Saw my first Santa Claus ad of the season earlier this evening on TV. And so it begins.

Has anybody else noticed what a weird first name ’Sherlock’ is? I mean, what the hell? I can’t imagine what his parents’ names were.

From the Beyond was delivered unto them a recepticle for the collection and dissemination of the holy nectar, the fruit of the holy Brewing. Long had they gone without the means to fill themselves with the holy Energies, the warmth of the spirit of the highest of concoctions.

Unto them was given a Carafe. And it was good. And from it flowed Life.

Et a mihi bibo affero.

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…when you’ve got friends like these?

Thank you, Jon Sung, for being straight-up awesome at just the right time. This man right here hooked us up with Season 1, out of the goodness of his heart. How great is that?

OK, that’s all for now. Must get to watching DVDs.

According to CNN:

Earlier, police officers told CNN that some of their fellow officers had simply stopped showing up for duty, cutting manpower by 20 percent or more in some precincts. Before Thursday night fell, police were stopping anyone they saw on the street and warning them that they were not safe from armed bands of young men who were attacking people and attempting to rape women.

This comes along with the reports of shots fired at National Guardsmen and widespread looting. Not looting for food, mind you, but looting for electronics, alcohol, and guns. I am hesitant to call out any specific examples, but I find the behavior of the people who use this tragedy as an excuse to become violent disgusting. I am also at a loss as to why the response is to get violent, rather than trying to pitch in and help. This is, if anything, a lesson about how fragile civilization is and how hard we must all work to maintain it. In contrast to the base and selfish behavior, I’ve heard accounts of gunmen being told to leave the convention center by citizens who banded together and told them to leave.

New Orleans resident Alan Gould described the situation as “modern day genocide”. I’m not sure what to do with this statement. Watching a video of the convention center, I saw groups of people chanting and yelling into the camera. It’s hard to comprehend being corralled into an area then essentially left to sit and wait. I’m not surprised that anger flares up. How couldn’t it? But I honestly don’t know what claims of genocide and demonstrations are going to do for the situation, other than enrage people further. Do they truly believe no one is working to help the situation? People are demanding to know why they aren’t taking them out of that situation right now, but where would they go? Shuttling people around without a plan will be worse than doing things right.

+ If you can, donate to the American Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief. Or go to FEMA’s site to see how you can volunteer or make a donation. If we pitch in, I sincerely hope that we can celebrate Mardi Gras in 2006 with a revived and rebuilt Gulf coast, but that just may not be possible. +

Last week, my wife and I drove to the not-so-nearby VW dealership for scheduled turn’n'cough car service. I was leading in my car and she was following me in hers. As I turned left onto the road, about 30 feet from the entrance to the dealership lot, I caught a view of something large and shiny disappearing under the front of my car. ::KRUNCH, scraaaaaaaaape::

Crap.

I pulled into the tiny parking dot (it’s a parking lot in a conceptual, rather than literal, sense) and promptly hopped out of my car, convinced I had slashed my tire(s) horribly and was driving on one or more of my rims. Nope. Whatever I hit chewed up a plastic covering on the underside of my engine, which was then dragging on the ground. It seemed largely cosmetic, so I took a deep breath and cursed a few times on my way into the dealership. Arguably, I did screw up my car at the most convenient moment possible.

Alisa, being the enterprising and wonderful woman that she is, ran out onto the street as I waited at the counter in the service office, and came running up to the lobby holding this:

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Is it odd that I feel cheated somehow, even though the fortune was free and it came true?

While in New York this weekend (more on that soon), I noticed that about every third New Yorker had the distinctive little white ear buds and white cords of the iPod earphones trailing from their ears. In fact, it was so prevalent that I saw a couple actually walking and talking together while listening to their iPods.

I mentioned to Alisa that I was pretty sure iPods were now required by the state of New York, then she pointed out that all I could see most of the time were the ear buds, not the iPod. She also claimed that the earphones are available separately (they are, but only with a remote, so I’m skeptical). So, in light of this new information, I submit that in order to live in New York for more than a year, you are now required to own iPod earphones.

iPod optional.

Today, while waiting for my chicken tenders and strawberry shake (more on that in a moment) at a food court Burger King, I noticed a sign that reads: “14 and 15 year olds can only bag fries”.

I immediately imagined the following scenario:

The scene: a Burger King kitchen. A manager is speaking to a new employee, who is 14 years old. Manager: So, we’ve got some rules here at Burger King… New Employee: [nods] M: The first, and I can’t emphasize this enough, and most important— [pauses and peers at NE]—rule is right here. [points to sign] See that? NE: [eyes widen, nods] M: It says, “14 and 15 year olds can only bag fries”. Do you know why that is? NE: Um, no… M: See that man back there? [points to a man handling a mop with one arm, his dirty jumpsuit's left sleeve is pinned to the shoulder] He started here back in ‘62. Before the Law. The Fry Law. NE: The fry— M: He decided he was old enough to bag a cheeseburger. Wasn’t 16. Couldn’t hold it together. Had to give up the arm. NE: [eyes widen] M: So! Now we measure you for your uniform!

So, once I got my strawberry shake, the first Burger King shake I’ve had in quite some time, and started to drink it, I noticed something odd about it. It tasted good, and it seemed OK, but there was something not quite right about it. It was as though the texture was shake-like, and the flavor was strawberry-like (and good), and the thickness was decent, but the parts didn’t fit together. The sensation of drinking the Burger King shake was something akin to getting all of the sensations of a shake, but having them held together by their coincidence in time, rather than their coming from something that had all of those properties inherently; as though the taste, texture, thickness, and other attributes were applied. That doesn’t mean I didn’t drink the shake, or like it, but it was an odd sensation, let me tell you.

Thus, I dub it ‘the Burger King Simulation of Shake-Like Sensations, featuring Strawberry Stimuli’. The tenders were pretty good.

I’m sitting in a community coffee shop with my book, my laptop, Alisa, and lots of other people’s children. Watching the people around me, I’ve determined that cocktail parties, and really any adult social gathering, would be infinitely cooler and more fun if they ran the way small children interact when meeting each other for the first time.

Imagine, instead of sitting at the intersection of two couches in someone’s living room, trying to balance your crappy box wine in one hand and 85 cheese cubes on a dish the size of a silver dollar in the other, you were piled onto an arm chair with 3 other people. Two of you are upside down, dress/bulky sweater over your faces, another one is wandering away clutching a cup the size of their torso (possibly singing), and the last one is kind of bopping to an internal rhythm, bumping into the person next to them, who is totally cool with it.

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