Monthly Archives: March 2004

Tinker’s Damn

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So, more tinkering with the stylesheet and main index, but nothing earth-shattering.

After discovering the joys of RSS feeds and reading in an aggregator, I discovered the heartbreak of excerpts-only feeds. So anything that offers a full-text feed is now linked via the aggregator, and anything that offers excerpts-only is linked via Blogrolling. Also, some blogs are nicer to read directly rather than via…(hark at her!)

Oy, I’m such a newbie still.

COMIX!

Oh, joy!! Mutts is online.

Yesh.

For now I’ll be reading via email updates, but an RSS feed may soon via available via Tapestry.

“I’m Not Trying To Be A Jag-Off”

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I’m not kidding, this is what a woman caller said to one of the agents today. The call was evidently not going well, and the woman was balking on some point of the corporate travel policy.

Then she interrupted the increasingly frustrated agent with this cryptic comment:

“I’m not trying to be a jag-off.”

So now we’re trying to figure out if she really said “jack-off”, which would be a a really weird and shocking thing for a woman executive to say in a business environment. The agent got a good laugh out of mimicking someone that sounded a lot like Selma Diamond for the rest of us.

Or maybe in the part of the country where she comes from, “JAG-off” means either “pain in the ass” or “argumentative sea-lawyer.”

Bad Idea, Wes

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Oh, Wesley, you really shouldn’t take in a stray, even if it does look like your lost love.

I reserve judgement on whether Fred will come back. As Spike and Angel admitted, it’s been done before, no big deal. Which is why now (with the series ending) it would actually be a surprise if Fred really was permanently dead, and not just mostly dead.

(kudos to Amy Acker, who got to do something interesting for the first time in a while)

Imagine if that was the series-ending episode…. yikes. I hope there are a few more eps in the pipeline.

I Can See My House From Here

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From Accordion Guy: a list of things we wish we knew how to say in Aramaic while watching “The Passion of the Christ.”

Notably missing are translations for:

  • Everybody, sit on this side of the table, or you won’t be in the painting.
  • “Always look on the bright side of life…”
  • Crucfixion? No, I’m here for freedom.
  • (On the cross): I can see my house from here!
  • Hey, Siddhartha! You just sat under a tree — I got nailed to one, yuppie-boy!

Collectively, they all got a big “Hee!!!” from me. Only the other morning, I switched over the car radio from a surprisingly serious and dogmatic discussion of That Big Religious Movie on “The Zone,” (young, hip, alterna-neo-grungy rock) to “WXRT Chicago’s Finest Raaahk” (more mature, still very hip, with a deep and broad playlist). Thank God, (Lin Brehmer was playing “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life.”

Perfect timing – Lin’s the Man.

And then tonight David and I discussed whether or not “I can see my house from here!” was a very bad line from Star Trek or not. David swore the line was a myth, but something like it was said by a Romulan traitor in Next Gen. I was not sure, but thought I’d seen an ep or movie with a Klingon saying it while standing in a holodeck for the first time.

David went to bed insisting I was imagining this.

Well, I was not. Sometimes my random access memory isn’t that random after all.

I think I need to wake him up with this important fact. ;)**&&&

Polar Bear Joke

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How To Survive An Attack By a Polar Bear With An Ice Pick And A Can Of Peas:

If attacked by a polar bear, run away while simultaneously hacking open the can of peas with the ice pick. Then use the pick to chop a hole in the ice, and quickly arrange the peas in a single line around the edge of the hole.

Polar bears are curious, and he will be intrigued. When the polar bear stops to take a pea, let him have it with the ice pick (no need to kick him in the icehole, he’s quite dead).

Congratulations, you have survived! You may safely return to civilization.

However, don’t forget to pack your trash out, so take the empty can with you.

The Planes! The Planes!

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When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to the airport to watch the planes land and take off. We’d drive out to the old Albuquerque airport and park somewhere along the access road near the end of the runway, and we’d sit on the hood of our green station wagon and watch for the liveries of airliners and military planes. There was nothing out there but us, the car, some tumbleweeds, the smell of aviation fuel mixed with the scent of sagebrush, and of course the planes.

These days this might seem creepy; then it was innocent, and offered a glimpse of the glamourous life of travelers and the space-age wonder of aviation. One day we saw a delta-wing aircraft, which Pop thought was really exciting and a technical wonder, but it gave me nightmares later about little aliens in triangular spaceships. This was about the era of the “my blannie, my blannie!” photo at the upper right of this page. That’s our old backyard in ABQ, by the way.

And now I’m a travel agent, and stumble across sites like this one. And I still get to watch the planes, and it’s still pretty fun (and also it’s handy if we’re at work and and United goes low and slow overhead – we can see where it’s going now).

There’s more airports linked off of this page.

Farscape Celebration Deflation?

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***Dave
reports exciting Farscape news, in addition to previous exciting Firefly news and B5 news (a friend has the Variety article on the Firefly news here.

But is this a real “bricks and mortar” production, or an online production? It looks like a project put together by former makeup/character production crew members… need to dig a little.

And while I do, this article is pretty amusing and/or depressing if you’re a fan of TV science fiction (and yes, we have Scare Tactics triple thumbs-downed, thanks for asking)

Gardening Is A Four Letter Word

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It was nice enough Sunday to get out in the yard and do a little cleanup. We have an ornamental trash-catcher bush in the front yard – I think it’s some kind of hawthorn, and I think it’s some kind of ugly nasty encroacher that’s going to see its last spring. Not only is it overgrown and ugly 11 1/2 months of the year, it shelters a merry little band of voles that have been feasting on the grass for a couple of years – I figured out what they were at the end of the summer, but then it was too late to get a little man in to deal with them. And I thought maybe they’d move on or get killed off over the winter. No such luck.

Well, it’s time for the GALMI system after all, I’m thinking.

I’ll be calling the dreaded Terminix (or whoever it is we use) and asking them if they can deal with the vole problem. From what I recall, it’s not a “homeowner fixable” task – the stuff they use (yuck) is dangerous.

If there were a way to trap the little buggers and ship them over to the nice wetland preserve across the street, I’d do it, but I bet they don’t have a humane trap option for this type of pest.

I realized I’d have to do something drastic about the voles because I had to rake a lot of junk out from under the trash-catcher, along with a pile of brush from last year that got tucked back underneath it the last time I tried to cut it back. The voles have killed the lawn all around the edge (and I don’t think it’s winterkill. My plan for that area was always to dig out the bush and some nasty flat junipers (the kind that always smell of cat-pee) and put in an irregular raised bed with maybe a Japanese maple (or some other lacy ornamental tree that’s not a traffic hazard on a corner lot).

The back yard shows some damage to the lawn, too – big dry cracks in the grass, yet the ground is saturated (gotta love the horrible clay “soil” we have here). I’m worried that there’s voles out back, too.

Joy.