Monday, right?
My password expired over Thanksgiving holiday. “Please type new password to log in…” it says. So I do that and it answers, “you do not have permission to change your password.”
Huh. Call the Helpdesk.
“Okay, security question: what was your first car?”
“Karmen Ghia.”
“Uhhhh…spell that?”
“K-A-R-M-A — no, E — N G-H-I-A”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Volkswagen?”
“No.”
“Errrr…VW?”
“No. And now you’ve given three wrong answers and you’re locked out.” He huffs in an now look what you’ve done I hope you’re happy kind of way. Then follows a lecture about how it’s extremely important to give accurate answers to those security questions. Well, my answers were accurate, dammit. It’s a stupidly ambiguous security question.
“So what do you do if someone dies.”
-pause-
“Ma’am, I don’t even understand why you’d ask me that question.”
“Well, let’s say somebody gets hit by a bus and you really need to get access to his data. He’s not around to tell you the name of his first car. What do you do then?”
“The manager.” (I swear that’s all he said. The manager, just like that).
“The manager…?”
Then the line went dead. I don’t think he hung up on me. Surely not. Surely. Not. But by then, I’d seen my boss go by. He’s The Manager that all the kids are talking about, so I dumped it in his lap, went back to my desk, and drew these small but hauntingly lovely cartoons on post-it notes until the Help Desk called me back.
I feel like I’ve gone to the Crazy Place.
November 26, 2007 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 49
Can Weasel come home now?
Back tomorrow. See you then.
November 23, 2007 — 7:29 am
Comments: 31
Happy Thanksgiving!
I give you this slideshow of 39 people, mostly celebrities, and their odd deaths. Many are too recent or too well known to be interesting. But how did I miss Christine Chubbuck, the Florida newsreader who committed suicide on-air in 1974? The Wikipedia article about her contains the greatest sentence in the English language:
She placed a .38 revolver in her bag of puppets and put it beneath her desk.
I definitely didn’t know Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap. He used to hold the cap in his teeth while he administered eyedrops. I think I knew that author Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick. And everybody knows Isadora Duncan strangled to death in a tragic wardrobe malfunction when her silk scarf wrapped around the wheel of her convertible.
Shucks, here are a few more ways to die.
There! Now you have something to be grateful for! Happy Thanksgiving!
November 22, 2007 — 7:05 am
Comments: 25
Nashville: blame it on the weasels
Nashville! It’s not a bad city, really. If you stay away from the touristy bits and avoid Summers, it’s a nice enough town.
My great great great great great grandparents led the first wave of white families to settle along the Cumberland River around the stockade fort pictured above (the original, not that replica) in 1779. Fort Nashborough was named after Francis Nash, a brigadier general killed in the Revolutionary War two years earlier. He and my grandfather were both North Carolinians and veterans of the War of the Regulators. Otherwise, the place would probably be called Weaselville, and that would have made it really hard to market as a vacation spot.
The next few decades, the story is all about clashes between the settlers and the Chickamauga band of Cherokees, so we’re hopelessly unable to talk sense about it. But, hey, Thanksgiving is the time for injun stories.
So here’s my great great great great grandmother. One day, a Cherokee band fired a single musket volley at the fort and fled, luring the men out into an ambush. Two hundred Indians got between twenty settlers and the fort. The settlers dismounted, and the Indians chased after their horses. Grandma saw an opportunity, opened the gates and set the dogs on them, buying enough time for the men to get back inside.
As someone remarked later, “thank God indians love horses and hate dogs” or no-one would have come home that day. My great great great great grandfather was born in that fort some time later. So, on the whole, hooray.
November 21, 2007 — 7:30 am
Comments: 11
If she offers me an apple, I’m outta there…
Today’s the day I’m a-sposed to be out…<koff>…clothes shopping with my stepmother.
What? You can’t see Stoaty as Snow White? Pff! You can smooch weasel butt!
November 20, 2007 — 8:31 am
Comments: 10
There I go again
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s about two things I’m especially good at: gluttony and gratitude. And four days off!
I do it up big every year, with turkey and dressing and potatoes and peas and candied yams and those peculiar gluey white supermarket bake ‘n’ serve rolls I love so dearly but only buy for special occasions because they’re pharmaceutical-grade empty stodge. Then the cats and I sit down and eat ourselves spherical, pass out in an unseemly tryptophan coma, and wake up to three more days of vile, uncontrollable gas and glorious leftovers.
Friends and coworkers — and family especially — have always considered my attitude toward holidays unseemly and inappropriate. As an old maid, I guess I am expected to spend national holidays drinking weak tea, nibbling a dry biscuit and thinking how different things would be if only I had a family. At least two relatives phone each Thanksgiving (and, for that matter, Christmas) and ask wistfully if I am celebrating again. “What, with the turkey? And everything?” They sound exasperated.
My stepmother is especially resentful. She likes nothing better than getting us all together for T’day — but not for warm, happy, a very special episode of the Waltons reasons. See, she can use the big diningroom when there are people over. And the good silver. And we can all sit up straight in our Sunday best and pick at tiny servings of exotic food.
I did it, like, once. I was terrified the whole time I’d have a sudden, mysterious outbreak of adult-onset Tourette’s. I did say something especially stupid to my little brother. I forget what it was. (I’m lying. Of course I remember what it was). The experience was everything Thanksgiving isn’t.
Well, this year, she wins. This is likely to be my last Thanksgiving in the US, and she’s going to buy me a…a…oh, sweet Jesus…a dress. So, see, I have to go. I’m leaving this afternoon.
Back on Saturday. I don’t know how often I’ll have net access, so I’ll auto-post some shit while I’m gone.
What’s the opposite of thankful? Oh, yeah…dead drunk.
Ohmigosh! I almost forgot! It’s the anniversary of my favorite own post ever. Last year, I spent some time over the Thanksgiving holiday creating this moving tribute to Damien’s jaunty balls, snipped off in a tragic veterinary incident the week previous. The procedure did not, contrary to expectations, mellow him in the slightest.
I’m especially proud of the soundtrack. Do you know how hard it is to compose appropriate theme music for excised testicles?
November 19, 2007 — 6:25 am
Comments: 43
This weekend? Clean the basement!
November 16, 2007 — 11:07 pm
Comments: 70
Stinks to high heaven
· In September of 2000 TV station France 2 showed footage that it declared was the murder of Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura by the IDF. It became iconic. It was shown and reshown and resulted in a hefty body count.
· After further scrutiny, it was clear that the film didn’t show what they said it showed. In November of 2004, media watchdog Phillippe Karsenty called bullshit on France 2, claiming the incident was staged.
· Charles Enderlin and Arlette Chabot of France 2 sued Karsenty for libel and, with an assist from the shameless Jacques Chirac, France 2 won.
· Karsenty appealed and demanded the raw footage of the incident. The appeal judge concurred.
So today saw the release of 18 of the supposed 27 minutes of raw tape. Film. Disc. Whatever. Among the revelations: al Dura peeking out between his fingers some time after his ‘death.’
Richard Landes of the Augean Stables is, as usual, on top of this one, too. For metabackground (don’t you hate fake words with “meta” in them?), Landes also runs Second Draft, which includes an excellent collection of data on Pallywood.
I met Richard Landes at Acepalooza when, asked my name, I blurted out
my own real name. This so shocked basic weasel protocol that
I walked away before I realized I had been conversing with one of
my favorite bloggers.
— 11:51 am
Comments: 12
Because government is evil, that’s why
In times like these, when there’s so much bustle and turmoil and upheavel in my life, I often think, “hey, what the hell happened to the Dionne quintuplets, anyhow?” Because, let’s face it, my head isn’t wired up too good.
The Dionne quints were born on May 28, 1934 on a little farm outside of Moosetesticle, Ontario. They were the first identical quintuplets known to survive infancy, and it was a close run thing. They were two months premature. Their father was a poor man with five children already and suddenly found himself with ten of the hungry little bastards in the thick of the Great Depression.
There was a world’s fair going on in Chicago at that moment — the Century of Progress Exhibition — and Dionne (reluctantly, says Wikipedia) signed a contract to exhibit the quints, as soon as they were strong enough, in a special pavilion. The Canuckian public howled with outrage and the Ontario government took custody the following year, to protect the babies from exploitation.
Then they built a special amusement park called Quintland for the girls and their caretakers, so visitors could come watch them play behind mesh screens. I shitteth thee not. Six thousand people a day filed past to watch five little girls not get exploited by their parents. Viewing was free, but the gift shop (!) and general flow of visitors to Ontario netted an estimated revenue take of $51 million over the years. Then there were the movies and newsreels and product endorsements.
Their mother never gave up fighting to get them back. And I damn well don’t blame her. If I blew five watermelons out my hoo-hoo one dark and stormy night, I would expect ALL MANNER of earthly reward. She won custody eventually, but by this time they were nine years old.
Nine. They’d never gone to school or done chores or played with other children or seen a member of the family. They’d barely left their little wire mesh freak show at all. They’d known nothing but nurses and the noisy shadows moving in the darkened space behind the wire.
Not surprisingly, it didn’t work out too good. Nothing did, ever after. I’m guessing, considering B.F. Skinner and all, they were just this side of squirrel-poop crazy.
They never adjusted to family. One by one, the quints died. All the ones who lived long enough developed epilepsy. They were desperately poor when the surviving three finally won a settlement of $4 million Canuckian, in 1998. It’s down to Cecile and Annette now.
Isn’t that a heartwarming tale of government stewardship?
November 15, 2007 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 27
Yea it is nitty, and verily it is gritty also
Okay, here’s where it all becomes a lucky happy pink fluffy buttload of playtime joy. The real estate lady looked upon my Mighty Pile and instantly decided it would be quicker if I picked out the few things worth keeping and then turned the ragpickers loose.
I’ve never liked throwing things away (which is how we got here). I’ve never been one for new beginnings and fresh starts. But it’s finally dawning on me that nobody’s waiting to compose my hagiography; that my every post-it note and snotrag is not a precious relic; that rubbing my adolescent journals on lepers will not make them clean. In fact — on the whole — I would rather the world not remember what a spoiled, whiny, self-absorbed unpleasant little proto-emo toe-rag I was at sixteen.
So here we go. I guess it says something not-flattering about me that the idea of throwing out my first computer is a whole lot harder to bear than the idea of throwing away letters from my first serious boyfriend.
After all, that computer is an XT clone with a Phoenix BIOS — the first proper cloned PC. “Phoenix” because the company rose anew from the ashes of its lawsuit with IBM. Ironically, IBM’s loss is what tilted the nascent PC market toward IBM and away from Apple, since there were cheap clones of the former and not (still not) of the latter. “Cheap” is relative, of course: I had to take out a loan for $2,500 to buy it — a very serious chunk of change in 1985 weaselbucks. Still, it ran at 9.44 MHz (as opposed to the 4.77 MHz for a genuine IBM XT), had an RGB monitor, a 20 meg hard drive AND two floppies (one of which was double density). I combed Computer Shopper for months before I picked this one out.
And the boyfriend was just some lovesick twit I grew up with.
November 14, 2007 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 19