Some late-night surfing turned up something that I found both funny and disturbing. Where Babies Come From in Germany
This is exactly why the Web is so cool, I never would have seen this if I were browsing around in a library or bookstore.
After a productive appointment with my acupuncturist I went to my favorite computer store in San Francisco, the always lovely Central Computer, and picked up a hard disk enclosure for a drive from my old laptop. The idea was to have a small backup drive (12 gigs seemed REALLY large back then) and maybe some tools on it that I could use when doing computer-stuff for people. Instead, I ended up with a little aluminum box that can’t even prop the door open.
The Coolmax HD-211 Hard Disk Enclosure (these bastards don’t deserve a link from me) claimed support for Mac OS 8.6 or higher on the package. I can’t speak for it’s support of 8.6 because I’m running 10.3 (Panther runs like a cheetah on crack on my ibook so my Tiger upgrade disc sits lonely and forgotten) but it certainly doesn’t work on OS X. It might run on the operating system but I don’t know because I got rid of that steaming pile of donkey dung as soon as I could.
Yes, I RTFM. I pored through local help files. I searched Apple’s site. I used the ubiquitous search engine. I even searched Usenet. All to no avail. I don’t care that it was only eighteen bucks, it’s the principle of the thing. I now have to leave the house again, a very painful process for me because of my spinal condition, and waste another three hours of my life returning it. In fact, it’s going to end up costing me because I’ll have to purchase a BART ticket to get to and from there.
Coolmax, you’ve burned me once. It won’t happen again. If I have one small part in bringing you down then I’ll go to my grave a happy man. Coolmax is dead, long live Elvis.
I went over to Wil Wheaton’s temporary webspace to see what was cookin’ and saw his post asking what sci-fi or fantasy character people are. You can head over to the TK421 site for yourself and see what character you are. It turns out that I’m none other than James Tiberius Kirk. To wit:
An impassioned commander with more respect for individuals than for authority, you have a no-holds-barred approach to life and its obstacles.
Well burn my pants, I actually thought I’d be something like JarJar Binks or Scrappy-Doo and instead I’m the guy that gets it on with hot, green aliens. Live long and prosper.
One of the wonderful things about living in San Francisco, particularly in the Mission, is the staggering number of tacquerias to choose from. Are you around 24th and York? Go to Tacqueria San Francisco. Folsom and 20th? Go to El Faro, the guys that invented the super burrito. Are you in the cruelly-named Inner Sunset? La Fonda is the place to go. There are hundreds of tacquerias here but not all of them are worthy of your hard-earned buck. You can figure out which ones to go to (or not go to ) by the traditional method of visiting every tacqueria that you come across and keeping copious notes about them but my experience with that method has left a rotten taste in my mouth one too many times. Enter the BurritoEater website, dedicated to providing up-to-the-minute (I could be making that up) information about tacquerias in San Francisco.
Specificity (thank you Ms. Loadholt, my ninth grade english teacher) is something that can be hard to find on the web and when I see it in action I get all gooey inside. This site doesn’t try to rate all of the food in San Francisco like many other sites do, instead they stick with tacquerias, and more specifically, burritos. Sort by name, neighborhood, and probably other ways. It’s all here - links to maps, links to the Department of Health for every tacqueria so you can see who is posioning you and who is merely just bad cooks, reviews, cool stuff like that with little mustaches everywhere.
If you live in San Francisco or are planning to visit then it would be a crime to not check out BurritoEater because let’s face it, if you’re here you’re going to have a burrito at some point.
Earlier today I came across a posting on BoingBoing about a guy that invented a thing for cutting “toast soldiers.” This post totally zoomed me back into Simi Valley, California when I was a little lad of 5 or so. We didn’t call them toast soldiers though. No, for us they were “fingers.”
When I was growing up, my mother and grandmother were these little plump Scottish ladies. One of my favorite breakfasts that they would make for me was called an “Eggy Peggy” and I’m assuming that my mother learned how to make it from her mother, but I could be wrong because I never asked them about it. Also, I don’t know if this is specifically a Scottish thing or if it was just because my mom and grandma were crazy. Anyway, an Eggy Peggy is a soft-boiled egg tossed into a coffee cup with a pat of butter, salt, and pepper. Toast is then cut into long strips, or “fingers” and is dipped into the might-make-your-heart-seize-at-any-moment egg mixture and consumed. Repeat as necessary.
I guess what I’m saying is that this invention isn’t so crazy as it sounds. Call them fingers, call them soldiers, the important thing here is that someone took the time to invent something that makes them. I love devices that are made specifically to do one thing (I don’t like the whole ‘convergence’ thing) and I believe that if those devices have something to do with making the preparation of food any easier then I’m all for them. If anyone needs more information on how to make an Eggy Peggy then just drop me a line, I’m more than happy to help out.
Eric sat behind the wheel of his beater car and chewed his gum with reckless abandon. He was noisy with the wad in his mouth and didn’t even try to chew with his mouth closed. Nope, the mouth was staying open because Eric was excited. If you walked by you’d see he had a gleam in his eye. The energy flowed off him in waves that could knock a person down if they weren’t careful, a full-on frontal assault of nervous energy that made the air crackle and hum. As he sat and chewed he watched. He watched the house that he had been watching for the past couple of weeks. He had their routine burned into his brain like a woodworker burns the image of a pheasant into a ten-inch-square piece of plywood to be hung on the wall. Tonight was the night.
Every day during the past two weeks Eric had parked his car somewhere on the street where he could see the house. He’d parked and he’d watched quietly, sitting for hours at a time in his car and barely moving. A blink here, a breath there, beyond those you would think he’d died he was so still. Eric had sat quietly, without moving, and watched the family. There were four of them in the house and he’d needed to know the schedules of everyone so that there would be no surprises when it was time for him to go into action. Surprises were bad and could ruin all of his hard work so it was best to hang out for a while and learn everybody’s routine.
He’d watched enough people in his life to know that Mom and Dad of this house were very typical of Mom and Dad everywhere else in the suburbs of America. Dad worked all day at a graham cracker factory and liked to drink heavily when he got home. Dad would come home from work with a beer already clutched in his hand as he exited the car and he wouldn’t be seen until the next morning when he left for work. Mom was in charge of someone’s calendar, most likely in a tall building full of other people managing the calendars of people that had better places to be than in the building of calendar managers. Mom liked to have long conversations on her cell phone while she sat parked in the driveway smoking long, thin cigarettes. Daughter and Son were pretty typical for the suburbs as well. Daughter was a cheerleader and practiced her routines in the front yard after school. Eric learned her cheers with her and would practice silently while he sat in the car, GIMME A K! GIMME AN I! GIMME AN L! GIMME ANOTHER L! WHAT’S THAT SPELL? KILL! KILL! KILL! He had never paid attention to cheers when he was in high school and was surprised at the level of bloodlust that one had to maintain in order to be a cheerleader. Son had a sprinkling of fuzz on the tip of his chin and he wore his baseball cap backwards, the brim riding low on his head and almost touching the ponytail that peeked out. Son didn’t talk to Mom or Dad or Daughter very much but he was friends the next-door neighbor and would come out when Mom or Daughter wasn’t around and chat with the neighbor. Eric suspected that the neighbor sold drugs but he had no solid evidence to back up that claim and he didn’t care anyway.
After watching the family for such an extended amount of time Eric knew their routine pretty well. He’d pored over his surveillance notes and figured that tonight he was going to do it. It was Friday so Dad was already wobbly when he parked the car and he would continue drinking until he passed out because he didn’t have to wake up the next morning for work. Mom was at her bridge game and wouldn’t return until sometime after ten. Daughter was spending the night somewhere with a couple other cheerleaders, they had left a few hours before and seemed in high spirits, giggling and whispering to each other. Son had left the house with a bottle of scotch so Eric knew he was off to play Dungeons and Dragons with his buddies and wouldn’t return until the next afternoon. Everything was ready, Eric had about three hours.
Peering up and down the street to make sure nobody noticed him, Eric walked around the house to the backyard gate and let himself in. They didn’t have a dog which made things easier for him. He tried a couple of windows but they were locked and panic almost set in. Luckily, the sliding glass door was unlocked so he was able to get inside without breaking any windows. He hated breaking windows and always felt that the money he left to pay for them wasn’t enough.
He took a quick tour of the house, making sure to be very quiet until he found where Dad had passed out, which turned out to be his bedroom. The rumble of loud snores shook the walls. It was no wonder that nobody else was home. Eric saw an empty whiskey bottle next to Dad and hoped that he’d had the entire thing. If he’d only had half a bottle then he might wake easily. Eric slowly closed the door but didn’t shut it tight for fear of the click awakening Dad. He finished his tour of the house and decided to start with the living room. It was the room that was first entered when someone came in through the front door and Eric knew that they all used the front door here, not like the weird people in South Carolina that used their back doors to gain entrance to their homes.
Eric started with the couch. He pulled it into the middle of the room so that he’d have some room to work with and saw that the kitchen table would fit perfectly into the space that the couch had occupied. He pulled the couch to where the kitchen table had been and liked the way it looked so he left it there. He moved the bookcase out of the living room and set it up in the hallway next to Dad’s room. Dad was passed out in pure bliss so Eric continued his activities. The entertainment center went into the bathroom and he moved the toilet into the pantry. On the lid of the toilet he left detailed instructions on how to hook the toilet back up in the correct spot. He left the refrigerator alone because he didn’t want their food to spoil. Daughter’s bed went into the living room and her dresser went into the dining room. It was a bit tight in the dining room so Eric moved the table into Daughter’s room. Son’s bed didn’t look right anywhere in the house so he just rotated it forty-five degrees. Son’s dresser was placed a few feet inside the front door, a swoop of undershirt sticking seductively out of one of the drawers. He hung one of the area rugs on the wall in the kitchen and he took a blanket from a cupboard and placed it where the rug had been. He put the contents of the medicine cabinet from the kids bathroom inside the cabinet where the cups and saucers were stored and the cups and saucers were placed into the bathtub, all lined up neatly as they had been when they resided in the kitchen cabinet. Books were stacked in closets and clothes were folded and placed in the bookcase. The silverware was put into the coffee-table drawer and the cleaners from under the kitchen sink were lined up in the kids medicine cabinet.
Eric surveyed his work and couldn’t help but smile. He’d done a great job and he still had some time on the clock which he’d use to make a clean getaway. He wished he could see the shocked expression on everyone’s face when they discovered his handiwork but that was against the rules, just like taking things or breaking things. He dropped a note that he’d printed at Kinko’s on the kitchen table in the living room and left the house the same way he’d come in. The note read, “This is just a game. We are Creepy Crawly.”
Eric climbed into his beater and took off for the next town. He was already thinking about what he would do to his next victims and it made him giggle uncontrollably. Switching the kitchen table with the sofa-bed had been a great idea.**
**This story was inspired by a song of the same title, written and performed by the Bumpin’ Uglies in, I dunno, the year 2000 I think.
To spin a yarn
from soup to nuts
is off the chains and not
unlike juggling picked onions
it’s nice to have one’s cake and eat it too
especially if you’re a tempest in a teapot
because you’re all mouth and no trousers
and i’ve brought a knife to a gunfight
opening up a can of worms
while the cat has got my tongue
but curiosity killed the cat
dead as a doornail
so let me play devil’s advocate
to this little dog and pony show
idioms are a dime a dozen
and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Fascism, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is “A philosophy or system of government that is marked by stringent social and economic control, a strong, centralized government usually headed by a dictator, and often a policy of belligerent nationalism.” I mention this because I believe that we are living in a fascist state and our dictator is none other than the boy-president, George W. Bush.
Earlier today on The Progressive I read about a high school student that was investigated by the Secret Service because of an anti-Bush photo that he’d taken for a class project. Seems that the teacher wanted the students to take photos to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights and he was trying to show his right to dissent. Some nosy asshole that worked in the photo lab of Wal-Mart (I’ll save my rant on them for another time…) called the cops and they in turn hauled in the Secret Service. All of this because the student had taken a picture of himself giving a thumbs-down to a picture of George W. Bush. Okay, the picture of Bush was hung on a wall with a red thumbtack through his head. OH MY GOD!!! Call the Army and have them get the nukes ready, a high school student has taken a picture from a magazine and hung it on a wall!
Ever since September 11 (hey, if the president can invoke it all the time then I guess I will) our country has become a nation of sniveling cowards that have nothing better to do than spy on each other while we root out the “terrorists.” It’s a good thing that Wal-Mart is on the case, I can sleep easier at night knowing that our domestic security is in the hands of teenagers and pensioners.
“…Government that is marked by stringent social and economic control…” Our system is supposed to be a democracy, where the goals of social control are determined through legislation by elected representatives, thus enjoying a measure of support from the population. What’s happening though is that corporate interests are controlling the media, advertising, and public relations, leaving most people horribly uninformed when it comes to making decisions that affect the lives of everyone in the nation. Companies like Clear Channel monopolize the local media and shut down anyone that might have a dissenting point of view, such as what happened to Howard Stern. I’m not a fan of Stern but I do believe that he is entitled to his opinion without getting sacked, regardless of how much he voices disapproval of Bush.
“…Belligerent nationalism.” All you have to do is listen to the president to get an idea of his belligerence. He makes statements like, “If you’re not with us then you are against us.” He defies the U.N. and goes to war with a country whose leader he has a personal grudge with and then refuses to apologize for his actions. Belligerent? You be the judge.
So where does this leave us, four years after the tragedy of the World Trade Center? Is having Wal-Mart spy on us making us as a nation any safer? Is the arrogance of this administration helping to build relationships with the rest of the world? How many of our rights are we willing to give up before we put our foot down and declare that we won’t take it anymore? I am sick of getting pushed around by rich old guys whose only concern is to make even more millions of dollars then they already have. Get smart America, vote these assholes out of office. It can be done.
update (10/15/05): Cory over at BoingBoing posted about this as well.
Today while I was waiting in my acupuncturist’s (is that a real word?) office I finished the novel “Uglies” by Scott Westerfeld. True that it is what some (the publisher, bookstores) would call “teen fiction” or “young adult” but I found it engaging and recommend it to anyone that enjoys reading. Read on for my review…
Tally Youngblood is about to turn sixteen and she can hardly wait. While most teens fantasize about getting their driver’s license when they turn sixteen Tally can only think about one thing, becoming pretty. When someone becomes a “pretty” their entire life is changed. They move into New Pretty Town where the only thing to worry about is what to wear to which party. Everyone becomes a pretty at the age of sixteen and leaving Ugly Town and undergoing extensive surgery is the first step. Every part of the body, including the skin, gets modified to become pretty. Cheekbones are reshaped, big noses are filed down, tummies are tucked, ears are nipped, and new skin is grown that is scarless and without freckles or moles. Tally is the last of her friends to become pretty and she can’t wait to see them again (pretties are allowed into Ugly Town but uglies are forbidden from entering New Pretty Town), especially her special friend Peris that she just might be in love with. One night Tally meets Shay, a girl that shares Tally’s birthday, and they quickly become friends. The two girls hang out and pull pranks together while the day of becoming pretty draws near. Shay however does not want to become pretty and she tells Tally about some of her friends that had run away to avoid becoming pretty. Tally’s world turns upside down when Shay runs away and a secret branch of the government starts looking for her. They give Tally an ultimatum - find Shay or never become pretty. Not wanting to stay ugly for the rest of her life, Tally sets out on a dangerous adventure to find her friend.
Westerfeld is a master of the craft. His dystopia shows a vivid world scarred by human carelessness and corrupt officials. One would think that Scott Westerfeld used to be a teenaged girl himself, his portrayal of the protagonist lets us in on what happens inside the world of a fragile teenage mind that just wants to fit in with everyone else. He deals with the concept of image gracefully and without preaching and shows that beauty truly comes from the inside.
I can’t wait to read the other two books in this trilogy but I’ve already got another novel by Westerfeld that I’m going to read first.
Uglies
Well, the new domain is up and running. Can’t seem to import my Blogger posts but I’m sure that’s because I missed some crucial step somewhere along the line. I’m not going to sweat that too much, they’ll either show up here at some point or they won’t. Maybe starting from scratch is a good thing. I’m using WordPress to power my site and I’m loving the interface that they have. I still need to learn how the permalinks work and go through all the documentation on everything else they offer and set up some categories but it’s lookin’ pretty sweet. I feel like a new man.