Thirteen cool microorganisms
I’m tired of fretting over macroscopic creatures. If it’s not the humans in my lives (agents, those ornery creatures!), it’s disappearing ferrets or reappearing rats. Let’s take a break from vertebrates and consider life on the nano scale.
Back ache
Back ache #2, originally uploaded by amitaibu.
Eh, nothing major, but I’d rather be lying down than sitting at the computer right now.
Oooh, this should be fun. Karen’s trying to explain “rug muncher” to The Boy.
Tomorrow: Thirteen Microorganisms. See ya then.
D.
Rats
Yes. They’re back. But not cute ones like these:
No, we’re infested with the great fat brown ones, Rattus norvegicus. They’re nice enough as pets, but you don’t want them in your attic, pooping and pissing everywhere and making more racket than Britney with a quart of tequila. For a while, the smell of cats in our house kept the rats away, but I fear the vermin have figured out that Ash and Mist are softies. They’re not hardened rodent-killers like our poor, ill-fated Faithful. Moth-killers, maybe. Provided the moth doesn’t put up much fight.
They kept my son up last night with their carousing. It’s like the dorms all over again, except rats don’t listen to the Kinks at top volume or guzzle their own bong water. Jake devised a method of eradication as novel as it was ineffective: he repeatedly banged on the ceiling with his didgeridoo. And this afternoon, Karen took a stab at Novel Eviction* Techniques by burning a stick of agarbathi incense in the crawlspace.
At least now, the house smells nice.
What can I say, he’s on my mind lately.
This is a rerun (below the fold), but it truly is one of my favorite posts. When I finally figure out how to make YouTube videos with my birthday present, I might start here.
After reading this, if you want more of my grandfather, read my short story, “Heaven on Earth.” That story, too, is one of my favorites.
I need to learn how to do this
Boogie Nights — Star Wars Edition.
And I’ll bet many of you thought my LOLPOTTS! post scraped the bottom of the juvenile humor barrel. Hah! You don’t know how deep my barrel goes.
I’d love to learn how to make a video mashup. I tried googling “video mashup tutorial” and found out that “mashup” has many meanings. And why can’t programmers speak Idiot like me? Hey! “Mashups for Idiots” — maybe that’s what I need to google.
I have a meeting from hell tonight. See ya later.
D.
Ferrets ‘n cookies
We bought a new ferret today. Bought him used*, so he wasn’t quite as expensive as Zappa. Zappa is the darker one in the background; the new boy is in the foreground. He’s creamy white with faint dark markings down his back and tail — an inverse skunk.
Any suggestions for names? I like “Ghost,” but I’m in the minority here. Can’t think of what might work well with “Zappa.” “Hendrix,” perhaps? How about a name-that-ferret contest?
Oh, and I made chocolate chip cookies today!
I wanted to use the Tollhouse recipe, but in searching for it, I found this site, which claims to improve on Tollhouse. Suggestions I followed: I used melted butter instead of softened butter, 1 tablespoon of vanilla instead of 1 teaspoon, and 1/2 cup of oats instead of 1 cup of nuts. The melted butter made for an easier cookie dough (no sore arm from stirring), the vanilla improved the flavor slightly, and the oats were a BIG improvement over the generic Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie. I like the flavor of oatmeal cookies, though, and Jake objects to nuts in his cookies, so the success of the oatmeal addition doesn’t surprise me.
Hmm. Maybe I need to run a “fatten up my family” contest — we can get readers to post their favorite fattening recipes. God knows I need to fatten up my family.
Don’t forget — live blogging tonight. Soon. My pork roast has to get up to temperature.
D.
*His previous owner took him back to the store; she was allergic to him. He’s six months old and as sweet as can be. I thought Zappa was good-natured, but this fellow is even better.
PS: Here’s something different. Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy . . . backwards.
This cracks me the hell up. And where is everyone tonight? You have to save me from myself.
A real Chi Weenie
Not this kind of Chi Weenie.
For this morning’s procrastination, I’ve been drinking up the posts at Neurotopia, a ScienceBlog authored by The Evil Monkey, a neuroscience postdoc. The Evil Monkey has eclectic interests (not unlike yours truly), and has recently written about the Marry Our Daughter website, the effects of bisphenol A exposure, more Intelligent Design idiocy, and the use of statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) to treat Alzheimer’s.
In the linked post, The E-M posts a YouTube video of a Filipino martial arts expert who demonstrates how an ancient ritual makes him invulnerable to injury. Not.
The E-M’s conclusion?
I think we can consider Chi and the like one more debunked philosophical construct. Just because you believe something, that doesn’t make it so. Any nice sharp sword will demonstrate that concept.
Enjoy.
Live blogging tonight, beginning no later than 8 PM PST. See you all there!
D.
Massage
I got a massage today. Not for any particular reason; I guess the October Special (one hour for thirty dollars) was reason enough. I hadn’t had a decent massage since my previous masseur went off to Mykonos to make his fortune.
Massage used to be a lifesaver for me. Until I discovered exercise, massage was the only thing that helped my lower back pain. Now that I exercise regularly, massage is little more than a treat.
It didn’t used to be that way. During residency, if I popped good money for a massage, it meant something horrible had happened. Maybe I had pulled a 40-hour stint on three hours of sleep, or maybe one of my senior residents had lit into my ass over something inconsequential. Or, as happened right before my first massage, maybe I had almost killed a patient.
Butt Cleavage Heaven
Untitled, originally uploaded by Random Picss.
Oh. My. God.
There’s a group on Flickr called Random Butt Crack. I’m ecstatic, delirious, like a kid in a butt crack store. True, I have to wade through some hairy-guy butt crack (SOMEONE needs to show some discrimination on this group) but it’s worth it.
Amateur butt crack — 1,120 of ’em. ‘Kay bye gotta go.
***
Yeah, you knew I wouldn’t do that to you, not even for prime butt crack. Tonight, I think I’ll pimp Bam’s contest, even though I don’t have an entry and Bam never visits me anymore. Lovely idea:
I am sick of reading about dudes busting down doors, waving around semi-automatics, bragging about their three-thousand-dollar Ralph Lauren Black Label jackets— while the females in the story simpered and shook like a wet chihuahua and waited for the loud-mouth braggart hero to save her. The theme of this month’s contest? Two words: Kickass. Heroine. You want FIFTY AMAZON BUX!! (USD)? Here’s what you gotta do. In 400 words or less, write me a short little scene (or story) featuring a harsh, uncompromising, kickass female (think Gina Torres in Firefly or Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs. Smith) saving the precious, taut hiney of your male love interest.
But here’s the sad part. When I read this, I remembered a scene in my SF trilogy in which Bare Rump, a ten-foot-long sentient tarantula, defends her love interest (a sentient male fly half her size) from marauding giant wasps. And I thought, wouldn’t this be great for Bam’s contest? I’ll bet no one else will write about a kickass female tarantula defending her beau, a giant housefly!
I haven’t looked at this manuscript since May ’06; since then, I’ve written a romance, I’m a year older, and not much else has changed. Nothing except for my writing, apparently, because now I have the overwhelming urge to slash the page with indelible red ink (which would royally piss off the wife, since this is a relatively new flat screen monitor). Is this what happens when you leave a manuscript and come back to it after a year? Frightening. I’m wondering if I could cut the trilogy down to a normal-sized novel, in fact.
I think I’ve mentioned before how my first abortive novel (tag line: Casablanca — in space!) died for lack of discipline on my part. The plot bunnies would not stop multiplying. My story threads became knotted in dreadlocks. My characters kept asking one another, “Now, who the hell are you?” And now I’m wondering if my trilogy (tag line: Animal Farm — in space!) suffers from the same problem, albeit to a lesser degree. I did indeed pull all the threads together, and I killed off many bunnies in the third book, but the damnable thing lacks discipline. What — eight, nine POV characters? At least.
I’m beginning to understand why people write four or five or six novels before they manage to write their first publishable novel.
Ah, well, I suppose I should look at that manuscript when I’m daisy-fresh, not when I’m burnt to a crisp at the end of a radioactive week.
D.