Side effects

The small-print writers at CVS have changed their phraseology: where my prescription drug side effects lists used to say "sexual side effects," now they say "changes in sexual ability." Which, for women, doesn't necessarily mean anything. ("Have you noticed any changes in sexual ability?" "Nope, I can still lie there.")



(Not that "sexual side effects" is a very useful description in the first place. It very seldom means "You'll have orgasms every time you set off your car alarm" or anything entertaining like that.)



My absolute favorite side-effect warning is the one I get on my birth control pills: "Do not use if you are pregnant or intend to become pregnant." Well, isn't that the point?

On December six-and-twenty

It's the day after Christmas, and that means another winter holiday in some parts of North America. Not just Boxing Day in Canada—Junkanoo in the Bahamas.



I discovered it when copyediting (by which I mean "practically rewriting") a book for teachers about holidays, which I briefly posted about back in August. The book mentioned it in two paltry sentences at the end of the section on Kwanzaa, but didn't actually explain it, so I did some Web research so I could provide more (and better-written) information. It turns out it's an Afro-Caribbean holiday started by slaves as early as the 16th century. The day after Christmas and New Year's Day were the two days on which they could hold traditional African celebrations, and the holiday has long outlasted slavery (which ended in the Bahamas in 1838, by the way, 25 years before the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation went into effect).



Anyway, Junkanoo sounds like a heck of a lot of fun. Parades, costumes, music and dancing in the streets—this Bahamas travel guide says "Junkanoo is reminiscent of New Orleans' Mardi Gras and Rio de Janeiro's Carnival, but it is distinctly Bahamian and exists nowhere else." Certainly more fun than wassailing in the snow. I love Christmas, don't get me wrong, and the Philadelphia Mummers Parade on New Year's Day is a, um, unique spectacle in itself; but one of these late Decembers I want to betake myself to the Bahamas, where the weather is warm and the art doesn't involve snowmen and the music doesn't involve reindeer or the words "fum fum fum."

Groan-inducing neologism of the season

Headline on AOL (yes, I use an AOL connection on my home computer): "Seize the Shoppertunity." Ugh. (Even "Shopportunity" would be better.)



Another one, not quite so bad: "Once Again Into the Mall." That would be "Once More," if you're going for the allusion I think you are; and "Unto" rather than "Into" as well. "Once Again" doesn't even scan, at least not in iambs.



(I'm being picky because I'm bored, and I'm bored because I'm home alone; J.'s employer has revoked the usual Christmas-to-New Year's break and is making them come in every weekday from the 26th to the 31st. "Them" meaning "Everyone who doesn't have as much vacation time as we managers do." Grumble. Well, it'll build camaraderie, if not morale...)

Cashmere me

For family scheduling reasons, J. and I exchanged our Christmas gifts to/from each other at home tonight; and I would just like it to be known that, at this moment, I am wearing nothing but a full-length long-sleeved burgundy cashmere robe.



Since the only reason I can think of for getting rich is to be able to wrap oneself in cashmere, I think I'm all set.



That is all.



(And to all a good night!)

Work, sort of

I am very unenthused about being at work today, along with five other employees and the six office mice. (Who aren't stirring, incidentally.) All the supervisory personnel have already disappeared on their vacations, so there isn't quite as much work getting done as there might be. We did get permission to go home at 3; and we'll have to actually stick around till then, because I'm sure one of the supervisory personnel will call the office at 2:59 to see if anyone answers the phone.



Well, gotta get back to work. No, really, I mean it.

'Tis better

Maybe I'm crazy—I have been wondering if I've got a manic or hypomanic episode coming on—but, dang it, I'm actually buying things from the wish lists of people I know solely online. Or planning to, anyway. I've tracked down the Amazon wish lists of everyone I've blogrolled who has a wish list link I can find, or whose name or e-mail enables me to search Amazon for one. Because I feel like it, darnit. And because, for a change, I have the financial wherewithal. And because I actually do like giving things more than receiving things. (I like receiving things, don't get me wrong; but giving is my favorite part of the holiday season.)



So if you get a package from Amazon in the next couple of weeks and wonder "Who the heck is this from?" it might be me. Happy assorted holidays—Christmas, the brief remainder of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, Saturnalia, Boxing Day, New Year's, Epiphany, Junkanoo, whatever—and rest ye merry, and to all a good night, and [deity of your choice] bless us every one.

Sort-of correction of the day

I have previously asserted, with some asperity (okay, a lot of asperity), that there is no such fucking thing as African moldavite. It turns out, however, that there is such a fucking thing as African moldavite (read the comments to the entry I just linked to). Or, at any rate, there are meteorite tektites in Africa that are similar in chemical composition to those found in the Moldau region of the Czech Republic from which the name "moldavite" is derived; although meteorite purists, like this guy on Meteorite Central's meteorite mailing list, say that "moldavite" is "solely associated with the Ries impact event," which the Lunar and Planetary Institute has more to say about here (PDF link).



So, in a limited way, I stand corrected. But I'm going to stand firm on the Moldavite Fragrance Collection—or any gemstone-derived "fragrance"—as being a big load of hooey. (There are a lot of perfumes that advertise themselves as having an amber scent, including this one from the ever-so-reputable Burberry's. I've actually burned amber, and believe you me, it's not something you want to smell like. But then, venerable perfume bases like ambergris and civet, in their natural states, are also pretty nasty; maybe they do something to the amber so it doesn't reek of burned pine tar.)



(I sincerely apologize for using a Wal-Mart link for that fragrance, by the way, but the actual Burberry's site is so overproduced and Flash-intensive that it would be even more annoying to link straight to them.)

The sky (is|isn't) falling

Top headline on AP: Terror Alert Prompts Tighter Security.



Top headline on Reuters: Americans Urged to Go on with Holiday Plans.



Perhaps I'll hide under a desk with a festively-decorated gift bag over my head.

The year in searches

From a Hollywood Reporter article on the year-end report of search requests from AOL, Yahoo!, and Lycos:

• Paris Hilton had the biggest increase [your sex joke here] in search requests since last year—212,000%.



• A quote: "Lycos is predicting, based on its growing number of searches, that the movies 'The Passion of the Christ,' 'Troy' and 'Catwoman' will be hits." I wonder what the market overlap on those is going to be.



• Another one: "'Finding Nemo' has the dubious honor of being probably the year's most downloaded movie at peer-to-peer file-sharing services." Hm. It's stealing; but it's a family-friendly children's movie. Does that balance out? (I suspect the Paris Hilton video is really the most downloaded movie, but I guess that doesn't officially count.)



• On Lycos, Michael Jordan was the third-most-searched-for athlete. What, is he still around? I thought he and all his championship rings had retired to Planet Nike.



• Britney Spears actually "fell off Lycos' top-10 list of search terms for several weeks" (somehow I feel like "fell off" deserves a sex joke too), until she did that kissing-Madonna thing and some sexy magazine covers and rocketed back to the top. Yes, when in doubt, and when unsupported by talent, the best way to grab the spotlight is to take off most of your clothes and engage in para-sexual activity with anyone in sight. (Well, it's less bizarre than when she humped that snake at the 2001 Music Video Awards.)



• And, finally, perhaps the most surprising thing of all: "Al-Jazeera...generated three times as many search queries in April than did the word 'sex.'" I didn't think anything could knock off "sex" as a search term. Wonders never cease.

One of these days I'll have to figure out the most frequent search requests for my site; I fear "m0n$terc0ck$" is going to be one of them. (Characters replaced to avoid further search requests.) I wonder where that ranks on AOL, Yahoo!, and Lycos...

More spam names

This week's spam names:

• Shelby Gamble



• bagron schreier



• lessa urena



• Tightrope S. Ferociousness



• Alfonso Koenig



• milam louthan



• Felecia Medrano



• Lazaro Pendleton



• shively vecchione



• Bemoan T. Timbered



• casavez grannum



• Mary Mento



• villada ortman



• Aubrey Friedman



• Regretfully J. Individually (clearly not trying very hard for this one)



• Spencer Macias

Cool Google logo

One of my favorite things about Google is their holiday/commemorative logos, but I'm usually not Web-searching on holidays, so I always miss them. I got a kick out of today's, though: in honor of the 100th anniversary of airplane flight, they've got a Wright Brothers' plane logo.



(If you're reading this any day other than 12/17/2003, the logo will probably be archived on their holiday logo page.)

A whale of a funeral

This is perhaps not ironic, but certainly counterintuitive: the Free Willy Keiko Foundation, which campaigned for the (sadly late) orca movie star to be released into the ocean, has now successfully campaigned for him to be buried on land. In a very, very big hole. (Insert willy/hole joke here.)



What I want to know is, what do they think is going to happen to that six-ton body? If it's been embalmed, it's got to be filled with such a huge amount of chemicals that it can't possibly be good for the environment. And if not, I'm sorry, it's going to rot. They're going to have a 30-foot-long, 15-foot-deep hole full of ever-more-foul-smelling decomposing flesh. And either way, I am not going to visit that grave.



(Since it's in Norway, the freezing weather may preserve the body in a reasonably stench-free state for a long time; still, it seems like a remarkably bad thing to do with a corpse of that size, especially one belonging to an animal that—are you with me, Free Willy Keiko Foundation?—belongs to a sea creature. You were clear on that when he was alive; why did you change your minds, and your mindset, now that he's dead?)

Spam names

I've been keeping a list of the most bizarre or amusing fake names I'm getting spam from; today I noticed a trend away from the "Random Foreign Name" paradigm—which looks as if they chose a first name from a phone book in, say, Antwerp, and a last name from one in Ulan-Bator—to a new "Random Slightly Obscure English Word" one. Which is certainly amusing, but I'm a bit disappointed; what, you ran out of phone books and languages?



But anyway, here's what I've collected since December 4th:

• almengor freiheit



• torset mcclafferty



• Lidia Guerra



• stiehm zacarias



• andrew niheu



• gammons birdine



• swoopes doop



• Curring L. Cessna



• Estelle Pham



• Porfirio Mccauley



• Abdul Swift



• Showman P. Scrawl



• Earline Joseph



• Foothold G. Heuristic

You gotta give 'em credit for digging up "Heuristic," but as bizarre names go, I haven't heard anything better than "Porfirio." Who wouldn't want to have a name that sounds remarkably like that of the horrible hereditary disease that caused the infamous madness of George III?

Another misreading of the day

D'ja ever quickly glance at several lines of text and have the words on two separate lines seem to converge? I looked at these headlines:

• Mortars Pound U.S. Headquarters in Baghdad
• Pentagon: Halliburton May Have Overcharged in Iraq

and my mind registered it as "Halliburton Headquarters." Which isn't all that far from the truth anyway...

Imponderable

An imponderable that's not as flippant as it sounds: who do the Polish tell jokes about?



(Brought about by channel-surfing my way to "Polish Kaleidoscope," which was broadcasting some kind of concert featuring Polish rock groups, Polish rappers, and a Polish stand-up comedian. My pan-Slavic language exposure was just enough for me to not quite know what they were singing/saying: "Something about his girlfriend leaving him and he's pissed off, I think.")



(Polish rap is extremely amusing, by the way; the people doing it are very, very serious and very, very white. And not a bad-ass Eminem kind of white, either; an "I look like a lawnmower salesman from Ohio" kind of white.)

Fake headline of the day

From this week's Onion: "Report: Poor People Pretty Much Fucked." You could just about run that on the front page of the New York Times and be censured for vulgarity, but not inaccuracy.

'Tisn't always better to give

I know everyone with anything to sell is trying to make the increasingly-extended holiday shopping season work for them, but really, you can't just repackage everything as a present. Case in point: I just received an e-mail with the title "Unique gift ideas from Equifax"—the consumer credit report agency.

Giving an Equifax Gift Certificate is a unique way for you to empower friends and family to understand and manage their own credit standing. Share the importance of good credit health with those you care about!

Yeah, "unique" is one word for it. It's also a unique way to make sure your friends and family never buy you anything again.



I'm not saying people shouldn't get credit reports; it's just a really crappy gift. It's like giving someone a gift certificate for a Pap smear. You need it, but you don't necessarily want someone to tell you you need it, much less inflict it on you while everyone else is opening their computer games and gadgets and toys and jewelry.



(If you actually do want to inflict it on someone, go here: Equifax Personal Solutions.)

Temperature, inside and out

So it's finally gotten around to being cold; which, regardless of your feelings about cold weather, at least has the advantage of being seasonable. It's just weird having 75° weather in November; and I was completely not in holiday-shopping mode. ("Christmas presents? Why? It doesn't feel like it's getting close to Christmas. Oh...twenty-eight days? Crap.")



Yesterday morning, outside: 18°. Yesterday afternoon, in our house: 60°—the heater was being uncooperative. J. fiddled with the heater and by bedtime it was up to an entirely acceptable 70°.



This morning, outside: 30°. This morning, in my office: 80°. Eighty? I'd almost prefer 30; I'd certainly prefer 60. At least when it's cold you can always put on more clothing; when it's hot, there's a limit to how much clothing you can take off, especially when you're at work. I wish I'd worn a t-shirt under my long-sleeved shirt and sweater and coat, so I wouldn't be sitting here feeling almost faint with the heat.



Just something in the middle would be fine. Really. The average of 60 and 80, the average of 30 and 80...just something bearable, not too extreme one way or the other. Haven't we reached a sufficiently advanced stage of technology that the weather inside doesn't have to be frightful?

Thanksgiving Eve

Last night J. and I went on our pre-Thanksgiving shopping trip; my assignment is to make apple and pumpkin pies and bring them to my parents' house in Delaware, where we'll be having the festivities. We wound up buying about 14 1/2 pounds of apples; six Granny Smiths and three Romes for the pie, and an assortment of Romes, Galas, Honeycrisps, and Staymans for eating. J. consumes pretty much nothing but apples, bananas, and distilled water during the workday; he's still avoiding sodium as much as possible, and the food available on campus (he works at a university library) isn't exactly low-sodium, low-fat, or low-anything, except maybe low-nutrition.



Figuring out which aisle the canned pumpkin would be in was a bit of a challenge—is it a canned fruit or a canned vegetable? (Trick question: it's a baking need.) My recipe calls for a 16 oz. can; naturally, they only had 15 oz. and 32 oz. cans. Humph. Their packaging was doubtless designed by the same people who sell hot dogs in packages of eight and hot dog rolls in packages of six. (I settled on the 15 oz. can.)



I'll be baking the pies tonight; J. mixed up a batch of refrigerator biscuit dough last night, which he'll be taking to Delaware as-is and baking when we get there. I also bought walnuts in the shell for our pet mice, so they can have something hard to chew on and something tasty to eat. We cracked the shells to give the mice a head start, but there's still plenty for them to hone their teeth on.



That's about it, I guess. Happy Thanksgiving, all you U.S. people; and, um, Happy Thursday to everyone else.

Misreading of the day

If you just glance at it, "Medicare" looks a lot like "Mediocre"; for a brief moment I wondered why Reuters had the headline "Senate Passes Mediocre Reform Bill." Quite frankly, it seems like that would be a better way to put it anyway...

We are really not amused

In fact, we are downright pissed off. My whole frippin' computer at work has apparently been taken over by a virus; gggrrrrr snarl snap bite. Hard drive wiping and reinstallation to ensue...



Well, at least that explains how the asshat spammers got into my mail server. I think I'll go assign some random passwords again.

PSA

By virtue of having once mentioned Paris Hilton, I've become a search result for people looking for that sex video. Therefore, this Public Service/Paris Sex Announcement: No, I don't have it. And I'm not going to mention the URL's I've been getting hits from, because then I'll wind up getting search results for that for months, like I did when I mentioned...um, just imagine the letters that the symbols/numbers are replacing: m@nst3rc0cks.c0m. (And I still don't know why I got referrals from there in the first place.)



As long as I've got the words "Paris Hilton" on this page, I may as well repeat what J. said the first time we talked about her:

Incidentally, what the hell is up with the name Paris Hilton? As J. put it, "Do you really want to give your daughter a name that implies that thousands of people have slept in her?"

The answer may not be "yes," but my oh my, is that implication being made...about as often as she is, apparently...

Friday Five

1. List five things you'd like to accomplish by the end of the year.

• Finish the Christmas stocking I started making for J. last year



• Make the fruitcake I got the ingredients for two years ago (candied fruit doesn't go bad, does it?)



• Vacuum (hey, it could happen)



• Work on my Web site, and maybe get my blog moxified



• Send my Christmas cards before Christmas

2. List five people you've lost contact with that you'd like to hear from again.



Oh, jeez...I mostly lost contact with them because I wanted to. Next question.



3. List five things you'd like to learn how to do.

• I'd say "dance," but I believe that's impossible; me:dance :: shellfish:quantum physics



• Speak Welsh



• And Irish Gaelic



• And that African language with all the clicks



• Anything well enough to get me famous enough to get on the Daily Show (mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...Jon Stewart)

4. List five things you'd do if you won the lottery (no limit).

• Pay off the mortgages on the houses of all my family members



• Donate a building to Yale (which I said I'd do on my application, although it was tongue-in-cheek rather than an out-and-out bribe)



• Upholster a room with cashmere



• Raise Arabian horses



• Get my goddamn thighs liposuctioned (they're disproportionately large, so no matter how thin I am I look like a Stone Age fertility goddess from hip to knee)

5. List five things you do that help you relax.

• Alcohol



• Xanax



• Hot baths



• Orgasms



• Backrubs

Proofreader, please

Or at least someone who knows English sentence structure. In the ack-basswards headline department: "Poll: Pa. falling out of favor with the president." The article then says that the president's approval rating is falling in Pennsylvania. So, M(r|s). Headline Writer, what you mean is "President falling out of favor with Pa." (Or maybe "in Pa." would sound better.)

Crime and...something

I'm going to try to limit the Michael Jackson postings, but I do have this to say: exactly how much of a scumbag are you when a state passes a law specifically because of you? (And how much more of a scumbag are you when you then run afoul of that law ten years later?)



Blah blah blah innocent until proven guilty. I get the feeling that his problem is that he's too innocent, in his own mind; he seems to have an overwhelming naïevté that prevents him from seeing any of his actions as threatening, dangerous, or, heck, even disturbing to anyone else. (The root of "innocent," by the way, isn't "not guilty"; it's "not harming"—"in + nocens," the present participle of "nocere," "to harm." And yes, I know too much Latin.)

We are not amused

Okay, I am really disliking whoever's sending zillions of spam messages from my domain name. First of all, it sucks in general; and second, I'm getting all the delivery-failed messages bounced back to me, and having 200 messages of that sort in my inbox is a) a pain in the ass and b) using up big chunks of my allotted megabytes.



I thought I'd taken care of it yesterday by changing all my passwords (twice), and indeed it had tapered off by the end of the day, but this morning I had over 300 returned-to-sender spams. Grrr snarl snap. So I changed my passwords again, and for good measure set up my e-mail aliases so that only the ones I specified would get forwarded to me; the "anything at zhaba dot com" ones—all the "rj_zipwinder-2983-blargthorp86" bogus spam ones—are getting deleted, baby. So whatever happens, I'm not going to see them.



To anyone more hack-savvy than me: Any and all advice is welcome.



To anyone getting spams from my domain name: It's not me.



To the spammer(s): You are so, so lame. A pox on all your IP addresses, and may your servers be infiltrated by wire-eating insects.

Rush Limbaugh is a big fat criminal idiot

Am I a really bad person for wanting this to be true?: Rush Limbaugh may have violated money-laundering laws to pay for his prescription-drug addiction.



(J.: I guess that's what you'd call a really white-collar crime.)

Talking to the TV

On President Bush's trip to London, and the extreme security measures therefor:

J.: It's humiliating to have a head of state who can't visit a foreign capital unless it's in a state of lockdown.

Later, a teaser for the 11 o'clock news on the latest Michael Jackson child-molestation accusation*:

Announcer: Coming up...shocking news about Michael Jackson.



Me: The only thing that would be shocking is if he grew some chest hair and darkened his skin.

*I couldn't find a New York Times link for this story, go figure...

Psst...church and state, anyone?

President Bush's statement on the Massachusetts same-sex marriage decision:

Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with Congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage

Ahem. First Amendment, anyone?



(What I really wanted to say was "First fucking Amendment, asshole," but...oh, hey, I just said that.)

Name of the day

In the "unlikely name" department: a Biblical archaeologist named P.L.O. Guy. (There wasn't actually an Israel, much less a PLO, in his time; but it's still an odd name to come across.)

Say it isn't so!

Britney Spears has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I'll just be over here banging my head against the wall.

You know you're in South Philly when...

I don't think you can get any more South Philly [adj.] than the line at the pharmacy in the all-night CVS on Passyunk. ("Pass-ee-unk" to anyone else, "Pashunk" down here.) Last night, I overheard a conversation between two archetypally South Philly women—couldn't help but overhear, actually, since one of them was in front of me and the other was behind me. They were somewhere around 30 with 50-year-old skin, hair like a beauty school's oldest mannequin, and the voice of a washed-up blues singer in rehab. And I heard one line that was so classically South Philly I spent the rest of my time in line memorizing it:



"Remember when Billy Potts stole my big Santa and gave it to Weenie to put it on his lawn in Jersey?"



It was one of those sentences I couldn't wait to get to the end of, and couldn't imagine the end of; with every word I thought "Where could she possibly be going with this?" Maybe it's not the funniest or weirdest thing I've heard; but it's just...South Philly. It doesn't get any more-so than this.

Etymology of the day

I finally got around to looking up something I've occasionally wondered. It turns out that oranges are not called oranges because they are orange; the color orange is called orange because it's the color of an orange.



The word for the fruit and the color first appear in English in the 14th century; "orange" as a color first appeared in 1542, according to the dictionaries I have on hand. The name for oranges, the fruit, is "narangah" in Sanskrit; it became "narang" in Persian and "naranj" in Arabic, and then followed the Arabs into Moorish Spain. In Anglo-French it was corrupted into "orrange" and finally made it into English as "orange." (Some people say the corruption was in English—"a naranj" becoming "an orange"—but not all sources have that.)



It took me a while to figure out where the name of the House of Orange, the royal family of the Netherlands, and of the William of "William and Mary," came from. It looks like it's from the French town of Orange, so called because it was the center of the orange trade. Hendrik III of the Netherlands, of the House of Nassau-Dillenburg, married Claudia of Chalon and Orange; thereafter the family was known as the House of Orange-Nassau-Dillenburg. (That's according to this page on the history of the House of Orange.)



For a whole heap of the etymology of words for colors, check out The Colour of Words.



One question I still have: how did people refer to the color orange before they had the word orange? Did they describe it in terms of other orange things—fire, amber—or as a combination of other colors, "reddish-yellow" or "yellow-red"? Or did they just not call it anything at all?



Middle Egyptian (the hieroglyphic kind) only has four words for colors, that I remember: green, which covers green and blue; red, which covers red and yellow; and black and white. The Mediterranean Sea was called "Wadj Wer," the Great Green. I don't remember what they called the sky, or lapis lazuli, or anything like that. (It's been a while since I studied Egyptian.)



Gosh, I used up my entire lunch break. I'd best get back to work. Perhaps I'll have an orange later in the afternoon...

On the news

Herewith, the top stories on my local TV news yesterday: an update on the couple who [allegedly] starved four of their adopted children; an update on a baby found abandoned on a doorstep; a woman on trial for [allegedly] binding her (former) foster children with duct tape (although her [former] husband was the one who wrapped them up like mummies and took pictures); and a baby who was mauled by the family Rottweiler. And that's all just on one half-hour newscast.



And on the national news? The partial-birth abortion ban.



Now, I am not saying that abortion would have been preferable to bringing the children in the above-mentioned stories into the world; but that, if the Bush administration is so all-fired concerned about the welfare of children, maybe they should be paying more attention to what happens in the world those children were brought into. Okay?



A quote from Bush's speech when he signed the ban: "The real issue is not when life begins, but when love begins." Excuse me, Mr. President, but all too often life begins and love doesn't. Is there anything you can sign to change that?

Talking to the TV

On the news last night, excerpts from President Bush's speech on "Freedom in Iraq and Middle East":

President Bush: In many Middle Eastern countries...women lack rights.



Me: Yeah, not like here.

(There was a sarcastic snort of laughter in there, too.)

Yo, don't mess with Philly!

This is why I love South Philly: when schoolgirls spotted a flasher who'd been exposing himself on the playground, they chased him down, beat him up, and held him till police arrived. You go, girls.

Peoplewatching

Yesterday, on the bus: a woman carrying an unsettlingly realistic mannequin head. I don't think it was a Halloween thing; maybe she was a beauty school student and she was taking it home to practice. But it was a very odd thing to see at the end of a long day.



In the drugstore: a guy standing in the feminine hygiene aisle, looking utterly perplexed. He finally took out his cell phone to call his wife/girlfriend, to no avail; no one answered the phone. I thought of offering to help, but figured that I'd just make him more embarrassed. ("So, is she a heavy bleeder?")



Also in the drugstore: a nun was ahead of me in the line at the pharmacy. I've hardly ever seen nuns out in public. I guess they have to get their medications somewhere, though.

"Well, duh" Department

Perhaps the most appropriate use ever of the Fark.com tag: Kentucky motorcycle deaths increase 58% after repeal of helmet law.



Two words: Organ donors.



::sigh::

Transfer of power

Gov. Gray Davis said [the San Diego et al. wildfires] may be the costliest disaster California has ever faced. He estimated the cost at $2 billion.



"This is a total disaster," he said.

Following which he said, "Here you go, Arnold, it's all yours! Hey, is there some water the firefighters aren't using that I can wash my hands of the whole situation with?"

Is there anything they don't sell?

This is...odd: Amazon.com has launched a gourmet food store. So now you can get your cookbooks, your dishes, and your dinner all in one cyberplace. I don't know, I don't quite trust mail-order meat...

Our fear(less|some|ful) leader

Trying to describe Bush's usual facial expression:

Me: He has the confused and earnest expression of a dog that's been given a command it doesn't understand.



J.: "Farch!"

Back in action

Finally my server is letting me post again...it was apparently under the impression that, because my domain name expired last year on 10/24, it also expired this year on 10/24, even though I renewed for two years on 9/24. And they say computers are good with numbers.



Anyway. All seems to be well in file-transfer-protocol and universal/uniform-resource-locator land, although all is not necessarily well in real-life-land. My brother's new house turns out to have had an addition that not only had termites, but was also not actually attached either to the ground or the roof, so he had to get the whole back of the house taken off. Now there's some plywood and plastic sheeting over the door to where the kitchen used to be, and the tiny South Philly back"yard" is full of concrete and timber and building materials. Oy. At least the temperature isn't regularly below freezing yet; the contractor says they'll be done by Thanksgiving. Probably. (You'd think the home inspector would either have caught it or would have to pay some money for not catching it, but apparently not; the only way to detect it would have been to put a hole in the wall, and home inspectors are generally not allowed to do that.)



So my parents and J. and I were over there again today, scraping paint and wallpaper and spackling the living room and hallway. Wall-scraping is actually kind of fun; it's the same guilty pleasure as peeling a sunburn or picking a scab, except no one looks at you funny for doing it. The primate grooming instinct, writ large and extended to interior design...



(I think I have an especially strong primate grooming instinct. I'm almost categorically incapable of leaving a pimple unsqueezed or an ingrown hair unplucked, although at least now I don't go after them on other people...)



(I occasionally think I should have been a dermatologist; then I think of exactly how bad some dermatologic conditions can get, and I'm glad I didn't.)

Good.

X10—they of the ubiquitous, God-awful pop-up voyeuristic camera ads—has gone bankrupt. Possibly because no one, ever, in the history of the universe, ever bought one of their products.



(I posted a rumination on the evils of X10 back in June.)

Keeping up, or not

Lots to catch up on. (Yeah, I keep saying that.) It's one of those "working at work" periods when I'm trying very hard to avoid Internet use except during my scheduled breaks, and I usually spend those e-mailing J. and catching up on my news and blog reads, and when I've finished all that I don't have any more time to post about the things I just read. (Don't you hate it when work interferes with your workday?)



But anyway. Saturday was my tenth high-school reunion, and Sunday was our first wedding anniversary, both of which could provide ample posting fodder if I ever had time. J. and I spent our actual anniversary at my brother's house, putting up wallboard and taking down wallpaper; we're doing the Anniversary Dinner thing tomorrow at Deux Cheminees. It's one of the city's top restaurants, less famous and hence less crowded than Le Bec Fin. We had dinner there twice when I was doing restaurant reviews; this time we've got to pay for it ourselves, but it's oh-so-very worth it.



It's been a year since our wedding, and, of course, a year since our honeymoon, which we spent in Washington, D.C., during the sniper attacks. We heard that they caught the guys on the radio in the cab on the way to the train station for our trip home. It was a bit nerve-wracking, especially when we were out on the street for long periods of time, but we eventually managed to ignore it as much as possible. There wasn't anything we could do about it; it wasn't even possible to avoid white vans (which is what everyone was looking for at the time). One day, J. tried to count all the white vans we saw; he gave up after seeing six in one block.



On the bright side, everything was reeeaally uncrowded. No school trips at the Smithsonian or the zoo, no one in the sidewalk cafes... There wasn't even a line to see the giant pandas, though the zoo was obviously prepared for one: there was a Disney-ride–like maze of buildings and walkways, with a point of interest every twenty feet or so, that would probably stretch a quarter-mile if you straightened it out.



(Okay, I've wasted most of the time I wanted to spend writing this on a fruitless Web search for the psychology of Disney ride line design. So I'm just going to post this and try to do more later.)

Possibly on TV

In the works: The J. Lo TV show. Excuse me, I just yawned so wide my jaw hurts.

The purple frog

I never saw a purple cow,

I never hope to see one;

But I can tell you, anyhow,

This frog is really damn purple.

Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis was recently discovered in a remote, mountainous area of India, where it lives underground for all but two months of the year. No wonder no one's seen it before.



A quote from the article:

"New species are found all the time—about 70 are found each year—but almost always they are related to other known species," [evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges] said. "This one is not; it is not closely related to anything and distantly related to a family in the Seychelles. That makes it very remarkable."

Yikes. 70 species a year? I think most of them are insects; still, that's an awful lot of previously-undiscovered species. I wonder if it's keeping up with the number of species going extinct every year. And I wonder how many undiscovered species go extinct every year, things we've never seen and will never see...



(Hey, I just brought myself back around to the purple cow poem. Not bad for a workday morning.)

She said/she said

I am not, I repeat, not not not, going to get into a detailed discussion of the Kobe Bryant rape case, specifically the defense lawyer's, how shall I put this, sleazeball tactics:

[Eagle County sheriff's Detective Doug] Winters detailed how [the {alleged} victim's] blood was found on the panties she wore as well as on the inside front of Bryant's shirt, and that a sexual-assault nurse examiner found her injuries "inconsistent" with consensual sex...

whereupon

...[defense attorney Pamela Mackey] suggested that her injuries could be "consistent with someone who had had sex with three different men in three days."

All I'm going to say is that, if I'd had sex with three men in three days and suffered bleeding genital injuries, I would not be very eager to have more sex. Okay?

Holiday spirit

So last night J. and I were watching the news, and, as usual, making snarky comments to the TV:

Newscaster: President Bush celebrated Columbus Day by meeting with Italian Americans.

Me: Oh, there's a big surprise.

J.: Well, what did you expect him to do, go to an Indian casino?

Me: Hey, that's actually a really good idea.

Yes, what better way to commemorate Rape of the Americas Day than by pouring money into the most successful Indian economic venture since the early days of the fur trade? It's too late for this year, but next Columbus Day, I say we all take a bus trip to the nearest Indian casino and put our money where the government's mouth isn't.



(Someone could probably think of a clever line involving roulette and putting one's money on red, but I'm not going to.)

Na zdorovye!

Hey, it's the 500th anniversary of vodka. It was originally used as an antiseptic. Then they figured out you could drink it, and the rest is history. (Much of it lost to blackouts.)



Damn, do I love vodka. (I'm half-Slavic. I can't help it.) Straight up, please, and preferably distilled from potatoes. I think I'll go home and have some Luksusowa tonight...

Mental health

Apparently yesterday was Bipolar Awareness Day. Hm. I wasn't aware of that. And I'm bipolar. Are we supposed to find this stuff out via brainwaves or something?



I got that from this article about how most Americans don't understand bipolar disorder:

A new survey found 78 percent of Americans polled failed to name bipolar disorder as a mental illness and 38 percent couldn't name a single symptom associated with the disease.

In all fairness, I bet they'd have responded differently if the surveyors had called it "manic depression." But we don't call it that anymore, it sounds too crazy...

Editing geekery

Okay, this is how much of a regular-expression geek I am: I have previously had dreams in which I did regular expression searches, but last night I had one that was so accurate I was able to use it, to good effect, at work this morning. (Warning: This next bit probably doesn't make much/any sense if you don't use regular expressions. But I'm pleased with myself, so I'm writing it anyway.)



<geek>



I'd been searching the files I'm editing for HTML character entities—&eacute; instead of é, for instance. So I searched for this:

&[^&;]+;

Except that kept bringing up every line that had an ampersand and a semicolon, including the lines with bizarre hidden Word coding.



(This, for instance: T]âÞ?CæÍ@¨Ž¡T0æ?}GÕÕÚ¡øEtó;ðoKôv(úÄÔÜÜÃÞ>DÇP/·æi¼l?DsÅ&ÑÍÚyÂ+Ç;D¦}ú‚ What the hell is that?)



And I wound up with the dismaying message "Found 109 occurrence(s) in 32 file(s)"—a pain in the neck to individually examine. Feh.



But in my dream, it occurred to me to limit the size of the string: &[^&;]{2,8}; I.e., to only catch strings with two to eight characters between the & and the ;. And I managed to remember it, and I tried it when I got to work this morning. And not only did it work, I was actually correct about the number of characters in a legitimate HTML entity. (In general, the longest ones have six characters, but in the Greek language set there's one with eight characters: &thetasym; I don't know if that will show up if I try to put it in here, though. ϑ—does that work on anyone's browser?)



Anyway, I ran that search, and got this: "Found 5 occurrence(s) in 5 file(s)". Hey, I like those numbers a lot better...



</geek>



And now, back to my regularly scheduled editing...

Shiny rocks

Half-assed Guarantee of the Day:



For an eBay gem auction:

*Item looked at and verified by certified gemologist*

(Asterisks and all.)



Um, "looked at"? From where, across the room? And "verified" as what? ("Yup, that's a physical object of some kind.")



Oh, and by the way, eBay gem dealers: There is no such fucking thing as African moldavite! It's called "moldavite" because it's from a meteor that landed in the Moldau region of the Czech Republic. I don't know, maybe there are meteor-based gems in other parts of the world, but they're not frickin' moldavite, okay?*



(I really, really like gems and minerals—or, more inclusively, shiny rocks—but I haven't bought any in a long time, since it's not exactly a cheap hobby. I'm getting an itch for moldavite, though, and maybe a demantoid garnet. And maybe a chrysoberyl cat's eye. And maybe...oh, crap, here I go again...)



(Here, for reference, is some moldavite. And here are some demantoid garnets. I assume everyone knows what chrysoberyl cat's eyes look like, but they're pretty, so here are some of them, too.)



*Update: On 12/23/03, I wrote another entry on the African moldavite question.

Things I've said

To J., last night, when he asked how my work day had gone: "I'm going to make Microsoft Word my bitch."

Overheard

"Excuse me, I have to go find a ten-foot pole to not touch that with."

Evil Microsoft Word

Update: Since combinations of "VBAWRD8.HLP," "VBAWD10.CHM," and "download" are by far the most popular search strings for my Web site that don't involve Li'l Kim, and because Microsoft sucks and I like to help people, I'm going to belatedly provide a link for the elusive VBAWD10.CHM file. It turns out you can actually download it from a non-Korean, non-bootleg-looking Web site—I was able to get it today (9/15/2004) from the IST department at Marshall University, who I hope aren't going to come after me with lawyers and hockey sticks for linking to them.



On their IST: Download page, under "Documentation," you can download the .CHM files for Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. If you got here with a "VBAWRD8" or "VBAWD10" search, their link for "MS Word Object Model" is the one you're after.



Now, back to our regularly scheduled entry...

I hate Microsoft Word. I hate it more than most government officials, more than the public transit authority, more than menstrual cramps. If it were a person, I'd hire someone to beat it up or set its car on fire or have an affair with its spouse. I. Hate. It.



Since our clients insist upon using this evil thing, however, I have to deal with it. And I am, slowly but surely, bending it to my will. Today, for instance, I achieved something that I have hitherto only dreamed of: turning those God-awful automatic numbered lists into actual paragraphs with actual text numbers in front of them.



How? Well, I looked in all the menus. I looked at the included "Help" file. I dug up a Word 97 manual and read everything about lists and numbers. I looked at the "Help" file some more. I did a Web search. I checked the O'Reilly Hacks page. I checked the Microsoft Help page. I checked the Microsoft Help discussion lists. I was directed to use the VisualBasic Editor. I opened it and found out I didn't have the elusive VBAWRD8.HLP file. I looked for it on my hard drive. I looked for it on the office server. I tried to find our original installation CDs. (Of course we don't have them anymore.) I did another Web search. I found a Korean Web page with a link to a download that was, well, sort of like it. (VBAWD10.CHM.) I downloaded it. I read it. I ignored the constant "Internet Explorer Script Error" pop-ups I got on every page. I put together a macro. I ran it. It didn't work. I tried again. And again. And again. And finally—finally—after only three hours of not getting any frippin' work done—I had a macro that would do what the frippin' program should be able to do anyway.



And here it is, in all its deceptive simplicity:

Sub convertnumber()



ActiveDocument.ConvertNumbersToText (wdNumberParagraph)



End Sub

Yeah, it doesn't look like much. And no, it doesn't solve everything. And the programmers among you are probably entirely unimpressed. But I'm not a programmer. And I shouldn't have to be.



And now, back to the editing I was supposed to be doing in the first place...

Unsent

Dear SoBe,



Why, pray tell, does the lid from my bottle of green tea bear the slogan "Remember the Alamo"? Since "SoBe" is an abbreviation for "South Beach," which is not in Texas, and your corporate address is in Norwalk, Conn., which is also not in Texas, I'm not sure why you feel the need to promote Alamo remembrance. I, personally, have absolutely no interest in whether the Alamo is remembered or not, being a) not from Texas and b) living in this century, thank you. (I mean, seriously; is anyone in the U.S. really afraid of the might of the Mexican army?)



I'm starting to worry about what I'm going to find under my next bottlecap. "The South will rise again"? "Fifty-four forty or fight"? There's enough antiquated, ack-basswards political thinking in this country without soft-drink companies throwing out last century's sound bites. Okay?



Sincerely,



Zhaba



P.S. Your Web site looks like it was designed by three spastic, colorblind first-graders with attention deficit disorder. I know you're trying to sell energy drinks, but jeez, do you have to make your Web site hyperactive too?

Nachnamen-R-Us

I've gotten two searches in the past few days for the literal meaning of Schwarzenegger, so, being the public-spirited person that I am, I'll do my best to provide it.



Via the German Surname Lexikon:

Schwar(t)z black



Egger/Eggers harrow, plow man

So it's something like "black plowman." No, I do not know what "black" has to do with anything in this context. Maybe just that the first person with this name was a plowman with black hair or a really deep tan. (Come to think of it, you would get a really deep tan if you were out plowing in the sun all day.)

Weekend, schmeekend

What with one thing and another, I didn't get any time to post over the weekend, leaving me with an even greater backlog of Things I Want To Write About. Much of the weekend was spent helping my brother work on his new house; it's a South Philly rowhouse like mine, although with a much nicer basement. We scrubbed down walls, steam-cleaned the carpets that were decent, tore up the carpets that weren't, and removed three layers of tile from the kitchen floor. He's helped me move many, many times, so I don't begrudge the time or effort J. and I spent on his house; but it did use up most of my time and energy.



Speaking of my brother, on Saturday morning he made his first TV appearance as Cop In Background. The local NBC station had a report on a murder that occurred in his district, and you could see him for about a second on the porch in front of the house. (My parents recognized him right away and called me at 8 a.m. to tell me to turn the TV on.) We all hope, of course, that he never winds up being the focus of a news story; but it was cool to get a glimpse of him in full Officer Mode.



(I tried to find a link to the story, but I can't find it at the NBC 10 Web site or on Philly.com. I guess murders in Southwest Philly aren't considered newsworthy after two days.)

Word association

So much to say, so little time...maybe I'll get around to all the stuff I've been thinking about and wanting to write about this weekend. In the meantime, a quick word-association meme:

1. Herpes:: Simplex
2. Freddy:: Kruger
3. October:: Revolution
4. Hunting:: Of the snark
5. MSN:: BC
6. 36:: D
7. Hotel:: California
8. Travesty:: Of justice
9. Health:: Insurance
10. Conditions:: Terms

(Swiped from SwimFinsSF, who found it at Subconscious Mutterings.)

Note to self

Post about this later: Women with breast implants have increased risk of suicide. (Actually, is it a risk if it's something you do yourself? "Risk of becoming suicidal," maybe.)

The local fauna

At the corner of 2nd and Tasker: a guy on a motorcycle with a rottweiler behind him in the jump seat. (Neither of them was wearing a helmet.)



Right outside my office: a cat eating grass at the base of one of the sidewalk trees.

Forest for the Trees Department

From a Space.com article about the current favorable planet-viewing conditions:

Here is a trivia question: How many planets are visible without a telescope? Most people will answer "five" (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). But if you answered "six," congratulations, you can go to the head of the class!



That sixth world that can be spied without optical aid is the planet Uranus.

[Clears throat.] Um, seven. Look down, buddy.

Fontography

Ever seen German text in Comic Sans MS? It's a bit of a mind-fuck, especially on this page about Kant. I'm not saying it's all gotta be that unreadable Fraktur font, but Comic Sans just doesn't seem to fit...

Thought of the day

There are people who enjoy pain, but I bet nobody enjoys itching.



(grumble grumble frickin' mosquitos...)

Test testiness

Okay, I know Web sites need to make money, especially the ones with popular free features. But sneaking the commercial stuff into the popular free features? That's like sneaking shredded prunes into a kid's hamburger and hoping he doesn't notice.



To wit: Emode.com's "What's Your Cat's Type?" test. Looks like a regular Emode test, a fun way to kill time...although question 4, "I buy different types of food to give my cat lots of variety," seems uncharacteristically dull...and on the next page, question 7, is definitely getting at something: "I purchase brands that provide nutrition to build my cat's system to protect it from illness and injury." And question 12 gets right to it: "It's important to feed my cat the best food I can even if it's more expensive." Ahem. This ain't much of a cat personality test, is it? It's more of a cat-owning consumer personality test.



As you might suspect, when you click the button to finish, you get this:

While Emode calculates Your Cat's Type, take this opportunity to enroll with Friskies and receive special offers designed specifically for your cat.

With a whole heap of questions about how many cats/dogs you have, what you feed them, how often you buy food...yeah, okay, I get it, you're the masterminds behind this test. And the most annoying thing is, it's not even a particularly fun or interesting test. There's four, count 'em, four cat "types," which are so generic as to apply to pretty much nothing. I'm not expecting deep, insightful answers from Emode; still, I expect at least the entertainment level and variety of, say, "What Breed of Dog Are You?"



Look, I know they've got to make money. And I don't mind them have sponsors. But I don't like having the sponsors worked right into the test. Or having a test that's just a thinly-veiled advertising and data-collecting tool.



Okay, I'm probably creating a tempest in a Lenox Swedish Lodge^TM Teapot, available at Bed Bath & Beyond for only $89.99 plus $9.95 for standard shipping. And if I'm doing something as silly as taking online tests I guess I can't take too high of a moral high ground. Still: It's annoying. And sneaky. Go hire a focus group or something, willya? And you'd better not be putting any shredded prunes in that cat food, you hear?

Hey, they're good for something!

At last, our elected officials have done something useful: House Votes to Reinstate "Do Not Call" List. When was the last time the government acted this fast to do, well, anything that we little people wanted?

"Hi-yo Silver, awaaaayyyyyyyy...." [splat]

Snapple fact of the day:

In 1985, the fastest bicyclist was clocked at 154 mph.

Yikes. What was he doing, being dropped out of a plane?



Update: First of all, it was 152.2 mph. Second, he was on the Bonneville Salt Flat, cycling behind a pace car designed to keep all the wind off him so there'd be almost no aerodynamic drag. (Which you can read about, and see pictures of, at 152 MPH Pedal Bicycle.)



Y'know, I think that's more impressive as a feat of engineering than one of actual bicycling speed...



Incidentally, the fastest bicyclist without a pace car got up to 63 mph, according to this Physics of Sports page. Now that I'm actually impressed by.

J. Ho-hum, or, "Is that a pistol in your pocket?"

Raise your hand if you give three shakes of a flying rat's ass about J. Lo and Ben.



Yeah, me neither.



I do, however, like this paragraph from the latest "Oh My God It's More Stuff About Those People!" story, in which the ersatz übercouple set off marriage rumors by going to a courthouse in Georgia:

"They were also asking where Mr. Affleck could get a pistol toter's permit," [court clerk Barry] Wilkes said, adding the couple were directed to the probate judge's office. Since that is the same office that issues marriage licenses, rumors of nuptials flared.

Um...what's he want a gun permit for? I don't know about you, but it seems to me to be more of an indication that the relationship is going to be very, very over soon...

It speaks!

So Bush just addressed the U.N.—so recently I can't even find a transcript—but my New York Times news alert includes this sentence:

He also proposed making the spread of weapons of mass destruction a crime under international law.

[Raises hand] Mr. President, does that include our weapons of mass destruction? Or just the ones belonging to people we don't like at the moment?

Assassins

Hm. Apparently I'm sexist.



A while ago the Swedish foreign minister was stabbed, and now an Iraqi council member has been shot.



Disturbing thing #1: I automatically assumed they were both men. Disturbing thing #2: Not because they were in positions of political power, but because they were, or were almost, assassinated. Disturbing thing #3: And I'm much more disturbed at the idea of women being assassinated than men. It just hits me at a much more visceral level. Is the "protect the women and children" idea so deeply ingrained in my conscience, our conscience, our culture, most cultures? Heck, even hunters shoot stags rather than does. (It's also disturbing that I'm not surprised to hear about women being murdered by their boyfriends/husbands/abductors/assaulters; that "domestic" killings of women are, while still appalling, not contrary to expectation.)



I dunno. It just ain't right, okay?



Disclaimer: Don't you go assassinating anybody now, you hear? And by the way, CIA, how's Castro?

In the movies

The New York Times review of the new Woody Allen movie (that would be "Anything Else") has come right out and said what I imagine we've all been thinking:

It helps that Mr. Allen, whom I am alarmed to find looking more like my late grandfather every time I see him, has declined to cast himself as the romantic lead.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I realize that Allen's wife is young enough to be his...oh, wait, she is his daughter. (Adopted, I know. It's still creepy.) But just because he still gets the babes in his personal life doesn't mean anyone wants to see him getting the babes on screen. Especially since he doesn't have the dubious qualification of being a particularly attractive aging actor. (I can see how babes would dig, say, Harrison Ford. But Woody Allen? Yeesh.)



I also like the line at the end of the review, where they sum up the reasons for the R rating:

It has many sexual references and a few sex scenes—none of them, thank goodness, featuring the director.

Again I say, a big ol' "yes" to that...

Quote of the day

In Latin, even. I found this while browsing the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, as I am wont to do:

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. (When they create a desolation, they call it peace.)

—Calcagus, leader of the Caledonians,
before a battle with the Romans in A.D. 84.

(I don't suppose he was actually speaking Latin; but that's how Tacitus recorded it.)



Just kinda stuck in my mind, with all those bomb-'em-and-leave-'em wars we've been having...



(The Caledonians lost, by the way.)

Here we go again?

Well, darn. I hope this isn't the start of another celebrity death week, like we had back in June. Johnny Cash has died at 71, and John Ritter at 54. Now, Johnny Cash was not looking any too healthy, and 71 is a respectable age at which to die; but yikes, 54? Without any previous outward signs of ill-health?



It turns out that Ritter died of an aortic dissection, a nearly-always-fatal heart condition that my aunt suffered from, but survived, earlier this year. If anyone wants to read about it, here are the links:



Wednesday, May 21: "Not good." My first post after it happened, when she was still unconscious and her chances of survival seemed slim.



Friday, May 23: "Less not-good." She was beginning to recover; I also posted about how small my family is, and how much anyone's major illness affects us.



Tuesday, May 27: "Good!" She was up and about and going home; the doctors were calling her the "miracle patient." Amen to that...

As for today...

• Looks like the newscasters have gotten around the "can't wear patriotic stuff because it's not journalistically neutral" by wearing black today.
  
  
  
  (I don't know what they're wearing on the Fox "News" Channel, though. And no, I'm not going to go check.)





• Just about everyone else I saw was wearing some degree or combination of red, white, or blue; of course, I'm in South Philly, where patriotism is right up there with Catholicism. I tried to count the patriotic insignia on the houses on one block and lost track halfway down. The ne plus ultra (on that block, at least) was definitely the house with the picture of Jesus casting rays of red, white, and blue light.





• Fortunately for the entertainment industry, a quirk of the calendar means that September 11th will move from Thursday this year to Saturday next year; it won't fall on a Friday until 2009. So it'll be a while before anyone has to promote a movie by saying "Get ready for a fun-filled, laugh-a-minute ride when [whatever] opens on September 11th!" (I'm not sure that would dissuade the entertainment industry in any case...)

9/11, on paper

I don't have any "on this day in 2001" blog or journal entries to link to; I was in paper-journal-only–mode then. I've been feeling like I should type up some of my paper-journal entries, and I guess 9/11 is as good a place as any to start. Herewith, exactly what I wrote...

---

9/11/01



I don't think I've ever seen a sky without planes.

---

Popol i Diamant aside, lighting vodka doesn't seem to work.

---

Oddly enough, my spoken-aloud salute/toast/whatever was almost entirely not in English. Egyptian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Hebrew, yes; in English, only "Peace" and "Amen." Which sums it up, I guess.



Oh, and Latin.



Requiem aeternam dona eis domine.

---

You know you're in trouble when they evacuate the Speaker of the House...

---

On the bright side, as J. pointed out, we're a hell of a lot more secure right now than anyone in Afghanistan.

---

I seem to be somewhat of a wimp. Just as the reaction I imagine myself having on the Titanic is inhaling a lot of water right away, the reaction I imagine having to a current disaster is swallowing every pill I have on me and hoping it knocks me out.



Well, not much I can do about being an inherent wimp, I guess. And drug-induced unconsciousness strikes me as being a better way out than jumping from a 100th-floor window.

---

It takes a surprisingly long time for a very tall building to collapse. And all you really see is the dust cloud going lower, as if it were climbing down the tower.



This is why it's a good thing we don't have earthquakes and tornadoes along the Eastern Seaboard. Our cities aren't built for disasters.

---

9/13/01



This is all very good for Gary Condit...

---

I suspect I'm going to get very sick of the phrase "war on terrorism." Can you even have a war that's not against a state? And you can have a war against Osama bin Laden and not even touch the Basques or the IRA or the Michigan Militia.

---

I think the most disturbing thing I've heard since Tuesday is a 14-year-old Muslim girl saying "I thought they were going to beat me with my own flag."



Must remind people that you can no more blame all Muslims/Arabs for this than you can blame all white people for Oklahoma City...



You know, it's almost kinda too bad that McVeigh isn't around to see himself get totally eclipsed. After he died congratulating himself for the deadliest terror attack on US soil. Well, maybe they have TV in hell. (In fact, I'm pretty sure they have TV in hell.)

---

9/14/01

Dad: Well, your brother's got the career of the future.



Me: So he still wants to be a New York City cop?



Dad: Openings, I guess.



Me: Aaahhhh...horrible but true.

---

9/15/01



You can tell it's getting back to normal when there are commercials on TV again.

---

9/19/01



"Operation Infinite Justice"? Who names these things?



(J.'s suggestion: Operation Smoke a Camel.) (And also: Operation Hot Date.) (And: Sand Blast and Rock the Casbah.) (Me: Operation Whack-a-Mullah, but don't tell anyone I said that.)

---

9/20/01



J.'s reaction to Bush's speech: "So to sum up, we're the world's policeman and God is on our side."



My reaction: getting "Deutschland über Alles" stuck in my head. Doubtless not the patriotic response I was supposed to have.

---

That's about all I wrote back then...for one thing, I lost the journal under a table for a while, and on 9/25/01, J. and I got engaged, which provided other things to write about.



One of these days I'll type up my Iraq War journal entries. (I actually started blogging with the intention of writing a war blog; but by the time I got started, the war, apparently, was over. Or at any rate it was out of the headlines and they were showing other stuff on MSNBC...)

9/11

Well, it's that time again.



Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine.

Department of "no kidding," again

Shocked, I tell you, shocked! First Richard Chamberlain made his big confession, and now Tab Hunter, his career behind him, admits he's gay. Gosh, I never would have guessed, would you?



(I didn't know he had a relationship with Anthony Perkins, though. Well, good for them.)

Quote of the day

"If Americans are so repulsed by gay sex, perhaps the solution is to just allow gays to marry and have kids. After all, everyone knows that parents of young children have no time for sex."—Gersh Kuntzman, Newsweek, Aug. 11.

"Abby-someone. Abby Normal."

Well, I could've told you this: Harvard faces shortage of "normal" brains. (In their brain bank, not in their faculty and student body; or at least, the article only addresses the brain bank.) Apparently people who donate brains (post-mortem, of course) usually send them the "diseased" ones (and I'm quoting from the article, so don't yell at me for being politically incorrect): the ones with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and the like. But they (Harvard, not the brains) also need so-called "normal" ones—both to compare and contrast, and also to see if the brains of people who, in life, didn't exhibit abnormal brain symptoms, have the potential for abnormalities, which would indicate things like the age of onset of various diseases and possible ways to screen for them.



I'm not saying it's not a problem for the researchers; I just find the headline very amusing. "Harvard faces a shortage of 'normal' brains. Of course! No normal person wants to go there..."



(Me? Yale '97, Trumbull College. And Harvard, in the immortal words of the Yale Precision Marching Band, sucks dead goats.)

Alarming art history fact of the day

The Venus de Milo was discovered in Florence in 1820 in a pile of marbles destined for a lime kiln. J.: "So basically some worker happened to look down and said 'Hey, this one looks nice, let's keep it'?" Me: "Apparently." J.: "So they could've burned her arms the week before."



Yikes. Never mind the burning of the Library of Alexandria...how much Greek and Roman marble statuary was incinerated without a thought, without malice, as just another heap of raw material for a furnace?

I grow old, I grow old...*

Today a teenage girl called me "ma'am." Oh, man, do I feel old.



*I do have the bottoms of my trousers rolled, but that's only because my pants are too long.

Weighty matters

J. and I have both lost quite a bit of weight in the past few months—he through exercise and a diet of non-processed foods (which leaves out just about everything with fat and salt), and I mainly through being uninterested in eating. But we've recently both reached the dreaded Diet Plateau, and this morning, he said, "I've figured it out":

I've figured out why it's so hard to lose weight after a certain point. This is your body's life savings. You've scrounged up all the change that was in the couch, you've gone through all the old pants to find the dollar bills that went through the wash, you've taken all the jars of pennies to the bank, and now you're looking at the 401K. And your body's saying, "You want me to give it up? Yeah, buddy. Make me."

In case anyone was wondering

Still here.



"Life. Don't talk to me about life."—Marvin the Paranoid Android, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Zhaba story

A message from a Russian reader about "zhaba" being "toad" in Russian reminded me that I'd a) taken out the blurb in my sidebar about the literal meaning of "zhaba," and b) never posted the longer "what it means to me" story. So here goes.



First, the literal meaning: "zhaba" is "frog" or "toad" in various Eastern European languages; when I encounted it in Ukrainian, the translation in my dictionary was "frog."



Second, my meaning: For my senior project in college, I translated a film scenario by a Ukrainian director. (Ukrainian is the non-English language I know best, although I haven't used it for a while.) There was a line in which one of the characters was having an attack of angina, and it used the word "zhaba." I came up with what I thought was a pretty nice translation, although I don't specifically remember what it was, about how he felt "like he was choking on a frog." Then I took it to my advisor, and she told me that "zhaba" can also just mean "an attack of angina." Humph. So much for my metaphor. Okay, I thought, but I'm going to get frogs into this translation somehow!



Months went by; days before the project was due, as I was racing through the translation of the climactic battle scene, I came across the line "The bombs going off sounded like huge frogs croaking in a marsh." In the margin of my notebook I wrote "FROGS!" in great big letters, and underlined it a few times; I was ridiculously happy about it. I finished the project in three solid days of no sleep—typed up the translation, wrote the introduction, added the footnotes, annotated the bibliography—and just before I took it to the printer, exhausted and bordering on hallucinatory, I added the title page, concluding it with the Cyrillic character for "zh" and the words "Copyright 1997 Zhaba Productions."



When I woke up the next day, I was able to think more clearly about why I'd had that urge to put "zhaba" on the title page. It had come to symbolize all the things that go on in the background of creating a work of art—the notes for a novel, the sketches for a painting, the preproduction of a film, the rehearsals and the near-chaotic backstage activities of a play—that the audience or viewer or reader never notices, maybe never even knows about, but that are important, meaningful, even vital to the artist.



I don't know if I'm much of an artist; I'm not making any claims for how good my work is; but good or not, it's always been there. All my life I've written stories and novels, performed and composed and conducted music, acted and written and directed theater, even made a few forays into filmmaking and graphic design. And the things that linger aren't the performances or the finished works, but everything that went into them: the research, the "I can't do this" panics, the "good God this will work!" triumphs, clashing with some personalities and unexpectedly finding friendships with others. They've become a part of me; they've shaped me. And I've been fortunate enough to find a symbol, or at least a signifier, to enfold it and hold it in my mind: Zhaba.



Or if you prefer Cyrillic:

Mink gone wild

More about the 10,000 ranch mink that were released by animal-rights whackjobs: those that haven't died of starvation or dehydration, been hit by cars, or been rounded up and returned to the fur farm are doing quite well, thank you, on a diet of domestic poultry and house pets. One farmer estimates his losses at $2,000, which, for those of us in the real world, is a lot of money. And I suspect the native wildfowl and other small animals will be suffering a rapid population decline, too. And the native mink will be crowded out or bred out. Yep, those activists did a lot of good for animals.



American mink released in Britain in the 1980s competed fiercely with the smaller native mink, and almost wiped out many species of ground-nesting birds. Nothing like inducing a vicious, predatory non-native species to an isolated habitat for some good clean extinction-inducing fun!



Yeah, I'm pissed off. Regardless of one's opinion about animals raised for fur, meat, or lab experiments, releasing them into the wild isn't doing anybody any favors. Most of them won't be able to survive; and those that do can wreak havoc on the local environment. Even if they're small and fluffy, like mice and rabbits, they can spread diseases (especially if they've been used in medical research) and compete with their wild counterparts; and if they're vicious and predatory, like mink, it's a death sentence for anything smaller or less aggressive. Yes, raising mink by the thousands in cages isn't natural. But neither is releasing mink by the thousands into an unprepared ecosystem. Okay?



Disclaimer: When I say "animal-rights whackjobs," I'm not referring to everyone who supports animal rights; just those who do fucked-up things like release vicious predatory species and firebomb research labs.

Who needs genetic engineering?

These are supposed to be rabbits. Dear God, what's happened to them? Have they been cross-bred with dust mops? Tribbles, perhaps? Can they see? Can they hop? And how on earth do you keep them clean? Vaccuuming? Dry-cleaning? My God. They've attained such a level of hyper-cuteness that they're not even cute anymore.

Quote of the day

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in an interview with Sean Hannity: "I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman."



Did I mention the importance of word choice...?

The importance of word choice

From yesterday's New York Times, in the article Two Former Priests Moved by a Massachusetts Prison: discussion of how inmates in protective custody should be kept away from other inmates who are likely to, say, kill them. Which makes sense, and which I'm not debating; I just want to call attention to these paragraphs:

Professor Austin, an expert on classifying inmates, said the two [pedophile Geoghan and the neo-Nazi homophobe who killed him] should not have been in the same protective custody unit. But he added that assigning inmates to avoid confrontations has become the "No. 1 topic of conversation" among prison administrators as a result of mistakes that led to serious injuries and killings...



After serious incidents, several states, have installed computer systems to ensure that inmates who are natural enemies are not assigned to the same unit, he said.

Um..."natural enemies"? I've only heard that term used to describe animals—"the cobra and the mongoose are natural enemies," "use natural enemies like assassin beetles to fight insect pests," and the like. I'm not going to get into a discussion of whether equating prison inmates with animals is appropriate in the grand scheme of things; only that it's not appropriate in a non–op-ed article in one of the nation's leading newspapers. (Since the sentence ends with "he said," it could be inferred that the term is the one used by the professor; but if so, I'd have put it in quotation marks to make it very clear that that was the case.) Personally, I'd have gone with "inmates who are likely to pose a danger to each other," or—as an op-ed piece in the Times today did—inmates with "perceived antipathies." No, that's not as dramatic; but drama and loaded language have no place in a news article.

Oh, shut up.

First it's O.J. feeling sorry for Scott Peterson, and now we have Mike Tyson expressing sympathy for Kobe Bryant. Boo-fucking-hoo, guys.



Disclaimer: Innocent until proven guilty etc. Still, as I said in the O.J. post, "you're feeling the wrong person's pain."

Two for Tuesday

Via Jewdez:



1. I totally cannot stand...



Cockroaches, car alarms, my neighbor's dogs, people who step on worms, homophobes, fast food, glue traps for rodents, people who don't vote, hot weather.



2. If I wrote an autobiography, I'd call it...



Not Quite. (As in, "Not quite [whatever] enough...")

And having writ...

Okay, yesterday was not a particularly good day. My dad got laid off; none of us are going to wind up in the street, or anything, but it's a definite shock, and will require a lot of mental adjustment and lifestyle changes. Feh.



Assorted impressions:

• When my mom got the Republican National Committee's request for their usual generous donation, she wrote back "Unable to donate this year because of husband's job loss." My dad asked, "Did you write 'It's the economy, stupid'?" (No, she isn't that direct.)





• Dad: "When your neighbor loses their job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression."





• My brother (hereinafter B. [his actual initial, not just standing for "brother"]) is a cop, as I've mentioned; he always has his gun on him, although when he leaves Philly he takes out the bullets. Anyway, Dad said, "I decided that I wasn't a suicide risk, so you could bring your gun." B., matter-of-factly: "You couldn't get it away from me."





• At his now–former company, they don't make you walk out with your possessions in a box. You can go back to your office for your wallet, keys, and briefcase, and then they box up the rest of the stuff and ship it to you. At least it's a more dignified exit.





• Back at home with J., talking about it: He kept reassuring me that things would be fine; they've saved a lot of money, they own some property they can sell, and my dad will get severance pay until the end of the year. "Nobody's bulletproof, but they're in the Popemobile."





• Also: "They don't have to worry about supporting their kids anymore. B.'s launched out on a new career, you're doing well at work, and I'm not too much of a disgrace..."

As for me, I'd better not get manic and get $10,000 into debt again, that's for sure...

Dept. of Justice And/Or the Law

So, the pedophile ex-priest has been killed in prison. I'm going to repost the comment I made over at redsugar muse: Some people say this is while child molesters shouldn't be put in the general prison population. Some people say it's exactly why they should be.



(Yadda yadda murder is bad yadda yadda illegal yadda yadda it's for God to decide yadda yadda maybe He just did.)

The cost of...reading?

Hey, the book I'm working on has a pre-order page on the publisher's Web site, and, good Lord, it's $59.95. What are they going to print it on, shatoosh? I sure wouldn't pay that much for it.



(No, I'm not posting the link. I fear that would lead to a good deal of trouble for all concerned.)

Work?

It's damn hard to work at home on a sunny and not-oppressively-hot Saturday. So here's some links.



First, it looks like Fark's not going to front-page this, so I'll just preserve my headline here: Now–ex-serviceman learns that for the Navy, appearing on "Boy Meets Boy" is in the "tell" category.



A bear who tests bear-proof camping equipment can open an ice chest bound with nylon rope in 90 seconds.



Here are some people making a counterintuitive entrance to their health club.



And here is a picture of a decontamination process that will be stuck in my head for far too long.



Never mind rats, it's the growing population of feral dogs that cities have to start watching out for.



And finally: you know you've got a flood problem when you have to watch the roads for salmon crossings.

What, he's in the news again?

This just in from the [alleged {ha!}] Wife-Murdering Scumbag Department: O.J. Simpson expresses sympathy for Scott Peterson. Yo, dude, you're feeling the wrong person's pain.

Democracy: 1. Hypocrisy: 0.

You can all put your thesauri down: a federal judge has ruled that it is legal to use the phrase "fair and balanced" to describe something other than Fox News.



The article is eminently quotable, but this one really tickles me:

Although Franken has appeared as a guest on Fox News Channel at least 10 times in the past five years, according to Fox, he is not affiliated with the network, which, in court papers, called his commentary "not good enough to be endorsed by Fox News."

I believe that's what you call "praising with faint damns"...

In the movies

From the New York Times movie review section:

Marci X and My Boss's Daughter are not reviewed because there were no screenings for critics.

No, I guess there wouldn't be...



(I'm more ill-disposed toward "My Boss's Daughter," because I have a visceral reaction to Tara Reid—I just can't stand white women whose skin is darker than their hair. I.e., blondes with very dark tans. It just looks skanky. And, not coincidentally, it reminds me of most of the girls who went to my high school...)



(Apropos Onion article this week: Local Woman Proud of Horrible Tan.)

I'm drunk. Bear that in mind.

So I'm drunk.



Every now and then, J. and I split a bottle of wine (or so) and solve all the problems of the universe, or at least talk about them till we're sick of them.



So today we got on the topic of holidays (via the book I'm copyediting), which led to religion in general, which led to the Catholic Church, in the tradition of which we were both raised. (He's been confirmed; I haven't.) And we were talking about how the Catholic Church is virulently opposed to homosexuality and birth control and masturbation, and yet has been covering up for pedophile priests for decades. And I suddenly thought, and said, "You know, I don't think the Bible actually says anywhere that you can't rape children."



(Note to all the perverts and/or FBI investigators who have found this entry via search engines: No, I'm not saying or doing anything illegal. Go away.)



Anyway...that would be interesting, wouldn't it? There's "wrong" and there's "illegal" and there's "sin," and depending on your religion or lack thereof they don't necessarily mean the same thing. You can sin to your heart's content, say a thousand Hail Marys, and you're good to go. And go. And go... And if something is illegal, but not a sin, why shouldn't the Church cover up for you? It's not like you broke God's rules, after all...



(Random bit of information: J.'s mother was actually excommunicated for marrying his father, who was a Protestant. And this was in Massachusetts in the 1950s.)



(This has significantly influenced both of our opinions on the Catholic Church.)



Sigh...I'm drunk. I'd better not say anything that'll get me flamed. And I'm damn-sure not going to run any searches on the Bible and pedophilia on the Internet; I'll check it tomorrow on my computer at work, where I've got a KJV on my hard drive. It would explain a lot, though...

No, no, no!

Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka in Tim Burton's remake? No, no, no, please God, no! What do I have to do, sacrifice chickens, self-flagellation, a thousand Hail Marys? I'll do it, just make this go away!



Update: Judging from all the other blogs, journals, and message boards on-line, I'm about the only person who doesn't think this is just the cat's knees and the bee's pajamas. Well, I like the original just fine, thank you, and it's hard to improve on Gene Wilder. I also think Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have both been getting increasingly mannered and creepy over the years, and I'm not sure how eager I am to see what happens when they get together again.

Dead man talking?

I guess you've all heard by now that we've captured Chemical Ali, which is quite a coup, since he's supposed to have been dead since April 5. (I've been looking for a contemporaneous link, but they seem to have all gone dead by now. Except the Fox News one, which I'm not going to link to.) Anyway, better late than never.



Amusement of the day: when you enter "Chemical Ali" in this Anagram Generator, you get "CIA call me hi!" (I wish could take credit for that, but I found it in this Fark.com thread.)



Update: I do, however, take credit for this improved rewrite: "Hi, CIA, call me!"

Oooooooooohhhhhhhh!

My life is complete: there is, indeed, a Web site called shoes.com. Oh boy oh boy oh boy...



(If this does not excite, nay, drive you wild with joy, you are clearly not a woman.)

Build your own hell!

Parents who bring squalling brats to R-rated movies
Circle I Limbo

The inventor of car alarms, My neighbors and their awful yappy dogs
Circle II Whirling in a Dark & Stormy Wind

Creationists
Circle III Mud, Rain, Cold, Hail & Snow

Republicans
Circle IV Rolling Weights

Qusay Hussein, Uday Hussein
Circle V Stuck in Mud, Mangled

River Styx

George Bush
Circle VI Buried for Eternity

River Phlegyas

Saddam Hussein
Circle VII Burning Sands

NAMBLA Members
Circle IIX Immersed in Excrement

Osama bin Laden
Circle IX Frozen in Ice

Design your own hell

Rodents (not mice)

J. sent me this link: rat-sized gerbils are decimating grasslands in north-western China. His accompanying e-mail:

They belong to the genus Rhombomys, and really ought to be marketed here in pet stores as the "Rambo Gerbil". They'd sell like hotcakes, only they're colonial and live in burrows. They sound a bit like prairie dogs, in a way. The story doesn't address what people might have done to cause a huge rodent population explosion. Like kill off all the local predators for the fur market, or start irrigating desert for grain production? Inquiring minds want to know. At least, this one does.

Hm, maybe the giant gerbils could be funneled into the fur market...

Unfortunate name of the day

Man, this poor guy: a British actor named Ray McAnally. (I'm going to start getting some unfortunate search results, too, I think...)

Spam

The "From" names cobbled together by spam programs are frequently amusing; this one's so good I had to preserve it before trashing the message: Litherland Struzzi.



I love it. It sounds like a Tolkien elf who married an Italian alpinist. I'll file it away for that grand fantasy epic I don't know I'll never write.



(Oddly, Mr./Ms./Sr./Sra. Struzzi's return address is "BoylGantzler@[snipped].com," which sounds neither Elvish nor Italian; kind of Irish by way of the Netherlands...)