11232181.1It isn't me after all.    Living in these times can do it to you, that is, make you think you're losing it, getting senile, whatever. Fact is, the culture itself is what's FUBAR. Silly things come along - gag me with a spoon - we absorb them and move on. But when Time Magazine picks up on something, you can bet it has been taken up by the group DNA already and is part of us. Like this:

As post-Minimalists do, he finds ways to make abstract forms to speak to things outside themselves.

Really? I got up real close to his masterpiece and didn't hear nothin'. Frankly, I thought


Brunhilde 1998-2000 was a wicker trash basket and caused a huge unnecessary ruckus when I turned it over and dropped a banana peel in it.

Did you know that nanofiction is a term coined by role-playing game designer R. Sean Borgstrom to describe fictitious quotes (that is, quotes which are "excerpted" from a non-existent source) which appear in the margins of the role-playing game, Nobilis. Now you do, should it ever come up.

Let's get lost tonight/You could be my black Kate moss tonight. Try reading Coldplay's lyrics while thinking ba-boom ba'-boom; helps you to get the message. Or if you still don't, go read about it - "omnivorous piece of hip-hop sprawl Electro frenchies gangsta mien."

They go on and on with this horseshit, all swept up like it all actually has some meaning. We need a depression or war or something to bring people back to earth and reality. Fifty people got burned up in Greece, but Olympia was saved. I just don't think those two facts belong in the same sentence. Trouble is, with six and a quarter trillion of us now, frankly, human beings are pretty much dispensable.

Television has gone from saying/showing things that would have made me sweat, turn red and slump down in the chair were I watching it with my grandmother, to my mother, to watching it with anyone. RE: Sen. Larry Craig. TV people, we don't need to know all the techniques for soliciting sex in restrooms oh for god's sake now they have actors demonstrating it and they're playing his tape on every channel. Where can we go to escape? Pluto?

Long/short of it, although I may truly be quite hopelessly senile, I feel quite regular and just old-fashioned tonight. Macherat


posted by Rick at 8:44 PM

11232180.1WMD.    It was announced today, somewhat hysterically, that deadly chemical weapons from Iraq were found in the files at the United Nations.

My word ... so does this mean the Americans were justified in attacking that wretched country?

It would appear so.

When is the evidence from those files going to be made public?

What evidence?

The information. Information in those files.

I don't think you understood. It wasn't information; the actual deadly poisonous fatal murderous chemicals themselves were found in United Nations' file cabinets. There has been a full New York-style haz-response and general panic.

Good Lord! Does this mean the Americans will next be invading the United Nations?

I'm afraid so. Macherat

posted by Rick at 10:21 AM

11232179.1Demented.    Terrible word, isn't it? Several times I've had a notion where I sign in to my blog, and a reader has left a comment, "Dude. We got together and I was elected to tell you. Dude, you've gotten really senile. Sorry." Is that how you find out? Do you ever really find out? Will I have that last oomph of sanity and typing ability left when the time comes to answer that question for you? Or has the time already come and I just don't know it yet? In any event, there aren't any readers, so the issue is fairly moot, isn't it, and I can just go on typing all I want. And that will happen just as soon as I think of something to say.Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:41 PM

11232178.1"Fluffy came out from behind a stack of beer cases .."


Macherat

posted by Rick at 9:27 PM

11232177.1Memories.Macherat Irritating and scary, that's what it is, losing your memory. They've invented this thing called "the senior moment" to placate our concerns, but that's all it amounts to. There really is no such thing as the Senior Moment. The forgetting and the lapses and all those Oh fiddlesticks, what did I come in here for? episodes - creeping, inexorable, inevitable senility. Sorry.

So tonight, out of the blue, here comes Nevil Shute's book, "In the Wet." Huh? Yeah, me too. Where was that in my shrinking brain, and why now? I remembered a brief passage from the book which I would have read around 1961 or so. Thinking a little harder, I remembered not only not finishing it but in fact only getting a few pages along and then losing interest. Now we have the internet, so it was easy to find out what it was all about and if it was worth either looking for here at home [good luck] or buying a new copy on BN. It seems the story takes place in the future, 1980, which is now of course the distant past, and the issue of Socialism has been settled for good. No need to bother with it. Whew, because I also remember that it was terminally boring in a British making-an-obscure-point sort of way, and it had that awkward problem [especially for us Yanks] with one character. On the Beach was better, but I hear Nevil hated the movie. Had he lived, I doubt if he would have much liked what they did with A Town Like Alice either.


posted by Rick at 9:34 PM

11232176.1Clarification.Macherat The Oz love to name things all Abo so they seem dusty and outbacky, when in fact most of their places are thoroughly suburban with sidewalks, cul-de-sacs and good behaviour. A perfect example, is the area containing the frequently confused communities of Woolgoolga and Woogoolga.


Woogoolga is the smaller suburb, of course, with Woolgoolga being the major town. I've found it easier if one remembers that Woolgoolga is south of Woogoolga.


posted by Rick at 10:15 PM

11232175.1A glitvh.123 That company which lets its customers make free long distance calls over the Internet, you know .. Skype? .. Yeah, that's the one, Skype. They had a computer failure. No calls went through. It was as if someone had blown the building which houses the company completely to smithereens. No explanation, of course .. no computers. "Our engineering team determined that this was a software issue," users in Vietnam, Colombia, The U.S., Brazil, Germany and Finland were eventually told. [Somehow. I couldn't figure that part.] "We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours." Oh yes, the 12-24 hours; I know it well.

In related news, the same thing happened, pretty much, to the company which does pagers a day or so before. No beeps went out for 12-24 hours, I heard. About the same time, the milking machines in 13 states and the Virgin Islands went down. Several cows exploded. We put up with this stuff now. What else could we do? It isn't as if caring, or complaining or going berserk is going to make the people who repair these things work any faster. I believe they are not from our planet anyway. What follows is a story from very long ago, long before that dingbat at your register was born, long before your brokerage statement arrived that time showing you had eighteen cents left. This was in the real olden days.

Shortly after I invented The Cubicle, I was chatting with one or two of the old ladies [in their cubicles] in the Room Reservations department when a younger woman, a newly-hired employee, went tearing through the room screaming and ran into the bathroom where she locked herself in. "The computers are down!" she kept shrieking. "What's this?" I thought, and I went out front to investigate. Before I even got out there I could hear this little buzz-buzz, a strange sound I hadn't heard before. Sort of [I would say later] what you would expect a gradually rising tsunami of human rage and anger to sound like. Yes, we [I] had invented the first computer glitch. Strange how innocuous things can steamroll. You take a fairly large hotel with about 5,000 registered guests, shred every bit of information about them
and then try to continue operating. "Checking in?" "Checking out?" Good luck.

Eventually, I escaped the riot since I couldn't be of any help there anyway. We had specialists for that. Nell T., for one, an impassive, pleasant Nisei girl, would be shoved out the door and told to hold the line while we hatched a plan. What a great little trooper she was. I went upstairs to brief Big Boss.

To say Big Boss was tight .. well, he really acted as if it was his own money, so I had to play on the one thing he hated more than losing money, "Boss, either we start paying compensation here right quick and get a handle on this or you'll be answering complaint letters until you're 95." "How much?" "A lot, boss" "How much!!?" "Under six figures, I promise." "many, many, many profanities," and him a former Mormon even, or so I had heard.

Anyway, I paid, a lot, while the geeks hacked, and we reconstructed the old manual system which we had [wisely] not demolished as instructed by Corporate but instead covered with an attractive blue Drapery and got back to running in ... 12-24 hours. But, when word got out that these computer thingies could bomb out and it could cost you tons of money and goodwill, well, things had to change. No, there wasn't anything that could be done about the boxes themselves, the aliens, you know, so they eliminated the compensation and all that apologizing. Now it's just "the computer's down." And we take it. I'd like to think that although I invented the crash itself, I also had a hand in the right way to deal with it, however briefly that lasted.


posted by Rick at 9:59 PM

11232174.1RE: The Market.123 Is this the end? I mean with stocks down another 324 points, is it the end of being rich as we knew it? Of course not! It is NOT the end. It is only the beginning of the end, so you should definitely not panic and pull all your money out at this time. Wait until I get mine out first.


posted by Rick at 10:06 AM

11232173.1My favorite catalog.123 It came today. You remember the one, full of outdoor furniture and other gracious-living items, all outdoor. I'm on their list despite living in Seattle because I occasionally buy items to use for something else. In this issue, they have moved just about the entire house outside: living room, dining room, kitchen, family room with wide screen plasma and other loud things to endear you to the neighbors. Even beds, though they don't come right out and say you're supposed to sleep on them outside. Only one room missing and, yes, just momentarily I thought about calling and asking them before remembering I'd get a help-phone-person in India who would be ever-so-polite as he/she tried to comprehend why people with fabulous multi-million-dollar American homes would want to live out of doors. Good thing, because on almost the last page of the catalog, my question would have been answered anyway:


Yes, it's true. For those summeroutsiderites who just can't make it back inside or don't care to.

There are generally fewer than five days a year in Seattle when one would/could enjoy outdoor furniture. Statistically, these dates fall around the first week in August, so that is why the city schedules Seafair, our annual thing, at that time. The big event is the Race of the Hydroplanes and the Blue Angels Show. The thing to do is drive your boat out onto the lake, tie it to the "Log Boom" and pard-eeeee. Someday, future archaeologists will probe the depths of Lake Washington and try to comprehend why there would possibly be over one trillion beer bottles in that one place. Anyway, a real Seattleite either does that, or he stays home and does the same thing on his own private lanai, balcony or patio. Hence the catalog.

The year my great-grandson Lancelot's father, North [long story,] took me to Seafair, he swore he had the password for entry to the Stan Sayres Memorial Pits. Dumbass. Everybody knows "Arrid" is an inside joke. Just as well; there is nowhere to sit down in The Pits, and no drinking. These happen to be the only two things I do at Seafair, which has to be the most boring thing ever invented. Well, three things actually, fall asleep and snore loudly, entirely embarrassing whatever remaining family members are still around. And yet they keep inviting me. Could it be simply because I pay? Surely not.


posted by Rick at 11:16 PM

11232172.1He must have made that up.123 No, as imaginative a writer as The Tomato is, he does not make things up. Yes, he embellishes, so go enjoy this one. I'm convinced that your better writers actually do have more interesting things happen to them, whereas the rest of us ... well, I had a sweaty nap today and that was about it.

My absences lately have been entirely due to the rush of events, far too much happening to stop and write about them. It's getting to be so crowded and busy here that maybe we should consider dividing ourselves into half a dozen planets.

Skipping all that planetary business, I tried to explain something which had struck me - to Brother. He understood what I said, which was good, but I could tell he was completely disinterested. Bummer. So I'll tell you. When I was a kid, living briefly in France, I distinctly remember the old ladies, sitting in the sun and wearing black from head to toe, talking about The War. Terrible. Unspeakable. Only they weren't talking about WWII - rather WWI. The World War. True, the lines had run right through this area of northeastern France, and the Chemin-des-Dames was literally across the street and up a fairly steep hill from our house. My first real connection with such a thing as "history." All that incredible suffering and death, right there where it was now so quiet, peaceful and flowery. I remember thinking that those old ladies must be a hundred years old [they looked it anyway,] since World War One was ancient history. That brings us to today, at my kitchen sink, where I'm realizing that in 1953 these old ladies were only 35 years removed from the end of their war. Heck, they could have been young widows and still be under sixty. By this time Brother, who is not good with numbers, was glazing over as perhaps you are too. But what this means is now that I'm .. oldish .. already, I shouldn't be surprised if the Vietnam War makes virtually or no impression on today's eight-year-olds. Things do move along, don't they?


posted by Rick at 8:53 PM

11232171.1Graveyard.123 To be truthful, this post is being written solely for the purpose of getting some keywords into the electrons of Internet. Tonight I did a search for some elements of my first (and only real) job and found a few. A couple of stories - not that good, actually, considering the job. What job? Night Auditor. When you think about how many hundreds of thousands of people have done this job at some point in their young lives or for incredibly extended periods of time in their old ones, there isn't much out there. And what is it? Night Auditors run the front desk and balance the books in hotels overnight. During the period we're talking about, before computers, this was a challenging, solitary, fascinating, scary, weird, frustrating, and wonderful job. I did it for about four years steadily, then off and on in relief for another four before moving on to the Big Job. Whoopee.

There are enough stories for a good-sized book. In fact, every night auditor I ever knew said there was a book in it. No surprise that none of us ever wrote one. Night Audit is mostly a solitary jumping-off point for Hell, so you don't get a lot of ambition on the graveyard shift. Ha - the graveyard shift, how appropriate.

I worked with Ruby, the PBX Operator, at least until she finished off her vodka and passed out. Ruby was pretty much walking death to begin with, so I let her be. She did the restaurant audit (easy, nothing to balance,) and I did the rooms. To her credit, she always finished her audit and got the wake-up call clock set before turning in. That was usually about 2:30, as soon as she got the register tapes from the bar, so she got in a couple of good hours snoozing before the first calls at 5:30 or so. She was able to sleep through incoming calls, so I had to kind of climb over her to answer the switchboard. Believe me, the effort was worth it; as she got drunker, she got louder and more argumentative, so it was a pleasure when she finally went unconscious each night. That allowed me to finish my own work and deal with the unending weird things on the other side of the desk all night long.

Oh, let me stick in a few more keywords. NCR 4200, Room and Tax, Trial, D-sheet, pickup error, FOLIO MISSING grrrrr. Gosh, this brings back memories.


posted by Rick at 10:40 PM

11232170.1Impress your friends.123 Just this evening I discovered something very interesting: if you are looking for a word peculiarity, the word Ghoti in the language of West Bengal is pronounced fish. No, really. They read "ghoti" and say "fish." "Ghoti," incidentally, refers to The Ghotis, a people of western Bengal, who have a culture, traditions, and cuisine distinct from their Bangal counterparts of East Bengal. The noun also has application in the distinction of subtleties of caste, but that gets entirely too complicated for this blog and this typer. Been there, studied that, bailed out.

That's only the half of it. In the Klingon language, called tlhIngan Hol in Klingon [or Klingan as I've usually pronounced it,] the word for "fish" is ghotl, a frequent misspelling of the correct form: ghoti.

Friends, things like this are not always coincidental.


posted by Rick at 8:59 PM

11232169.1Just Watch Big Brother, same idea pretty much.123 Every blog in the world has probably latched onto this. How could you not? Lindsay Lohan, celebrity in the early 21st century sense, has given an interview. In it, she said,

It changed my life. I didn't have a good grip on it and I needed to get my shit together. I was going out too much and I had too much pressure on my shoulders. I was not that happy and I needed to go to that place to be happy. If I get stressed out I say a serenity prayer. I meditate too. I was going out with someone and they said I should read Machiavelli and I was like, 'nah', and then I was, 'OK, I'll read it' and now it is always with me.

When she talks about Machiavelli here, she means Niccolo Machiavelli and his work, "The Prince." The webpage I found to copy her quote from already had 871 comments. They weren't kind. My take ... our society has turned loose upon a city of nine million a Machiavelli-swilling blonde with megamoney, automobiles, an I.Q. of a grape and an attitude in the stratospheric range. I can see only positive things here as a new industry comes to life with the job of chronicling the fallout. Could be good for a full point of GDP in the long run.

Another entry from the "Don't Get Old" Journal. Your ears. Hair grows throughout your life but, sadly, at a certain point, DNA goes berserk and begins to grow it just about anywhere and at any angle. Like on your ear where it can curl a bit and just barrrrely touch the inside where it itches to the point where you wish someone would just reach in and pull your brain out. So .. I got the idea of using the new camera to get a real good picture of that side of me, a view which is awkward if not impossible with a mirror - the beginning of a plan at least. I put the camera on max everything for the closeup of the left side of my head.

Advice: Do Not Do This. Itch or not, you will never again be ready for that much of a close up, Mr. DeMille.


posted by Rick at 9:47 PM

11232168.1You seem pretty strong for a girl.123 Having groceries delivered is probably a bit beyond my means, but who knows what "means" even are these days? I'm not buying diapers or crack cocaine, so that portion of my disposable income I suppose can go for groceries. In any event, I'll never go back. If there is one place on earth where I definitely do not belong, aside from a kitchen, it's a grocery store. This girl, woman, drives a huge truck and hauls all my stuff UP the driveway [steep] and UP the stairs [10] to the front door and then into the house with more bags in each arm than I could lift in half a dozen trips. Okay, slight exaggeration, but she did heft enough that it prompted the comment from me. She was all right with it, even though these days it would be considered critically gender inappropriate, because I'm old. Oh let it go, Sasquatchia, he's old. Kinda cute, though.

Down at the Safeway you get no breaks, however, old or cute. I used to ask the old ladies for help in the produce section. Not the young ones, though; they tend to freak when dirty old men talk to them. But I pretty much stopped talking to anyone when all I did was ask this one old lady which she thought would be better, squash or cucumber, and then she got all weird and loud.


posted by Rick at 11:39 AM

11232167.1"Mike, our next millionaire.."123 That's what John Beresford Tipton would say each week in his labored, raspy, airless voice as he reached out his bony, scaly arthritic hand to give the check to "Mike." Three adjectives for Mike? Androidistic. Cold as a dead fish, can't remember the word for that - something ichthyish. Efficient.

Our next millionaire, not as uptown. Long/short, a young boy was taken from the woman who gave birth to him and delivered to a maternal step-grandmother for safekeeping. How could that hap... No one knows. Grams beat the hell out of him for years, parked him in a small trailer in the back yard and generally treated him with a bit less kindness and care than she would her junkyard dogs. She got paid for this labor of love, of course, we do that. Many, many C.P.S. referrals later, enough that when the whole thing finally hit the fan, which these things generally do, dead or alive, the Actual Director of C.P.S., a blonde, went on television herself to do the statement. Cracks, as in "Falling through the." Adjustments. Training. More phones. Changes, so it will never happen again. Studies. Meanwhile, in Seattle, several lawyers very high up in skyscrapers found they were developing erections, and these weren't for the blonde.

Yes, in a few years the lad will indeed be our next millionaire, in a sense, after the investigations, the court stuff, the routine. There will be a small headline back in section B-2 $1.93 million awarded in child ab ... and some might glance at it and wonder wasn't that the one with the kid and the step-grandmother? Of course, the lad will never know that he was briefly a millionaire, since the loot will be oh-so-carefully held and monitored "for his ultimate protection" until it is completely consumed by the holding-of-for-protection fees and considerations. Ahhhhh.

And how do you retain your soul and sanity in a world where such cruelty and injustice prevails, thrives? By having a strong belief in an alert God Almighty who takes Very Good Notes. Sadly, I don't.


posted by Rick at 10:06 AM