Damien Weasel, Cat Scientist
Poor little bastard was set up. She went out first and planted herself at the foot of the stairs. They are arch enemies, so his only escepe was to take a flying leap over her head. The walk was covered in an inch of smooth, melty ice with a skim of water over the top. This is his first Winter and we haven’t had a good freeze yet, so he doesn’t know from ice. He took his leap, hit, made it all the way to the end of the walkway on his ass in one smooth, wet, flailing pinwheel of knees and paws and elbows and turned around with this amazing “whoa! d00d!!1!!” look on his little mug.
Imagine if he still had balls.
February 19, 2007 — 6:15 am
Comments: 8
Blogging and the OCD Mailman
Have you ever seen this video of the OCD Mailman that made the rounds a few years ago? For nearly three minutes, this guy pulls the basket out of a public postbox, checks it, feels around for mail, closes it up, walks away, walks back and does it all again. You’ll never know how long three minutes is until you watch this performance. If he did it at every stop along the way, this poor bastard missed his dinner.
I find this one more ‘funny ouch’ than ‘funny haha’, having been gifted with an improbable number of O’s and C’s myself.
This guy is a ‘checker’. I’m more of a ‘polisher’ myself. I hone. And I burnish. And I buff. And I do this weird thing where I must maximize the efficiency of simple tasks.
Like, I’m reading a book and drinking coffee and eating a piece of toast. When I finish, I want to go upstairs with my book. This (naturally) has to be done in one trip. If I put the cup on the plate and tuck the book under my arm, I can go in the kitchen and put the dishes in the sink, but I have to put the book down to rinse them and the book might get wet. If I put the book down on my way into the kitchen, it’s not on the shortest path to the stairs on the way back. If I swing by the stairs first and put the book down, I’ll go past the mail, which I will want to examine. But I will have a plate and a cup in my hand.
In the end, I manage to calculate the route of maximum economy. Or, you know, say ‘screw it’ and go for a drive.
I read a biography of Turing that claimed his bicycle lost its chain periodically on his way to work, causing him to fall off. Rather than fix the gear, he observed that the chain worked its way off every twelfth revolution, built an apparatus that calculated the number of elapsed revolutions and rang a bell in time for him to jump off the bike right before the chain slipped.
I’ll bet the story isn’t true. It’s got that apocryphal stink all over it. But the general approach is weasel-approved (not that I’m comparing myself to the Father of Modern Computing, you understand — Turing was way gayer than me).
So blogging has been a sort of therapy — having to throw shit into the arena fast, often, half-polished and one-eighth baked. It might be less painful to pony up for an actual therapist, but you never know if you’ll get the good kind who dispense drugs, or the bad kind who want to talk about your mom and your genitals. In the same conversation.
So, now that I have the new site nailed down, the general plan is to post something every weekday, be it ever so small or craptacular. That’s not a promise, it’s a general plan. Weekends off. And if I find one of those congenial, pharmaceutical-dispensing pshrinks, I am so out of here.
See you Monday.
February 16, 2007 — 7:33 pm
Comments: 9
Misspelling my way to fame and fortune
Judging by the Google hits from the WordPress site, two of my biggest sellers were “Janet Jackon” and “Stonehedge.”
“Heh heh,” I thought, “stupid illiterate Googlers.” Until it dawned on me I had to be getting those hits because I had spelled those words that way. Which — duh — a search proved to be correct. I started to fix my mistakes, and then it occurred to me that the pool of websites serving the “Janet Jackon” community is a LOT smaller than the pool of websites serving the “Janet Jackson” community and I was closer to the top of it. Why throw away hits? And hits of such obvious high quality, as well.
This isn’t a new idea, capitalizing on sloppy typing. If you type drudge.com, you won’t get the Drudge Report but the Drudge Retort. I have a friend who was surfing once and tried typing the URL for the blog Biased BBC by hand. He got as far as “bi”, prematurely hit ENTER and Firefox sent him to bi.org — serving the world bisexual community since 1996. And now that it’s cached, he keeps accidentally renewing it.
At least, that’s what he says. Me, I get Behavioral Interventions when I do that. But, hey. I love you, man. You don’t ever have to explain yourself to me.
My one correctly spelled big seller was “boobies,” both of the “perky” and “droopy” varieties. So, I’m thinking…what if I misspell “boobies”? That’s got to be a pure, pharmaceutical grade Googlepalooza, right there.
Let’s start with Boobah — TV’s colorful, squeaky creeptastic pustules. Invented by Anne Wood, who also brought the world the Teletubbies, they too are aimed at under-fives and hallucinogenic drug users. Boobah are a continuation of the freaky fat-assed aliens theme, but without the Tubbies’ charm and obvious artistic merit.
Click the link. But stay away from the brown acid.
As opposed to buboes, which are swollen lymph nodes. They’re a common feature of many diseases, but they gave their name to the bubonic plague. In fact, Wikipedia says, in current epidemiological usage, if it ain’t got buboes, it’s not a plague. Bubonic plague was (almost certainly) the cause of my favorite pandemic, the Black Death.
My second favorite pandemic was the 1918 ‘Flu Pandemic, but that’s gotten so much press, what with the whole bird ‘flu thing. You know how you like something, and then it gets popular, and that ruins it?
In conclusion: boobys booobies boøbies boòbyes bubies bôôbeze bubize beubice boobease bübice b°°beez and boo!beas!
February 15, 2007 — 10:26 am
Comments: 4
You know what I love about being a drunk?
Every day has the potential to be April Fool’s and Christmas morning rolled into one.
Like the morning I woke up and my bedroom furniture had been completely rearranged. Not knocked over, mind. Carefully rearranged. (Okay, actually…that morning scared the shit out of me and I toned it way down for a while).
Today I got a package in the mail: a book I have no memory of ordering. It’s like a present from Drunken Me to Sober Me. Drunken Me has pretty good taste and knows better than to order anything over ten bucks or so, so I’m not bothered.
Looks interesting. Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements. Under three dollars, hardback, in Amazon buy it used. I love buy it used.
Though why they insisted on misspelling ‘$*!)@’, I have no idea.
February 14, 2007 — 7:59 pm
Comments: 6
Behold!
Yeah, I know. Going straight to hell.
So here’s the first draft of sweasel.com. There’s still a lot more I want to build, but the front page is (more or less) fully functional now, so I figured I’d go live. Maybe the tantalizing possibility that I might at any moment spectacularly screw the pooch will drive some traffic.
Which is currently nothing like enough to justify buying a domain. I couldn’t help myself. I really, really wanted to play with the code, and this is the only way. I’ve started with a band spanking new sitemeter set to zero, so you can witness my dizzying ride from invisibility to unpopularity.
I’d like to thank the ice storm that covered New England today, giving me a chance to stay home and make this blasphemous graphic. Start as you mean to go on, they say…
— 1:57 pm
Comments: 23