Journals : 2006 : March
1 March 2006 | Link this
It's off to Greensboro tomorrow to take care of some business for a friend and to install a new printer and scanner for my mom. I wanted to do this earlier in the week, but my life is sort of on hold thanks to the leisurely pace at which so many medical professionals seem to operate these days, particularly when it involves getting in touch with patients.
Of course, my aversion to technology which facilitates people getting in touch with me may be making this all a bit more difficult, but I'm comfortable with that.
This, by the way, is hysterical, and comes to you via here.
1 March 2006 Later | Link this
I'm baking a cake. A carrot cake, specifically. It may be a very interesting carrot cake, because I accidentally sprinkled garlic powder into the mix rather than the ground cinnamon I thought I had in my hand. I think I managed to scoop most of it out, but you never know how much of a great new taste treat I may have developed here.
4 March 2006 | Link this
Random thoughts for a Saturday night:
- For those of you who may have been concerned about this, the secret ingredient in Wednesday's cake, while no particular improvment to it, also proved not to be particularly detrimental either. In other words, no one (myself included) really noticed.
- I spent today in Columbia with my parents, visiting an elderly cousin I hadn't seen in a good twenty years or so. This being the south, we're ALL cousins here, so I'm not 100% sure of the relationship. She was my grandmother's first cousin, which makes her (I believe) my first cousin twice removed. Yes, this being the south, people also pay attention to distinctions like that. Makes it easier to keep up with who's off limits for breeding.
- Is it just me, or do truck lane restrictions actually make driving on the freeway MORE dangerous rather than less? Around here, trucks are restricted to the right two or three lanes of urban freeways. In theory, I assume it's supposed to make drivers in the left lane feel safer. In practice, however, it just makes truckers behave like assholes in lanes where other drivers expect to be moving at a slower pace. So you end up with big rigs riding your ass at 70MPH when you're not even IN the fast lane because (a) they CAN'T pass and (b) they WON'T slow down.
- Why is every freaking freeway interchange in South Carolina NAMED for someone? And why is it always someone with a stupid nickname in quotation marks, like Jefferson C. "Buzz" Dingleberry, or something similarly idiotic? As honors go, having your own memorial onramp must rank just slightly above having a toilet in New Jersey named for you.
8 March 2006 | Link this
I decided on Monday that there were several reasons why it was necessary for me to leave town for a few days. The water was going to be off all over my apartment complex, I have a promising interview later this week which might make future trips more difficult, and I just sort of felt like it.
So I went to Atlanta.
I just got home. I'm beat so I'm not going to tell any exiting stories about the trip tonight. OK, there weren't really any REALLY exciting stories anyway, but still...
10 March 2006 | Link this
13 March 2006 | Link this
So now I'm all excited at the prospect that "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" (the TV series) may be coming to DVD soon. I loved that show; I used to watch it in re-runs every night on channel 18, right before "Nanny and the Professor". And just like "Bewitched", it had its own token homo, in the person of Charles Nelson Reilly...
18 March 2006 | Link this
It's shaping up to be a long and mildly unpleasant week, so I guess I should make the most of the weekend, huh?
20 March 2006 | Link this
Funny, funny op-ed piece from my hometown paper:
he zoning laws are very strict concerning the naming of new residential communities. If you are well-funded and have the right lawyer, you can pretty much drop houses out of the sky wherever you please, but the name must be generated from the grid below by choosing one word from each of the columns, (e.g., “Hootenanny Hills Holler” or “Deer Droppings Down”).
...
I live in northwest Greensboro, which is zoned “HT-3,” meaning it is mandatory that a Harris-Teeter be located every three miles or else. Under municipal ordinances, if it is ever found that there is a greater than three mile distance between any two northwest Harris-Teeters, the city is empowered to build a deli and/or bakery in your residence until a new store can be constructed. Until they opened up the new Harris-Teeter on New Garden Road last month, my mom was forced to hang rotisserie chickens from her porch, and it caused a serious animal problem.
While driving around looking at houses with the hubby, I also like to come up with new subdivision and street names. Some of my favorites include numerous variants on "The ___ at ___ ____" and cute, little multi-word street names. Forget "The Shops at Peppercorn Point" or whatever. How about some of these?
- The Projects at Piedmont Courts
- The Prostitutes at Larkin Street Commons
- Crystal Meth Marketplace at Ashley Point
- The Check Cashers at Wal-Mart View Terrace
- The White Trash of Dover
And in the vein of street names like "Timid Deer Lane" and "Spotted Oak Trail", may I suggest the following:
- Uncircumcised Penis Lane
- Hempsmoke Heath
- Lost Cherry Circle
- Detached Retina Drive
21 March 2006 | Link this
It's absolutely insane that a decade of bickering over aesthetics now means that the eastern span of the Bay Bridge will not be completely rebuilt until a quarter of a century after the earthquake that originally damaged it. I'm glad I don't have to drive across the damned thing anymore.
Notice that I said "insane" rather than "surprising". There is, alas, nothing at all surprising about it.
22 March 2006 | Link this
Happy Elmodance...
23 March 2006 | Link this
I like our new mortgage broker. I really do. She's friendly and helpful and she's found us more money at a lower payment than we expected. I only have one problem with her: like so many Americans today, she seems to have forgotten that the word "gift" is a noun and not a verb.
One does not "gift" something to someone else. One gives something to someone else. A gift, for example.
It's an annoying trend that I trace to recent news stories about the practice of "re-gifting", or recycling unwanted presents by wrapping them up and giving them to someone else. Corporate types have been saying idiotic things like "let's interface" and "can we dialogue?" for years now. However, I think the real root of this nagging tendency to turn nouns into verbs goes back to the heinous "new way to office" ad campaign used by Kinko's about ten years ago. That one was quickly followed by California Pizza Kitchen's "cool new way to pizza", which was even worse.
Even so, I can see how one might be tempted to use "office" or "pizza" as a verb in a commercial, because there's not really a comparable term. "Work", for example, is a little imprecise, and "work in an office" is a little wordy. But why stoop to such liguistic abuse when there's already an appropriate word like "give"? It bugs me on the same level as "orientate" and "orientated", which some people have a tendency to use when they mean "orient" and "oriented".
I'd really like to conversation with some of these people about the way they've been misbehavioring with resepct to the English language. But that's something I've already statemented on many occasions.
24 March 2006 | Link this
I stand corrected, and by a member of the family at that. Apparently, "gift" actually is a verb common in legal documents for several centuries. Of course, legal terminology is somewhat unrelated to plain English anyway (by design, maybe?), but I apologize for my error. I will, however, continue not to use "gift" as a verb myself, because I find it just a little repulsive. As I've said before, the fact that you can do something doesn't mean that you necessarily should.
26 March 2006 | Link this
Only two more days until we lose the giant fans in our office. Thursday night, just as we were leaving to go to dinner, the toilet tank in the office bathroom overflowed and didn't shut off. In about five minutes, all the carpet within five feet of the bathroom (including the media closet) was soaked. I'm glad we caught it before it could do any more damage.
Fortunately, maintenance managed to get someone out here with an extractor that night, and we now have big fans blowing above and beneath the carpet to get it good and dry. I'm sure it will also get cleaned afterward, but I fear we'll never have that "new apartment smell" again. It's a good thing we're planning to vacate pretty soon. All the same, I'll miss this place. After thirteen years in a dingy San Francisco hovel with a cigar-smoking lunatic downstairs, it's been really nice living someplace with appliances, plumbing that (usually) works, climate control, and a relatively pleasant aroma.
Anyway, we left the noisy fans behind and went to Winston-Salem on Friday and Saturday. We might have stayed the whole weekend and done more, ummm, shopping, but Mark had to be on a plane back to The City of Doom this morning.
27 March 2006 | Link this
Medical Marijuana Issue Returns to Court
Each time the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on medical marijuana, the justices have come down against allowing the sick and dying to use the drug to ease their symptoms and possibly prolong life.
Regardless of your opinion on the issue itself, wouldn't you have to admit that this is a somewhat biased lead for a story being presented as news rather than as commentary? Granted, it's not a Fox News level of bias or anything, but it's a little more than I'd expect from a semi-reputable print publication, even one based in San Francisco.
28 March 2006 | Link this
Ah, my old block. I can almost smell the urine.
I hate days like this. I got to bed a little too late last night because I was being an übergeek, but I still got what I thought was a reasonable night's sleep. Nevertheless, I've felt like I have a hangover all day: I'm dehydrated and headachy and I alternate between belching and having the munchies. One of the most appealing things about giving up booze and cigarettes was the fantasy that I'd never feel like this again. Oh well...
28 March 2006 Later | Link this
After looking at numerous real estate listings in recent weeks, I've come to the conclusion that more North Carolina houses were built in in 1963 than in any other year before or since. I assume it must be that the developers were anxiously anticipating my arrival the following year.
29 March 2006 | Link this
Extra Big Quadruple-strength Happy Elmodance...
30 March 2006 | Link this
It's sort of fun reading the early days of The Boondocks while Aaron McGruder is on "hiatus". I can't remember for sure if the Chronicle started running the strip from day one or not, although I think it did, since the earliest one I remember featured Riley sighing when he realized he lived on Timid Deer Lane...
You know what's scary? Right now, my site is number one when you do a Google search on "Timid Deer Lane", apparently thanks to this post which really had nothing much to do with the comic strip in question.
The big difference between The Boondocks, and even Doonesbury, versus token "conservative strip" Mallard Fillmore, is that the first two usually strike me as funny, even when I disgree with the politics. Mallard Fillmore, on the other hand, shows no subtlety, no characterization, and precious little humor. That's the kicker: It's just not funny. It's a pity, because an actual well-done strip with a right-of-center slant might be interesting to read, even if I disagreed with its viewpoint much of the time.
30 March 2006 Later | Link this
Sad. They're about to turn the cool high-rise fomer Howard Johnson's hotel in my hometown into a bland and generic Doubletree. The restaurant closed years ago and eventually became a Hooters, but the hotel itself remained sublimely HoJo until it lost (or renounced) its franchise last year.
Another nearly-intact HoJo with restaurant was bulldozed in recent years for a freeway improvement project, something Greensboro seems to get way more than its share of.
I miss Howard Johnson's restaurants. And I'm really mad at myself for not getting to the Times Square location before it closed last summer.
30 March 2006 Even Later | Link this
I'd forgotten that today was the opening day for the North Carolina state lottery. I really couldn't give a damn about the morals of the whole thing; people can do whatever they want with their money, including throwing it out the windows of their cars or wiping their bums with it, for all I care.
As someone who lived in a state with a lottery for thirteen years, my biggest gripe with the lottery is that, as of today, no conveniece store in North Carolina will ever be convenient again. Every time I walk into one hoping to grab a quick soda or candy bar, I'll be forced to stand behind some moron spending ten minutes trying to sort out his fucking lottery tickets and Powerball scan sheets.
I'm glad I don't smoke anymore; that at least cuts down somewhat on how much this will affect me personally.
31 March 2006 | Link this
It's the end of the world, I tell you. I always thought I could count on Indiana to be a haven from this twice-a-year nonsense. Not anymore. Alas...
31 March 2006 Later | Link this
They're kidding, right?