Category: categories

te>Couldn’t we all use a little John Denver right about now? We could:

Aye Calypso!
The place's you've been to
The things that you've shown us
The stories you tell
Aye Calypso!
I sing to your spirit
The men who have served you
So long and so well

Right. Why am I still at work?

8:47 p.m.

San Francisco Moment:

Guy in a Jeep Cherokee passed me this morning with his radio blaring. He stopped for the light and as the engine roar quieted, I heard, “THE NASDAQ COMPOSITE INDEX PLUNGED TO ITS LOWEST LEVEL IN 15 MONTHS…” He was blasting NPR. Rock on, suburban white guy.

10:16 a.m.

Stuff that creeps me out, in order of creepiness:

  • Russian grandmother sells her living grandson for organ harvesting.
  • Japanese men are signing up for an online service that lets them woo a virtual woman over email. They must court the woman, and if they’re good enough the relationship will, ah, progress. If not, the “woman” dumps them.
  • This museum has an exhibit on the human body that includes fake human feces floating in a toilet. Kids love it.

2:11 p.m.

With my ears plugged from the cold, I mistook an ambulence siren for an aria and looked around for the fat lady.

10:28 a.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Characters: Friends from my college newspaper.

Subject: Finding a sugar daddy.

Excerpt (minus extraneous inside jokes):

Drew: I’ve been looking for a Sugar Mama/Daddy to support me while I finish my novel. Now, who the hell’s pulling down the most here?

Me: Extremely generous SWF seeks aspiring novelist to share mutually beneficial relationship and writers’ nest in city. I’m a wealthy editor seeking a young man to dot my “i”s and cross my “t”s. Can you prove that your sword is as mighty as your pen?

Matthias: The only four words I need to win Drew’s favor: Hung like a rhino.

Drew: I’d like to respond to ad box #133256, “SWF seeking aspiring novelist, etc.”: SWM, rugged, untamed, unflinching…Alaskan. Seeking a woman to clean game and fish including, but not limited to, caribou, moose, salmon, carp, trout, ptarmigan, grouse, bass, shad, dolly varden, raven, wolf, bobcat, house cat, sewer rat and the occasional feral monkey. Must have own knife and “fat-scraper”, must be able to make fire from snow, must weigh at least 195 (for boat ballast). Are you strong enough to be my man? I mean, woman?

Me: Um.. what’s dolly varden?

Jessie: That’s like Dolly Parton, except minus the gargantuan
boobies, and also it’s a fish.

2:05 p.m.

As the friend who sent this to me notes, Sally Struthers is always good for a laugh. From Satire Wire’s Please, Help Sally Save the Dot-Coms.

With each passing day, dot-coms are finding it increasingly difficult to stay
alive. Cut off from further venture funding or bank credit, without access to
sufficient revenues, many are forced to make choices about which essentials
they can afford: salaries or benefits, marketing or product development, sales
or office parties? Choices no one should have to make. Despair takes the
place of hope.

10:14 a.m.

From this week’s Onion:

Hypothetical Question Clearly Not Hypothetical

YUMA, AZ– Brad Thorstadt was rattled Monday,
when hiking partner and longtime friend Ken
Daniels asked him a hypothetical question that
clearly was not hypothetical. “What the hell did
he mean by, ‘Hypothetically speaking, if you and
Cheryl were into threesomes, would you consider
me?'” Thorstadt asked. “That’s not the kind of
thing you just ask hypothetically.” Thorstadt
added that he likes Daniels and everything, but
damn.

3:08 p.m.

Overheard a city mom talking to her little girl. They passed a produce stand and mom said:

“Look at the all the fruits and vegetables! Do you see the asparagus?” Pointing to a stack of neatly trussed bunches. “You have a toy asparagus at home, but that�s how they grow in the wild.”

I�d like to hear her take on hamburger.

12:40 p.m.

Some of the things Deepak Chopra says don’t really mean anything.

“Letting your inner awareness easily feel your body, greatly smooths any sort of stress release.”

10:52 a.m.



From the SF Gate Pic of the Day site. “A Palestinian child looks through a bullet-ridden metal gate in front of a shop in the West Bank town of Nablus.”

3:22 p.m.

One of my haiku product reviews appearing in the December collaboration issue of Web Techniques:

Talisma Online Services

Trailing willow branch,
Best-of-breed solution suite,
A sun ripened pear.

www.talisma.com

I love my job.

11:49 a.m.

My boss got a press release on the world’s fastest thawing spaghetti. The last line is a classic:

“Spaghetti innovations are rare,” said a spokesman for the UCC Ueshima
affiliate.

11:18 a.m.