QOTD: "When powerful technology gets pushed out from central places to the hands of individuals, anything can happen. The only sure thing is that somehow it will be used for porn." - Kevin Maney
Reading: Roger Rapoport and Bob Drews (editors), I Really Should Have Stayed Home
Listening to: the original cast recording of Redhead
Decluttering accomplishments: took two posters to be framed, unpacked yet another box, threw out a couple of magazines
I have discovered how to solve droughts. All I need to do is drive somewhere that lacks lane markings which are visible in the rain and, sure enough, it will pour. My sense of direction proved as (un)reliable as usual last night when I drove to Beltsville, Maryland for a storyswap. I can understand how I missed the left turn on my way to the swap, as the street sign was less than obvious. But I'm really not sure how I managed to drive past the on-ramp to the Beltway on my way home. It may have just my moodiness, as it wasn't a very good swap - only five people, one of whom left after half an hour. And he was the most interesting person there, as he claimed to have served five years in Djibouti with the French Foreign Legion.
The rain was far heavier today but I managed not to get lost anywhere that I was going. To be fair, I only found the store I was looking for because it was in the same shopping center as the store I wasn't looking for but remembered the existence of as I was driving by. Alas, the lamps I like continue to cost roughly twice what I think they ought to.
I was in Los Angeles during the week, by the way, sitting in on a software engineering audit. I also took advantage of being there to meet with various people and dig into odds and ends of what's going on in the program. It wasn't horribly arduous, though trying to check my company email was rather annoying as I had to muck around with trying to open non-local databases in Lotus Notes, often ending up with cryptic error messages that didn't actually seem to prevent me from doing anything.
While I was in L.A., I was able to go to Community Storytellers on Thursday night. It was fun and I suspect that was part of my Saturday night let-down. I also had a chance to have a nice lunch (Thai food - mmm, spicy mint leaves) with Mary Joan one afternoon. I got together with Julie another evening for gnocchi with pesto at Il Fornaio (okay, but a bit heavy) and gossip about our former jobs and current jobs and life in general. Tuesday night I tried a new restaurant someone had recommended Fleming's is probably a good place to go if you're with a large group and you're all really into wine, but it was wasted on me, as the food was too salty and the service was mediocre. China Grill was better, though a bit on the bland side. The really great meal of the trip was dinner at La Seranata Gourmet, a Mexican seafood place near where I used to live. By the way, I had two glitches on the trip. One morning the hotel had no hot water. And then there was some difficulty in returning the rental car. First, they had no rovers to check people in, so they had a long, slow-moving line. Then their computers went down and they were just giving receipts that said you'd returned the car, while offering to fax the real (i.e. credit card) receipt to you. I called my secretary when I got home and the fax hadn't shown up, so she'll have to call this week.
I have a few other notes of things to write about. The first is an oddity of usage. The correct way to abbreviate titles of military personnel is to use a period with ranks of captain and below, but no period for majors and above. Hence, one writes 2Lt. Jones, but MGen Smith. I'm not sure why anybody should care about that, but I thought it was interesting. And I do try to follow correct protocol at work, so it's useful info for me.
Another item I noted was from the state news page of U.S.A. Today on Tuesday. The South Dakota item mentioned a trial that invokes a state law allowing a person to sue if someone seduces his or her spouse. The law is odd enough, but what really bothered me is that the newspaper printed the names of the people involved. For the record, I don't think you can seduce somebody who doesn't want to be seduced. Blaming the "other woman" (or "other man") may be a handy excuse but cheating spouses make their own choices.
A final note has to do with the religious origins of bowling. Apparently, the sport developed out of the German practice of carrying a club for protection. When men went to church, they stood the clubs in a corner and they were believed to represent sins. A stone was thrown at them to symbolically topple the sins. The evolution into the bowling ball and pins happened sometime in the early medieval period. Martin Luther is credited with fixing the number of pins at nine and it was that version that was brought to North America by Dutch settlers. The game developed into one with gambling on the outcome, so became banned in New York and Connecticut. The tenth pin was added to get around the ban. This explains a lot of things, but fails to account for the horrors of bowling shoes and pink shirts with embroidered names on them. It does give me an excuse for not bowling, since I'd prefer not to participate in Christian rituals.
Now, all I need is to find equally good explanations for why I avoid karaoke.
Copyright 2002 Miriam H. Nadel