Happy Full Moon!

I don’t recall what its real name is but I call the November one the Love Moon.

Blue Moon is generally the second full moon in a calendar month (rare in November). Black Moon is the second new moon in a calendar month. I think the November one is traditionally the Beaver Moon but for me it is always the Love Moon.

The list I found from Jan-Dec is {Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Harvest, Beaver, and Cold} Moon, respectively.

If I were naming them, my first set of candidate names would be {Polar Bear, Snow, Precious, Zuni, Lightning, Diablo, Girlie, Leo, Chocolate, Magic, Love, and Blonde} Moon.

I was at the mall earlier, and saw a guy using a pushbroom, sweeping up pennies and algae into a pile where the water in the fountain used to be. I’d venture a guess that’s not within spec on the coin counting machine, but it was funny!

Also, some funny things my kids have said:

Jeremy didn’t want an alarm clock: “Alarm clocks distort me”

He used to refer to gibbous and full moons as a Loud Moon.

I fail to understand how “pop culture” writers can use the word “inimitable” (is this a contraction for in (un?) imitatable (sic) without the apostrophic contraction), a word that someone even as literate as me has to contextually bluff that I know it and hope for the best, and at the same time pervert the language to say “an historical” because people are too lazy-talking to put the accent on the hard ‘h’.

Getting that into the MoS, imho, is a political feat akin to a unanimous worldwide adoption of the Kyoto Convention. I wonder who {verb1, verb2, verb3, …} someone or who knew who to pull that off.

“An historical…” is an abomination to humankind. “An honor” and “a historical record” are different. More dumbing down of the language, like the lately-accepted interchangeability of the very different terms “I’m anxious to…” and “I’m… eager to…”! I don’t know where that manual that everyone is forced to use is printed, but I would venture a guess left coast, and it was an intentional attack on extraordinarily literate 80s graduates, just like the deletion of the last comma in a comma-delimited list (which, I’ve been told is called an “Oxford comma”). Every time I see that, it annoys me, 10 years in, 50 more to go. I’d like to recast the sentences that comprise their job descriptions.

I woke up feeling somewhat better and thinking, like many people have, that schools should teach a bunch of essential skills that everyone should know.  Many of these things are normally taught by parents, which I presume is the ungiven reason for its absence in the curriculum.
However, I’d like to point out that not everyone has their parents, and even fewer people have good ones. And even the good ones can’t always know everything that belongs in this list.

I’ve been thinking for a long time how odd it is that in middle school, everyone was taught how to use a sewing machine, even though I only know one person who even owns a sewing machine.  40 years later, they’re still teaching this to my kids.

So, in this evolving post, I’m going to collect some things in one place that I think would be more valuable and better investment of time.

The first item that came to mind to commit to the list is  “When to go to the doctor.”

You should try to know where your food comes from, and how to shop for groceries, to look at expiration dates, to read labels, about cooking safety, to buy locally when you can.

How to mail things.  Most people waste so much money because they don’t know how to mail things.  Everyone should know what a letter, a large envelope, and a package is, and what options there are to mail packages (including the online-only options).  Learn how to use the post office website and the paypal Multi-order shipping tool to save money.

People do not evaluate risk well.  It’s important to try to do a better evaluation of risk based on actual facts. For example, just because you are personally in control of your car does not mean it’s safer to drive than to fly.

Don’t ever use your teeth as a tool like to strip wire.  You need them and they will crack later in your life if you do this.

Copyright law.  Everyone should have a basic understanding of copyright, and who owns what.  Unless you are paid to do it, or you relinquish your rights, when you create something, you own it.  I’ll elaborate on this later.

If you’re eating something that’s too hot, don’t inhale to cool it off.  Exhale only, or you could end up with the food stuck in your throat and choke to death.

Sometimes stores will sell things in a big package that costs more than two smaller ones.   Look for the latest expiration date on anything that you buy.

I think that sex education in schools should be augmented with dating and relationship ed.   For example, people who are inexperienced at relationships but who are rejected will typically internalize that there is something wrong with them.  Rejection is simply a fact with no message.

Learn how to protect yourself from spam and spoof emails.  Don’t click on links that say you “won” something.  They harvest your email address and then spam you forever.  Logan’s hotmail got compromised this way, and the next day he had 2000 spams and had to permanently set it to Exclusive mode.

Before cashing personal checks, call the issuing bank and ask them to confirm that the funds are in the account.  Otherwise you may end up paying a hefty bounced check fee — for a check you didn’t even write.  Ruint.

Well, that explains all the back pain I’ve been having!

My Valtrex prescription ended up only being $118 (instead of $190 they misquoted on the phone). Walmart was about $80 cheaper. I have no idea how CVS and Rite Aid can remain in business.  Unbelievable.

Those fuckers are huge horse pills, I hate that. They said a common side effect is dizziness and I have a little of it but not too bad. Between only getting 3 hours of sleep last night (bed very late, up very early, yuck) and cooking dinner from 4:30 until 7:45 tonight, I’m fried.

But dinner was good, the kids loved it. When I was cooking, I made a game of giving them the Myers-Briggs test. When I was working at QI, I had a management course and they had a test where you get 15 sets of 4 words and have to choose one.  Many of the words were not easy words, so I had to define them.  So they learned about 25 new vocabulary words, learned about their personalities and the differences between us, and had fun for an hour and a half because it was a game!

It was hard though, having no sleep today and cooking for 3 hours, my back has been hurting but at least now I have an explanation.  Some people have very severe pain, I just have light pain (most of the time) and bad itching. I have itchy spots on other parts of my body but they so far are not bad and usually short-lived before moving on (usually to a new location), not any worse than how my skin usually is. I hope it isn’t too late starting the meds because I’d hate to spend $118 for nothing. It feels very strange, like a sunburn on my lower back, itching around my waistband from my sides to just barely onto the front of my body. and if it’s itchy and you scratch or touch it, it usually hurts immediately, but not always, it’s unpredictable. I had a flash of pain that felt like I got stabbed in the back with an ice pick, but it only lasted the duration of a camera flash. And you feel like heat and movement, like there are tiny worms in there sometimes but not always.  It’s constantly both itchy and hurting a little bit. The back pain is annoying, like I strained it, but I haven’t needed to take anything for it. I hope it doesn’t get much worse. I have spots on my body that if I press on them, feels like a bruise. It’s very strange. I don’t like it, but it is somewhat interesting. It feels a little bit like the body that I am inhabiting is not the same one all the time. It’s as different sometimes as the difference between what your body feels like when you are drunk compared to sober. It’s not very attractive to look at, so I won’t be finding any playmates in the near future LOL

My doctor was surprised that I got it so young.  They usually do not vaccinate for this until you’re 50.  If I were you, I wouldn’t wait that long.

I got three hours sleep today.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had to appear for the dreaded drivers license renewal at the PA “Motor Vehicle Services Center”, which is closed Mondays and closes every day at 4:15pm. Isn’t that convenient for people that work.

The four highlights of my experience were:

• arriving and voicing my irritation for the line of people that extended from the service desk inside, through the available space inside, out the door, and down the sidewalk and past the Mail Room (an authorized UPS shipping facility with a superhot customer service girl with the strangest name I’ve ever known) and saying out loud to the amusement of the other agitated customers, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
• watching the motion-detected electric door opening and closing two thousand times as the line proceeded inside to be serviced by a single, unexpectedly pleasant individual handling service requests and giving out thin paper tickets sequentializing those seeking mugshots.
• walking around, wishing I wasn’t there and having a random guy pass, take a look at my awesome Killola ‘shattered’ shirt and saying “NICE SHIRT!”
• listening to another customer talking to his family and relating to his complaint of it taking too long and that PA is the worst state in the nation for service at the DMV.

I was not amused with my half hour wasted, but he was a commercial licensee and needed to recertify.  They drove 45 minutes and had been waiting for six hours.  Mark my words:  One day, someone will go DMV and replace an expression.

The anti-highlights were the two hundred people there who did not speak a word of English, one of them with a cute little baby girl who desperately needed not only a diaper change, but a parent change. Isn’t the definition of ultimate failure as a parent, to impose upon the most important thing to ever exist in your life, such a disadvantage as not speaking the predominant language of the country in which you live?

I’ve been talking to a Blondie fan in Brazil who learned English because of Blondie, so she could meet other fans and communicate and have more personal choices.  She’s more literate in English than most of the people I’ve encountered in waiting rooms in the last three years.  Now there’s someone I respect.  No wonder the economy is in the toilet.

Back to today:

At the traffic light in Kenhorst, I finally parted company with a 40-in-a-45-zone driver clogging a train of cars.
Entering the left turn lane and looking through aligned windows, I had the privilege of discovering the source of the impaired driving:
She had a cigarette in her left hand, and was texting with her right hand on a cell phone held midway between eyes and windshield.
Left palm on the wheel, right hand on the keyboard, no eyes on the road.  WTF?  Prison is my recommendation.
And prison for everyone who thinks that’s not more impaired than a .07 BAC, which is now just shy of a felony.  The only reason it isn’t is it generates more cash per year than could be stuffed into the volume of my house.

My skin is disintegrating from my infection of no-longer-dormant chicken pox virus that I had 39 or 40 years ago.  eeeek!

I wondered for 30 years what that song is about.  I was writing on my friend Hayley’s facebook page and listening to music when it hit me.  Here are my words, in original order, since I was writing when it happened:

I set my hand to writing you, and I’m scared to death I’m going to freak you out or that your fan mail will get lost on its way.

Dragonfly is parked outside.  Do you get in?

Hover high level off.  The time space tactics saved us then.
Grande Trex fans throughout the universe are well informed on the risks pilots take in entering this race.
We have retained as an added feature of daring, thrills, and excitement for this race, a feature, which I’m sure you’re going to like: musical override lasting three and a half hours…
…
The postulate for mischance runs high but not as high as the tension and competitive spirit right here, and all over the galaxy!

XXXX amazing
(blk) is having a moment of Blondie supernatural inspiration!  !!! no words
The line in Angels on the Balcony: “The door swings open and it’s cold outside” which is one of my favorites of *anything* **ever**…
It’s a coincidence (spoken like the twilight zone “It’s a Cookbook!”)

I finally understand it, after 30 years!!! :: Everyone who matters to you, the door opens; they all come into your life when it’s cold!!  October, November, December!!!
BLK supernovas!
5:09am 11/3/10

the season may vary but not everyone like me has such an uneven distribution, where are all these Cancers from?!

I want to do an online chat with Destri about his writing, it’ll never happen but I like Dreaming

I don’t believe that time actually exists (and many physicists who work with quantum mechanics not only believe it too, but have proven it in experiments where doing something now changes something that had already happened in the past!).  Sometimes it seems like certain things that have happened to me very far apart in time are so closely related, or so unlikely, it seems like everything happened simultaneously.  One day I’m going to have to write about that in detail but let me give you the short version…

Obviously everything does interact to some extent with a clock or a calendar, but I believe in connections and I believe that they exist without regard to time and distance, through time (and space) and that those connections are what allows us, to an extent, more of an extent than most people realize, to make our own reality. Consider this: there are six billion people on the planet. There was one person among tens of millions of Blondie fans who became friends with the band and ended up making, owning, their official web site — and it is me.

I sent [Blondie guitarist and co-founder] Chris Stein a letter (through Chrysalis Records) that I typed on an old antique typewriter (older than my grandmother) in 1984, 85 maybe…

When I ended up friends with Chris, I would visit him and stay over at his apartment in NYC and sleep in his downstairs recording studio. Around 1992, maybe 93, on one of my first visits staying over, I was looking around, fascinated, all this stuff — everywhere — on the walls, on the floor, on every horizontal surface, in cabinets and drawers and just everywhere. And I was reading stuff on the walls and just shocked: there it was, my letter. Hanging on the fucking wall, next to a letter from the late artist Vali Myers who he named his child after.  So talk about a full circle moment, all of the things that had to happen not only for the letter to even be there, but imagine the fact that *I* ended up there to SEE IT.

Just received a terabyte drive from California, packed in a custom-sized box, with a foam block protecting the drive on the top, bottom, and THREE sides!! you have got to be kidding. wtf?

Needless to say, it doesn’t work. Beeps and clicks and you can’t even get into the system bios.

I am so busy, I have so much work I need to get done , lot of computer shit and that goddamn hard drive doesn’t work, fuck.  I am so screwed.  It’s a no returns ebay listing and I guarantee that hitachi will not replace an impact damaged drive because the seller didn’t pack it properly.  I feel another two-month long seller dispute brewing.  another $200 gone until then and I still don’t have the fucking drive.  I was up until almost 7am this morning again doing work and computer stuff, it’s like that almost every day, and each day the performance of the computers gets worse and worse with all these website add-ons like google instant, facebook chat and spell checkers and character counters, software updates, and ads pushed constantly.
Now my dad wants me to come visit sunday (which probably means sat. night late through sometime monday..) so i’m really feeling the time pressure.  if that’s not enough, the goddamn shower started leaking again (dripping).  I just fixed that damn thing last month and it took me almost two whole days, all day and six support calls.  I have no more parts so I had to call again today and order the parts (at least they’re free) and I *have* to fix it because if you don’t, the dripping water actually eats away the drain and it is almost impossible to fix.  The hot faucet in the kitchen sink also leaks water but only around the base of the handle when it’s on.  They sent me the parts for that too but I have no time to install them.  I don’t know what it is with me and water issues.  My house is only 13 years old and I have had nonstop problems with dripping faucets and at least seven *major* floods (with ceiling, floor, and/or furniture damage and even some of my posters and Blondie magazines).  Every time I hear water drip, I get like a cat that’s all poofed up!

—

I don’t know who is playing a part in the dumbing down of the world (or behind it) but I’m not buying any shares in that!

so so what
I am a rock star!
I got my rock moves!

Never ceases to amaze me that people could be intimate and then hate each other.

The only rational explanation I have for this is that the person you were with hates themself (or more accurate: hates the self), except for the obvious case where abuse is involved.

That’s going to take some effort to research and write about.

At least one of my friends who really “gets me” gave me the DSM-4 for a birthday present!

This thought is almost enough to inspire me to read it and see what scientists and professionals have written on the subject.  I know I’m baffled.

10/3/10 around 3:30am

I am 99% sure that hearing intense electrical buzzing noises and seeing flashes of brilliant white light emanating from my microwave a few minutes ago means I’m probably going shopping for a new one later today, first thing after coffee.  Ruint.  At least there wasn’t an explosion like last time.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend because we were thinking that all our lives, we never recalled personally knowing anyone developing mental disorders that interfered with their lives. I thought back into my past, to a child, a teenager, in college, and I never remember this. But now, we both know so many people now who have such problems that in some cases it could be classified as near insanity. I know so many more people today who have psychological problems than medical problems and it is really bizarre.

Did I just not notice when I was younger, or wasn’t it there? I remember feeling so aware of what was going on around me that I can’t imagine I just missed it. Did I learn to like people or have something in common with people who were the ones who must develop mental problems as an emergent property? Is there an environmental cause, insanity caused by something that’s changed, a toxin or biological agent due to warfare, or an undiscovered disease, even a minor one that triggers biochemical changes to the body at a later age? Or was there (is there?) a spike in childhood abuse or sexual abuse that manifests itself this way later in life and now I’m at that age when it manifests?

I don’t know, but it was a really interesting conversation.

Last night, Killola did a short live show that was available to people (like me) who had purchased their new album on the USB “dog tag.” I hadn’t seen this technology before but it was great!

I just plugged the album into a USB port, clicked on an option, and it opened a browser with a video window of the show, expandable to fullscreen, the live audio, and a chat area where fans could type to each other and to the band. It was a nice experience, second only to being there..

This morning, I had a long period of lucid dreams. I was constantly waking up thinking about Killola and in some cases hearing music in my head (which, unlike most people, never happens to me when I’m awake). At 6:22am, I got up and shut the windows and doors because of the noise from the birds. I hate birds.

In the first dream I remember, I was aware of myself walking around in a building, getting ready to go outside. It was night. As I approached the door, a large glass one with two large glass windows on either side, like the door in a business rather than a home, it appeared at first to be foggy outside. As I approached, I realized it was snowing! Visibility was limited; the ground was white. Maybe an inch had fallen; it was fine, slightly icy snow, the kind you get when it’s almost warm enough to sleet or freeze rain. I thought to myself, “Isn’t it July?” For a moment, I believed it was November and felt a moment of fear: Where have those four months gone? Was I in an accident? And that made me realize I was dreaming! I was completely aware of it and could carry on thoughts like I do when I’m awake. I often talk to myself in my mind and I think in my own voice. I wonder if that’s how other people think. But it was just like that.

The realization I was dreaming didn’t make it end like it typically does, and I stayed in that state and it persisted even if I moved around. After a short time, I tried to think a few things and the scene changed. Last night I had a nice call with April and I must have been thinking about her or about how much I miss her, because suddenly she was there, and it made me really happy so I kissed her (not something I normally do) and said, “that’s all,” abruptly finding myself in another scene.

I was listening to Goldfrapp — some kind of a CD-quality live recording that someone gave me and that I downloaded. For those of you who listen to Goldfrapp in real life, Alison can be pretty hard to understand. Very often, even though I’ve read the lyrics to her songs many times, I *still* don’t understand what she’s saying when I listen to them!
It’s a mysterious quality and some people aren’t into it, but I love her voice. Anyway, she was singing in perfect clarity; it was definitely her voice, but all the words were totally clear. It was just perfection, like how I felt when Kato kept the vocal take that Debbie recorded, the one that made me goosebumpy. I can almost remember some line about changing the day to night or about the day becoming night. It was so beautiful, I so wish I could remember the rest of it!

It’s so hot here, it feels like what I imagine a tropical forest to be like. It’s supposed to get much hotter too. And lately it’s been hot. A couple of days not long ago were the hottest in a decade.

“someone on facebook is looking for you”.   Wouldn’t they just send me a friend request?

“blk claim your pack of cigarettes”.   I think anyone would know just by googling my name that I don’t smoke.

Late last night, I emailed Helen something funny about how much I hate birds. She thought it was funny, and this got me to wondering whether there was a facebook group for people who hate birds, and sure enough, there was. “I Hate Birds” has 3,948 members. I joined and posted part of my email to her, here for your amusement and/or horror (you have been warned):

just a little while ago, the moon set. it’s still nice out, though much cooler than earlier. and guess what. there’s a fucking bird tweeting. not just once in a while…. like crazy, and on and on and on. like the ten millions others do at sunup, but here we have one that is different.

I asked myself just one question, and it’s the same question I ask of myself: in the grand scheme of evolution and influence on the world, how will this individual do — success or failure? be interesting to know. I only knew one other bird, that I can recall, that tweeted at night. It was in 1991 at my dad’s when April was there. we had a couple of drinks and just laughed and laughed and laughed…. eventually I was like, “I hate birds. I’m going to go shut it up. do you want to come along?” (she did), so we went outside, snuck around to try to get close, and blasted a gun near it (which I had conveniently remember to bring along). It shut up. 5 minutes later when we got back in the house, it started up again! You might imagine the uproarious laughter we extracted from that experience!

Now bringing this story up to the present (yesterday):

Today not long after i got up, before coffee, i heard really loud tweeting….now remember, I hate birds with a passion except if they’re cooked and served on my dinner plate (or flying around in the air near me, shotgun in hand, on their way there). I’m one who will let the windows open at night and who detests the morning, but will get up just to shut the windows so I don’t have to listen to those fuckers tweeting, squawking, chirping, squeaking, screaming, twittering, or making any other heretofore unmentioned useless obnoxious noises, except possibly the screeching of an owl in the night and the quiet clucking of a chicken living in oblivion.

So I’m hearing this tweeting, looking for an open window to close, but all the windows were shut because it was so hot today… perhaps you’ve heard scientists describe the planet Venus in the daytime. it was like that only different. I traced it down not to a window, but to the garage door… I threw the door open to surprise it, and sure enough, a bird flew out of the open garage door. As I was looking in the area it flew from, searching for a nest, another flew out — right out of my tool box! those little fuckers had built a nest in a cardboard box in the top of my tool box. there were no eggs in it so I dumped it outside and picked up all the little pieces of grass and then put a grinder in the box… which was labeled “Angle Grinder”, not “Bird Nest”!

the bastards can’t read anything for shit, but they sure do shit on anything they can’t read.
which is *everything*.

A bird is just a digestive tract with a mouth at one end and a perpetually open asshole at the other where black, white, and purple shit constantly emanates because nature forgot to design them a sphincter!

I can’t believe I just typed that out loud but I *really* hate those disgusting little fuckers.

Do you?  You can join my own I Hate Birds facebook page.  The other eventually went away after attaining 6000 likes.

I had to share this thought from Barbara Sicuranza’s Facebook page:

Barbara Sicuranza:
“Passing a waterfall today Vali asks, “Is that man-made”?
“No baby, that is nature”, I said.
Akira asks “how come you never hear of anything that is woman-made?”

Laurel Katz-Bohen commented, “Tell her everything is woman made!”

Amazing.

It annoys me that my phone erases voicemails even though I press the Save button.

That means that the Save key is actually a Delete key two weeks in the future.  How useless.

If I wanted the message to be deleted, I would have pressed Delete, not Save.

I like the 22nd of months. Maybe I’ll explain sometime.

Completely unrelated:
Today I was thinking that I know very few people nearby (there are a few proportionately speaking) who I think are genuinely good people (all you have to do is drive anywhere to know what I mean), but realize that I know so many genuinely good people if I look at everyone I know online and include those who aren’t nearby geographically. I don’t know that I could count them all. This got me to thinking: do people who are genuinely good to others have more of an impact on the world (more accurately: on the people living in the world) than those others who are “average” or not genuinely good. I think this is true. I don’t quite know how to express this idea, but here’s an example:

Five years ago, I ordered a really tasty Hungarian Goulash (Gulaschsuppe) at a local German restaurant, and being a cook, wanted to develop my own recipe. My process is to do a lot of internet research and then iterate with revisions until successful. I am at the point now where I can think in my head how a recipe will taste just by reading it, and I invariably know if it would be good and how it would need to be changed to make my zero-calorie imaginary culinary delight into its real-world reciprocal. One of the things I did to develop this one was read voluminous material on recipe sites (allrecipes etc.) and I found someone who seemed to have just the right background, so I scrounged around until I tracked down an email; I wrote her, and she wrote me back, contributing her personal recipe, experience, and insights, uncompensated, just because she agrees with me that recipes are guidelines and she’s a genuinely nice person sharing a common passion.

Last week, just after Debbie did the rainforest benefit, I was looking for something specific in my old emails, and of all the things, I found her email from four years ago, so I wrote back with the link to return her favor with my own version of the recipe I developed (which is one of my best, at least in the “easy” category). Such a delight to discover this morning through her reply that her email was still valid.

It really put me in a good mood, and I try to return favors and give back to anyone and everyone who gives something of themselves, something that makes a difference in the quality of life of someone else. Do you know anyone who just radiates? I do, and I gravitoward them.

Also on unrelated tangents:

I liked Google’s playable pac-man logo today, but I had to keep closing it because the cpu fan on my lapdance, er i mean laptop lol, ran constantly at cruising speed. (My car has six speeds, but the laptop only has four: Off, Turtling, Cruising Speed, and Jet Engine).

I made shawarma today, but had to mix up a new batch of Baharat (the spice that’s the primary flavor in it). The big batch I mixed on 12/2/07 got used up. I haven’t cooked it yet. It’s one of my very best recipes… if I ever get an opportunity to cook for Debbie, it might be this one.

I like snakes (and reptiles in general) and was trying to figure out why some people don’t like or are even afraid of them…
Snakes are just flexible tubes covered in hard little plastic scales (like glitter), and upside: you can even order them in different colors and sizes!

I originally wrote this in an email on April 30:

I have been working ALL DAY on Blondie’s new Links page (deploying Monday) and I wanted to link in the rock and roll hall of fame, and they have added really great content since my last visit, and they had — fuck me — a transcript of Shirley Manson’s beautiful induction speech. I have never seen anything so lovely and sincere. I can’t even *read* it let alone watch it. It just shreds me up into little pieces in the first three sentences.

http://rockhall.com/inductees/blondie/transcript/shirley-manson-inducts-blondie/

The beauty of this is not constrained to humans. This is why I believe in aliens. plus the fact that Debbie revealed it to me in a dream, and Chris had already taught me that those you meet in dreams, they are real.

There is no one on the planet I would have rather had induct Blondie than Shirley Manson.  Perfection.  Another dream come true.

At least once a day I get the stupidest spam emails perhaps ever. The subject line is “Please update your firewall” (the capitalization varies).

What this makes me wonder about is whether there really is someone, somewhere, who would act on an unsolicited commercial email asking you to install any software, let alone a firewall. Could someone look at this and actually believe that their firewall (assuming they even use one) needs updated, and go to this site and download (or purchase?) and update and execute it?

The only thing I can think of is comedian Ron White’s You Can’t Fix Stupid.

(see also, another article I will write in the future about stupidest and funniest spams).

I really like libraries. In Mechanicsburg, where I grew up, we had a great library that was supported by a library tax that was overwhelmingly approved by the voters. I always voted yes on those.

I still live in a county that has a great library system. Where else could you go to a place that’s exactly like one of those big bookstores with a music and movies section, choose all the things you want to purchase, and go up the checkout counter and have someone ring you up, say “That will be zero dollars, sir. Come back anytime” and then you get to take your three DVD movies, six music CDs, and a shopping cart full of books home for free.

Now maybe this next idea belongs in the halfbakery, but the one thing for me that could improve a library is if it would be noisy some of the time. I’ve noticed that for some reason, all the places people go that have books are quiet and all the places that have drinks are noisy. What if someone were to open a library with a full bar? Nuclear explosion maybe? I’m fairly sure that in Pennsylvania, you need a trillion dollars to get a liquor license, so if that’s out, how about a library where people who read something they like are encouraged to read it aloud or to start impromptu discussion groups so other patrons can listen in, discover new and exciting literature, and meet people just like library day at Monroe Elementary!

A friend who I met online asked me today if I had the new Hole CD, Nobody’s Daughter. This brought back a really beautiful memory that I want to share.

Those who know me surely have a clear perspective of how important music is to me. It hasn’t always been that way. The first show I ever saw was Blondie in 1982, just after my high school graduation. It changed *everything* and as that band became a central part of my entire adult life, I came to realize that what I had been missing all my life was the emotion and meaning and insight that I derive from music now. It’s not entertainment for me, it’s life itself. That said (again), I’m also very sentimental and lucky enough to have received a few truly great gifts over the years, things with real meaning and a deep and irrevocable emotional connection. I keep these things near me all of the time and when I see them, I realize that these gifts are so great it made me actually integrate the person who gave it into my self, into what I am.

so just off the top of my head, here are a few…

a lovely and brilliantly insightful girl whose humor, wit, and inspiration is dearly missed, gave me a black refrigerator magnet with a Carl Jung quote printed in white but could just as easily have been printed in my own love and blood:
“the meeting of two personalities
is like the the contact of two chemical substances;
if there is any reaction,
both are transformed.”

Chris Stein, by putting me on the guest list for four shows on June 28, 1990, gave me a lifetime of Blondie experiences, and his personal insights about so many things started an avalanche of self-discovery and ambition and the realization that the only thing that was limiting what I could accomplish is me myself.

my friend of 26 years, REB, knowing how much I love Blondie, gave me free hosting of blondie.net and debbieharry.net since the mid 90’s, and a plane ticket to England in 2005 so I could go see them on tour.

someone I met in Debbie Harry’s front row in 1993 gave me a red silk rose because it was what I needed at that moment. (Twilight Zone: “What You Need”)

the lovely Apes gave me a Debbie Harry postage stamp from Mali and the inspiration to fly around the world chasing my dreams before I had realized that was the right thing to do every day.

Killola gave me the last fragment of what I needed to demarcate the end of the previous part of my life from the beginning of the next part. That one is going to gets its own article here when I figure out how I can express it. It is unreal what they gave me.

Now with that all in perspective, I want to talk about what my dear friends in the band Cilver (on the original date of this still known as Me Talk Pretty) gave me on May 2 when I went to see them play at the M-Room in Philadelphia (the same place that Killola played on TMI Day (March 28). Both Me Talk Pretty and Killola are two of the three bands that searched my music preferences on myspace (back when it used to be good… not like now, just a dumbed-down version of facebook that limits how much you can say at a time… one of the primary motivators of me doing this site, in fact) and afterward, when I listened to them, I loved them immediately and bought everything they had for sale. I have been into them for years and to watch them, all of them, make it, is fabulous. Why two of those three are from California isn’t clear since I hate California with a passion. But I digress, so back to the story, mostly quoted out of an email I wrote the next day:

first of all it is always supremely exciting to see Me Talk Pretty, and the fact they had advance copies of their new CD that won’t be out for months already was already sufficient to make me burst.

so I wanted to know what time the show was and brought up the bar’s website and fuck me! The Action Design is playing!! I like hem. They are also from California, and played with Killola the first time I ever saw them live, on my birthday in 2008… I didn’t know about them, but Killola Johnny said that day, “you should check out this next band, they’re good and you’d probably like them.” A hot grrrl was waiting for me at the beach in NJ so I figured, okay, I’ll check out a few songs and split, but she had to wait: I ended up staying for the whole set and buying their CD (and a second one that came out a year later). I love their songs “Pale Horizon” and “Landmines” (oh so relevant!) , plus they covered Hanging On The Telephone (had it on their site). Imagine the chances they’re actually playing the same night. WTF?!! they were good too, luscious. I got some stickers and got to tell them how happy I was to see them here! that is so crazy. but not so crazy as this….

so Me Talk Pretty (guitarist) Leon, my friend, says, “I have something for you. Don’t leave.” That was rather early and I’m like “I won’t leave until there are no more bands here.” Then they played, it was soooo good 🙂
they were hungry and I guess it’s the owner who was working the bar (and maybe cooking?) is Greek, and Me Talk Pretty (singer) Uliana’s sister lives in Greece and is married to a Greek man, so he made her a really nice salad for free and gave her some more drink tickets, one of which, to my delight, she placed in my hand. the others in the band ordered food as well; I think they were eating while I was watching The Action Design.

Afterward, we all had drinks together, and later, Leon had me follow him to the van and as we were walking there, I asked him what he thought he of the Hole show he’d said he went to on April 27, the day before I saw Hole at Terminal 5 in NYC with Steph “front row grrrl”, and Debbie Harry saw me there. Leon was describing how she did four songs acoustic and that everyone had to buy the CD to get in, then how there were 100 people waiting in line to get their CDs signed and when they got their turn, Uliana asked Courtney Love if she could give her a sticker from her band, and Courtney was like “sure” (really nice about it) and liked the name. Just at this moment, reaching across the front seat, Leon produces his signed copy of Nobody’s Daughter and handed it to me and said, “I want you to have this. It is a gift from us.” It was a complete surprise, so there I was standing next to him holding this disc with both hands and just looking at him, frozen. I think the word “Seriously?” was the only one I managed for like the next two minutes, maybe three. He asked me not to be speechless, but I couldn’t help it. Courtney Love lives in fucking California and never does anything where you can meet her, I would never be able to get an autographed disc, and these lovely people bought this disc and waited for a hundred people ahead of them to get it signed and give it to *me*. When I got home at almost 3am, I took a photo of myself with the Hole disc, my arm signed by Uliana (how lovely!), and holding their new album We Are Strangers. Their new video Wake Up came out that same day. Leon said it would be on MTV in about 3 weeks or a month from now. Looks like I’m not the only one who likes them heheheeeee.

This is one of those gifts.

I owe my dear friend April “Apes” Kincaid a debt of gratitude for teaching me that great word. I don’t really know how to define it, but I can describe it by example and I know when something is ruint. It doesn’t mean ruined or match any of the urban dictionary definitions. Try this example that just happened and made me want to write about it:

So I have this “sort of” friend who calls from time to time, but she really just wants to pump me for information about life updates and gossip about people we know in common…. she doesn’t actually want to talk to me, and we don’t have much in common, and she is always elusive, doesn’t ever tell the truth (then wonders why I don’t believe a word she says), never answers a question straight up (changes the subject or talks about something unrelated).  ‘She doesn’t take calls / she only makes calls’ [Killola reference], and she only calls me while driving (probably when no one else answered and I’m the last resort) then brags about some dickhead guy she hangs out with and…. never mind. I want to hear about that about as much as I enjoyed listening to everyone throwing up on South Park last night. Then, when I didn’t answer, she left a voicemail that was just four seconds of that farting noise that kids make. What did *I* do?!

Ruint!

One definition I wrote that’s close but not quite on is this:

“Ruint” (adj.) pathetic and without foundation; irrelevant; consisting only of meaningless diversion or distraction.

That definition came to me after reading a somewhat nonsensical article on Yahoo news about scientists who allegedly cooled atoms below absolute zero (?).

Like most of their articles, stupid people who can’t spell wrote completely worthless comments, references to politics, Obama, whose fault it is, that sort of thing.  Ruint!

I wrote in a reply to one of those comments:
Are you right?  Who knows.  But I thought this was supposed to be a science article.  It’s definitely not a politics article.  Right or wrong, these comments are off-topic and stupid.  No wonder everyone who wants news and can spell is looking for a better source.
I propose the introduction of a new word into English for your comment:
“Ruint” (adj.): pathetic and without foundation; irrelevant; consisting only of meaningless diversion or distraction.

It’s different than “annoying”, which would be like how I was just now making a drink and putting ice into my glass from a container, carefully avoiding a small bug that had flown in there, but observing when my was glass was full of ice, the bug was unaccounted for. [No, I didn’t just drink it you fools! I threw it all out and got new ice after washing everything!]

A person can’t feel “ruint”.  In fact, usually “ruint” applies only to situations and actions that people do, rather than the people themselves (like in the above example).  Here’s another really good example:

An ice storm froze my car window and caused it to detach from the regulator and fall down inside the door (letting a lot of rain in as well).  On Jan. 7, 2014, on the coldest day of the past year, I spent many hours cleaning the garage to get the car in, and worked off and on for the next two days tearing the door apart to fix this.  The procedure is very involved: I had to follow 23 steps to remove the door panel and more than 50 steps in this great online tutorial for fixing the window problem.  Although I got it fixed, just as I was finishing up, of course I had to get injured.  I cut my hand down near the wrist… out of all that, when I was cleaning the window.  Ruint!  Hit some stupid sharp edge doing the most mundane step in the entire procedure.

Now you know what Ruint means.

And that I like South Park. Don’t miss Grey Dawn (old people driving! eeeek!), Cat Orgy, Scott Tenorman Must Die, Gnomes (underpants gnomes!), Cow Days (“I Declare Shenanigans”).

Although I’m very allergic to cats, I have two: Belly Rub and Velcro. A few months ago, I discovered that Velcro insanely loves sauerkraut. He never gets on the table, but he climbed over me to get to it. I never heard of such a thing. I gave him some and he ate it all.

Velcro got his name because when he was a kitten, he always had the claws out which fastened him to the carpet. When you’d pick him up and pull him loose, it made that same sound as velcro does when you pull it apart. This would happen repeatedly if you’d put him down and pull him back up again… one day I was demonstrating and said “Look, he’s just like velcro” while I was sticking him to the carpet and pulling him back up five or six times in a row, giggling.

I think Belly Rub has itchy skin because I just saw him rolling around on the concrete patio to scratch his back, and when I scratch his back, he licks my arm. Continuously. It’s very funny (and scratchy!) and I need to get a video of it. Belly Rub is fully recovered now from his horrible ordeal last July, my pretty baby lovecat.

Today is Alison Goldfrapp’s birthday and the new moon (which Chris Stein says is as powerful as the full moon), so I figured there could be no better time than now to finally start writing publicly again…. I finally did it.

The layout here *will* improve but I have to evaluate what I’m going to use that will let people comment and leave me with ownership of my content. I’m not sure how the free sites get away with claiming ownership on content written by someone else without paying them, but I don’t want involved in that. “Include me out.” Yesterday, I was doing some research and someone had “guidelines” for writing on the internet (they called it a “blog” but I despise that term; in fact it is on the LSSU List of Banished Words, so I will not use it). This person suggested that because there are so many people out there writing, that one should write on only one topic you are knowledgeable and passionate about. And to that, I say this:

I am knowledgeable and passionate about a lot of topics, I’m funny, and I’m a better writer than most. Sure, I’m no Diablo Cody (except maybe the diablo part;)… more on my favorite crazygrrrl another day… but I’m going to write about whatever I feel like writing about, and say it’s like a smut magazine: If you don’t like it, don’t read it! As for the rest of you, I hope I can bring some Blondie stories, laughs, insight, magic, bizarrely skewed reality, new music, and weird shit into your life.

The title of this thing is “10 Minutes After Midnight”, which is a line from the song “Mid-Day Rebel” off the new Killola album Let’s Get Associated. I love Killola. I love their music and the talented, intelligent, caring people who are Killola and who I am beyond delight to call my friends. And I love what they and their self-published status represent. I will discuss them in vivid detail another time soon…. for now, I’ll just say that is one of only three bands: Blondie, Goldfrapp, and Killola, who I would die without. These three, together with Crossing The Rubicon by The Sounds dragged my ass out of the darkest place imaginable. Goldfrapp turned out to be right: “What you thought you’d lost was just mislaid.”

For those readers of my past work who, like me, are very observant and recall a lot of detail, you might remember that After Midnight was the working title to the movie Intimate Stranger starring Debbie Harry. I’m a creature of the night, and she has an 11 in her email address, and 11 minutes after 11:59 is 10 minutes after midnight. That’s about as appropriate and personally relevant as it gets… just like naming my Debbie Harry fanzine Fan Mail.

BLK 2:22pm
May 13, 2010

—

I don’t often edit my older posts with new information, but on “site launch day”, November 3, 2013, I’d like to point out one other strange development: the coincidence that 12:10 also happens to be my lovely girlfriend Steph’s birthday.  I had met her when I wrote the above and had already chosen the name, but I didn’t know her birthday and I certainly had no idea we’d become what we are now!

This is actually an exact copy of an email I sent to Debbie Harry.   I can never find it when I want to, so here it is.

From an email I sent to Chris:

I had a very cool dream about you this morning.  it was somewhat brief, but I was lucid, so let me see what I can recall of it.

We were at a soundcheck somewhere in a very old building with wooden construction.  A garage door was open to the outside, sort of like what it was at Metropol in Pittsburgh, 1994.  It was warm out, probably May, just like then.

You had a device that you were using to compose something.  It was far more advanced than any computer or program that I’ve ever seen, but it is within current technological capability.  The device had a fairly large, completely smooth glass-like touch screen, it was flat not like a laptop, and bright like the displays they have in aircraft cockpits that you can read in direct sunlight (years ago I interviewed at a company that makes them, they are near here but they didn’t hire me).  you obviously had used it a lot because you could operate it with exquisite dexterity.
You had recorded onto it a bunch of stuff: samples of things, people talking, some music, all sorts of stuff.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

The device autoprocessed all of this recorded information and displayed it almost as if it were a map of the land, like a map of the U.S. but I didn’t see the boundaries, and each spoken word was printed over the map like the label of a state.  A sentence was a series of states, most of them were rectangular but of varying sizes.  you would pan across the map and zoom in and out like on an iphone, but it was a full size screen and infinitely more responsive.  You were moving around and selecting words and fragments of words and notes and sounds and sending them to the construction area, assembling something.

You could zoom in on any of the single spoken words or even on a single note, and as you did, the device would break up a word into something that looked like counties, each with a letter or a note or a symbol representing inflection if it was a spoken sound.  zooming in on a single word would show you a zoomed in view of a state on a map which represented the word, broken down now into smaller pieces that were a combination of English letters, notes, and pauses.  you could choose from these and were adding them to your composition, sometimes a full word at a time, sometimes just word fragments or music notes.  you explained that you could take a sentence and directly reassemble it in a different order without using a cut and paste operation, you did it by just selecting the words or notes or fragments as objects instead of as a waveform like the sound editors I’ve used.  The view seemed to have limitless zoom in or out capability, which is a bit reminiscent of that film from the 70’s, “Powers of 10” where they repeatedly zoomed out by a factor of 10 into the scale of galaxies in space, later back in to the microscopic level.  you were doing this with great dexterity and quickly assembled a composition.

After a while, you went to the composition field and played it and it played all of your samples in order, maybe 40 seconds duration.  I remember it wasn’t overly musical but it was outrageously creative and easy for you as you had started it before and finished it while I watched.

And that’s all I have from it.  But it was fuckin cool.

Greetings everyone,
Since I’m going to be filling in new articles from the file on my computer and they won’t necessarily be in order,  I’m going to maintain a revision history here so you know what I added.

03 Nov 2013 – Launched.