PAgent’s Progress

I am very honored to have been given an “Excellent Award” from Miss Cellania. I have trouble describing my blog is “Excellent”. In fact I suspect that Miss Cellania is only buttering me up so I will continue to send her various odds and ends (mostly odds) that I run across.

Be that as it may, the rules stipulate that I must now “pay it forward to ten other worthy blogs, thus spreading the accolades around blogtopia.”

Without further ado, ten blogs that are most excellent, dude, in no particular order, and with the understanding that there were many more I could have included just as easily:

Blue Dog Blog: Musings of an IP attorney

The Scent of Green Bananas: Foodie Blog from the South Pacific

Riot Clit Shave: Awesome photoblog, sometimes NSFW

Futility Closet: An idler’s miscellany of compendious amusements

Middle-Fork: Wonderful Oregon photoblog

Dingleberry Gazette: Life as viewed from behind the counter of a downtown convenience store

Bent Objects: Wonderful little tableaus

Drawn!: The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Dark Roasted Blend: Weird and Wonderful Things

Lelo in Nopo: Portland’s own Cook/Seamstress/Gardener/Blogger Extraordinaire

Stabby Pain

I had a doctor’s appointment this morning, and no doctor’s appointment would be complete without getting a needle stuck into my arm to withdraw some of my precious sanguineous resources. After all, he wouldn’t have anything to lecture me about next month if he didn’t monitor my blood sugar and lipid levels.

I have notoriously difficult veins to stick, and this one was a bad one. It hurt. Hours later, it still hurt, and it is swelling up quite nicely. By tomorrow afternoon my arm will look like one giant bruise, as if I got two for flinching from the Jolly Green Giant.

Pain in the Ass

So my arm was aching as I walked back to my office, which put me in a somewhat less than stellar mood. Of course, I got jumped by a member of the Children’s International mafia. I hate those guys. They all received the exact same training in how to snare pedestrians, which goes something like this:

A) Make eye contact, smile;

B) Extend your hand as if to receive a hearty handshake; and

C) Confidently start speaking to the mark as if they were a long lost buddy.

I HATE this.

So when dickweed starts heading for me, hand outstretched out like a talon, and booming out “Hey, glad to see you aren’t late this morning!” I’d pretty much had it. This was not my buddy. This guy did not know me. I’m almost positive I would have remembered someone with a silver barbell in his nose and plugs in both earlobes. So I ducked sideways, tucked my shoulder down, and snarled “NOT THIS MORNING” as I passed him.

God I hate those guys. I mean, I hate all the folks that feel they have a right to get in your face and demand your attention and usually your money. But these guys are really irritating.

Stomach Pain

When it came around to lunchtime, I was starving. Bear in mind, I’d gone to the doctor’s office on the sharp end of a 14-hour fast, and I’d only had a snack after my appointment. So I went over to Buffalo Wild Wings to grab some takeout, which was a mistake because once I was there I saw their specials menu. And for a limited time only they had a very, very special hamburger on sale.

It was a large burger, with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, onions …. and a pile of pulled BBQ pork, honey BBQ sauce, and onion rings. It was, quite possibly, the least healthy thing I’ve ever put in my body. Oook.

The irony of having such a ridiculous lunch immediately after a doctor’s appointment was not lost on me.

Pain in the Pocketbook

To round out my afternoon, I then received a phone call from my wife, who was overseeing the work being done on our roof. It turns out that the original strategy of “We’ll look at the decking, and replace any pieces that look bad” had been quickly replaced by plan B, which was “Holy Hell, is there anything on this roof that isn’t rotten?”

This additional (and considerable) repair work would normally have delayed the project timeline a great deal, but due to the incredibly shoddy work performed on the roof originally, demolition was taking far less time than planned.

Oy vey iz mir.

I am amazed every time I see another segment on the TV about some someone who has “invented” a car that runs on water. Or a perpetual motion machine. Or a generator that extracts energy from the magnetic field of the earth. Anyone with a background in even basic science will tell you these claims are ridiculous. You simply cannot get more energy out of a system than you put into it. Ever. The universe doesn’t work that way.

Using water as some kind of fuel is equally stupid. Water is a stable molecule. If you want to make it reactive, you need to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. It will always require more energy to break those chemical bonds than you can ever extract as useful work. Always.

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal. People really want perpetual motion machines to exist. They want to believe that The Establishment is keeping us chained to internal combustion engines, all the while buying off and/or killing the inventors of alternative technologies.

Sigh.

As a public service, here are Robert Park’s Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science. Learn them. Live them.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

If you want to read the original 2003 article by the always entertaining Robert Park, you can find it here.

The new chimney is done, and looks quite handsome. The roof will get done this next week.

The dog is adapting to life as a convict, but isn’t happy about it.

Our daughter snitched a lighter and a candle from us when we weren’t looking. She burnt some hair and cloth outside, but then smuggled them into her room. Thank goodness the Wife caught her. The image of her playing with fire in her rat’s nest of clutter is quite terrifying.

I helped my sister move a chair yesterday. Halfway to our van something in both knees went “sproing!” I’ve been popping Advil ever since. I took my cane to work, which I haven’t done in something like nine months. Sigh.

And to round out my Monday, I stopped by Starbucks to replace my travel mug, which finally died after several years of valiant service. I picked up a nice shiny blue insulated mug, filled it with a mocha (no whip), and limped off to the office. When I got there, I realized to my horror that I had spots of mocha foam all over my coat and pants.

Bewildered, I tried to figure out how they got there. It must have been before I put the lid on my new mug, because the cup is airtight, right? To prove this, I gave my new mug an experimental shake, which caused a jet of mocha to spray from the joint between the lid and the mug, covering my desk (and all the papers on it) in sticky brown spots.

And a happy Monday to you.

I logged into the alumni database for my undergraduate college today. I was searching for the contact info for a roommate from my junior year. He had gotten married and had a child recently, and I wanted to congratulate him.

While I was in the database, I idly put in the name of one of my former girlfriends. Our relationship had been passionate, and like many very passionate relationships, it hadn’t survived when I graduated and left and she didn’t. We had not kept in touch.

She was in the directory, and her alumni profile listed her married name and the city she was living in. I did some quick googling, and almost immediately found out that she was fairly paranoid about leaving personal information online. Nevertheless, I soon had her husband’s name, and discovered that she was involved in Celtic dance. Very shortly after that, I had her phone number.

For those of you that don’t know, if you put a telephone number (with area code) into Google it will often spit out a name, address, and map. Try it with your own number sometime. I googled her phone number, and was soon looking down at her neighborhood in a satellite view, trying to decide which house was hers.

I love to find things with Google. It’s like a game, me against a volume of data that is beyond the ability of the imagination to comprehend. It’s a needle in a haystack. But you can find that needle remarkably easily if you can narrow your query through the judicious use of the appropriate keywords and phrases. Unique ones. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, and it often serves me well professionally.

When you get right down to it, it’s all about words. And I love to play with words.

But getting back to the stalking. I suspect that, no matter how fondly she might remember me, if my long-lost love had known that I now knew her name, address, phone number, and how she spent the third Wednesday of every month, she would freak out. But other than getting her married name and hometown from the alumni directory, all of the info I found was in the public domain.

Was I stalking her? Really, I was just trying to see what she was up to, and maybe find a picture of her to see how she was aging. But if she had known about it, it might have caused her some concern.

And that’s why I don’t think I’m stalking anyone. I have no intention of calling her up, either to breathe heavily or to ask how she’s doing. Why not? Because I, myself, am remarkably easy to find on the internet. Anyone that wanted to get in touch with me could do so easily.

She hasn’t. And I can respect that.