Ecce Sigum

Category: Life

  • Weather Related

    All of my plans for this evening were cancelled by a solid inch of ice coating every available outdoor surface. I still have power, but the streetlights went dark at around 10:00. The trees will be sweeping the sidewalks by morning.

    So I did what any other red-blooded American would do when stuck inside on a bitter Friday evening in April: I looked at porn.

    No. Scratch that. I did my taxes. There was a heart-stopping moment when I though I would owe something in the neighborhood of $2k, but a quick review of my math showed that I had used Cosine when I should have used Sine, and I will in fact be getting a little back.

    So what to do with this minor windfall?

    I could get a new digital camera – not that there is anything wrong with the current camera. I could bulk up my DVD collection, or my CD collection, of my bookshelves. I could get a good start on a liquor cabinet. Or the contents thereof, anyway. Maybe a good suit. I bought my current suit just after I graduated from college, eleven years ago. I haven’t worn it since 1995, and it was a little tight around the waist at the time. I could buy a new sword or two. Not very practical, buy quite high on the nifty scale. Furniture is out of the question, because I can’t fit much of anything through the doorway into my apartment. A bike might be fun, but I have no place to store it when I am not riding.

    Option paralysis.

    I added a little more content to Master Lee’s site, this in the kung fu and tai chi forms pages. A little here, a little there.

    Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 can Eat Shit And Die is that it comes in such a wide variety of distinct flavors: IE5 on the PC, IE5 on the Mac, and IE5.5 on the PC. Three entirely different beasts, one major browser release. So not only is the rendering engine crap, but just try coding a workaround with it’s half-and-half support of the standards. Makes we want to break things.

    And so to bed.

  • The Vultures Are Circling

    President Bush has caused the death of fewer than a hundred American soldiers in Oil War 2003, and already the corporations are squabbling like fat children over a bacon pie to determine who gets trading rights for Texas II. France, who up until oh, about two days ago, was Iraq’s biggest trading partner, says that all contracts with Saddam Hussein made before the war will still be valid after the war. The US and Britain think otherwise. I can say with dead certainty that were it France declaring war on a US trading partner, the US would be all “Back off, Frog” to France, no matter what the justification.

    And who’s getting the biggest contracts? Dick Cheney’s corporation. Hmm.

    I hope the SUVs will still run on oil which The Administration has diluted with the blood of American soldiers. That’s why we sent them over there.

    Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 Can Go Eat A Bag Of Hell is the following: IE5 does not recognise padding applied to the bottom of an image. That beautiful dashed (in non-stupid browsers, anyway) line which should be 20 pixels below the image is instead a solid line stuck to the bottom of the image like a flattened dog turd on a cowboy boot.

    On a much lighter and more beautiful note, Potato Moon has a gig at Hair of the Frog brewery tomorrow night, starting at 7:30. I plan to take Virginia, if we feel up to being around other humans.

  • Laziness

    Weeellll This evening I got off my lazy, inconsiderate ass and added content to Master Lee’s Website . I realized part-way into the work that some of the pages needed sub-navigation. Fortunately the design – created by the inebriated inestimable Bock – left room for such a thing, almost as if he anticipated the need.

    I got my geek on this weekend with a movie and a comic book. The movie was Donnie Darko , which was all about angst and time travel and demonic rabbits. Okay, I may have over-simplified it a little, but it was a suspense movie of a flavor not entirely unlike PI . I highly recommend it.

    The comic book, or “graphic novel”, if you will, was the collected first six issues of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. The reviewers at Amazon (follow the link) do a much better job of pimping this than I ever could; suffice it to say that I was hooked on page 2.

    And last but not least, I am slowly putting together a page of useful design and development tools, which can be had for free at various places on the internet. It is linked in to the right, in the middle of the Library section.

  • Outside

    I spent several hours today on a ladder drilling holes in a house, in anticipation of a day of blowing several bales of shredded paper into the walls for insulation. This was something I did for a friend in exchange for wood-fired pizza. I think I get the better end of the deal. How often does someone say “You want to come over and drill holes in my house”

    Working in front of a computer for so many hours a week, I sometimes forget the simple pleasure of a day of hard manual labor. Far from being a wasted weekend day, today was relaxing and refreshing. I saw a couple of friends I haven’t seen in several months, and a couple of others whom I see every week, but seldom have the chance to talk to.

    I have been sick most of this past week, which is fine, because the weather has been…not so great. I have made headway on my stack of books, including over a hundred pages of This Cold Heaven, by Gretel Ehrlich, which is a travel narrative about Greenland, by a poet who was once struck by lightning. It is a fine, fine read.

  • Lamb

    This afternoon Virginia and I went to Sami’s for gyros. After the initial feeding frenzy, in which I lost the tip of my pinky finger, we traded gyro stories. Actually, it was less a trade and more of her listening to me while she ate.

    I had my first gyro in Gorky Park in Moscow, in June of 1994. This was at the tail end of a six week class excursion to Russia, and the bunch of us were dirty, sleep-deprived, suffering from mild alcohol poisoning, and loving every minute of it.

    The day was overcast and spitting rain, and the park was mostly empty, except for the carnies. Boy, if you think American carnies are scary, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We didn’t dare go on any of the rides; by Cedar Point standards they didn’t look like that much fun and we had a healthy distrust of Russian safety measures. The latrines were the most frightening experience of my life. They made my eyes water from a hundred yards UPWIND.

    Just off of a smaller path a ways away from the river two Azerbaijani gentlemen had a small kiosk set up with a home-made rotisserie grill thing and a small strongbox. On the rotisserie was a big hunk of sheep meat. After days of sparse sack lunches and shoe-leather stew, the site of so much fresh meat sent us into a slavering frenzy of waiting in line for the sheep to finish cooking. The twenty minutes felt like an eternity. Every movement of an Azerbaijani arm left a vapor trail and the glint of sunlight from gold teeth was blinding.

    Finally they were preparing my gyro. Several thin slices of lamb on pita bread, with a cucumber sause and fresh crushed parsley. To this day, I remember it as one of the best meals of my life.

  • A Few More Random Things

    Added a page of my Flash experiments, if you are in to that sort of thing. Link is in the navigation.

    Continuing to read Mishima. Now I am not sure if he is closer to Dostoevsky or Camus. In the “big picture”, definitely Dostoevsky, but he writes with a certain existentialism which tastes strongly of The Stranger.

    Nethack calls; more later.

  • Debriefing

    Where have I been? I’m glad you asked! I… have been working so much that the thought of looking at my computer after-hours fills me with fear and loathing.

    And if that weren’t bad enough, I just downloaded Nethack . If you have never played Nethack, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It hearkens back to the days of Rogue, Telengard, Bard’s Tale, the early MUDs; it is The Original Adventure Game, and it has been constantly updated and upgraded for the past twenty or so years.

    And it is free.

    I expect I will be using it a lot as a distraction in the coming days as we gear up for war. Personally, I think Saddam needs to be ousted. His methods are on par with Stalin and his continued rule will be worse for the Iraqi people than any U.S. led war that doesn’t go nuclear.

    Having said that, I will now say that I think the Administration should just come out and admit that the one and only reason we are even acknowledging Saddam’s existence is The Oil. Seriously. If the Middle East wasn’t chock-full of oil we wouldn’t pay any more attention to it than we do to the AIDS-decimated countries in southern Africa.

    Think about this: If it was Catholic terrorists flew the planes into the towers, would we have declared war on Rome? Nope. After the Oklahoma City bombing did we declare war on Michigan rednecks? Nope. You know why? Not profitable.

    Every president since World War II has been a sociopath to some degree or another. The kind of ego that would want to be president believes nothing other than itself truly exists. I don’t think Bush gives a damn about, or even notices the existence of, other human lives. They simply don’t factor into his reality. Those hundreds of millions of social security numbers are nothing more than assets in his giant game of Sim Presidency. I absolutely believe this about him.

    And if he has this level of respect for the people of his own country, imagine how expendable he considers the rest of the world to be…

  • Neighborly Courtesy

    At the bookstore there is, in the back room, a fire alarm-type-siren which is so loud that to be in the room with it when it is wailing causes disorientation and nausea.

    This morning at 4:00 I discovered that there is an identical siren on the roof of the local jewelry repair shop, less than a hundred feet from my bed. Apparently a glitch in the wiring set it off. It screamed for a good half-hour before one of the dozen or so police responding to irate phone calls managed to disconnect it.

    No sign of the owner.

    I can appreciate that the siren is there to make the building more safe and secure, but I feel that it should be mandatory that he have a duplicate siren in his bedroom, which can only be shut off from inside his store. Fair is fair.

    In other news, I am considering, in my extravagant free time, performing a scholarly comparison between Dostoevsky and Mishima. If you don’t know what I am talking about, then click on the BOOKS link to the right and spend a little time browsing. I will perform the comparison on my trombone. I bet no-one has done THAT yet.

  • Irony

    Charles T. Sell was a dentist for a number of years before he was arrested on over 60 charges of insurance and other kinds of fraud. He has spend the last five years in jail because he is suffering from serious mental illness and has been deemed not competent to stand trial.

    Unless he is medicated.

    Given his current state of mind, which includes the fear that the government is trying to kill him, this medication would have to be forced upon him. So he is appealing the decision.

    Did you catch that? The government, in order to make him sane enough to stand trial, is trying to force medication upon a man who is suffering paranoid delusions that the government is trying to kill him.

    The legal community is rather nonplussed. Adding to the confusion is the fact that he hasn’t actually been convicted of anything yet.

    I don’t feel much of anything about this case, one way or the other, but wow! what an odd situation to be in. In order to cure his paranoia they need to feed it.

    I have updated the Books page to include only those books which I am reading/have read during this year. Also, I have started on a new collaboration, this one a site about sloths.

  • My Whacky Neighborhood

    This morning my daily ritual of repeatedly hitting the snooze button was interrupted by loud noises from outside, where several police officers were breaking down the front door of the neighbor’s house and hauling some of them away in handcuffs. An angry man stood on the street out front shouting “I told you he was a punk!!!” and something about a dog. Several young women with babies in carriers evacuated the premises at about the same time, and one woman, wither holding her stomach or cradling her arm, went away in an ambulance.

    This is, I think, the third time that Grand Rapids’ Finest have come and cleaned that place out. The most recent was over this past summer, when one of the residents at that time had walked up the block and shot one of the employees of the local scummy convenience store in the legs.

    Two weekends ago I noticed that that scummy convenience store, on the corner of Fulton and Diamond, has lost its liquor licence. “Until Relocation or Closure”, it says on the notice. The Powers That Be finally got fed up with them selling liquor to minors and looking the other way when drug deals and muggings happen out front and in their back parking lot.

    This past fall someone tried to mug Master Lee at that store. As he was getting out of his car someone hit him in the back of the head with something and yelled “Gimme yo fuckin’ wallet!” and other such niceties. Master Lee turned and advanced on the guy, saying “You want my money? Come take my money!!!” The guy turned and ran. Probably the wisest decision he has made in his life.

    Unless he has since decided to commit suicide, which would be a truly neighborly thing to do.

    mmmmmmyep….

    I recently finished reading The Red Hourglass, a nifty book about all sorts of predators like Black Widows and Praying Mantids and Pigs and Rattlesnakes. The chapter on pigs had some interesting things to say about humans, both physiologically and psychologically. The chapter on black widows had this neat description of how doctors determine if that ungodly pain you are feeling is, in fact, a black widow bite: They ask you if this is “the worst pain you have ever been in?” If the answer is Yes, then it is likely that you have about a year of painful recovery ahead of you.

    If you survive the next 24 hours.

    So for the rest of the evening, I will read Richard Dawkins, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and eat Ethiopian food from Little Africa (the best food in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan).

    Oh! Before I forget: Fundamentalists are really necrophiliacs .