The Diary of A Simple Man

On Wednesday I "graduated" from physical therapy. I still need to exercise my elbow, and it's not 100% yet, but it's a lot better.

---

Last weekend Teri and I went to King Richard's Fair with her brother, his fiancee, and some of their friends; we were the designated drivers. Unfortunately we couldn't bring Sebastian. He's never been there, but he would have loved it. We saw a guy selling ocarinas with a songbook for both Zelda and Majora's Mask; if Sebastian knew, he'd go absolutely insane! But they were too much money to buy this year.

---

Alan Greenspan has magnaminiously agreed that he screwed up on the whole "self-regulating finance companies" idea. I had to comment over at the Washington Post:

And how does Mr. Greenspan propose to pay us all back? All the working-class Americans who were left behind while his policies fattened the wallets of those who (he is now shocked to discover) were robbing us blind?

Somehow, I don't think he has an answer for THAT question. Which is a pity, because now it's the only question that matters.

---

Over on Askville, a right-wing idiot asked "If Obama gets elected, how would he respond to an attack by Iran?". In the details, he answered his own question: Obama would be clueless and pathetic. My sarcasm mode suddenly clicked on, and I wrote this comment:

He would say "HA HA HA! I am an Evil Muslim! Go ahead and destroy the infidel dogs, my Muslim terrorist brothers!".

Then he would cook and eat a white Christian baby on live national TV. And he'd nuke the entire United States for dessert.

There. Are you happy now? Have I fulfilled your twisted fantasies?

---

Askville seems to be dying, by the way. All the moderators and management have simply disappeared - they haven't been seen for a week or more. Spam is running amok, in large part because Askville/Amazon itself is apparently using a new "Bonus Question" system to allow MTurk users to gold farm - real cash - on Askville. They're churning meaningless questions created by bot to gain $0.03 per question. There may be some sort of search engine gaming going on as well. Many people have stopped answering questions, and most of the activity there is now on the discussion boards. But there's a strong general impression that the management wants all the old users, all the people who enjoyed seriously answering and asking questions, to leave. We're interfering with the commercial aspects of the site.

There has been some chatting about setting up a non-commercial answering site lately.

Brr! I'm freezing. Time to go to bed!

Zines
I almost forgot: I don't know if anyone is tracking it, but I've annotated and posted a shitload of zines on my RQ site lately. Twenty-three of them since late June. Just in case you're desperate for something to read. I haven't given up on the sheetless roleplaying article, but it's basically gone into slow-motion for a while. I'll definitely finish it within a month or so, though.

LJ Backup
I've been manually backing up my LJ. Did all of 2003 (it was only half a year anyway), and am up to October 2004. It's a bit tedious, particularly since none of those old posts are tagged at all. I've been adding tags to them before backing them up, which definitely slows the process down. On the other hand, this means that there are a lot more posts that have been tagged; politics and Sebastian in particular have expanded a lot.

Shogun
I don't know if anyone here is a fan of Shogun (the novel by James Clavell), but if you are, or if you're interested in Japanese history, you might find this interesting: Learning from Shogun - Japanese History and Western Fantasy. It's a PDF with a number of academic essays about the novel and how it relates to the actual Japanese culture of the time. It's a bit disillusioning, in places, but that's inevitable. There's also an essay by one asshole of a professor who made up a clever little bit of wordplay to insult fans of the novel and ignorant Japanophile Westerners in general; he's so pleased with himself over his little coinage that he uses it about five hundred times in his essay, filling me with a powerful urge to kick him in the balls, hard. Still, the rest of the essays are pretty interesting.

Here's something that drifts in and out of my mind every so often when I'm doing a particular everyday activity. You might put it in the form of a riddle:

Under what circumstances is this equation true?

40 = 0

Now, I'll admit that this is ridiculously difficult, because I haven't given you enough information. So I'll write an easier equation in white text below. Ctrl-A or click, hold and drag across the area below to see it.

60 + 40 = 60

I'm sure someone (maybe everyone) will get this, but if not I'll see if I can come up with a still easier equation...and in any case, I'll post the answer in a week.

For three days in a row I've seen the same bizarre thing while driving down Social Street in Woonsocket.

There's a guy walking around with two young alligators, one on each arm. Their bodies are at least as long as his forearms, not counting the tails. In other words, these are pretty big, and they are definitely alligators.

The guy himself looks to be in his mid-20's, wears muscle shirts, and looks like a muscle-bound idiot. But that's me being judgemental again.

I wonder if it's legal to walk around the streets with alligators?

* * *
This morning as I was walking down the stairs at Ruggles Station I stopped in shock. Just where I was about to step was a perfect little sparrow lying dead on its side.

So why am I bothering to write about something so mundane?

Because no one else will, and I don't know if anyone else cares.

* * *
Two Saturdays ago I drove with Sebastian to the animal shelter where Teri volunteers. I'd left my wallet in her car, and needed to pick it up. We hung around for a while, and as we were leaving a man came in - dark hair, in his late 20's (I'm guessing), dressed in Casual Yuppie and carrying a cat in a cage. Sebastian and I walked out as he came up to the desk, and once we were through the door Sebastian stopped and looked at me.

"Who was that man?"
"I don't know...just a man. A man with a kitty."
"Is he talking to Mamma?"
"Yes. Come on, Sebastian, we need to go..."
"I don't want him to talk to Mamma!"

It was hideously hot and humid, so I urged him along to the car he continued to talk about that man, and how he wanted him to stay away from Mamma. I noticed that the guy drove an expensive new SUV.

Later, Teri told me the story. It was long and confusing; I may have some points wrong, But apparently this guy had adopted a cat from the shelter about a year ago. He'd come back with the cat a few days earlier (in other words, after he'd had it for a year) and asked to have it put to sleep - it had suddenly become vicious. The shelter people refused to put it to sleep, so he stormed off with the cat. Later, calls came into the shelter from other shelters and veterinarians in the area. The guy was making the rounds, trying to find someone to kill his cat. All of them refused.

Finally the guy came back to Teri's shelter. She was shocked, because she'd known that cat in the shelter, and it had been very sweet-tempered. One of the people at the shelter told the guy that if he wanted to leave the cat there he'd have to pay a boarding fee. The guy stormed off in a rage.

Soon after, someone at the clinic found the cat in its cage. The bastard had simply left it on the ground outside of the shelter to broil to death in the sun. Note that it was well out of sight of the door and any windows, and that this is not a well-travelled area - if some people hadn't happened to come in, the cat could have been stuck in that cage in the sun for hours, and could easily have died.

What this idiot had apparently failed to realize was that his name and address were in the shelter's records. The police had a conversation with him, and he apparently was shaking in his shoes; he claimed he'd told the shelter people that he was leaving the cat there. (Outside. In the sun. Right.) Unfortunately for some reason the police could only warn the guy. By rights he should have been staked out in a box in the sun himself for a few hours.

I must say, Sebastian seems to be an excellent judge of character!

* * *
On Sunday I was pumping gas into the car (on Social Street, come to think of it), when there was a loud crash. A huge old boat of a car had just rammed into the protective barrier in front of the gas pump in the next row, and half of its bumper had been knocked off. The driver got out; he was in his mid-80's, at least. His wife (at least, I assume she was his wife) sat frozen in the passenger's seat.

My first reaction was anger. Teri and Sebastian were in the car, after all, and they were only feet away from the accident scene. Why the hell was this idiot still on the road? Today a gas pump, tomorrow what - another car? Pedestrians on a sidewalk? A group of schoolkids waiting for the bus?

And once again we'd hear that same insane, utterly infuriating excuse:

"I tried to step on the brake, but the harder I stepped on it the faster the car went!"

Here's a tip, Gramps - if you step on something and the car goes faster, you're stepping on the gas pedal.

But as I stared at that aged couple something changed. Looking at them, I suddenly saw them as they must have been forty or fifty ago...like me and Teri, perhaps even with children of their own.

Time plays cruel tricks. They never asked to have their reflexes and senses decay. They may have known that their bodies would fail with time, but until it actually happens you can't really understand it. I'm sure I can't. They seemed pathetic, frightened, tricked. I pitied them, and empathized, and felt a touch of dread - because, of course, the same fate awaits us.

A glance at Sebastian always makes me feel better when thoughts like that press too close, so I smiled at the boy as I got in the car. And before I said a word Teri started talking. Funny, but she'd gone through the same thought train just then!

* * *
Remember a few entries ago, when I took Sebastian to the old-fashioned car show in Woonsocket and a photographer from our local paper took some pictures of him?

The photo went up on the newspaper's website. They claimed that it had been published on 8/7/04, so I ran out that night searching for that day's paper (I only happened to see it on the site at about 10pm).

Every try to find a copy of a local paper at 10pm on the day it was published? It's not easy. Teri called and suggested I hit the local newspaper boxes, but the one I found was empty. Finally I found a couple of copies at a supermarket and bought them both. As soon as I got to the car I flipped through them eagerly...

No picture. Nor was there one on Sunday, nor the day after.

But today, Teri just called me. He's on the front page, in color! She picked up eight copies.

If they ever film a movie about the life of Isaac Asimov, Al Franken is the guy who should play the lead. The resemblance is remarkable, and I'm sure Al could imitate the heavy Brooklyn accent without too much trouble.

* * *
Amusing idea: a new game called "Bushopoly". Two players vie to be first into the White House. The player with the Bush token gets ten times the money of his competitor, and even if his competitor wins, there is a 90% chance that Bush wins the White House and the game by judicial fiat. It could be kind of funny. I had an idea for some Chance cards, but it slipped my mind. Stuff like "Terror Alert! Your polls rise 5%. Keep this card and use it as often as you like. Card only valid if your name is Bush."

* * *
I wonder if the rising popularity of SUVs, pickup trucks, and vans has changed yard sales? Seems to me that they would make it easier for a large item like a piece of furniture to be an impulse buy, since they have so much more cargo space.