Muttering, two weeks in a row

What the heck. Don't think my associations are very interesting, but I annotated them to give you a better idea of why my brain went where it went.



Unconscious Mutterings, Week 102

1. Yoda::'s penis (thanks, The Onion: they've got an article titled "Don't Tell Me You've Never Wondered What Yoda's Penis Looked Like," and you can get that headline on a t-shirt; and now I'll never be able to get it out of my mind, thankyouverymuch.)
2. Mensa::genius (bo-ring)
3. Pink::Rose (not just the flower; that's the name of a little bakeryrestaurant near South St. where you can have breakfast and dessert all day as well as order big ol' cakes and pastries for all your sugar-intensive party needs)
4. Text message::go away (irritable, I am)
5. Galactic::Enterprise (is that from "Star Wars" too?—I know the "Star Trek" ship is called the Enterprise, but I don't know if there's an organization called the Galactic Enterprise in that.)
6. Chicks::eggs (even I am surprised that I didn't go for an "attractive young women" reference there, but I think little fluffy bird chicks are so darn cute I can't not think about them when given the opportunity)
7. Quesadilla::yo quiero Taco Bell (no idea if I'm spelling that right)
8. Backpack::CD drive (that's what my external CD drive is called)
9. Socket::wrench (I've been hanging around J. too long to think of anything but a tool for this one)
10. Compromise::or else (you can't compromise and have an ultimatum at the same time, can you?—oh well; irritable, I am.)

Fourth time's the charm?

Last night I actually dreamed about yesterday's Eagles game; it was near the end of the fourth quarter, and the score was 28-24, and one of our players was running down the field holding the ball, and I was saying (in the dream) "Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up..." And then I woke up, and remembered that they had not-fucked-up, and had won, 27-14 (okay, so my dream-numbers were off), and were headed for their fourth NFC championship game in a row. And then I thought, in my conscious mind, "Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up..."



This is from my pen-and-paper journal, written back in June, right after Smarty Jones lost the Belmont by less than five lengths:

The Philly contestants—teams, individual humans, individual horses—always choke in the clutch. Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Come up short at the last minute. In other words, lose—not all the time, like some teams (I don't know for sure all the legendary ones, but aren't the Red Sox and the Cubs up there?)—in cities that just shrug and wait for another 3-27 season; our teams wind up with 27-3, where the third of the three is the NFC championship or the Elite 8 game in the NCAA tournament or the seventh game of the NBA finals. So, hey, the third leg of the Triple Crown? Hell, we were practically expecting it. (All down the backstretch I was just saying "Please do it, please do it"—never mind yelling "C'mon!", just "don't let us down again.")



But they always do...

Yes, okay, I'm sounding pessimistic. But this time it's more like upside-down pessimism flipped into optimism—"we've always fucked up, maybe this time we won't fuck up, maybe this time we will make it, let's just hope they're good enough." They don't have to be great, they don't have to be the best, they don't even have to be good—just good enough. (Or, as the saying goes, "You don't have to be faster than the fastest cheetah; you just have to be faster than the slowest gazelle." Or [the one I like better], as one fleeing Great White Hunter might say to another, "I don't have to be faster than the lion, I just have to be faster than you.") We don't have to be the best team in the NFL; we just have to be better than the Falcons, and we just have to be better than them for one game on one day.



So: let's all hold hands and say it together. Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up. If the Red Sox can do it, why can't we?*



*Don't answer that.

One of those weeks

Did you ever have one of those weeks where you said "Yeah, I'll have that project done on Monday" and then it was Thursday and you had absolutely no idea why you ever thought it could be done by Monday? (Even better—I'm making up a program name here—I said "Sure, we can make the deadline, unless something really crazy comes up in the Cite-O-Matic step." Today, I got to the Cite-O-Matic step, and guess what? Something really crazy came up! I mean, you think you've seen every weird way someone can do a Bible reference citation, and then, my God [um, so to speak], someone does something weirder. Oy. How hard is it to say "Genesis 1:1," people?)



It's also been one of those weeks where I get to work late-ish (9:30 instead of 9), don't start actually working till 10, then forget to have lunch until 2:30 or later. (Today I kicked myself out of the office at 3:30 to get something to eat.) This is probably one of the ways I lose weight ("dang, I forgot to eat again!"), but it's annoying to have to tell myself to eat, and, for that matter, to move every half-hour so my legs don't fall asleep. (Behold the power of Ritalin. It's legal speed, I tell ya.)



Gosh, another really boring entry. I've been copying links and quotes and writing draft posts in my ever-growing "text.txt" file, but I never get around to perfecting them and posting them. Feh. This weekend my DSL connection and I might spam my blog with a week's worth of backed-up "I read this in the Times" or "I saw this on Fark" or "J. and I talked about this last night" posts. And pictures. Oh, you guys are gonna get pictures of my bird, whether you want 'em or not. (She's molting right now, and not very photogenic, but I've got plenty of pre-molt pictures languishing on my hard drive.) Oh, and the Mummers Parade! I meant to post pictures of that on New Year's Day. If you're not from Philly or the Philadelphia TV viewing area, the Mummers Parade is...hard to explain. (If you are from Philly, it's still hard to explain, but at least you're used to it.)



Okay. Time for that nighttime-routine thing again. And if I survive the work week, I'll be back tomorrow.

Hey, DSL backwards is LSD

Ooohhhh, I got me some DSL—on my home computer, even—so the slow dial-up connection I so often complain of is gone, gone, gone—at least till my 60-day free trial of DSL is up, and I have the feeling I'm going to pony up the money on Day 61.



It's not as fast as I'd hoped, but it's sure as hell faster, and being able to download a 5MB file in 38 seconds is a vast improvement. And I really like being able to click on Firefox in my QuickLaunch menu and go straight to my homepage, instead of clicking on the AOL icon, waiting for the window to open, clicking on "Connect," waiting for it to dial, waiting for it to do that "brrring, brrrring, beep beep beep" thing, waiting for it to say it had done that and actually open AOL, and then click on Firefox and get to the real Internet.



This is probably TMI in the most boring sense...but, really, this is the most exciting enhancement to our house since we got cable in June (um, since we paid to get cable in June; for the two previous years it was, ahem, free). J. asked if he was going to need a photograph to remember what I looked like; I posit that I won't spend too much more time online, because a lot of the time I used to spend was waiting for things to download or upload and being mugged by Windows updates. (I'll let you know how accurate that "not too much" prediction turns out to be next week.)



Oh, phoo, almost 11:30; must be a good computer-user and post this and...I was about to say "log off," but I don't have to. Sah-weet. But I do have to post this and get ready for bed. G'night, at 10MB a minute...

.tmp-orary insanity

Cross-posted from my journal, because I'm busy lazy nah, busy.

Spent(=wasted) at least half an hour editing/re-editing and running/re-running one of my Perl programs over and over, unable to figure out why one of the steps wasn't getting the right results when all the other ones were; finally realized it was due to the difference between these two things:

@ARGV="$TheFile";

@ARGV="$TheFile.tmp";

Ah, the wonderful world of programming, where just a few characters can fark up the whole thing...and I get paid to catch tiny little incongruities in other people's text; how'd I miss that comparitively glaring error in mine?



Oh well; at least it's less significant than the three letters left out of the 1631 "Wicked Bible," which turned the Seventh Commandment into "Thou shalt commit adultery." (I've heard various stories of what happened to the printers after that, including that they met untimely, fire-induced ends; they didn't, but they did have to pay a £300 fine that put them out of business.) (My mood has been vastly improved, by the way, after reading about this and other Bible-printing bloopers at The "Wicked" Bibles, from Theology Today 37:3 [Oct 1980].)

Muttering meme

I've been signed up for the "free association" meme at Unconscious Mutterings for a while now, but I usually don't post them; a lot of the time I don't have any associations, or at least not any interesting ones. But this week I actually had some immediate responses to the first few words, so I went ahead and did the whole thing. Without further ado, Unconscious Mutterings, Week 101:

1. Pistol:: whip
2. Rick::shaw
3. Full circle:: Half-nelson (no, I don't know why)
4. I wish:: for fish (is that a line from a Dr. Seuss book, or some other rhyming children's book?—I have this in my head: "I have a wish, a wish for fish")
5. Frame::-up
6. Adult:: films
7. Photography:: studio
8. Stew::meat
9. Cheat:: lie
10. Brad:: cop (that's my brother's name, and he's a Philly police officer)

Friday miscellany

Hey there. I haven't drunk an entire bottle of wine tonight—J. had one glass, so I only had, um, the other five—but I'm a bit punchy and I haven't posted here for a few days, so I'm throwing a few things at the wall to see if they'll stick. Stand back.

• Have you guys noticed this trend in movie advertising? Movie ad: "[Some movie] is the winner of three Golden Globe nominations!" Excuse me, no, you're not. You're the recipient of three Golden Globe nominations. You're only a winner if you win an actual Golden Globe, okay? (Or a Film Critics/People's Choice/Academy/Whatever-the-Hell Award.) Stop trying to make it sound better. Geez, they already stopped saying "And the winner is..." in favor of "And the Oscar goes to..." so they wouldn't hurt anybody's feelings. If they're not even saying you're the winner when you win, you're sure as hell not the winner when they nominate you. Okay?



• Philadelphia Traffic Imponderable: When two people run a red light in opposite directions, and one of them is making an illegal left turn, who has the right of way? (Hint: The guy in the biggest car. Or, if they're the same size, the guy in the least-expensive car. You wanna chance your new Beemer against my '85 Saab? I didn't think so.) (God, I miss my '85 Saab. It was dark blue and stick-shift and had no radio or air conditioning and was named Nixon. [Because it had a nose like a weasel.] I went to grad school in North Philly for four years and I was the only person I knew whose car was never broken into. Hell, there were times when I'd've paid people to break into that car. "You want it? If you can get the damn thing started, it's yours!" {I eventually gave it up when the parking tickets got to be too expensive; and buying the third transmission would've cost a lot, too.} Oh well, Nixon; rest in pieces. Lots of pieces. Probably distributed among many Saabs in the Delaware Valley by now.] At any rate, if any asshole in a Beemer had tried to assert his right-of-way over mine in the middle of an intersection when we both had a red light, I'd've gunned the engine and said "Yeah, Beemer boy, crash the fuck into me, I don't even have collision insurance, see if I care." Ha. [I miss you, Nixon.])



• I didn't do any New Year's resolutions posts, or seeing-how-I-did-on-last-year's New Year's resolution posts, because I can't recall ever having made a serious New Year's resolution in my life. (I haven't given up anything for Lent since I was in Catholic school, either.) It's not that I don't want to improve myself; just that the Gregorian-calendar year isn't something I feel the need to attach it to. Hell, it's the middle of the fucking winter; you think I want to be standing on a scale next December 31st and seeing if I, for instance, lost the 15 pounds I said I'd lose the previous January so I'd look good in a swimsuit the previous July? Hell no. So fuck it.
  
  
  
  But—there had to be a "but" for me to be writing this—but...I want to learn to draw birds. Or to get good at drawing birds. (I'm pretty good at drawing; or I was, back when I had free time and free art supplies.) I have an ulterior motive, which I haven't confessed to anyone but myself and J.; but I'll put this one right out in public for anyone online to see, while the five glasses of wine put the smackdown on my usual inhibitions: I'm going to learn to draw birds. I already bought two books on drawing animals at the art supply store on South St., and ordered an "Artist's Reference" book on birds from Amazon. I've been collecting Peri's feathers in a glass jar (she's molting, and she's not very happy about it), so I can use them as models; and, eventually, I can try to use her as a model, though I imagine she'll be much more interested in perching on the pencil or pecking the paintbrush than in standing still for me. But. Anyway. I'm saying it: I'm going to learn to draw birds. And if I don't, you can call me on it in 2006. Okay? Okay.

So there's that. Now, it's not even 11 p.m. yet, and even though the wine bottle's empty, there's a box of red wine downstairs that will do almost as well now that my quality-receptors are happily down for the count. I'll see you when I see you. G'night...