Peeling the Banana

12:57pm: Never has this quote felt quite so apropos
"Once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode(software), and high-speed pizza delivery."

5:18pm: It's been a long while
And much has happened. And I don't want to talk about any of it. But here's a link you might enjoy:

http://thoughtcrime.crummy.com/2009/

So far I've had some fun reading it.

2:53pm: Birthday Presents
I got books for my birthday. I promptly read 3 of them over the plane trip home. Does my family know me or what?

I also got pot holders, nifty uber-flexy silicone spatuloid thingys, a screen cleaner shaped like a green M&M, and some whisky-flavoured candied pecans (yum!).

Made my pumpkin cheesecake for Thanskgiving/b'day. It was a hit with the family (who doesn't much like pumpkin pie in its normal form). Yay. Was gonna make a couple for work today, but plane delays put the kibosh on that. Later this week prolly.

All in all, another wonderful day and another year gone by.

1:19pm: CSTS: 2007
Show your support if you can.

http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com/

9:48am: Slave to the meme
I have no idea how they got these characteristics from my answers....

10:48am: God damn it!
You've got to be kind.


We'll miss you.

10:41am: Plug for a fellow primate
Anyone who's seen 300 should drop by Kung Fu Monkey today. As usual, the chimp has chops.

11:09am: Meme-age
Who'd have guessed?

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

You Are 87% Burned Out

You are extremely burned out. You work too hard, and you're not getting the results you deserve. It's time for a life change, as soon as you can manage it. You're giving away most of your energy to something you don't even enjoy.

Guess it's a good thing tomorrow is St. Patty's.

11:14am: Knowing that we choose to give things power over us. Knowing that even thinking about how to make it less so makes it more so, today is still a day full of dread and loss. One day at a time. What to do when you look back on thousands of days and see nothing but thousands more stretching ahead of you? Paste on a smile and fake it for just one more day. And then another. Live for the rare days that you don't have to fake it.

1:15pm: Altoids - The Chocolate-covered years
After a month of testing and experimentation I have this to say about the new Altoids.

Meh.

To elaborate:

Chocolate-Peppermint: Rather like a York Peppermint Patty or a Junior Mint with a hard centre. Tasty enough, and the chocolate balances well, but it's not enough to sell me on the candy. Then again, barring my candy-cane binge around the holidays I vastly prefer wintergreen to peppermint. YMMV.

Chocolate-Ginger: I like the idea of sweet and ginger together (thanks to a college girlfriend I'm a huge fan of candied ginger) but the plain ginger mints are clearly the better candy. The balance is again good over-all, but the bite of the ginger is lessened, and that's part of why I like them in the first place.

Chocolate-Cinnamon: Of the three, perhaps the one I liked the most (in the sense that I might continue to eat them). I had expected that I wouldn't like this one at all, since I'm much more fond of the spicy Altoids than the minty ones (and thus more resistant to change in them), but the two flavours work well together. I didn't get a whole tin of them, I stole a couple from someone else, so I'm gonna have to give them a longer test once I can find them in the store again.

1:01pm: RotD
I realize that the blogrant is an overused and cliché meme, but I'm not a staggering tower of innovation at the best of times, so here we go into the New Year with a whimper.

I'm not going to dredge up tired old tropes of loud talking and inappropriate venues like bathrooms and restaurants. I'll shy away from the inevitable comparison of handsfree jabbering to the ramblings of the methanol swigging fellow who lives under the train trestle near my place. I've even managed to make my peace with cellphone drivers on this day. No, what I come here not to praise is a far more ubiquitous scourge of the modern age: The Cellphone Meanderer¹.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for meandering. Get me in a park or the woods somewhere and I'm all about the meander. But. We live in a largely rectilinear world. Offices, halls, sidewalks, staircases. These things are, for lack of a better descriptor, straight-edged. Why is it then that once people begin to converse on a cellphone they become incapable of walking in a straight line, or indeed in any pattern distinguishable from Brownian Motion? Merely attempting to cross the atrium in my building is an exercise in pinball emulation where the bumpers are driven by some maniacal force to swerve and lurch about like fawns tipsy on fallen apples². And why is it my job to avoid them? One would think I'd barged into their phonebooth mid-kryptonian-quick-change from the faces they give me when I impinge on their progress.

I could wax poetical³ about the subject for longer, but work beckons. More ranting later.

1 - Yes, I know it's not a word.
2 - Or like this simile.
3 - Too much Firefly this weekend, apologies.

4:52pm: Comic Goodness
New issue of Cheshire Crossing is out. If you're not reading it, you should be, even though the long update cycle is painful.

6:06pm: Do Politicians Dream Of Electoral Sheep?
I am more convinced than ever that this country needs

a) a revolution

or

b) a viable technocratic party (not the old neo-utopian one, but a new "numbers and reality" one, like Ross Perot with more data and less crazy)

I was, however, 55th to vote at 7:20AM today, so there are signs of a strong turnout which is good, even if some of them are socially stunted mouthbreathers (you know who you are, Mr. "I'm so important I'm going to cut in front of the grey-haired old lady 'cause she walks slow)

12:39pm: You also gotta love UPS.

[Edit: Pic removed because it mucked with formatting]

http://simianendymion.org/tracking.jpg

It arrived in Louisville at 9:13 PM on 10/30, went out for delivery on 10/31 at 3:29 in the AM, then it departed Louisville again 44 hours later just to arrive back there a minute later. And then it went out for delivery again on the next day at 4AM, to finally arrive just 53 hours after it initially went out for delivery. When contacted, the UPS folks said (and I quote) "Well our tracking system is more up-to-date than the internet and we don't see anything unusual in this package's routing". OK then, I guess you know best.

10:34am: All Saints Day
You gotta love the Jesuits.

9:24am: Having finally digested this, I find much in it thought provoking and worth recommending to those who may not have stumbled across it already.

3:32pm: I am a shameless geek
But I must have this.

4:32pm: So, of course, I went to http://www.vespavenger.com/

I should have known that he had that base covered.

5:50pm: Because I've been more boring and pointless than usual lately.

Memeage:

1:19pm: Long Hot Weekend
It's been a long while since I updated, so here's a short self-congratulatory update.

CF2006 has come and gone.
Much spicy (and not so spicy) food and malted beverages were consumed.
Fun was had by many.
Several hundred live crawfish were harmed during the creation of this event.
Void where prohibited.
Your mileage may vary.

11:01am: Things I haven't done in 25 years
Last week, I did one of these things.

Before:



After:



Forgive the blurry-ness, I am a bad self-portrait taker.
I am still unsure how I feel about it long-term, but Locks O' Love has some new material to play with.

3:45pm: Back from vacation
As usual, much time spent with Dad and some with Sis and none with friends. I need to do a friends-only vacation run sometime soon so I can see people. I really had planned to spend some time with folk this trip, but it just didn't work out (again). I came home to no disasters more severe than the usual spring ant invasion. That was nice. More later in the week perhaps.

4:36pm: My CDBaby cart has grown to nearly $600 now....

I need my tax refund. Or a more flexible moral imperative. Or a local music scene I can stand to be in for more than an hour without wanting to throttle someone. Any of these would be useful. Some more than others.

3:54pm: "brawl! canberra a bearish, lome be autonomous not creole see checkout see trivium it arrow a massage a anent be chew in angst may diehard a bashaw see dosage be rapid be perfidy be stubble may centenary and hemosiderin be curious it olsen be greatcoat! fume a interpretation! it's mackintosh! manama some"

I can't shake the feeling that there's meaning just around the corner. Wait.... Nope, it's gone. Guess it's just spam after all.

10:41am: Lemme hear a RAmen!