Some Words

The SO and I have gone to San Francisco for the wedding of a college friend of mine. We decided we’d make a vacation out of it, and so we arrived a few days early, so that we could see some of the sites.

Now, some of my friends will see this coming. I am very pale. I also frequently forget to wear sunblock. In Minnesota, I know where everything is, and I bike there. Minneapolis is small enough that this menas I’m almost never in the sun more than half an hour, unless I’ve gone camping, which sadly I don’t do enough of. Half an hour of sun I can handle. So, now, at a lower latitude, with more direct sun, what did we do? We forgot the spf 45 in the hotel while we wandered the streets being good little tourists. Now, because I shave my head, the entire damn thing is a giant fucking burn.

I was getting up every few hours this past night to douse my head in aloe. When that no longer got the job done (because there was already a nasty later of aloe over the entirety of my skull, I got up, and have now been sitting in the bathroom with a wet towel on my head. For those of you keeping track at home, this is amazingly effective, until the water gets warm.

I’m not lobster red, it’s more that pink near the center of strawberries. I foresee myself catching shit at the wedding.

I went to college reunion this past week. This was more than a little silly, as it was for the class that graduated the year before me. Still, there had been a lot of great people in that class, and I’d lost track of most of them. So I thought I’d stop in and say ‘Hi’ to a lot of people at once. I could only make four hours or so of it, as I had to work, but I drove down to Northfield anyway.

It was a good year for this sort of thing. Minnesota has actually gotten some consistent rain in the past couple of months, so the fields looked lush and green as I drove down. It was the golden hour, and everything seemed somehow more than it had been. I was driving back to some sort of fantasy campus that had never existed. The rosy glasses were held firmly in place by the Tom Waits I was playing.

The weirdness really began when I got there. Some of these people had been strangers to me since they had graduated. There were several that I would have liked to say ‘Hi’ who weren’t there, and a few that gave a general sense of brush off before I could say hello. But there were plenty of people who I had really missed. It’s hard to imagine a more pleasant nostalgia trip. An old friend, Dan Diamond, even got his ass out of NY for a little while. I’ve got to track down a few people now who couldn’t make it. But it has been great motivation to keep up with people better. For those of you I’ve lost touch with, I’m sorry. I make this sort of resolution about once every four days. I’m going to try to write though.

The other nice thing about a five year reunion, is that no one has managed to get so much done that I feel like a failure by comparison. At some point, someone is bound to do something so awesome, that when I hang around them, I inevitably, not matter how gracious they are, feel like I’m wasting my life on some level. It’s really hard to do that in five years. Ummm… grad school… yeah. Time to go I think.

All my life I’ve made a habit of starting to do more than I know I can handle. It’s not hard to forsee that this will have mixed results. And so, amid a miriad of projects, posting fell to the wayside. And now, suddenly, I find myself with two places to post.

And so, fortified with a little gin, some lime, and a few other things mixed in, I’m trying to dig out of that hole.

Oh, and the lime was squeezed by one of these. I honestly can’t say enough good things about it. It’s totally simplified the most annoying part of drink making for me. God bless eBay.

And before I really dig in, there has been a lot of talk about books and length here and over at Iceland Spar. Here is a link to Marginal Revolution that relates nicely to what I’ve been saying. Remember, you will be tested.

The NHL Playoffs started today. For those of you watching, I have heard that Don Cherry will now be on NBC. Consider this a public service announcement. This man should not be taken as a representative Canadian.

Image from challies.com. Where they found it I don’t know, but it’s the best Don Cherry picture I’ve ever seen.

I wonder why every time I hear about some “scientists” determining the “correct” values for the personal taste aspects of food it’s always a study done by British people. First it’s trying to determine if tea is better if the milk goes in before or after the tea, now this. If it were something like divining the perfect way to fry chicken, for those of us who like our chicken as crispy as we can damn well get it, that would be one thing. But saying just how crispy crispy should be? That is simultaneously absurd and sinister. There should be a word for that.

Consider this a plea to the British populace. Please, stop your food “scientists” before they strike again.

You know… in a way I think that 1984 should have just been released without any copyright at all, or the copyright should have been released upon his death, or some other special exemption should have occurred. Because this article about his estate suing a satirist is pretty high on the unintentional comedy charts.

Today I had an interaction with my old landlord. When it was done, I wanted to call my current landlord and offer to pay her more money. It’s not that this guy was mean, he’s just epicly lazy.

He is the Beowulf of lazy. Getting Shit Done is his Grendel. He kills it with his bare hands, and then dives below the water to slay Grendel’s mother “Hope of Getting Shit Done.”

I called him today about my, and my former roommates’, certificate of rent paid. This is used in Minnesota for a state tax rebate. It’s a big rebate too. Last I checked, landlords are required to send it by law. I had to call him, it’s over a week past when I should have gotten it anyway, and I know he has my address, because that’s where he sent the deposit.

His response to my question about the forms? “Email my wife, she’ll do it when she’s back in town.” I am so glad to be done with him.

I keep The Valve on my RSS feed, and sometimes I’m sorely tempted to just take it off the list. It’s not that it never has anything interesting to say, indeed it catches my attention at least once every day or two. But there are some decidedly frustrating aspects of it, like the titles of the damn posts, which I think I’ve griped about in the past.

This may be part of why I loved this post by one Scott Eric Kaufman. It’s pointed out in the comments that this has already been done to death, but it was a great post anyway. It seems n+1 ruffled some feathers by saying that blogs are a troublesome medium for criticism, which seems a bit obvious, given how quickly topics get old in blog land. Others did not seem to think it so.

Bonus: Contains the quoted phrase “I shit on Dante.”

All around just a fun summation of lit crits and would be lit crits being really catty with each other.

So I have an Epson C84 color printer. It’s cheap, it did its job. I had gotten it because it was cheap and would do its job.

Today it stopped doing its job. The SO went to print a document and the printer said, “Sorry!” What was wrong? It had no color ink.

“But,” I said to the printer, “this is a black and white document.”

“Ah…” says the printer, “about that… my black ink… it’s not really black. I’ve been using the color ink to cover for it, but now that I’m out of color ink I can’t cover up the fact that the ink is not black. I’ve been living a lie.”

“You can’t just print with whatever the hell is in the black ink cartridge?”

“No… my sense of honor wouldn’t allow me.”

Now it doesn’t take long to figure out why this situation came up, and it’s not because the SO needed something printed for class. No, it’s because black ink is cheap, and color is where the money is. There isn’t even money in the printer itself anymore. They just make them to sell the color cartridges. So how do they deal with people like me and the SO, who only really want to print black and white text files? The obvious solution is to set the windows drivers so that even when you say to print in black and white, they use color. Then, just so you can say you aren’t totally fucking over the consumer, put a check box in the “advanced” options, that claims to make it actually print in black ink only. Why? Because using the ink you want is a difficult decision to make, and Epson wants to protect you from the dangerous, and unprofitable, choices you might make. I’m not even sure that the “advanced” option works. It sure as hell doesn’t let me print in black ink when the black ink cartridge is new and the other three are empty. Now, my iBook never used the color cartridges, I just picked black and it was black, the ink in the other cartridges didn’t go down. But now it won’t print anymore either. I guess the black ink Epson sells just wasn’t black enough.

Addendum, two links from the FAQ about the C84, courtesy of Epson.

Why does color ink go down when I’m printing black and white?

Can this printer print with one cartridge empty?

There’s also one answer in there that says black only is impossible in OS X. I find this all darkly hilarious.

Published by the Globe and Mail, found through Boing Boing:

US detains 9 year old child. Someone play the anthem, I’m getting misty eyed.

As long as I’m not finishing the rant I started… I should also point out that over at the Poor Man Institute, they are outlining a few of the many reasons that ‘fascist’ is just a way of saying ‘neoconservative’ that saves you eight keystrokes. It pays to be efficient.

I was going to finish my rant about the plotting of Heroes, and I still am. But wait! What is that I hear? Could it be the sound of Martin Peretz talking shit about former Presidents doing charity work? It might seem that way, but no, he’s just going after Bush Sr. and Clinton for how much they make on the lecture circuit. Here’s the thing though Marty, when most of us are trying to make a point, we don’t assume that the point itself is tacit. If it was, we wouldn’t have to make it.