Category Archives: Idle Chit-Chat

Why I Like This Place

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After a productive morning, I was forced by thermodynamics to go find some food. I am exothermic. There’s just no getting around the fact. I don’t eat, I stop. I am fortunate that there are millions upon millions of people working to make sure my little furnace is stoked.

When I went in search of people-chow, the sky was a clear, deep blue. The midday sun hung low in the south and the wind was mild. The temperature was just above freezing. I walked down the long stairs through the the little park near home, really enjoying the scenery. Perfect weather for a miniskirt and tall, fur-lined boots. Dang.

A few hours later I was sitting with fuego:the brother at Sax’s, and a tall woman with a short dress and a long jacket came in. “I can’t believe you’re leaving this place,” f:bro said.

Thanks!

Tonight’s Game

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11:30 As I tune in to the game between the San Diego Chargers (the good guys) and the Baltimore Ravens (the bad guys), the Chargers are winning. The announcers are talking about what a nice guy Ray Lewis is (Lewis narrowly dodged a murder rap). San Diego has the rather unusual score of twelve points. Four field goals? It seems early in the game for that, but we’ll see.

11:33 Baltimore challenges a call, doesn’t win. Dang, this whole replay review things makes for boring sports. Hockey also had video review, but it seems to work a lot better. Baseball is going to be introducing video review of some calls. Just what baseball doesn’t need,

11:42 Chargers are marching down the field, but not really looking good doing it.

11:44 I’m not sure what Baltimore was thinking, but the Bolts just got an easy touchdown. Somebody wasn’t doing his job. Tomlinson crossed the backfield to make a key block. It won’t show on his stats, but dang. It just adds to my admiration of the guy.

11:46 Dang! I can’t type fast enough! Chargers get the ball back on a muffed kickoff reception.

11:49 Field Goal by San Diego with time running out in the half. I have to think, however, that there was a missed extra point earlier. That would be the second in three games.

11:50 Halftime. Back to work on NaNoWriMo.

11:55 Wait a minute — who were those guys in the “best quarterbacks ever discussion” commercial promoting a game next week? Some of them looked like… some of the best quarterbacks ever.

11:56 I’ve had a hankering for some good sushi for several days now, this minute included.

12:04 Bolts take the kickoff, go to work. They made almost no yards rushing in the first half, now they start the second half with three consecutive run plays that all work.

12:08 Chargers pick up the blitz, Ray Lewis is burned for a touchdown. I’m starting to think to myself, “No curse tonight.” I have seen San Diego score 17 points, and I have yet to see Baltimore’s offense on the field.

12:12 Hey! That’s Peyton Manning in a TV commercial! Who woulda thunk?

12:13 The third ad I’ve seen suggesting that I buy a car for someone I love. A car. Diamonds aren’t enough anymore; but the car is probably an easier sell because the gift-giver benefits as much as the receiver.

12:17 The Ravens are moving down the field pretty well, no sign of panic.

12:21 Nice play action pass fools the Chargers completely, and Baltimore shows that they know what to do to make a comeback — just play solid ball.

12:27 Chargers barely manage to burn a minute off the clock before giving the ball back. And now back to the commercials.

12:31 Bad-luck call against the Chargers gives the Ravens a break…

12:33 … and the Ravens are moving again.

12:36 the San Diego Crowd forces the Ravens to burn a time out on 4th and 1. Nice work, fans!

12:37 The Bad Guys are called for illegal use of cheating, and the drive is over. Barring catastrophe, the good guys will get the ball back. Let’s watch some commercials! Cars! Beer! Mobile Phones! Peyton Manning!

12:42 My video stream has frozen on a view of Peyton Manning’s butt. Priceless.

12:52 Chargers score again, a field goal, but really, it’s the nail in the coffin. I believe that despite my watching, the good guys are going to win this game.

12:54 I feel like having a Budweiser. The only thing is, I don’t feel like having one of the Budweisers they’re showing on TV.

12:56 If you have the urge to buy me a car for Christmas, I’d rather have the cash.

1:01 I think, if you could pin down two things that are different this game than the previous few, it’s that the Chargers have their excellent center back, and that the Ravens suck. Hard.

1:03 “What a great race the AFC West is going to be,” the announcer said. This is because the top two teams, Sand Diego and Denver, are equally bad, and the other teams, although truly awful, aren’t too far behind. Woo Hoo!

1:05 OK, I understand tactically why Baltimore is challenging the call on 4th and 3, since they have nothing to lose, but still, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

1:11 The Chargers aren’t pretending to be trying to score anymore, they’re just running the clock. Go Clock! Go Clock!

1:13 The stream has switched to Denver/Chicago. I can no longer watch, therefore San Diego’s victory is assured. There was no sign of my curse throughout the contest. A good day. Denver is ahead, but even though they are San Diego’s rivals in the division, I can’t help but pull for them. It’s a geographical thing. First play I saw: Chicago scored a touchdown.

Well! How about that? The Good Guys won, right before my eyes. This is really going to throw them for a loop in Las Vegas.

Thanks!

Typo of the Day

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Obviously I was trying to type “biology” but the above is a great word in need of a definition. Suggestions?

Thanks!

Travel Plans

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I put off buying plane tickets for my holiday travels because I was hoping for clarification of some rule changes for immigration in the European Union. Rather, I was hoping for some clarification of rules enforcement here in the Czech Republic. Word on the street is that if I leave I’ll have to stay away for a while.

I never got that clarification, but it was time to take some action. The plan: buy a ticket one way and figure out the rest later. This morning I went online to do just that. And…

Holy Cow! The first set of tickets that came up were ridiculously expensive. I tried the next day and there at the top of the list was a ticket that cost about 60% as much as the second-cheapest. It got me to Albuquerque via Los Angeles. I cut out the Albuquerque part of the itinerary and the price went down even more. A bargain, plain and simple (well, relatively…). I bought it.

The catch is that I planned to arrive in California with a car. There is one waiting for me in Albuquerque, although there are complications there, too. So, for me, the ideal plan is for someone to meet me at the airport, take me to the DMV to renew the registration and then drop me off in Albuquerque. Any takers?

Alternately, I could spend my California time carless, which is the environmentally responsible thing to do (and doesn’t make Shrub’s friends yet richer – even the sagging dollar puts money in his buddies’ pockets), but with all the different places I want to go, that could be a real Pain in the Patoot. I suppose I could look into Greyhound package deals or whatever. That would certainly be an adventure.

Thanks!

Jose Drew a Duck

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Yep, Jose was learning Flash and at one point was doodling while resting his brain. He drew this duck. Then I made the duck’s wings flap and beak move. What fun!

Of course, once one has a duck with flapping wings, one must make the duck fly around. Thus clouds and other accessories were required. But once things get longer, you really start to need some music. I poked around and there was the Polkacide version of the duck dance.

Once there was music, then the animation needed to be much longer to match, more ducks were required, and the whole effort had to tell a story of sorts. Far too much of my life later, this is the result. I may still tweak it a bit — there are some dead spots that would be good to fill in — but on the other hand I’ve wasted far too much of my life on this dang thing already.

I haven’t been able to test the loading screen on a slow connection, so I really don’t know if it works or not. It’s supposed to give you the button to start the animation when it estimates the download will finish in time. If anyone out there can tell me if it works, that would be cool.

Um… that’s all there is to it, I guess. Hey, John! Can you give me permission to use this music?

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The Curse

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At about 2:30 a.m., I thought to myself, “Wow! My San Diego Sports curse is over!” Sure, the good guys had blown one of the most routine scoring opportunities in sports, but it was only one point, and they were winning twenty-three to nothing.

By 4:00, I knew I was wrong. The Bad Guys had pulled to within two points, and were in range to take a one-point lead as time expired. Tired, disappointed, I saw the handwriting on the wall and turned off the TV at the 2-minute warning. The game was in the hands of two of the most reliable players in the league, and there was no way they were going to blow that chance. “I should go on the record right now, and post that I turned off the game,” I thought, but there really didn’t seem to be any reason to bother. My curse may have only been enough to swing the game by a single point, but it was going to be the difference.

[As a side note, if you watched the game, you probably saw ads for the movie No Country for Old Men, the Cohen Brothers’ latest. It was filmed in New Mexico with the able assistance of fuego:the brother, and the sharp-eyed will recognize his car in some of the shots. I’ve heard the film is excellent.]

This morning I slept in. When hunger finally drove me from the warm embrace of my bed, I showered and checked email. I almost didn’t bother to check the final outcome of the game. Just heading out for Café Fuzzy I decided to confirm the inevitable.

Well, it seems the Chargers won after all. Apparently I missed a couple of pretty crazy plays, and the Colts choked, letting San Diego escape with a win.

I take full credit.

Thanks!

An Open letter to Britney Spears

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I don’t know you. I’ve heard of you, of course, or I would not be writing this. But I don’t know you. I don’t know what you said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do. I’m even vague on what you look like; I would not be able to pick you out in a police lineup, though I’m sure I’ve seen you on TV once or twice.

What I do know is that the whole world seems to be taking unnatural delight in dumping on you. That has to be tough.

If you want to spend a few days not being a pop superstar, drop me a line. I’ll meet you at the airport holding a sign that says “Emily Bronte”. Nothing personal about the sign, but I don’t think I would recognize you. Then again, you wouldn’t recognize me either, so it’s even. I’m a pretty boring guy, but maybe boring might be fun for a few days. Simple times, when you can randomly yell “Shit!” and never have to explain why. As a special bonus, I can teach you a couple of dance moves.

Note to the rest of the world: do the woman a favor, and back off for a while. It’s hard enough to get your shit together it in private.

Thanks!

Holiday Plans?

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I’ll be back in the Western Hemisphere shortly, and more or less at loose ends for a while. I’m not planning anything on the scale of the Mini Road Trip (some of you in the background are sniggering right now that I even needed to write a sentence that started “I’m not planning…”), but I am looking forward to some time on the open road. Christmas itself I’ll spend in New Mexico, I think.

So… are there times and places I simply must be over the holidays? Do those of you who actually make plans in advance know where you’ll be? Any strangers out there who would like to buy me a beer somewhere? I’m flexible.

Thanks!

Message from reality

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I got a lead balloon from an old friend tonight. Heavy, but miraculously buoyant. The first part was an answer she gave to an essay question on a test. Mechanically, well, it was her runaway style. I’ve seen poet laureates try to manufacture her voice, and fail. Her emotions are felt so hard it’s impossible to write her off as sentimental.

(Somehow nowadays sentimental is a bad thing. I often disparage my own work for being sentimental. Here I am styling myself as a writer unconcerned with what other folks think, yet I can’t raise a sentimental middle finger to the Art Establishment.)

Anyway, tonight I was fortunate to hear from her. She has mastered the run-on sentence. No, more than mastered, she has made the run-on sentence her groveling minion and her flaming sword. I would not dare construct her sentences, and I am less for it. She is a verbal avalanche, and the only thing worse than being swept away by her is to wonder what you missed if you somehow got out of the way. In this way her language is an honest reflection of herself.

To all English teachers out there: Be true to the kids. Be true to the language. Style counts, and when style is backed by passion… well, you dream about that already. There’s art nearby.

Thanks!

Odds and Ends

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I should mention that I have the cover story over at Piker Press this week. It’s set in the Tin-Caniverse, a neighborhood of the Science Fiction multiverse in which a few laws of physics have been suspended for being inconvenient. It’s the first in the series told in the third person, and the continuity issues between this and the previous installments I chalk up to conflicting memories. We won’t consider that one person is remembering something before the other person experiences it. In fact, in this case we can temporarily reinstate relativity to make traveling faster than light a form of time travel, explain away the problem, and then put that pesky law of nature back in the drawer.

I’m pretty happy with the story, but reading it now that it’s been published, I think I left a little on the table. No such worries about my story that will be published over there during zombie month. Zombie Month! Where have you been all my life? I’ll let you know when my modest submission is up; it’ll be a few weeks, yet.

I’ve settled on my NaNoWriMo story, but I really don’t know what I’m going to do with the idea. It’s a comedy based on the statement “When math is outlawed, only outlaws will do math.” In a world where governments willfully keep the populace ignorant, what would a revolutionary look like? It’s got lots of possibilities. I picture street gangs that hang out in ‘math houses’, leaving elegant mathematical clues how to find them scrawled on walls throughout the city. I think I’ll start with a scene where during a police raid the protagonists must convince the cops they were only doing drugs, and that the drugs were obtained through sanctioned sources.

This morning I put out a new release of Jer’s Novel Writer. The last version had a bug that only happened to users installing the software for the first time. Not good, and of course none of my usual testers were going to catch something like that. I’m not exactly sure how long the bad code was in there, but the problem manifested most obviously in the last release. I wonder how many odd problems people have been having over the past months were caused by the bug. Ai, ai, ai.

On Monday What’s-Her-Name sent me a message asking if I was free. I haven’t seen her since her brief tenure as a bartender at Little Café Near Home. My phone and I don’t really get along, though, and I didn’t see the message until about an hour ago – three days late. Somewhere, the capricious gods of telecommunications are laughing.

Finally, do any of you remember reading an episode about the Awkward Bowling League? I wrote it a couple of weeks ago, and now it’s… gone. There’s no sign of it. I was going to write a follow-up, and I wanted to read the original first and link to it. I’m just wondering if it vanished before or after you guys got a chance to read it.

[Late Addition!] Five cover letters tonight. I just have to assemble the parts, and I’m caught up. Got a smiley-face infested message from What’s-her-Name, so that’s cool. Getaway Cruiser is playing some good noise into my head right now. Things could be worse.

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Thanks!

Gambler’s alert…

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The Bolts are playing as I write this, but I have intentionally avoided checking the score until after I get this out.

First, some history. The San Diego Chargers Professional Football Club has, for many years, sucked. There was one giddy year, when they jouked and jinked their way to the Super Bowl ™ to be completely humiliated by San Francisco. That complete ass-whuppin’ was the best the Chargers managed (which, to be fair, means at least they got to the dance) while I lived in America’s Finest City ™. Most years, we were happy for mediocre.

Then I left town. I went so far away I couldn’t even watch the games on TV. The Chargers have been contenders ever since. (Also note that the San Diego Padres Baseball Club has won their division ever since.) Two years ago I started issuing alerts when I was in town, or when I would be following the game. Let’s call them red alerts and yellow alerts.

My first red alert was a couple of years ago when San Diego was heavily favored to crush Miami. The point spread was ridiculous, but Miami was really horrible, and the Chargers were looking pretty good. The catch: I was in San Diego. Miami won, and the Chargers never recovered. Season over.

That is the power I seem to wield.

Of course, one game, even when you call it ahead of time, does not a curse make. No, for that you will have to review the other gambler’s alerts on these pages. All of those are before the fact and therefore unassailable, but there are also the after-the-fact lamentations, as when I followed the last five minutes of the Chargers-Ravens game last season. When I started watching, the Chargers had the game in hand. When, nauseous, I turned off the game minutes later, they had lost.

The Chargers lost three games last year. After the first two losses, I spent a great deal of time convincing myself that it was simply coincidence that they choked in games I watched. I was not a curse, despite my statements here. I was nine time zones away, and no rational person would believe that I had any effect on the outcome of the game.

They lost.

I have not checked in with tonight’s game, but the message here is that I have discovered the world of Internet bootleg sports broadcasts. The barrier for me watching the Bolts is suddenly much lower.

It still might be OK. I’m not in San Diego. The delay in the bootleg broadcast might be enough. Still, I think it’s time to put a yellow alert on the entire season.

Gamblers, you have been warned.

Thanks!

I am Become Google, Destroyer of Worlds

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Those who remember the old days might recall that sometimes I would compile a list of unusual search phrases that have brought people to these pages. What follows is a list I started quite some time ago, but either I’m getting more jaded or the number of wacky phrases people are finding me with is dropping. Fried Egg queries are still the most popular, but I’ve been letting the culinary pages gather dust, which lowers their attractiveness in Google’s eyes. That doesn’t really bother me. Still, when I take the trouble to look over the various ways people stumble across these pages, I have to chuckle. Here, then, is a list of some search phrases that have caught my eye, and (usually) a link to the place in the blog that fateful string brought them.

On another note, the phrase I bastardized for the title of this episode is more interesting than I ever suspected. Apparently, “I am become time…” is an equally valid translation. In context it makes sense. A God is trying to convince some schmoe to go for the glory, and pointing out that since in the long term he will be forgotten no matter what happens, he has nothing to lose. Bitchin’. Meanwhile, on with the show!

  • bily bear meat – Linked to an episode about czech hockey, of course.
  • wm byrne pub kilkenny – linked to an episode about our stay in that congenial place.
  • piker list of stupid – top hit, baby! When it comes to stupid, I’m very highly ranked.
  • fivepin bowling 5 pin approach video online – far more interesting than the idea of some guy knocking all the pins over, is a bunch of guys knocking all but the 5-pin down, while team bowling.
  • kicked in the balls+girl – no longer sure where it linked to on this site, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to meet that girl.
  • Cost of Trip to Giant’s Causeway – whatever it costs, it’s worth it!
  • carl sagan trampoline gravity – linked, of course, to a particularly extreme get-poor-quick scheme.
  • All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku bathroom – bathroom? It seems odd until you remember that the bathroom stall is an elevator to the evil meeting room.
  • humped his sweater – brought the unsuspecting googlist to the Stories category page, where a Werewolf’s bad manners are discussed.
  • Deanna Mac Guinness – apparently I’m the only one at homepage.mac.com/ that Yahoo found any mention of Guiness and Deanna.
  • easy steps to sketch a large cowboy hat – The Cowboy God pulls in another one looking for something else.
  • writing essays with modern language ass. – I’m not sure how modern my language ass is, but I have some thoughts on the subject.
  • car accidents 395 adelanto – they’re not pretty.
  • Neurotic writers – Not surprisingly, I have some thoughts on that as well.
  • bosom machine – Ahh… bosoms. Though a mechanical one doesn’t sound as appealing.
  • jer’s novel writer for windows – doesn’t exist. Trust me.
  • Budvar Bar – there are many, but this is my favorite.
  • reggie wanker – John and I were recently lamenting that that movie is still not available on DVD.
  • why does bud light kill you? – it can only hurt you if you drink it. Don’t.
  • what do u learn when u study graphic design – Muddled U starts attracting potential students!
  • ho does one save if earning 9000 – brought the searcher to, of all places, the Get Poor Quick category page.
  • glenwood cutoff – one of Google’s top matches brings people to the heart of suicidal squirrel territory.
  • post graduate degree course for someone who doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree – Muddled University again!
  • tom carruthers glendale ohio – someone was digging deeper into the insidious infiltration of the squirrels, and the humans who have betrayed us. We were here to help.
  • EDDIE ROCKETS – I’m glad that someone in the UK took the trouble to look past the first nineteen google results to land on my appraisal of the rather awful place.
  • how to fix a yoyo ball when it is broken in half – Muddled Ramblings was one of the top matches, despite the lack of yoyo’s
  • Nightmare Jer – surprisingly, was not my ex-wife searching. Whoever it was, ended up reading about a rather unpleasant flight I took recently.
  • one toe itches more so at night? – I hope they found a cure for that.
  • women in the great gatsby literary criticism – linked to my brief discussion of a pretty dang good book.
  • bagel rhymes – not just for breakfast anymore.
  • secret evil bunny labs – brought the searcher to the Rumblings category page.
  • cuttlefish for birds blister card – that almost makes sense until you get to the word ‘card’. Cuttlefish-man to the rescue!
  • cowboy holding coffee table – The Cowboy God pulls in another lost soul.
  • glad commercial, robbing bank – hey, I could have been in that, except I wasn’t very good.
  • Eddie Bauer fishing rod – all right! My open letter to Eddie Bauer is starting to attract attention.
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Thanks!

Last Night’s Dinner

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Last night’s dinner is still in there. I can feel it, a solid brick of chow resisting every enzyme and corrosive chemical my stomach can throw at it. It’s pitched its tent and has started laying the foundation for the cabin.

Let’s call the recipe “Empty Larder Surprise”. That’s a bit of a misnomer because there really wasn’t any surprise involved, but there’s a long tradition in our culture to associate ‘surprise’ with ‘danger’ when it comes to food. Seriously, when was the last time you read, heard, or even thought about a recipe with ‘surprise’ in the name that was good?

I don’t generally keep a lot of food in the house. One thing about living in a culture that is not based on the automobile is that the retail economy is built around people buying only as much as they can carry home. My life has a fairly simple pattern: buy a few things at the store, take them home, and stay there until the food runs out.

So it was yestereve I found myself hungry and not the slightest bit interested in going out to eat. No problem! I had food. I patted myself on the back for my tremendous planning skills and went to see what secrets my refrigerator would yield. Hmm… we seem to have a bit of dissonance. The food available to me fell into two categories. 1) things to go on bread and 2) rice.

After only a brief hesitation I set to cookin’. After all, bread and rice are both starchy foods. Stuff that goes on bread shouldn’t be too bad on rice. While the rice bubbled away (the little porous boiling bags rice come in here are a bachelor’s dream) I turned to the fridge and pulled out my other ingredients. Sitting lonely on the shelf was a small packet of swiss cheese and some stuff that goes by the name Dračí Tousty, which, with the help of the picture on the label, I translate to “Dragon Toasts”. Mmmm… dragon toasts.

Dračí Tousty is potted meat. I doubt it’s made with real dragons these days (not for 17 crowns a tub!), but in a country that has raised potted meat to an art form, Dragon Toasts stands out. (“Toast” in this part of the world refers to the toasted sandwiches many bars serve as emergency food. I assume the Dragon Toasts is meat intended for use making toasted sandwiches.) DT is spicy (on a Czech scale of spiciness) and, to my palette, mighty tasty.

And there you have the recipe for the next revolution in material science. Cook the rice, add the swiss cheese, and mix in dragon substitute to taste. Taste, you ask? In fact it wasn’t… too bad. Starch, salt, fat, a bit of spice — I’ve certainly had much worse cooked by people who weren’t constrained the way I was. No, the flavor wasn’t the problem. To borrow from geology, the conglomerate formed by the rice in the cheese matrix immediately started setting up into an aggressively solid mass. I’m not sure just what interaction the dragon meat had with the rest, but its addition seemed to act as a hardener. Dračí Tousty served the role of that unexpected wild card that has caused may a fictitious scientist untold grief.

When the mass is surgically removed from my stomach, I will donate it to science, hopefully for the betterment of all mankind. Perhaps the first building constructed of “Empty Larder Bricks” (Made from renewable resources!) will be here in the Czech Republic. They have the best access to dragon meat, after all.

Thanks!

Episode 1000

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Depending on exactly how you count things (there are many unpublished episodes lurking around, and different parts of iBlog report different numbers), Saturday’s little story snippet was the 1000th episode on this blog. I’d seen the number coming, and entertained several ideas about how to celebrate it. Even more remarkable than my having written 1000 episodes is that there are people who have read them.

Tonight I took a random stagger through old episodes, ostensibly to find links broken when I upgraded my blogging software (there are a lot of them), and to fix a few formatting issues also caused by the conversion. My first impression: Muddled Ramblings is a good name for this blog. I can be incomprehensible when I don’t put my mind to it. It hurts the most when I turn cryptic right at the key moment of the episode, the big payoff sentence. This is the result, I suppose, of continuously publishing rough drafts, but Defective Yeti doesn’t seem to have the same problems I do. (In fairness to myself, I often attempt sentences with a high difficulty factor. You can’t play jazz if you don’t take chances. On the other hand, just because I’m taking chances doesn’t mean I’m playing jazz.)

Tonight I read some episodes I’d completely forgotten, and others I remembered with varying degrees of fondness and trepidation. I read the words ‘expecially’ and ‘whork’. One of those was intentional and satisfying, the other mortifying (and subsequently edited). Pronouns fly with reckless abandon, unburdened by the need to represent anything. My pronouns are free spirits, and don’t have time for oppressive grammatical shit. Free them! They don’t have time for things! Anything but things! They don’t care what they say.

Sometimes I was surprised to find two episodes next to each other. It’s impossible for me to picture the events discussed as having happened at pretty much the same time. In some cases they feel years apart in my memory. I’m not sure how that makes me feel about the last few years of my life being verifiable. I’m going to have to deal with future spouses, publishers, and other litigants with a better memory for my deeds than apparently I have.

One thought I had tonight was that should I become famous (hey, it’s possible), some poor intern at a publisher somewhere is going to have to read through all this crap, mining for nuggets that might be considered insightful or wise. By now, just over a thousand episodes in, that wretched soul is sitting with eyes crossed, pencil still poised over a blank page, knowing that if she doesn’t come up with something, she’s going to have to read the whole damn thing over again. To that person: Sorry, dude. Really. Remember when you were happy that you landed this sweet gig? Think of it this way, though. Now you can say, “Yeah, I’ve paid my dues. The check’s in the mail.” (I want to credit Snake Pliskin with that line, but it was some other guy.)

Roughly a quarter of the episodes are filed under Idle Chit-Chat. There hasn’t been much in the get-poor-quick category for a long time. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps it is the company I keep. I don’t have anyone around to discuss sporting events based on cloning up wooly mammoths, or the correct way to construct a hotel on the moon. On the other hand, just about everybody here has a get-poor-quick scheme. I think that first rush of capitalism has given the locals the impression that all you need is a good idea and you’re on your way to fame and fortune. Everyone is a schemer here.

I’m mildly curious how many words this blog has in it by now. It’s a bunch. I did a count a while back, when the blog had maybe half this many episodes, and it came out to 170,000 words — a very fat fantasy novel or two mainstream novels. It’s likely I’ve more than doubled that count, but we’ll see.

Meanwhile, for an oddly anticlimactic milestone, yippee.

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OK, a bit of time has passed. I was pleasantly surprised to find that iBlog was scriptable, so with a bit of cursing at the worst programming language ever (AppleScript) I managed to write a little routine that counted the words in the bodies of all the episodes in this blog. While testing particular entries yielded slightly different results than I got from Jer’s Novel Writer for the same text (something worth digging into), it’s pretty safe to say that this blog has more than 450,000 words in the bodies of the episodes alone. That would make three quite fat novels, or five normal-sized ones.

I don’t know what to make of that.

Thanks!

That’s me right there, the guy next to the guy.

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I had a conversation with a friend tonight. She is terribly down-to-earth, considering that she is young and beautiful. She’s Czech, so that helps.

“Soup Boy’s having a birthday party,” I said, “do you want to come?”

“Who?”

“You know, the guy who was my roommate. All the girls like him.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I know who you mean. He is very good looking, but I don’t know him well enough to say I like him.” Emphasis on like. Significant pause. “But I like him. What time is the party?”

My whole life I’ve been the guy standing next to the guy that every woman in the room wants to be with. This theme has been so consistent that sometimes I wonder if perhaps my proximity imparts some magical quality upon my friends, but in the end I know that’s not it. The only answer I can figure is encouraging.

I hang with smart people (unless I hang with a collective delusion). Despite all the bad press women get for their questionable skills in choosing men, they will choose a smart hot guy over a stupid hot guy. I have no hotness myself, and I don’t know how I offended the gods, but for my entire adult life I’ve been the buddy of the Most Wanted Guy, the guy who’s not just good-looking but quick-witted and downright artistic. Soup Boy is all of the above, and my current platonic relationships with some really nice women began with their hope that I was the stepping-stone to his heart.

Before Soup Boy there was Vince, and Steve, and all the rest. Women have been taking me aside to ask me for the secret to win my buddy’s heart since I’ve known what ‘woman’ really meant.

I was about to take that statement back as an overstatement when I remembered something from a long time ago. I was in seventh grade, and my buddy was the object of a crush. He was an athlete, quick-witted, and creative. As the boy next to the boy of her dreams, I was interesting. Useful. Unspoken, unspeakable, was how I felt about her. In the intervening decades, nothing much has changed.

Thanks!