True stories from rec.humor.funny

Heard last Sunday on CNN:

"Another suicide bomber blew himself up in a busy Jerusalem intersection
today. No one was injured."

--------------------------------

This morning, November 30, 2002 a Columbus Ohio newspaper ran a story about a library in Ohio that cannot access its own website. It seems the library was named after a prominent businessman in the town who had donated generously to the library.

His name was Leo Flesh. The library installed NetNanny to block porn sites, and it won't let library computers go to the library's website because it is www.fleshpublic.lib.oh.us.

(The website has since been changed; this link will take you to the new Flesh Public Library.)

Hairy woodpeckers and eyeball tongues

Today's Straight Dope was very informative on the subject of woodpeckers. You may know, perhaps, that they use their long, barbed tongues to probe the holes they drill in bark and yank the grubs out. What you may not know is that some woodpeckers' heads are too small for their enormous tongues. This site has a very nifty photograph of a woodpecker skull in which the root of the tongue wraps up and around the bird's eye socket and behind the skull, terminating just above the nostrils!

(Sorry, Gene Simmons.)

I watched Freddy vs. Jason last night. It was...pretty decent, actually, from a B-movie horror perspective. There are plenty of ways to do this kind of titanomachy wrong; the writers got to the heart of what made the villains different and interesting, and that was reflected in the conflict. It's a trickster-vs.-brute warrior thing, basically a retelling of Odysseus vs. Ajax. (No, really.) And it had the girl from Ginger Snaps in it (Ginger Snaps being a fabulous, if low-budget, feminist werewolf movie from a few years ago).

F vs. J kept me up too late, unfortunately, which means I slept late, which means I didn't accomplish much today. I did make a tasty tuna noodle casserole (which sounds dull but actually involved water chestnuts, crushed red pepper, & cumin), do my laundry, finish my Bare Necessities arrangement, and read a chapter of Harry Potter 5 to a somewhat droopy Kendra. (She spent a lot of time banging her head against her dissertation today, and was feeling less hopeful than she was yesterday.)

I also watched the premiere (from last week) of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital. It's interesting, but suffered from being completely directionless—lots of disconnected expository incidents with no flow. I suspect this came from keeping the protagonist in a coma for the entire episode, and may therefore improve in subsequent weeks; we need a single viewpoint to tie everything together, methinks. Right now it's like Newhart without Bob, or Northern Exposure without Joel. I really like the creepy telepathic anteater, though. Giant anteaters have really alarming skulls, I've always thought, and I'm glad somebody is doing something with that.

Oh, yes—I spoke with my mom, too. Her car got anonymously sideswiped today, while parked in downtown Portsmouth, and she was rather distraught.

In happier news, she was invited to, and attended, a work group for writers and illustrators of children's books. She's a professional illustrator—quite a good one—who has always wanted to illustrate kids' books, but she has no faith in her own abilities. She wrote and illustrated exactly one book, back when I was just wee, about a lion who loses his mane, and it was wonderful. She never went any further, though.

This week, she took that thirty-year-old rough mockup to the work group, and all the pros heaped praise—sincerely, it seems—upon her. They got her to agree to rework it, one sketch per week, and, perhaps, submit it in six or eight months. She's bubbly about it now, but she suffers from the same ebbing enthusiasm syndrome that I do, so I don't know if she'll keep with it. On the other hand, a weekly work group, and the encouragement that comes with it, may be enough to keep her head of steam up. As the dutiful son, I will do my part as well; it would be wonderful if my mom could finally get some recognition.

I can never end these things, except abruptly.

Hymenoptera in the hat

The problem is bees in the bonnet.

This applies equally well to liberals and conservatives, and explains why I feel like such a damn alien in my own country sometimes. Someone is bothered by something; they have a gut reaction, something strikes them as problematic, something in their brain lights up over this issue, and they decide to Make a Difference. Not to put too fine a point on it, they get a bee in their bonnet. And we end up with children unable to research AIDS because their library computers won't load pages with those words, and the FCC imposing ludicrous fines as a result of a semi-second of clothing malfunction, and beeping crosswalks that annoy the sighted and don't help the blind, and someone trying to change the colors of chess pieces because white going first is racist. It's the Mrs. Lovejoy syndrome, over and over, short-circuiting reason: "Won't somebody please think of the children!"

Bees are great. I love bees, don't get me wrong. They give us honey, fertilize flowers, and alert us to real problems. But bees aren't the final step; they're the first. If you have a bee in your bonnet, that means you need to learn what's happening, study the situation, see if there really is a problem, or if you're overreacting. Choose to make a difference after you know that it's the right difference to make. The bee will wait.

I guess that's pretty obvious, but it's the best I can do getting that off my chest at 5AM.

Like a bead on a wooden wire

It surprised me to learn that Johnny Cash covered a Nick Cave song, but after Kendra explained to me it seemed rather fitting. "Cash loved songs about murder, mother, hard-living people who make bad choices and regret them. But defiantly," she said. And that's much of Nick Cave's ouvre. Anyway, Cash's version of The Mercy Seat is bone-shaking and earthy and passionate; I wish he were alive to record more Cave.

Successful class again tonight. Our cellist is sick, poor thing, so the band consisted of fiddle, keyboard, and guitar (me); we were a little fast on the strathspeys, and Kendra says the keyboard was a bit too loud, but we sounded solid to my ear, no obvious flubs. We actually elicited some proper whoops during the last bars of Round Reel of Eight. We cheated, playing Suzie Petrov's Flowers of Edinburgh set instead of the (unpracticed) RR8 set, but it worked very well. (If you ignore the repeat in King of the Fairies, once down the page is 88 bars. If you don't, as our fiddler failed to the first time through—ahem—you can stop 24 bars into King of the Fairies and it still sounds good, so long as you resolve to an Em for the bow and curtsy.)

During the third hour, when the band is replaced by recordings and the beginning dancers are replaced by the advanced, Britta and I had quite a pleasant conversation about her misspent undergraduate years in the SCA and Lemony Snicket in German. I'm enjoying time with her more and more as I continue to get to know her; I wish she had more time to do things other than grad school. (I'm also finding her seriously cute; she has this self-effacing mischevious quality that's quite attractive to me. Hmm...but she knows I have a LiveJournal now, so maybe I shouldn't go on about that. ;)= ) She brought a cake for Kendra, just "because [she] seemed really down last week," some of which I will have to eat soon.

It is, crappily, snowing rather hard, complete with high winds and slippery roads. I elected to not change the marquée tonight, since it would have been too slippery and windy for comfort. Our hardy crocuses were still bravely facing down the winter this afternoon, but I can't see them surviving this.