Letter from the Empire

Hallelujah and O My God...

I finally received a letter from someone back in the States.

Technically, I paid $1,000 dollars for someone to send me a letter from the States, but it is just as meaningful for me on two levels.

1) Now I know what I have to do to get people to correspond with me. To be honest, I won't pay most of you that much for anything short of a sex act, but at least I now know what is required.

2) Hey, it was my first letter while here!

I have included the pic (with some slight blurring) for three reasons.

The first is to prove to some skeptics that all you have to do is actually send me a letter and I will receive it.

The second is to reinforce what the address is without entirely giving my ID away to the random and evil innartubes.

And the third is to suggest that the person who sent me this letter is probably a dangerous psychopath of some kind as suggested by relatively random handwriting/font approach they take to something as simple and brief as an address.

1) My name in a savage and jagged script which suggests great anger and barely controlled desires to violence.

2) The name of the Institute in tightly controlled and universally sized capital letters.

3) The remainder of the address in the "large cap/small cap" format, semi-randomly applied across words.

If I happened to be the husband of this correspondent (and you know who you are!), I'd take a long, long hunting trip. And ask to get letters, lots of letters.

And not come back until some of this letterary evidence of insanity is reduced.

FINAL POINT (or, as correspondent might write it FINAL POINT): I showed this to the TSR and his response was:

"As someone who is not an expert at handwriting, it looks like this person might be a relative of yours."

Prima facie evidence of instability!

Teaching English in Japan: "Spare Me My Life!"

This is.. uh.... odd?

Just Wrong

Well, I suppose it's a good thing that whoever did this is

a) Barren
b) Unlovable

or both...

Screwy in St. Louis...

Well...

it's fixed now. I have lodgings at the lovely Chesire Lodge and my flight is cleverly planned so that I need not wake up early on either departure date.

The lovely discussant promises her feedback on my paper by Saturday. The BAG fulminates darkly about how Koreans always "love to hold me up." Hey, sometimes I stagger baby, sometimes I stagger! And I think a six day turn-around on a conference paper, for a post-doc who is reading several others, is just fine. As far as I'm concerned it means I don't have to do any more work on the thing this week...

Work itself is oddly under control... all these events are unfurling as planned and I seem to be marginally better at planning them. One community event and one Major Conference Entertainment to go, but with luck these will be the last for a very long time.

On a more (less?) amusing note, one of the previous wives of the "Just Married Uncle" has had a stroke pursuant to surgery. The surgery had been scheduled on the same day as the JMU's wedding, which led to some speculation that it was a sort of dramatic "fuck you" to the whole day.

As I noted to my BS, if this were true, the ex-wife clearly hadn't thought her brilliant plan all the way through. A death the day before would have had some swing, now it becomes a very sad footnote. I wonder how the JMU feels? If this has any impact any longer...

Oh well... as I sit at the bar waiting for

1) My laundry to dry
2) The BAG to get here
3) Total Consciousness..

I don't wonder all that much.

Because I'm selfish.

And all I really need is a good reason. ;-)

I felt kind of let down...

When the rather promising "Medium size Cat o"


Turned into this:


And not the S&M implement I had been hoping for

alas...

My Blog is rated...

Mingle² - Blog Rate-iation

So all you kiddies get outta here..

Suggestions from the Great Unwashed

Apparently in response to my post on the absence of Korean books at Borders, the BAG suggests that I am cranky because I don't get enough sleep (she forgets she slept over last night and it is her lumberjack level snoring that makes this so) and that I should not be Grumpy Old Dude (GOD) and instead should be Dude of Grumpiness (DOG).

On a similar note of intarwebular love, a reader who is apparently my sister suggests that I call myself "BOTBAG (boyfriend of the bizzarre alien girlfriend)." But this has the unfortunate sound of something frat-boys would do to each other during a hazing gone wrong ("We could give him the shocker, purple nurple, or botbag the son-of-a-bitch." Later the police come, and shortly after that, the coroner).

I accept both of these suggestions in the spirit in which they were offered, scorn and derision, and will remain GOD around here.