20 RIP HST

"Just another goodbye to another good friend!"

7 The Day After

POSSLQ is still in the hospital. Stubbornly refusing to die. ;-)

This means my brilliant plan to play the grieving lover in every bar in SJ is temporarily halted.

On the way back from the 7-11 last night, after the Super Bowl, the accident and all, I got just one more reminder of the heat death of the universe.

As I crossed the last big intersection before my house the local fire department came boiling out our their house and ripped down the road. Where they turned right, and then right again. Which means I came upon them again outside one of the expensive tract-houses just before my own humble abode. They were carting off some old guy who coded out after the game.

Must have had the over...

Or the spread.

Or the spread on the roast-beef sandwich.

Or something.

One way or another

Life is a 7-5 proposition. Against.

Saturday night my Korean friends came around and we drank til past midnite. The usual good times with that lot. When I awoke at 9:30 the POSSLQ had headed out for an early morning hike with a friend. I dithered around the house a bit and decided to take a walk. Headed out to the bank, about two miles away and desultorily noted a couple of one-ounce bottles of vodka by the side of the road. By the time I noticed there was a real pattern of these bottles developing I was out to the semi-wild section of the walk. It was the kind of day where you just plain forget that not only are you gonna die, but everyone is gonna die, the sun is gonna blow out, and the universe will become colder than any grave man could conceive of. Cold, dead and static.

Unless of course we can come up with a way to escape through a wormhole into a alternate universe.

Anyway, I got my money, and just since the day was so nice I snapped a quick shot of the horizon just at the point my Ipod kicked in with a Led Zepplin and Elton John song. a shameless audio snapshot of the past. It was just about 11 o'clock and I felt great. One of those moments where you just can't decide to laugh or cry at how beautiful things are. Things, as they often do, were not going so well elsewhere, but the world is a coarse enough place and I chose to enjoy my walk.

On the way back I got to the vodka bottles, and with little to do before the Super Bowl, began to track the great (probably) White Urban Drunk ( Niveus Urbanus Dipsomaniacus). I finally found 11 shot bottles of vodka spread out over just about one mile (typical photo included here). I concluded that the wily Dipsomaniacus had started its travels at a liquor store on Pearl and Branham and concluded on New Compton road, or thereabouts. Tomorrow I will limn the entire tracking process as well as the surpising anthropoligical conclusions that I draw from them. Suffice it to say that, while I could not capture the elusive beggar, I feel as though I not only know him, but want to hang out a little bit.

I'd bring the chips.

Get home, sit down in front of the tube and prepared for the Super Bowl. Phone rings now and then, but since no one is leaving a message I know it can't be too important. Just before the game I come back to my computer to check email one last time before the deluge and, looking out my window, I see a strange car pulling into my driveway. It is a friend of the POSSLQ's. I answer the door and she tells me the POSSLQ has been trying to call me for hours. Messages were being left, but the POSSLQ had inexplicably left the ringer on but the sound off on our little phone. In fact POSSLQ would really like me to answer as POSSLQ has just hours ago been cut out of a totally wrecked Toyota Echo and is in the hospital with a fractured pelvis, some spine damage, and an amusing set of bruises that you might expect to find on a professional football player. Or after some Saturday night I got sassed too much.

This all happened at just about 11 that morning while I was having my moment of existential joy.

The rest of the day was spent in trips to the hospital and a certain existential chill.

Just goes to prove my "conservation of happiness" theory which states that no happiness can be created in one place without an equal amount of happiness being destroyed somewhere else. In fact, happiness might just be more like heat.. it might be subject to entropic decay.

Bummer.

I'd like one order of wormhole to another universe, please.

With a shot of vodka on the side.

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click on the pic and you can check out a much longer article on this

Greg Kihn is a badly aging ex-rocker whose youthful excesses have precipitated, in senescence, into right-wing stupidity (right down to the "family values" spiel coming from a guy with multiple divorces). But he outdid himself today. After playing a sound clip of a mother grieving because her children had been hit in a crosswalk, one killed and the other seriously injured, Kihn asked what we could learn from this tragedy.

His answer? That the kids should have been more careful because you have to enter crosswalks defensively.

Better? Having succesfully discarded the dead child and the dying one as lessons in how foolish children can be, Kihn moved on to the driver. That would be the driver who had been distracted by a "foggy windshield" which allegedly caused the accident. Oh. The driver was speeding as well.

How do you get temporarily distracted by a foggy window? You've either have a foggy windshield when you get in the car or one develops as you drive. It doesn't blow magically in from the coast before humans could possibly respond. The driver could have cleared the windshield before driving, or pulled over before it clouded his vision, maybe even slowed down. He chose "none of the above" and hit the kids.

So what does Kihn say about the driver? "He was a cleric so he must be torn up inside." Er, unlike the rest of society who would gleefully hoot and drive on to the next crosswalk looking for more targets?

I don't know how Kihn can say such things other than the fact that he can't see any symbol of authority without reflexively orally servicing it.

Lame.
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Once a phrase only used on FARK, the "tinfoil hat" meme is spreading. I spotted it twice today.

In Defamer it spreads over an entire car:

Lindsay Lohan’s lawyers to sue anyone in the media if they so much as think about recent accusations made by her estranged dad. Shit, we totally thought about it when we typed that sentence! Is that the doorbell ringing? Is a process server hiding in the bushes, waiting to waylay us on our afternoon trip to Starbucks? We’re covering the house in tinfoil and never answering the phone again.

in the River front times it is used about "earworms" and some horrible musician

What else can you do? You've tried a tinfoil hat, but it's too late. That song has bored its way in and set up shop in your cranium. It's stomped out the names of the clouds that you learned in grade school: "Circu.... Communglious? Chew-ing gum! Arrgh!"

Tinfoil Hats.. coming to a Walmart near you

• Tried to outwait the world's slowest blogger. But he hung in there. So I'm back scrapping.

• As a callow youth I worked in my Uncle's game booth at the Northern California Rennaisance Faire. If someone "won" one of our games (expressly designed to make that almost impossible -- the carnies had nothing on us but bigger jugs of liquor) we gave away the cheapest trinkets available.
  
  Somewhere the genial old fraud found hundreds of miniature representations of Bosch and Breugel paintings that had been laquered onto pieces of wood. So we had to hawk "Bosch and Breugel Blocks" as we shilled to the crowd. Turned out that I really liked Bosch (Right panel of the "Garden of Earthly Delights" is right here)
  
  Now some crazy people are making figurines from the paintings... get yours while they last!
  
  I eagerly await the introduction of figurines from the art of Jackson Pollock!
  
  And yes, I am putting a comment link here today in the vain hope that someone will tell me Pollock began as an illustrator for a fashion magazine, or something else I don't know about. ;-)

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