But I don’t wanna marry Kevin!
So I had this dream. I dreamed there was this ratfaced dude with long, limp brown hair and they were like, “right. This is Kevin. You’re going to marry him.”
And I’m like, “wait…what?!”
And they go, “you promised you’d move to England and get married, didn’t you?”
And I’m like, “uhhh…yes. I guess.”
And they go, “well, the regular guy can’t make it, so you’ll have to marry Kevin.”
And I wail, “but I don’t wanna marry Kevin!”
That’s going to be my personal catchphrase for a while. You’d appreciate the power of this dream more fully if you had any idea how many suicidally stupid things I’ve done in my life because I felt like I’d promised somebody something.
And don’t get me going on the irresistible power of the dare!
Okay, so this here is what I laughingly call my studio. Actually, it was a proper artist’s studio for years, but then I raised three baby squirrels to robust adulthood in it. Squirrels are a genetically-engineered cross between rats and psychotic trapeze artists.
It was my task this weekend to pull out everything I want from this great tottery pile of squirrel-tainted weasel poo so the Garbage Fairies can come over the holidays and whisk the rest away to Santa’s Landfill. This was what it looked like on Friday. I took one look and wailed, “but I don’t wanna marry Kevin!”
But I learned something, going through my old drawings and other artwork. I learned that, if I work hard and put my mind to it, I sure can suck. I also learned that ammonia dissolves india ink — good to know when you find a big crusty pool of dried ink with squirrel tracks radiating outwards in all directions on a hardwood floor. This happens to everyone some day, and now you’ll be prepared. You’re welcome. Also, I found many hidden caches of inky peanuts and dessicated broccoli, so you’ll be relieved to know I’ll be okay in the lean times, thanks to my beloved psychotic trapeze rats. Fare thee well, boys — wherever thou mightst be!
Wait! How long do gray squirrels live in the wild? Never mind…
December 18, 2007 — 7:09 pm
Comments: 12
Boston has a innernets
Found among some papers tonight. No, this isn’t irony or anything. This is THE IN-TER-NET, coming to Massachusetts. Doot-de-doodly-doo!
Actually, I’d been on THE IN-TER-NET for almost a decade when I signed onto this service, but this really was a breakthrough for price and ubiquity of coverage. I think this was the mid-Nineties. The Usenet days. The Web existed, but it was still excruciatingly lame and boring and non-interactive.
The deal with Usenet, you could post under any name you liked, but your IP address was always in the header for everybody to see. That’s what made AOL such a popular trollhaven when it hit the ‘net: no matter who you were or where you posted from in the world, the IP address just resolved to plain old AOL.com. All AOL users looked alike. They could trash talk anonymously.
These people, this USAinternet thing, had dialup numbers in cities all over the country. When I posted from work (yeah…I had a dedicated outside phone line for data transfer…sweet), I dialled a local number and my IP resolved to something like powernet.boston.ma.com. And from home it was powernet.providence.ri.com.
Well, lots of ISPs used these same phone lines, I noticed. So, for the modest price of a long-distance phone call, I could make strange troll-y messages look, to anyone who paid attention, like they came from…whoever on Usenet happened to be irritating me at the moment.
Yeah. Hm. They don’t call me “weasel” for my silky fur and jaunty whiskers.
December 5, 2007 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 9
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
Farewell to an old friend
This here is Stoaty’s hash pipe (I’m experimenting with speaking of myself in the third person. It worked so well for Bob Dole). A good friend made this for me in High School. It’s a layer of rosewood, a layer of ebony and a layer of ivory laminated together and carved to shape. It’s beautiful.
And until the ivory finally burned away from the business end, it tasted like you were smoking toenails.
Still, when someone gives me a gift, I use it. Only, I haven’t used it since 1980. I stopped doing illegal things entirely when I realized I was qualified for grown-up jail. I’m fairly agnostic on the topic of gay marriage, unless it involves me. I don’t want one. Especially by force in a federal detention facility.
Twenty seven years. So I was astonished when I poked it up one nostril and picked up the acid tang of illicit herbiage. Oops! Can’t bring it to England. They go through your stuff. Can’t mail it to one of you guys, just in case it goes astray. So I gave it to a friend of mine who occasionally still indulges.
I hope she remembers she put it in the glove compartment before her next traffic stop.
September 4, 2007 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 37
I found it!
Remember that coonskin cap I told y’all my oldest brother knitted me? I found it in the basement this weekend when I was throwing away my old college clothes. Here it is, charmingly modeled by Chastity.
Then I looked him up on the web. My brother, I mean. He uses a singular online username and he sometimes mentions his real name (he’s got a highly cornpone Southern moniker, too. Thanks, Mom), so I easily tracked him down first time I tried. Every once in a while, I look him up to see how things are going. We were eight years apart and not even a little bit close. Getting in touch directly might result in…more of a relationship than I’m looking for. Still…you know. Fambly.
Turns out he still knits. He has gout. And three grandchildren, one of whom likes astronomy. And his favorite band is Tool.
Isn’t the internet neat?
August 29, 2007 — 11:44 pm
Comments: 22
Before there was Photoshop
I don’t know how many thousands of dollars this baby cost new. Several, many. Can you get a feel for the scale of it? I should have shot the picture next to a Junior High School gymnasium for comparison. This is a Truevision videographics adapter, but everybody called it a Targa board. They were the only game in town for image manipulation in 1987.
Before there was Photoshop, there was this. Before there was this, people had a touching and almost religious faith in the veracity of photographs. It was my job to crush those tender feelings under the heel of my sneaker.
Truth is, we didn’t really need the bzillion dollars worth of graphics computing we bought in the ’80s. In some measure, the main purpose was to make our customers go, “woo!” My computer room was a stop on the company tour for every client. My boss would keep up a snappy patter about what the machines were capable of while I demonstrated in real-time. Like a freak show.
Or sometimes an engineer would drop me the client’s annual report before a meeting, and I would digitize a picture of their headquarters and set fire to it. They walk into the meeting, see a picture of a half-destroyed Conglamco Industries’ flagship facility projected on the back wall and dive for the phones. Ah, it was sweet.
Then there was a time I almost bought myself a lifetime of unwanted attention from the Feds. See, somebody was going to talk to Boeing, and he gave me this really crappy, blurry picture of a jet to use on the title slide. That wasn’t right, so I cleaned it up. Sharpened it, drew in the obvious lines. My boss saw it and nearly wet himself; it was the first released photo of a certain stealth bomber; it was supposed to be all blurry.
All our computer graphics stuff lived in a small, purpose-built room with a real door. A real door, and walls that went all the way to the ceiling. It was that important. Two complete graphics workstations, five monitors, assorted cameras and bernoulli boxes. Things that whirred and things that hissed, blinking LEDs of every color (except blue…those came later). The bridge of the Enterprise wasn’t a patch on it. The whole room worked on one circuit that was operated by a single knife switch by the door. I got to work before dawn and it was my great privilege to hit that switch and bring the whole glittering, wheezing chromium beast to life every morning.
I couldn’t possibly have used this board. It was nonstandard in every way. But my boss is a great thrower-awayer of things, and I’m a hoarder. (They had to wait until I was on vacation to biff our original three computers: an IBM XT and two ATs. Oh, god. Where are they now?). And I have the monitor that this board drove (also useless). But, you know…it just wasn’t fitting to let something this amazing and world-changing go into a dumpster. It had earned itself a flaming Viking funeral ship, at the very least.
Eh. I’m sure I’ve told you guys these tired old stories before, in some thread or other. Indulge me. It makes it easier to say goodbye.
August 21, 2007 — 6:46 pm
Comments: 20
Weasel’s lucky coon bone
This here’s a baculum. An os penis. A penile bone. Specifically, this is the peckerbone of a raccoon. I’ve carried it in my wallet for thirty years. For luck.
Somewhere along the line, the business end got broken, so I can’t demonstrate. But it’s worth remembering: if someone hands you a bone with one joint only, and you’re pretty sure it’s not a finger or toe bone, you can rest assured you are holding in your hands a winkiebone.
Most male mammals have an os johnson, including our closest animal relatives, the chimps. We are in a small group of boneless dickwielders, along with horses, marsupials and rabbits. We are, indeed, hung like horses. And/or rabbits.
Biologist Richard Dawkins thinks humans lost the os dingdong via sexual selection by females, since you have to be healthy to build and maintain a decent stiffy purely with hydraulics. By that logic, humans should’ve lost their leg bones and eyeballs and tongues as well, since you’d have to very fucking healthy to writhe around on the ground like a blind slug making “awoo” noises and still survive to mate. Me, I think evolution took them away when we began to walk upright. Otherwise that thing’d be whipping around slamming into stuff all the time.
Or possibly the devolution of human penis bones coincides with the evolution of pants.
There isn’t a word in Biblical Hebrew for skinflute, so some speculate that Eve was actually created out of Adam’s os tallywhacker. This would neatly explain both our modern lack of dickbonage and <insert your own woman/penis joke here, because I couldn’t think of a good one>.
The female homologue to the schlongbone is called the baubellum or os clitoridis.
Occasionally, modern human babies are born with an os peepee. They are surgically removed. (It seems more likely that it’s some sort of stray ossification than a proper, jointed and fully formed prickulum, though, don’t you think?)
I didn’t know half of this ten minutes ago. I cribbed it all from Wikipedia. Some day, I may have to rename this blog Stuff I Stole from Wikipedia but Hopefully Funnier.
My mother had a pair of earings made from coon bones. She said it was a way of swiftly identifying country boys (to what end, I do not know). She said a man who grew up hunting would invariably turn red and splutter, “ma’am — do you know what those are?”
And she’d say, “no, but somebody told me I’d look good between two of them.”
So over the years, people sent her various exotic specimens of pudbone. I remember an impressive one from a kodiak bear. And a walking stick made out of a bull’s wiener, stretched and dried. I wonder where they all ended up?
Anyhow, I’m not giving this one away. I just wanted to share.
And see how many words for pizzle I could think of off the top of my head.
And guarantee myself ALL KINDS of unfortunate Google traffic.
In conclusion, weasel porn!
July 31, 2007 — 1:52 pm
Comments: 106
Ladies of Spain, hm hm hm hm…
My dad plays Lady of Spain on the banjo. It’s my favorite. I told my mother that, and she said, “Yes, that is pretty funny.”
And I’m, like, “funny? What do you mean?”
And she said, “Honey, it’s a joke. Lady of Spain? On the banjo?”
And I go, “I don’t get it.”
And she’s like, “well…it’s not a song you associate with the banjo, is all.”
And I say, “I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”
I get it now. I guess. Anyhow, this lady of Spain is a large cast metal bust of a lady. From Spain. My grandfather picked it up somewhere and she’s been smirking in my livingroom ever since. When I was a child, her jewelry was touched with different colors of shiny enamel. My grandfather again. He had outbursts of taste and spasms of tacky. A real Renaissance man.
We call her Chastity. I didn’t get that joke for years, either. See, she’s destined to remain chaste. Because…no snootch. Her map doesn’t have the Netherlands on it, know’m saying?
Later, Mother had her bronzed. Turns out, the original casting material was…zinc or something.
Mother didn’t like Chastity. It’s that prim smile. Looks a touch judgmental for her comfort. Mother was no better than she should have been, as the saying goes. She couldn’t afford to have a lot of judgment aimed in her direction.
Chastity gets decorated at Christmas time. The rest of the year, she’s mostly a hat rack. Yep, I’m still Spring cleaning. I have a feeling y’all will get to meet a lot of my stuff.
July 2, 2007 — 3:52 pm
Comments: 119
Coming up for air…
I’ve just gone through and sorted them into piles. It was almost perfectly one third pre-Code horror comics (reproductions mostly), one third gun magazines and catalogs, and one third Teletubbies publications.
If I’m ever suspected of anything serious enough to evoke a search warrant, I’m screwed. They won’t know what they’ve got on their hands, but
they’ll know whatever it is belongs in prison for a long, long time.
June 26, 2007 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 14
Bedeviled by aunties
I’ve started and abandoned several posts tonight. I’m sick of the sound of my own voice, I guess. So, here…here’s a picture of something.
Who is she? No idea. She has a sweet face, hasn’t she?
Years ago, I had a friend who was a photographer; his work sometimes took him abroad. When it did, I looked after his cats for him. He paid me with bits of junk he picked up in his travels. I love me some bits of junk.
There’s a flea market in London he liked particularly (note to self: why have I never been to this alleged flea market in London?); picture frames were something I liked particularly (I like to start with the frame and then paint the picture for it). Hence, this.
Only, he bought it with the photograph in. And every time I tried to throw the picture away — or at least take it out of the frame — I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t. What if this is the last vestige of this lady on earth? What if I toss it and there’s nothing left to prove she even existed? It would be like she never was. Like I’d wiped her right out of human history with my own fair paw. That’s a heavy burden to hand a weasel.
So she lives on my sideboard, next to my actual family. There are no notations on the photo (people! Be kind to the strangers who inhabit the future! Write names on your stuff!), but the photographer was Edmund Wheeler, 43 Western Road, Brighton.
Brighton! I don’t know from ‘Western Road’ but I’ve left Brighton headed West a time or two. Maybe we crossed paths, Aunt Fan and me.
Aunt Fan. I made that up. And the book she’s reading: it’s Wuthering Heights. She thought it was rubbish. And tosh. She liked to say “rubbish” and “tosh”. She also liked port in the evening. I made all that up, too.
You live with somebody else’s Auntie on your sideboard for twenty years, you have a right to her biography, I say.
May 31, 2007 — 5:20 pm
Comments: 17