floorpie

Being a dork, I have many dorky hobbies; one of which is keeping a reef aquarium. There is something different about this particular dork pursuit, though, in that whenever someone is in my apartment, they invariably gravitate towards my aquarium, lean down to put their faces on an even level with the inhabitants, and let their speech trail off as their fascination increases. Everyone seems to know at least a little bit about marine life; enough so that they may ask more than polite questions that border on actual interest. It seems to me, then, that I have found an eddy in the nerd stream; a place where one particular pastime is somehow immune to the majority of dorkedness flowing so closely beside it. Therefore, to all of you closet Trekkies, Chess-Club co-captains, too old Barbie aficionados, and Dungeon Masters, if you’re interested in being at least slightly accepted by the Masses while still retaining your dork heritage, may I humbly suggest that you pick up some goldfish from your local State Fair and go to town. You will not be disappointed.

I stumbled upon this cool and creative site where the author draws pictures based on the title you give him. My favorite so far: Stephie poo, I am still madly in love with you.

My apartment complex has a little laundry room down at the bottom of the stairs. 4 washers, 4 dryers, $1.00 each machine. Obviously, there’s a little bit of luck involved if you think you’re going to snag a machine after work, and tonight I was just that lucky. I only had $2 in quarters, so I had to be selective. Sheets were going to have to go yet another week, I had enough socks to last me a little while, underwear was a priority of course, as were my very few hip-ish shirts. As I loaded the washer, I looked around and saw a dryer with only $0.25 needed. Some poor sap had miscalculated how many quarters he had, and I was only two bits away from a dry instead of the usual rock. Looking stealthily around I saw only one other washer going with less time than mine. If the fates smiled on me, I would be back down and loading that dryer before my competition was the wiser. I hurriedly finished loading my washer, set the thing to “undulate”, ran up stairs, and set a timer.

A re-run of Friends later, I’m downstairs and throwing clothes into my prize. A few seconds after I start, my competition walks in. She doesn’t know what she just lost, but to me she looks defeated all the same. Dial in my preferred settings (permanent press, medium heat), pull a new gleaming quarter with some representation of Georgia stamped on it out of my pocket, slide it into the slot and…nothing. Quick whack on the change box…nothing. Damn. Looking inside I see the remnants of the other beady-eyed laundry jockeys’ attempts at pulling a fast one on The Establishment. I, however, am an engineer, and if there’s one thing about our breed, we like to tinker with things until they work. Run upstairs, luckily find an extra quarter to start my laundry going regardless, grab the broken off end of a hack saw I’ve been saving for apparently just this occasion, and head downstairs again. I throw my wet clothes into the next-door dryer and start it up. Close the door to the laundry room and set to work.

15 minutes, several kicks, and a hundred hack saw jabs in the slot later, I was $3.00 richer and Master of the Universe. I guess those sheets are going to get washed after all.

oh…my…god. I have found something that will seriously impact my future work performance. The Gen X-ers among you will certainly remember all of those awesome video games you used to play at the Flipper Flapper in the mall. One of my favorites was always Spy Hunter. You remember that one? It’s the one where you drove this car with two speeds and a machine gun as standard equipment. That not quite James Bond theme would play in the background, and, (near as I can tell) the only point was to drive, drive, drive. Awesome. Up there’s a picture of me concentrating very hard on it, and, down here’s the link to Midway Games (Atari)

I love this site: 19th Century Medical Curios/Elephant Man HomePage. If you’re feint of heart, I’d definitely recommend going to get a Twinkie instead. If, however, you’re into the deliciously disturbing, click away. Delve further by clicking the baby picture where you’ll discover that some guy sells these things under the guise of high art. Glorious…

The “group” at work, and I, have reached local status at one of the diner-esque places down the street. At least two of us can confidently say that we’ll have “the usual” and have faith that we’ll receive what we thought we would. As I’m sure you all realize, along with getting your driver’s license, this sort of thing is basically the penultimate Life occurrence. So I don’t know if I’m happy to have achieved this so early in Life, or a little disappointed that now I’m really just waiting to die.

Interesting article from FEED summarizing the energy situation in California. It paints us as being wide-eyed and naive with real hopes for a Hollywood ending. At least it also implies we have fashion sense, though:

“The fossil-fuel business is the Old Economy at its most primeval and piratical. It’s not run by dot-com guys in moleskin slacks and polo shirts. It’s run by genocidal warlords in berets. “

Or something.

At any rate, I find it interesting how easily we can take a cavalier attitude to this sort of thing, and languidly hope that everything turns out OK in the end. In Russia (and by “Russia” I mean any stereotypically grim country where things are assumedly worse than here) they’d be lining up around the block to stockpile sterno and candles by now. Err, that is to say, I’m not the only one watching TV with all the lights on and pretending this isn’t happening, am I?

For those of you among us who believe that The Establishment is embroiled in an insidious plot to control and influence us in a highly technological and deliciously evil way, should take a trip to your local Post Office. There you will find the last true bastion of old world hospitality, charming inefficiency, gloriously social queues, and technological wonders that harken back to the early Betamax Age. Of course, Their true genius could lie in Their apparent lack of it…

Things I wish I’d done by now but haven’t yet, Second in an increasingly unlikely Series:
– become an artist
– bought a new car
– bought a house to enclose said car
– invented a widget that everyone needs two of
– led the Morlocks in revolution

Taking into account that she’s an intelligent, well-read, senior editor for a magazine, I for someone reason found it really funny that while playing Scrabble yesterday, Meg was heard to exclaim, “I only have, like, ONE consonant [pause, pause] I shit you not!!!”

Having been harangued by, err, someone for the above, I’ve decided to append a more flattering (although fake) anecdote about the aforementioned evening. Again taking into account how she works in the literary field, I was duly impressed when she cleared all of her tiles with “quoroms”. That “q” really racks up the points, especially on a triple word score. Plus, you get 50 bonus points for using all of your tiles, so… Who ever comes up with words like that, anyway? I’m usually stuck with stuff like “cat” and “a”. Of course, I was luckily able to come up with more “cats” than she was “quoroms”, which resulted in my, humbly, kicking her ass.