I try and be funny at captions blog. You should go there and try to be funny, too.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. – Rick Blaine
I watched Casablanca for the second time last night. I know, I know, a dashing young gentleman such as myself should be watching football instead of a romantic drama, but hey, it’s a great movie. The best thing about old cinema is undoubtedly the dialogue. There wasn’t music over every second of film as there is now, and with all that impending dead silence, they had to fill it up with something. You actually have to pay attention to follow the storyline, and when you do, you’re rewarded with a bombardment of witty humor and amazing elocution. Perhaps I’m getting a bit carried away, but you can’t help waxing poetic when dealing with an accepted classic.
Trivia: The famous line, “Play it again, Sam.” is never actually said in the movie. Ilsa almost says it (“Play it once, Sam”) and Rick does as well, though less so (“If she can stand it, I can. Play it.”), but the exact words are never actaully uttered. Not unlike, incidentally, the fact that P.T. Barnum never actually said “There’s a sucker born every minute”.
So, I have my new comments template up…
(thanks to Snorland for the comments system)
Good? Bad? Indifferent?
…and a fire-truck, and a new bike, and a Red Ryder Carbine Action, 200 Shot, Range Model Air Rifle…
So, all Choire wants for his birthday is a story that I wouldn’t otherwise tell. In his honor, I shall tell one. It’s not particularly sordid or compelling, but it is something I rarely mention:
I am a weird guy. This is not based solely on personal opinion, or, this-one-time-at-band-camp stories. I’ve come to this conclusion through the opinion of others. I have been called: weird, odd, strange, dramatic, eccentric, sick, off, disturbed, unique, abnormal, curiouser and curiouser, and a host of other names that illustrate that I have not been successful in fitting in the box society built for me. You wouldn’t know it by looking at me, though. I don’t have any tattoos, my hair’s the same color it was when I was born (actually, that’s not true, I was born blond but ended up brown), I wear my underwear inside my pants instead of out, I have a normal job, and I function reasonably well from day to day. Apparently, though, it’s not the way I look, it’s the things I say, or more correctly, the thoughts I think. As with most people, as you get to know me you begin to develop a more lucid picture of what’s going on inside of me.
As near as I can tell, there’s something weird with that picture…but I digress.
More often than not, my weirdness is explained by those around me by the phrase, “Oh, he’s an only child? That explains it!”. Enter the part of the story I don’t usually tell. To all outside observers, I am an only child. I have no siblings, I’m spoiled rotten, and I don’t know the joys of sharing a room. Even so, this is not entirely true, I once had a sister.
Well, that’s not entirely true either. My parents once had a daughter. She was born about a year before I was, and lived only one day, killed by complications during childbirth. Her name was Stacy Ann Kleeman, and I’m sure I would have loved her very much. I’ve never been to her grave, and never talked at length about her with my parents. All I know is that she existed, and that she was my sister, in a way.
Sometimes, I wonder if I would have ever been born if Stacy’s life hadn’t ended so tragically. Sometimes, I wonder if we would have ever even gotten along. Most times, though, I just think it’s sad. Consequently, whenever someone says “Oh, he’s an only child? That explains it!”, I do a little evaluation in my head. Do I want this person to feel bad? Is it really relevant? Do I want to talk about this right now? Most of the time the answer to these questions is “no”, and I keep my story to myself; partially so as not to upset the person, and partially not to upset me. I always feel guilty not saying anything, though, as if I am not properly honoring the memory of my sister (a memory I don’t, strictly speaking, actually have). I feel like explaining my behavior away as being the result of a single upbringing, completely dismisses a life that didn�t have a chance to begin, but that has had an affect on me all the same.
So, should I ever meet you, and you ask if I have any siblings, if I hesitate before saying “no”, understand why.
I stayed up late and drove to a park to check out the Leonid meteor shower. I stopped counting as I crossed over 50; but, I couldn’t help my dazzlement being mingled with a sense of melancholy when I thought about what I was actually looking at. Which, namely, was not a whole lot. I could see Venus, and ubiquitous Orion; but, the patch of relatively clear sky above me wasn’t much larger than a projection of my outstretched hand. The rest of the sky was shrouded in a muddy fog of dispersed light. It made me wonder what I was missing and how much I might have seen. How strange it will be, when the inevitable future of no night sky catches up with us. Imagine the panic, 500 years from now, when the forgotten sky suddenly flares back into life from a world-wide power outage. Hysteria and Chicken Little.
At any rate, light pollution is a correctable evil.
Besides which, we wouldn’t want Don to miss out on his fun:
A cool thing to do when out eyeballing a meteor shower is to wait till someone is looking at the ground and then say, “Whoa!”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Friday’s should not be this busy.
Especially seeing as everyone else seems to work less, and get paid more…
I ate alone in a restaurant tonight for the first time in a long time. Of the five occupied tables, two of them were singles. The other single table was a 40-ish man, umarried, eating slowly, and…crap no, that’s his wife and that’s his daughter returning from the bathroom.
Make that 1 of 5.
Overheard Conversation
One Guy: I took this test last night, and I have no idea how I did on it.
Two Guy: Oh yeah? What on?
One Guy: ‘C++’ …It’s over at the college.
Two Guy: Oh yeah? How much did it cost?
One Guy: $67
Two Guy: …
One Guy: It’s tough, you’ve got to have a complete handle on Object Oriented Programming and control structures.
Two Guy: sure, yeah…
One Guy: [couple walks by] Hi! Welcome to Orchard Supply Hardware, can I help you find anything?
couple: no thanks…
One Guy: Yeah, so anyway…
I’ve come to a hard realization:
I will never be a Blog of Note.
I don’t know, maybe I’m not funny enough, interesting enough, deviant enough, or whatever enough;but, as I muddle along in this blog-world, I feel more and more that I will always be hovering just outside the A-List. Sure, I’ve been linked by blogging juggernauts like ernie, dave, and jish, but I’m no hot camgirl or survivorcam hero.
Maybe it would help if I knew evan, but, unfortunately, staking out his apartment doesn’t seem to be helping. Or, maybe making friends with fellow bloggers would make me more provocative (although hanging out with meg only made me interesting temporarily, and it turns out that that was because she is).
Ah well, I can live with my relative anonymity. This whole blog-McDealie is supposed to be for me and my sanity anyway, not the notoriety that I may gain from it. Besides which, I will take the world by storm when I unveil my amazing new invention: hot-dog clocks.
if you think this was a thinly veiled plea for links, you may already be a winner
2 psi Radius: 4.7 miles
Any single-family residences that have not been completely destroyed are heavily damaged. The windows of office buildings have been blown away, as have some of their walls. Everything on these buildings’ upper floors, including the people who were working there, are thrown onto the street. Substantial debris clutters the entire area. Five percent of the population between the 5 and 2 psi rings are dead. Forty-five percent are injured.
Should nearby Lockheed Martin be bombed (at which, by the way, I once worked and was told that the satellite dishes there were on the country’s top ten strategic strike sites list) my apartment would be a pile of bloody sticks. Which would go with my personal style, of course, as I’d be a pile of bloody bits.
Check the carnage in your area! Fun for the whole family!
