Is it sick if you know you’re doing it?
Meet my desk toys! They sit on my monitor stand, inches from my busy fingers, waiting to entertain me.
The toothpicks and the picture tacks work in similar ways: I can shove them under the edge of the monitor only so far, and then they stick. Then they can be shuffled and arranged in various ways. Sometimes, neatly in rows. Sometimes fanned out from an imaginary centerpoint. Sometimes — as pictured — quite randomly. I’m flexible like that. Not like some people and their tight-ass OCD; mine is a loose, free-wheelin’ sort of obsessing compulsion.
The foam ring came out of a package of CD’s. It fits over the knuckle of my little fingers — either one of them — but not the next biggest finger. Amazing! Naturally, I have to test this astonishing property frequently to make sure it still applies.
The push pin is for raking across my data CD’s to ruin them before I throw them away. No stealing my data, you wicked imaginary dumpster data bandits! The paperclip is for sticking in the little hole in the CD burner and rescuing CD’s that have become trapped. One of my CD burners is occasionally naughty like that. When not thus employed, it is bent just so and stuck under the edge of the monitor, much like the toothpicks and the picture tacks.
Stickstickstick; sticky stickity stickstick. Things that stick and unstick are so gratifying!
The twist ties…don’t do anything. But I save them all in that spot. Because, hey! You never know when you might need a twist tie. In that spot.
The piece of artwork turned up recently. It’s a 35mm slide (remember them?) of a fish on a platter with big red lips and white teeth. It’s the second drawing I ever did on a computer, some time long about 1985. The first drawing I ever did was an elegant, understated graphical treatment of a fountain pen. I remember it distinctly. Does that turn up? No. All I got is this stupid toothy fish. Some legacy!
Look, I watch progress bars for a living. A bunch of my day is spent waiting for programs to compile or CD’s to burn or images to render; awkward, fiddly little chunks of time that aren’t quite enough to do some other productive thing but a tad too long to do nothing at all. Perfect for arranging toothpicks and slipping foam rings over your finger bones.
It’s a caged animal thing. Back and forth, back and forth.
But, you know, I can’t actually see myself moving these objects and setting them up in the new office. That seems a bit eccentric, even for me. I’ve put out hand several times with the intention of throwing them away. I haven’t quite made it yet.
Can you see why moving is a bit of a chore?
October 10, 2007 — 12:41 pm
Comments: 10
The incredible shrinking weasel
I’m not really an atheist. That’s just shorthand. It’s easier than explaining that inexplicable things happen to me, but they don’t seem to emanate from something grand and mighty like the God of Abraham. More like something small and relatively weak. With a rotten sense of humor.
Every turning point in my life bristles with weird coincidence. Like so: I’ve worked for the same company in the same location for almost 25 years. We moved office once in all that time — from one side of the parking lot to the other. So I could reasonably expect to serve out my last few months in a comfortable, familiar environment and stick the next poor bastard with clearing out my junk.
But no. Boss lady has decided we have to pick up stakes and move operations to the home office right now. Exactly one week before I fly to England to help Uncle B move the London house to the new place.
So everywhere I turn there are cardboard boxes and and bags of trash and huge hairy dust bunnies and the painful throwing away of things. I don’t throw away things good. I collect things real good, but every time I throw an object away it nibbles off a little piece of my happiness.
But a twenty year old computer graphics program is worth exactly nothing. Those barrels? Full of them. And the manuals that came with. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stuff…back in the day. Now, begone! Geroff! Vamoose!
Ow! Owowow! Boohoo. Shit. Woe is Weasel. Make it stop!
October 9, 2007 — 2:19 pm
Comments: 53
Who can turn the world on with her smile?
Hazel Frederick, that’s who. She’s the lady in the picture with the scarf and the scowl. When they filmed this shot for the title sequence of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the crew kept the camera as concealed as possible so that bystanders would behave naturally. So there’s Hazel doing what comes natural when a grinning nutcase stands in the middle of a busy downtown intersection and flings her hat in the air. Probably hopped up on goofballs.
I must say, I’ve had a few happy moments in my life, but I’ve never experienced such a general feeling of well-being that I was overcome with the overwhelming compulsion to fling my stuff in the air while crossing a city street. I can’t help feeling I’ve missed out. Note to self: buy more goofballs.
In an ironic juxtaposition, TV Land paid to erect this large bronze statue near the spot. It’s a chilling interpretation of the Mouth of Hell from Dante’s Inferno. Abandon hope…I know I did!
I’ve just bought the first two seasons of MTM on DVD. I still think of it as “the new thing that lady from the Dick van Dyke Show is doing.” It holds up very well, actually.
I cribbed most of this from Wikipedia, natch. According to the article, the people who owned the house used in the exterior shots of Mary’s apartment got so irritated with the attention, they hung an “impeach Nixon” sign outside to discourage picture takers. This was the reason she moves to a high-rise in the fifth season: they couldn’t take any more exterior shots of the house. Which sort of implies they never had a contractual arrangement with the owners and just banged around Minneapolis taking pictures of cozy houses.
In conclusion: happy Columbus Day!
October 8, 2007 — 2:33 pm
Comments: 40
I coulda swore it was Thursday
October 5, 2007 — 11:58 pm
Comments: 24
Russian? Anyone?
This was on the back door of an otherwise plain white work van I saw on the commute home tonight. Anyone?
Yeah, I know. Lame post, but I’ve goofed off all day and I hesitate to break a perfect record. It was a cinch the stapler post would dominate the blog all week, anyhow.
Uncle Badger says I deserve you guys. Sometimes, it almost sounds like it’s not a compliment.
— 5:04 pm
Comments: 43
People come and go so quickly here
This blog has become one of my favorite daily reads. So I shall show my gratitude by swiping his stuff.
Like this map. The one up top there. Guess what the dots mean. No, guess. Seriously, I’m not typing anything else until you do.
Wrong! It’s a list of all 160 cities in 1900 that had a population greater than 25,000.
Holy smokes! Can you believe it? Granted, some of those cities had a lot more than 25,000 citizens. The top twenty ranged from New York City, at 3,437,202 to Providence, RI at 175,597. (Poor little Rhode Island. Providence has slid to 124th with a current population of approximately 176,862. We’re leaking people!).
It’s so easy to forget that Superpower America is a 20th Century invention. Before that, we were a few happy rubes with cowshit on our boots. One of my favorite displays at the Smithsonian was in the Castle: they preserved intact the 1876 centennial exhibition, showing all our proudest accomplishments at the end of the Victorian era. Tennessee’s entire display is a coon skin and some pieces of wood. With bark on.
Somehow, that map links up in my head with this datum what I also nicked: as of 2006, service industries accounted for 42% of the world’s employment in 2006, agriculture 36.1%. Listen up — we got more peeps driving desks than driving ploughs!
He says (and I agree) that this is a huge milestone: the point at which the majority of our species is no longer in the business of grubbing up food.
Why do these two ideas go together? I…hmm. Well, history moves very fast. And, despite everything, pretty much in the right direction.
Get me! I’m an optimist!
October 4, 2007 — 6:07 pm
Comments: 19
The Museum of Swingline
“Why do I have so many staplers?” I asked no-one in particular when they just kept turning up in every drawer and cabinet today.
“Because the last time we moved, you wouldn’t let anybody throw one away,” said a voice from the opposite cube, “don’t you remember?”
No. But I believe it. My boss usually waited until I took a day off to throw things out; it was so much less painful than prying my fists open and listening to my ululating wails.
Look at these beauties! Big and heavy and streamlined, like some mighty diesel engine of stapling. They streamlined everything back then, as if the efficacy of simple office supplies was determined by their coefficient of drag. Is your desk holding you back? Get the sleek, modern, aerodynamic model, new for 1952! Now with wind-tunnelocity!
This company is both old and parsimonious; stuff hangs around until it flat out disintegrates. Do you know how long it takes furniture of the mid-twentieth century to fall apart? And since we were the art department and got shit on everything we touched, we got the leftover’s leftovers.
My old desk was a heavy, grossly overengineered slab of a barge of a piece of furniture, something like the QEII on legs. Blaaaaart ding ding! Out of the way, you little fishing vessels! Weasel doing paperwork!
We shed most of that stuff when we moved here, across the street from our old offices. But I managed to rescue these few small time travelers. And some rather nice scissors. And a magnifying glass. And all the X-Acto knives and pica rulers. A french curve set. Two excellent multi-hole paper punches. A six foot tall motorized photographic enlarger. And a Bernoulli box.
Ambassadors from another era.
Come, my pets. Would you like to visit England?
October 3, 2007 — 5:52 pm
Comments: 42
A Wiper for Every Need
You know, I started this blog to talk about news and politics. I wasn’t prepared for rude poetry and potty humor. Still, I’m on a roll!
Badump-tsssssss.
Yeah, look what I found in the back of a drawer today. Kimwipes! We used to buy these by the crate; now this sad, mustly little guy is probably the last of his kind in captivity.
I’ll bet you didn’t know there were different wiping needs, let alone that someone prided himself on being the standard for his particular wiping duty.
Kimwipes were a designer’s essential; they’re hard, lint-free wipes primarily used for mopping excess wax off galley using powerful, braincell-eating film cleaning solvents. If you don’t know what the hell activity I just described, don’t bother learning — the old way of preparing publications for print is never, ever coming back.
Not even after the apocalypse, when we’re running around with mullets and shoulder pads popping caps in each other’s asses.
See, the old photographic processes were extraodinarily complex, sophisticated and expensive. Assembling a magazine required several gigantic specialty cameras, many different kinds of film and papers, all sorts of amusingly lethal chemicals and a thousand little specialty items of no use to anyone else ever again under any circumstances. We had burnishers, waxers, rollers, wipers, technical pens, non-repro pens, markers, swatches, specialty knives of all sorts, registration marks, tracing overlay, illustration board, foamcore in an assortment of colors, lead holders, lead pointers and leads. We had rubylith and amberlith (which we called rubylips and amberlips), the Leroy lettering system, and something we called a Blue Thing, which was a burnishing tool that came inside tubes of 3M photo mounting adhesive but was the best darned all-around essential paste-up burnisher ever.
I can remember six different kinds of tape I couldn’t get through the day without.
Man, sitting here thinking about it, more and more stuff is coming back to me. The specialty furniture, the lighting, the drafting tools, the calculators, the stencils, the Letraset thingies and the Pantone dinguses. And we haven’t even touched on the darkroom stuff yet.
Huh. Not all earth’s vanishing languages are in Siberia or New Guinea.
October 2, 2007 — 6:26 pm
Comments: 29
Bidet Week continues at sweasel.com
Hey, this graphical thingie came in handy quicker than expected.
Yes, it’s a year today since I first posted on WordPress. I paid them $15 for the ability to edit my stylesheet, and that expired yesterday. I don’t know if that simply means I can’t edit the CSS any more, or if they’ll actively remove the changes I made and revert it to a default template.
For those who don’t know from stylesheets, CSS controls everything about the look of a site: font size and style, number of columns, color scheme…the lot. If they blow up my customizations, it’s going to get real ugly. So far nothing’s changed.
Anyhoo! I started the original site as a distraction before a trip to the UK. I’m a pretty good traveler, but I worry excessively beforehand. Nothing like a big wet sloppy pile of HTML to occupy the brain.
Several months later, in the face of no demand whatsoever and dismal traffic, I bought the domain sweasel.com. And the rest, as they say, is footnote.
I’ve learned a lot in the past year. I’ve learned that leaving a Plymouth Belvedere in a pit for fifty years is a Very Bad Idea. I’ve learned that boobies drive traffic but cats kill it. I’ve learned that I’m a girl.
No, wait…you learned that. I pretty much knew it already.
But mostly, I’ve learned to pull posts out of my ass. One every weekday. Sometimes in the wee hours, when I could barely focus or summon the will to touch-type and just flailed away with my elbows. Sometimes at work, because let’s face it: I’m salaried. Sometimes in that brief, frantic period between the evening commute and the moment the vodka hits my frontal lobes and I start hanging all over you, blubbering about what wunnerful, wunnerful people you are and what a lucky, lucky girl I am and heylissen thur playn Our Song.
Together, we’ve written booger haiku and and poems about Peanut Lady Fuck. We’ve swapped recipes and old family stories and supernumery nipples. We’ve shared and, I’d like to think, grown together just a little.
So here’s to the next twelve months of sweasel.com!
Or not. Whatever.
October 1, 2007 — 12:39 pm
Comments: 30