So I decided to write that book, and fill it with as many lies and as much misinformation as I could muster.

Today I took all the scanned images and stuck them together in Word and made a PDF file out of them, the better to print out or browse through on a computer.

http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/AmericanStates.pdf

Lucy's Favorite Page

It’s still available as individual images on Flickr.com.

We’re really talking Meta here: The audience who’d instantly get this joke would be anyone who works in the Web Ghetto, and old-school nerds like myself. But consider this: this joke wouldn’t exist 30 years ago. Comic Sans was invented in 1994 and I’m not sure when the Comic Sans backlash started. Helvetica was born in 1957 — it’s the same age I am! But Helvetica as a signifier to the common folk dates back only to 2007 when the Helvetica movie came out.

So long as we’re deconstructing — consider the black guy in this picture. In the age of Obama, the slim, light-skinned black man is a signifier. It says ‘hipper than standard issue white guy, but not all ghetto.’ Would they ever try and sell a shirt like this with a scowling black man in a Sox cap rocking a 5XL? I think not*

*and yes go ahead and call me racist, but I see black men rocking this look every day at the bus stop.

Bless redacted’s bureaucratic little heart. I’m sure it’s all very important to the business of the hospital, but I can only hear this e-mail in John Cleese’ voice when I read it.

Iowa City is home of the Zombified “Resist Evil” Zombie Movie trilogy, an annual Zombie Parade (which benefits charity), and now, a guy who apparently imagines himself a zombie fighter.

Dude fucked up — Zombies eat brains, not burritos.

At said stopping point, I looked at my finger, and then the floor, and apparently unbeknownst to me, I’d been bleeding profusely, and there was blood all over the kitchen floor, counter & spattered down my pant leg. At that point, I changed pants and ran to the grocery store for some proper band-aids. Once I got enough pressure on it to stop the bleeding** I mopped up. The place looked like I’d slaughtered a goat, though I couldn’t have lost more than an ounce or so of blood.

*Way back when i worked construction, I worked with a guy who would bind up wounds with any semi-clean absorbent material and duct tape. This works surprisingly well, better sometimes than band-aids or gauze+tape dressings. I suppose it’s preferable to use sterile dressings, but in the real world, a reasonably healthy individual will rarely get an infection in a cut allowed to bleed freely for a few seconds, and then bound tight enough to slow the bleeding down to an ooze. That’s why your blood is at a positive pressure gradient with respect to the outside world — so it comes out instead of letting germs in.

**I have to have a pretty bad cut to consider stitches, having wasted my time and money a couple times with ER visits. If you can stop the bleeding and you can’t see bone, carefully applied clean dressings usually do just as well. My last ER visit about a cut involved a broken olive oil bottle and looked like an improvised mouth 3 inches wide. I drove myself to the hospital with my right hand wrapped in a bloody towel. Good times.

It didn’t arrive, and this was my entry into what seems to an American the surreal world of India. Let me enumerate.

1. Where he’s living, there are no street names, or street numbers. You send your mail to a particular post office in a city, and from there it’s identified just by the family name. So apparently mailmen (and DHL couriers) are good when they know the names of everyone and where they live, and fucking useless otherwise.

2. I called DHL and she said she’d contact the DHL office where the package is supposed to be delivered. She also gave me a local number for DHL. But phone #s in India are 10 digits — usually — and she only gave me an 8 digit number, with no indication of a city code. Given that the number of phones in India won’t fit in 8 digits, I don’t have high hopes that it will be very useful. Not only that I can go to the DHL India’s web site and it gives different numbers.

3. In a web-based sort of insanity, on the DHL page, the image where the phone #s are isn’t actually a normal image — it’s a flash application. And until you right click and zoom in, the text below the phone numbers is illegible.

I turn 52 today. I did the math. Turns out I have been thinking I was 52 for the entire last year, for some reason. So this is the year I have a birthday, and stay the same age!

Well, to paraphrase Robbie Burns, the best-laid algorithms o’ mice an ‘men gang aft agley.

Cette vidéo n'est pas sur les chats.

Which is sad, because “Main Dans la Main” is, I think, a clever pop song. Sure the arrangement is really wimpy, but I like Elli’s voice and style. Jacno looks like the guy who got kicked out of Kraftwerk for being too French.

I liked this song “Je T’aime Tant” as well — Elli preceded Lady Gaga by almost 30 years with the No-Pants style, and she’s cuter than Gaga as well.

It’s kind of like virtual particles appearing in a vacuum — do genres and anti-genres pop into existence and then annihilate each other?