinner’s “Alt 80s” channel, which plays all the crap I played on college radio circa 1985. This is both bad and good. I like a lot of the music still, but music has a way of transporting us directly to the time and place it was most heard, and the express train back to Major Depression can be a bit trying.

It’s like looking at a car crash. “Ow! Hmm, I wonder if the next one will hurt?” Really good selection of music from that time, though.

The garden is an amazing explosion of roses and orchids right now. It’s good to live in Paradise.

Check it out my homies! I am so going to jail! I RULE!!

I had blood taken today, and at the lab they had a large sign up on the office wall that said UNIVERSAL PRECAUTIONS OBSERVED.

I left in a haze of philosophical introspection.

I love ad banners sometimes.

No More Wire Hangers!

Someday when I’m all grown up I want to pull something like this.

Wiping the tears from my eyes, here.

The pork people have problems. I sympathize, somehow. You have to sell fatty meat that many religions call impure and that doctors tell people not to eat. It’s a hard sell. So far, over the years they have tried:

1) “The other white meat.” This resulted in fodder for bad comedians for years.

2) “America’s Cut”. No one got this.

3) “Where there’s Pork, there’s Fire”. Hello?

I wonder if some postmodern grad student types had taken over by #3. Anyway, now they’ve snapped completely. Allow me to present the Post 9/11 Pork Banner:

PORKRIOTISM is the LAST REFUGE of a MARKETER! YOW!!

Hey kids! hack your fish today!

Wonderful was the contrast between the steamer and that villa on the Mahmudiyah canal! Startling the sudden change from presto to adagio life! In thirteen days we had passed from the clammy grey fog, that atmosphere of industry which kept us at anchor off the Isle of Wight, through the loveliest air of the Inland Sea, whose sparkling blue and purple haze spread charms even on N. Africa’s beldame features, and now we are sitting silent and still, listening to the monotonous melody of the East — the soft night-breeze wandering through starlit skies and tufted trees, with a voice of melancholy meaning.

And this is the Arab’s Kayf. The savouring of animal existence; the passive enjoyment of mere sense; the pleasant languor; the dreamy tranquillity, the airy castle-building, which in Asia stand in lieu of the vigorous, intensive, passionate life of Europe. It is the result of a lively, impressible, excitable nature, and exquisite sensibility of nerve; it argues a facility for voluptuousness unknown to northern regions, where happiness is placed in the exertion of mental and physical powers; where Ernst ist das Leben; where niggard earth commands ceaseless sweat of face, and damp chill air demands perpetual excitement, exercise, or change, or adventure, or dissipation, for want of something better. In the East, man wants but rest and shade: upon the banks of a bubbling stream, or under the cool shelter of a perfumed tree, he is perfectly happy, smoking a pipe, or sipping a cup of coffee, or drinking a glass of sherbet, but above all things deranging body and mind as little as possible; the trouble of conversations, the displeasures of memory, and the vanity of thought being the most unpleasant interruptions to his Kayf. No wonder that “Kayf” is a word untranslatable in our mother-tongue!

— Sir Richard F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah.