It amazes me...

...that the phrase 'cat personality transplant' yielded no results on Google. Neither did 'feline personality transplant,' for that matter.

I shall just nurse my claw- and fang-inflicted wounds in cranky silence, then, while I wait for Google to crawl this page. Infernal beast.

Head Games.

Hello, my name is Fox, and I am here to humbly admit to my greatest vanity... my hair.

There have been times where I have had maybe fifty dollars to my name, and I have opted to live on instant rice for a couple of weeks to be able to spend that money on a haircut. I'm not saying my hair looks good all the time, believe me. When I'm at home, I let it do whatever the hell it wants. But I am the sort of person who, if I know I'm going to be seen by someone outside my home, will be certain to do my hair... even if the single soul who will see it is the City Treasury clerk who takes my payment for a parking ticket, for example, or maybe the teenaged stoner who sells me cigarettes on the gas station graveyard shift. I don't really think any random person cares about my coiffure, and I don't really care what they think in the first place, so don't ask me why it matters, but it somehow does. When I go out in public without doing my hair, I feel as though I should be wearing a bag over my head so as not to scare small children or cause people to bend over, retching. I was profoundly uncomfortable to meet a whole bunch of people in Canada some months ago after what I found an unsatisfactory haircut, too... I suppose I could have just made and worn a badge with a picture of myself with better hair or something, but that really reeks of 'crazy' and I don't think my hair neurosis is quite so far gone.

I do, however, blame salons for furthering hair madness. Mine is particularly bad. I walk in through the glass doors and warm air laden with a heady blend of the sleek scents of perfumed styling products hits me full in the face and almost palpably, seductively slides over my skin. Machines whirr and click and roar, mutedly. All around me, dim golden lighting glints off exotic-looking bottles, jars, pots and tubes of jewel-bright potions and unguents, elegant and arcane on stacked glass shelves. At the front desk, the pampering begins. The receptionist takes my coat, my stylist expertly massages my scalp during the shampoo, works her amazing magic and ultimately makes me feel relaxed, confident and invariably both more stylish and sexier than when I walked in. The question, 'So how would you suggest I maintain this look?' can usually, at that point, boil right down to 'Please, dark mistress of hair, share the secrets of your glamours with me! Which of the insanely overpriced products out front must I buy to make my hair look as though you styled it personally every day? GUIDE ME!'

At which point I pay for the haircut, tip extravagantly--I consider it insurance against haircut 'accidents' in the future--and invariably end up buying some miniscule amount of product in a disproportionately large and expensive-looking container. The less of it you get, the more expensive it tends to be, too... the illusion of rarity. The styling product that comes in a plastic jug priced at five bucks per gallon is never going to sell in the alternate reality of a beauty salon, no matter how great it is. Put the same hair goop, one gram per, in a frosted-glass container shaped like a pyramid with a sparkling red metallic capstone lid and be sure to call it something French, like 'L'Egyptienne,' and that shit will fly off the shelves at easily twenty bucks a pop, whether it's any good or not.

The stuff I got last time is a whole four ounces of 'molding crème' in a funky translucent tub bigger than my fist. It smells faintly of tropical fruit, lotion and sex, but looks like iridescent, cream-coloured slime. The directions instruct one to emulsify it between one's fingers, and the whole reason I bought it is because when my stylist did that part, she pulled her fingers apart to show me that in a wholly inexplicable phenomenon, tiny little fragile white fibers poof out of the slime and into the air. As almost all the ingredients have names like 'deaoleth-evil-ycene stearated hydroxylethanolosis no. 4889' and the like, I have no idea what the little fibers are. But they fascinate me, and my curiosity as to their indentification has led me to discover the following freaky ingredients in my hair goop:

-Copper, iron, magnesium, silicon and zinc ferments
-retinyl polypeptide
-sucrose
-castor oil

I had no idea until right now that I was smearing a mixture of metal 'ferments,' sugar and castor oil (among other ingredients) on my head. And a polypeptide is, if I remember correctly, like a string of amino acids... linked by peptide bonds? I could be generating primordial life in my hair with this stuff. Witness the power of salon suggestion... I know it will be the same thing all over again next time I have an appointment.

Vancouver Chainsaw Massacre!

The title of this entry is courtesy of the esteemed Linkmeister, as is the article excerpted below:

Let me just say that the Sawfish robot is quite possibly the coolest thing I have heard about in weeks. At least. I just wish I could find a picture.

Remember QRIO?

I marveled at Sony's QRIO robot before, but my jaw dropped when I watched four of them dance.

Oh, yeah... one conducted the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra recently, too.

(dance link via)

100 Things: The Revenge!

Okay, so no actual revenge is involved. But after some well-deserved bitching from readers who shall remain nameless about how crummy my 100 Things About Me page was, it has been redone.

New and improved, it is--same information, but the layout, banner and colors have been revamped, and it's now illustrated! Whee. The sidebar link is updated, as is the Renegade Scientist link, since in the last entry I introduced the new honoree. Enjoy!

Renegade Scientist of the Moment, Dr. Roy F. Craig.

I'm sorry to say that this is the first of my honorees to receive this award posthumously. Dr. Roy F. Craig, most notably one of the chief investigators for The Colorado Project (more on that below) and co-author of the three volume Condon Report, lost his battle with cancer on 18 March of this year at the age of seventy-nine.

Into those seventy-nine years of his, Dr. Craig enjoyed a successful career as a scientist of repute (his biography was listed in A. M. Marquis' 2001 edition of Who's Who in the World, for example) and gained a reputation for both friendliness and integrity. A brief biographic sketch, mostly courtesy of his obituary article in the Durango Herald:

Craig's college studies were interrupted by military service during WWII, but upon his return he attended Colorado State University, the University of Colorado and Caltech before receiving his doctorate in physical chemistry from Iowa State. He went on to work for Rocky Flats (then an operational nuclear weapons plant outside Boulder, now a decommissioned Superfund cleanup site), taught physical science at the University of Colorado, and helped set up the Four Corners Research Institute, offering environmental and scientific investigations. His teaching career also included visiting professorships at both the University of Hawaii and on the South Pacific Island of Ponape.

He was a prolific letter-writer and concerned citizen who was vocal in his opposition to the Vietnam War, and more recently, about issues of local land use. His opposition to the war was the result of a moral awakening of sorts--he had been supervising a staff of eighteen people at Rocky Flats, manufacturing nuclear weapons, and believed in the notion of deterrance--"If we make them, we won't have to use them." One night, he attended a speech given by an Army general who said there was no reason they shouldn't use tactical nukes to blow up Vietnamese bridges.

Very soon after attending that speech, Craig quit his job at Rocky Flats and began his teaching career.

None of the above is, somewhat unfortunately, why most people who know Dr. Craig's name have heard of him. What they know about Dr. Roy F. Craig is that he was selected by a certain Edward Condon to be the chief field investigator for The Colorado Project, the official government search for verifiable, scientific evidence for the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). In this capacity, he co-authored the aforementioned Condon Report.

The report debunked the idea that UFOs are spooky, alien-laden vehicles from space, but as recently as October of last year, Dr. Craig remarked, "I love 'em. Reports of UFOs have changed popular culture so people are accepting the probable fact that there are intelligences elsewhere," he said. "It's got people out of the rut of thinking the whole universe was created for man."

Years after the Condon Report, Craig wrote a book about his experiences researching for The Colorado Project, and later donated his papers and findings to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Library at Texas A&M's Cushing Memorial Library on the condition that they be preserved in a climate-controlled building, properly catalogued and accessible. He raised llamas, kept two peacocks and pastured buffalo on his ranch, and named the beauty of peacock feathers as all the proof he needed of the existence of God.

By all accounts that I have found, the scientific community has lost a kind, thoughtful member who loved life and promoted wonder. He receives my Renegade Scientist honor for several reasons: his work in an uncommon field for true scientific investigation, his moral opposition to the actual use of the weapons he and his team created (against the grain for a former soldier and government-employed scientist), and, though the Condon Report concluded that 'ufology' was largely useless to science, his own personal assertion that the core reason for UFO disbelief comes from humanity's very fledgling understanding of physics and cosmology, as he maintained in his own book that interstellar travel will soon be proven to be at least theoretically possible.

Further reading:
Rocky Flats Closure Project
Who's Who in the World
Nuclear Weapons and Concerned Scientists
Edward Condon and the Cold War Politics of Loyalty
The Condon Report
The Colorado Project--a scientist's perspective for MUFON
Ufological History Outline
Peacock Feathers

Expand the entry for links to previous honorees.

THE DEAD SHAMBLE!

Recently I mentioned my plans (gloriously achieved) to see Dawn of the Dead. It was excellent, scary, gory and comes highly recommended by yours truly, but it is not actually the subject of this entry.

The subject of this entry is one of the more amusing coverups I have seen of laughably bad research, courtesy Wikipedia. The sad tale begins with Paz's receipt of The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead for his birthday yesterday. He browsed through with interest, but told me I could read it first, if I liked. I am a fast reader, the book is relatively brief--I plan to finish it before he gets home from work. It is immensely entertaining and darkly tongue-in-cheek, though the surreal subject matter is dealt with in a straightforward, U.S. Army Survival Manual manner. (Mind you, many compare the Zombie guide to the Worst Case Scenarios series, but having read those books and the actual Army Survival Manual, I feel it is much more like the latter, and logically offers a good deal of the same sound advice.)

In the very beginning of the book, author Max Brooks describes a virus called Solanum that produces a classic, cinematic zombification. Throughout the rest of the book, which features a chilling list of accounts of Solanum/zombie 'outbreaks' through history (eyewitness sources are often mentioned, government conpiracies and health organization coverups abound), many references to controlled laboratory experiments involving zombies (Solanum-infected, reanimated human test subjects) are made, and the paranoia subtly and effectively reinforced. Perhaps it even has you wondering. It certainly fooled someone at Wikipedia...

The word 'solanum' had been nagging at me. Was it an obscure joke of some kind? A term for the 'disease' used in a classic living dead flick I hadn't seen? It sounded oddly familiar. A quick check revealed that solanum is the genus of plants to which potatoes, eggplants and, incidentally, deadly nightshade all belong, something that probably rang a bell with me because I've been reading up on gardening of late. Curious to see if anyone fell for the zombie virus gag, I Googled around and spotted what appeared to be an excerpt from the book itself on a Wikipedia page about zombies. I clicked the link, but the entry as it stands now doesn't mention the Solanum virus or The Zombie Survival Guide.

That was when I knew--and I had to see the cached copy, before someone advised Wikipedia of the error. I even grabbed a quick screenshot of it--it won't be in Google's cache forever. Someone took The Zombie Survival Guide at its word that the Solarum virus existed, introducing a lengthy excerpt from the book with these words:

In the interests of being thorough, I note that several Solanum viruses do exist--but they have the genus as part of their name because those are the plants that are affected... also, never fear, they do not reanimate recently deceased eggplants (nor anything else, for that matter). And in case you're frowning, thinking that I am mocking unnecessarily some poor Wiki writer who was taken in by the clever con of the nefarious Mr. Brooks, which could happen to anyone, I would like to note a few facts which require absolutely no outside research to discover if one is in possession of just the Survival Guide itself:

1. The fact that the ailment described in hour-by-hour post-infection detail does not exist is actually stated in the text itself--"Unfortunately, extensive research has yet to find an isolated example of Solanum in nature. Water, air and soil in all ecosystems, in all parts of the world, have turned up negative, as have their accompanying flora and fauna. At the time of this writing, the search continues." The semi-astute reader will have some trouble reconciling that statement with the some sixty-one accounts of zombie 'outbreaks' and massacres that make up about a third of the book.

2. The purported modern 'outbreaks' were largely hushed up or otherwise occluded by The Powers That Be, ostensibly to contain the situation, terminate the 'infected' with suspected extreme prejudice, and avoid the panic an admission that the dead were reanimating to feast on the living would undoubtedly bring... but some guy who seems to have no other book credits or, truthfully, any actual credentials of any kind, journalistic, military or otherwise, happens to know all about them, and has managed to openly publish a book revealing the truth.

3. Check just above the barcode. Check the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, for Pete's sake. From which section does this work hail? Humor.

4. Though many references are made to journalistic and/or historical accounts (usually written records), as well as scientific studies and experiments, this book contains no bibliography.

If that's not reassurance enough, please realize that Max Brooks is not only the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks, but also a writer for Saturday Night Live. The most cursory of web searches will reveal that, as difficult as it may be to accept that anyone who provides material for that show actually wrote something this funny.

EDITED TO NOTE: Wikipedia makes no claims of validity, mind you. It is a user-edited site, and the content on any subject may, in fact, be super-duper-false. No one actually edits it. That said, I still have to snicker at anyone who took The Zombie Survival Guide as an authoritative reference document steeped in fact... and believed that a virus that reanimates the dead crops up rather regularly all over the globe.

Musical Interlude

Opium Tea

Here I sleep the morning through
'Til the wail of the call to prayer awakes me
And there ain't nothing at all to do but rise and follow
The day wherever it takes me

I stand at the window and I look at the sea
And I am what I am, and what will be will be
I stand at the window and I look at the sea
And I make me a pot of opium tea

Down at the port I watch the boats come in
Watch the boats come in can do something to you
And the kids gather around with an outstretched hand
And I toss them a diram or two

Well, I wonder if my children are thinking of me
Cause I am what I am, and what will be will be
I wonder if my kids are thinking of me
And I smile and I sip my opium tea

At night the sea lashes the rust red ramparts
And the shapes of hooded men who pass me
And the moan of the wind laughs and laughs and laughs
The strange luck that fate has cast me

Well, the cats on the rampart sing merrily
That he is what he is and what will be will be
Yeah, the cats on the rampart sing merrily
And I sit and I drink of my opium tea

I'm a prisoner here, I can never go home
There is nothing here to win or lose
There are no choices needed to be made at all
Not even the choice of having to choose

Well, I'm a prisoner here, yes, but I'm also free
Cause I am what I am and what will be will be
I'm a prisoner here, yeah, but I'm also free
And I smile and I sip my opium tea.

--Nick Cave

also there is a monkey in the film

I've been browsing IMDB fairly regularly lately, writing little movie reviews, messing around. Last night I had the misfortune of seeing Old School--I had figured it would be good, stupid frat slapstick to have in the background while cleaning. Well, it wasn't. But that's somewhat beside the point.

I was browsing the reviews on Old School, trying to see what justification anyone could have for voting it (on average!) a 6.7/10, when I happened upon this:

"i cant belive there is a film in with skeletor. it is a brilliant idea. the only problem is that papa smurf is not in it. the main bio of this film is about a cople of narcoleptic school students who go on a road trip (wooooopy) cause they have lost their magic balloon.

Guest Starring: Joe Pesquali - Slimmer"

IMDB purportedly screens their user-submitted reviews very closely and carefully, or so they would have you believe. It was only written this month, so perhaps they might decide to yank it due to... well, bizarre irrelevance? A strange attempt at humor? This review is much funnier than the actual movie, and coincidentally bears no resemblance to it at all. I felt the need to both share it with you and immortalize it for posterity. (A check through the same user's other comments reveals more of the same, but this one seems to be his crowning glory.)

Proofreader of the Dead.

I'm going to see Dawn of the Dead tomorrow, and I thoroughly expect it to scare the living bejesus out of me. In anticipation, I was idly exploring the movie website. They have an excellent 'undead timeline' that lists summaries of a whole host of zombie tales and films through the years, beginning around 1920 or so.

Reading the brief description of Evil Dead, I noticed that in the middle of this slick little atmospheric Flash timeline, someone missed an error. Sam Raimi's cult classic is referred to as the debut of his 'ultraviolet trilogy.'

Wow... ultraviolet! What kind of drugs do you have to do to get that effect? I'm not sure the infamous 'tree scene' in Evil Dead would be improved by shooting it in black light, but you never know. Couldn't hurt.

Hollywood Violence!

I guess it stands to reason that such an emotional film (as it is for so many) could result in some heated debates. The War of the Davidsons is certainly not the first time people have fought over religion, nor will it be the last.

I'm still occasionally giggling about it, though, because it is such a graphically violent film, and I can just hear echoes of Focus on the Family or the CAPAlert fellow complaining heartily about the effects of Hollywood violence on society (CAPMan's review of The Passion is available on his site... my link in no way implies endorsement of his opinions or ministry).

Ghost Voting.

The article will disgust you further, if you share my view on this. You know, I bet Rieger doesn't need that per diem, but I doubt he's going to actually 'soon return' the money. Considering that a ghost vote was once the single vote that caused Pennsylvania lawmakers to pass a tax increase, I bet his constituents could use it. I know I could.

Rieger, specifically, has been confronted about this before, and his professional response was to launch a profanity-filled tirade at the Inquirer. Golly, I guess I never realized that playing hooky and taking Hawaiian vacations while a wad of paper votes an indiscriminate 'yea' on every bill that happens by was so common, even though it is in direct violation of House rules. I don't feel that this is particularly representative of the wishes of the people--how many of us could get away with that sort of behavior at our jobs?

I'm disgusted that an elected official is swearing at and lying to the press when confronted on the issue of not doing his damn job, and getting our money for it anyway. Perhaps it's time that the rule about ghost voting is enforced... else what is the point of having such a rule in the first place? It certainly doesn't make me feel very secure to know that our state House sounds like it's running on slipshod autopilot by conniving weasels.

The Blogroll Alphabet.

I have some kind of wretched head cold. In the interests of keeping myself entertained while I am waiting for the medicine to kick in AND the continual desire to keep this blog updated on a very regular basis (despite my dead computer), I submit for your approval The Blogroll Alphabet!

Every link has been culled lovingly from my blogroll, specifically from content available on the front page (i.e., at least semi-recent entries).

Yeah, it's blogroll pimpin'.

No, it ain't easy... but it sure is fun.* Expand and see.

Observe.

I have written entries on how to locate, foil and subvert various visual surveillance devices. I've also told you about iSee, a burgeoning project that maps the path of least surveillance through various metro areas.

Today, I find myself writing yet another entry on public cameras, only this one is fraught with links to them! Nice, huh? Well, you can thank Carnegie Mellon's Data Privacy Lab, and their Surveillance of Surveillances (SOS) project. One of the outgrowths of the SOS project is Camera Watch, a database of online cameras that monitor the public all over the United States. At this time, the page advises that the database includes only a few hundred active links, though they have six thousand more queued for processing and later addition... as soon as within the next few weeks, so keep checking back. Most of the current links go to highway or aerial cams, but there are school and jail cams, scenic cams and more (no personal cams included).

Just moments ago, I watched an employee of the Anderson County (Tennessee) Sheriff's Deaprtment idly pick his nose. It's amazing, the things technology allows.

While you're waiting for more interesting links to be added to the Camera Watch database, expand this entry for some other online cameras you might enjoy watching...

Howard Vs. George, New and Improved!

Dr. Dean may be out of the race, but there's a new Howard on the political horizon... radio 'shock jock' Howard Stern.

No, he's not running for office. But he's now exhorting his 8.5 million listeners not to vote for Bush in November. It's important to note that Howard has plenty of reasons to dislike the current administration, considering their support for the huge increase in FCC indecency fine amounts alone... and how many of those he's incurred over the years. But whether or not you like Stern, he has been credited with helping his candidates win tight elections in the past, such as NY Governor Pataki and former NJ Governor (now with the EPA, I believe) Christie Todd Whitman (who named a rest stop on the NJ Turnpike after Howard). It may also be noteworthy that both of them happen to be Republicans.

Apparently he really kicked into overdrive on the Bush-hating about two weeks ago, and now it's a constant thing. More power to him--the article on ABCnews.com also notes that approval of Bush is down significantly among Stern's main audience... men. I don't think we can attribute that to Howard per se, but there's little arguing that he has a lot of sway over his loyal listeners, and perhaps it will impress people who know he has supported the GOP in the past. Then again, maybe more people than expected will just write it off as a personal vendetta. Who knows? All I can say is that I'm just glad someone else is speaking out. The margins last time were close enough that a whole election was fudged and stolen.

Every last vote counts.

Let's just have a robot print us a cement house!

Linkmeister sent this to me right after I had had a conversation with Paz about this same topic. Recalled to mind was an article I'd seen a while back about scientists using inkjet printing technology to 'print' living tissue, the first step in being able to replicate entire organs or sheets of living skin for grafts. Truly fascinating stuff, I think.

The article on the robotic house-printer reminds me of something I read in a William Gibson novel--I think it was mentioned in Idoru. One of the characters can see buildings 'growing' rather organically outside his window in Tokyo... they're being constructed by great swarms of nanobots, so they appear to slowly be sort of sprouting up out of their foundations, not obviously being built by anything that can be seen by the naked eye.

I find it interesting how quickly technological concepts from science-fiction and near-futurism are becoming reality. I feel we are witnessing, in these first 'printing' tech baby steps, the dawn of, say, Star Trek-style replication or the Maker units of Transmetropolitan.

Lawn Analysis.

I have robots and stuff to write about, but I insist upon highlighting trivial, Boring Daily Life Stuff for a moment.

The other day, I walked out of the house to discover that our next-door neighbour had blocked off her patch of front yard with three-foot-high wooden stakes. Now, we live in a townhouse that is connected to the townhouses of our neighbours, so when I say 'patch' of front yard, that is exactly what I mean. The area she staked off can't be more than, say, five square feet.

A little background first, though--this particular neighbour is very nice. She is also very odd, or at least, she keeps an odd schedule. Actually, I've got nothing to say about her schedule--obviously I keep an odd schedule, too, or I wouldn't be awake to know that she does. But when one is, say, doing some heavy-duty gardening at four in the morning, I think 'odd' applies more broadly. She does take a great deal of pride in her little garden, and it is by far the nicest flowerbed of any of our townhouses. In fact, it's almost always tidy and trimmed and flowering and seasonally-decorated--she puts the rest of us to shame.

These stakes, though... they were a new development. At first I wondered if perhaps she was laying the plans to wall us off or something. But while I have terrible luck with roommates, I usually do okay with neighbours. She couldn't hate us that much. Then there were more worrisome theories involving the heads of her enemies or a looming visit from her long-lost cousin Vlad the Impaler. It was only after the third or fourth day of the stakes that I noticed grass seed had been carefully and evenly scattered within the boundaries defined by said stakes.

Aha! She's trying to get her mud patch to grow grass! Well, presuming her efforts haven't been derailed by our current freak snowstorm, that is. See, I forgot to note that our 'lawn' area is one big collective muddy bald spot, for the most part, due to various factors including a slew of stompy neighbourhood kids, the piles of snow this winter, alien abduction, whatever else makes grass not grow well. Everyone else in our row of townhouses seems content to let the grass spend its time in Europe, finding itself, or whatever it's doing. We pay a lot of rent, and not so we can spend our own cash on the side, trying to coax grass out of our mud-lawns. If I'm going to devote that kind of effort to my mud, it had better be growing me cash crops or food for the table or something, not some decorative green patchy ground cover I then have to spend the warmer months mowing down again! How Sisyphean, this 'grass!'

But hey, more power to her. Her lawn is going to look even better now, in comparison to our mud patches. I was thinking about planting some flowers in the flowerbed, but I'm not engaging my neighbour in a turf war. Amusingly, I got a big packet in the mail today from one of those companies that likes to charge people huge fees to spray their suburban lawns with deadly chemicals that leak into the water table... presumably so their mutant children have somewhere nice and green to 'play.' The exterior assured me that they had enclosed a very important 'lawn analysis' that was supposedly 'specifically for' my address. I didn't open it, because I doubted it had any refreshing honesty enclosed, just another mass-mailing sales pitch. If someone had actually analyzed my lawn, the letter probably would have sounded like this:

"Dear Resident of Your Address:

We have analyzed your 'lawn' and couldn't find any. It appears that you have a mud patch instead. We'd like to sell you some toxic chemicals anyway, but we'd look silly spraying them on your mud, so we regret that we can't help you. Get a lawn already, you townhouse slackers.

Sincerely,
Us"

R.I.P., nice machine...

My computer, she is broken. Veddy broken. As in, "I got a virus so bad it starts messing with me before Windows even BOOTS" broken. This, despite my snazzy firewall and expired Norton Antivirus subscription!

Actually, at this point, my working theory points to Norton itself. I'm sure that after the eighty-millionth time I clicked on the 'Remind Me Later' (about my expired subscription), the folks at Norton got a little testy and decided to show me just exactly why I should never have let the thing expire in the first place. You know, some kind of Mafia-style virus protection scam.

It's not like I scoffed at the idea of updating my virus definitions--"Well, they've come out with 8.74 gazillion new viruses this year, they HAVE to be running out of ideas! No need to update!"--I'm just broke, and now my computer has been savagely slain.

Anyway, that whole 'broke' thing is going to mean that Paz and I have to double up and share his computer for a while... at least until the cash can somehow be dredged up for a new machine (which I sort of needed anyway, just not immediately). He's being very sporting about this, and I really appreciate it. Don't worry, though. All I have to do is walk two feet from my broken computer and I'm at his snazzy functional one, so the impact on my blog, for example, should be relatively small. (The posts have been sporadic lately, yes, but only because of a sort of two-week unofficial vacation period, which is now over.) My email response time is mega-crummy, though--even worse than usual, so be forewarned.

This afternoon would be much better if:

1. Paz didn't have the car.
2. It hadn't been snowing all day, with no sign of slowing down now.
3. I had any cigarettes left.

No problem. I'll just venture out to the store when he gets home... in eight or nine hours. In the meantime, I'll try to ignore the stress-voice inside my head that is trying to tell me that smoking the last quarter-inch of cigarette left on several butts in the ashtray is an acceptable stop-gap solution.

Damn viruses, and damn nicotine addictions, too. Smoking is a filthy, vile habit anyway. Excuse me, I'm going to go empty all the ashtrays and take out the trash.