Category: Uncategorized

Tales from the Picnic Table

the_friend and pbd told the tale of the person at work who thought B. was smoking pot because someone else was smoking cloves, and called her in to utter this line: “When you came back from lunch today you… …REEKED! of POT!” This same person was on a severe Atkins regimen that involved bringing in raw bacon and string cheese, microwaving the bacon, wrapping it around the string cheese, and eating the resulting delicacy for lunch. She had yellow eyes and blackening teeth by the time they both left that job.

A frightening Canadian folk tale was told several times.

Seventeen-year-old boys appeared and explained the world to us enthusiastically, then left.

I heard a number of stories about why you shouldn’t go to work in a bike shop. I think my favorite was the guy who bought the $5000 carbon fiber frame and then clamped a 9 pound lock on to it, removed the clips for regular pedals, and added fenders, a basket, and a bell. Also, not getting paid.

Good food was eaten, including: chicken with little Post-It™ notes all over it, hummade hummus, guacamole, my accidentally vegan potato salad, sweet potatoes, cupcakes, peanut butter PIE, and small irresistible appetizer thingies with salami and cheese in them. I hadn’t had cupcakes since the last child’s birthday party I attended.

the_silent_one and realitylost said they were looking at pumpkins but I think they were actually hunting an invisible bunny. What do you think?

Late in the evening, just before I left, the_silent_one and the_friend were sitting at the table in our conversation lit only by candles from a bit below. They were in a Georges de la Tour painting, and they were so beautiful.

Tales from Bozospace: The AOL Trivia Club

I’ve been using online computer systems since 1977 or so, starting with a very primitive teletype-and-paper-tape hookup to a school district computer in junior high school. Later I used university systems, bulletin boards, dialup Internet, and most of the online services.

For most of this time I didn’t use these networks socially. In the earlier years this just wasn’t technically practical. When I bought my first computer I was 25 years old, living in Los Angeles, and heavily involved in the music scene, so I didn’t feel the need for any additional social outlets.

However, I’ve always been a trivia nut. I did College Bowl at UCLA, and our team won and went to the statewide competition. When Trivial Pursuit came out I loved it and won a lot. I even liked the dumb trivia games in bars. So when I found the live interactive trivia games in AOL chat rooms I got hooked right away. There’d be maybe 10-15 people chatting and a game host and a scorekeeper, and you’d try to type in the correct answer before the host typed the “buzzer”, but just before! So that others couldn’t copy you. The hosts wrote their own trivia games. If you won you got some free time on the service.

and therein lies the tale

my academy, your academy

The Fall’s Hex Enduction Hour, which I recently got the re-release of, is even better than I remembered it. If you own just one Fall album, make it this one. And now, links:

  1. Pac Man on Trial (via waxy)
  2. Dog owner bites man.
  3. AAAIIIIGH! Cannibal squid!
  4. The “official car” of the Rolling Stones tour is the new Mercedes-Benz luxury minivan. Just retire, guys.
  5. Country singer tries to get away with promoting America’s childhood drug abuse gateway drug. Thanks, Gretchen!
  6. Jon Stewart versus Christopher Hitchens (quicktime).
  7. Nutcase Turkmenistan dictator sends his book into space.
  8. The Los Angeles Fire Department has some good information and advice about that “ICE” cellphone emergency contact thing you keep hearing about.

mac tech question

Mac heads –

My shiny new Powerbook is a delight, but it does something that I hadn’t noticed previously. I’ll be working along typing or browsing and suddenly it will just grind to a halt doing something like updating articles in netnewswire or starting a program or copying files. I get the beach ball in that app, whatever it is, and nothing happens for quite a while, maybe 15 to 30 seconds. If I can see load it’s normal, and the machine has enough RAM, and doesn’t appear to be obviously I/O bound (no disk grinding).

Any ideas what’s causing this periodic hangup? It’s so frustrating, especially since the machine itself is so fast and everything else about it is great.

O ye lawyers and ferris wheels

The total bill for my vertiginous vomitous vacation to the ER is roughly $900 after my excellent insurance. Otherwise it would have been more like $5000. For which I am grateful. But, so much for paying down more debt next month. Also, the insurer and the hospital are disagreeing about whether I pay that particular bill to the tune of $521 or $487, so I foresee a fun conversation on the phone tomorrow about that.

And then I think about the people who’d have to put that money (either sum) on credit and pay the minimum on the never-never, and how they can’t go bankrupt any more, and how their minimum payments will double next year, and I am even more grateful that I’m on the Eloi scale and not the Morlock one right now. If this had been me 15 years ago I would have been in deep shit. Oh wait, that was me 15 years ago, and I got sued in small claims court for $2000 by a medical group!

I was thinking these thoughts as I went over to the Apple Store to get them to fix a bad key on my expensive laptop that I can barely afford, and there was a guy in front of me in the top of the line Mercedes SUV (5 liter V8, MSRP starting at $49,275) driving like a complete dick and endangering others, and as I went down Dover Drive to PCH this person was basically playing chicken with a gigantic tanker truck full of gasoline. So here you had the gas-guzzling luxury pansy-ass dude ranch $50,000 SUV with one old fat white guy in it risking the lives of everyone within a mile over whether he got to go in front, including the working-class dude driving the fuel truck who is bringing Mr. SUV the fuel he needs to keep on with his pathetic lifestyle.

I live in this weird part of the world where almost daily I get an overblown condensed symbol of everything wrong with my country shoved right in my face, and I find myself saying to the Great Novelist: “Where is your subtlety? Enough with the clunky obvious symbolism!”

At the Genius bar I sat next to a 20something perfect California girl hottie with the blonde and the tan and the curves and the hoo and the haa. Not usually my type, but she was exceptionally hot and also really nice. However, I fell out of “love” with her as soon as she used the word “proactive”.

As I left, a family was arriving and the little girl was complaining about something. I heard the mother say “Well, we’re going to stay here for quite a while. We’ve FINALLY made it to the MALL!”