Month: August 2002 (Page 1 of 6)

Taking off for the yearly Labor Day family reunion festivities. Back sometime Monday. In the meantime, why not reload my page many, many times to get to see all the links on the right side? It’ll give you something to look at, and me some more hits.

It’s a win-win.

Took my yearly pilgrimage to St. Vincent’s today, to gather up items for the White Elephant gift exchange at the family reunion over the weekend. I always feel vaguely guilty somehow buying things there that are destined for gag gifts. But the place is rich with possibilities, let’s face it.

I purchased:
1. A wall hanging consisting of a sort of Kabuki/mime mask surrounded by beads, with a frilly fan spread out behind it.
2. The Better Homes & Gardens “Cooking with Cheese” cookbook from 1966.
3. An LP of “Barbara Mandrell’s Greatest Hits,” with a photo of Babs seductively posing in a mostly-unzipped fur parka.

Of course, I felt less guilty when the guy in front of me in the checkout line bought one item, a single golf ball for 11 cents, and used a penny from the “Take a Penny” jar to help pay for it.

Found out by watching The Screen Savers on TechTV today that Patrick Norton and I have just about the exact same computer: 600 MHz Athlon, 20 gig hard drive, TNT2 video card. We’re both too cool to bother with the latest and greatest stuff.

I guess I’ll have to file this under freaky celebrity synchronicities, like when I found out that Al Gore and I have the same favorite movie: “Local Hero.”

I wonder if Al has seen “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

Synonyms of the day

Bellicosity and truculence.

My friend Kevin had a great idea for a new product today. Make a recording of general office background noise, and sell it to lonely work-at-home freelancers. Charge a little extra to include a personalized page over the intercom:

‘Adam Blust, please come to the front desk. Adam Blust to the front desk.’

Have you ever had an e-mail ruin your day? I sent an e-mail today to a client I did a small job for a couple weeks ago, asking about the status of my check. Anyone who’s ever done any freelance work, especially when it’s your only support, knows how important those checks are. I was just asking nicely about it, and I received a really shockingly mean and snarky reply.

I debated whether to respond at all, and in the end I did send something back to him that made me feel somewhat better. Whether I should have sent any reply at all is debatable. I didn’t expect to get any more work from them anyway. But for a while it really disturbed me, and I felt like the only way to stop stewing about it was to reply somehow.

E-mail seems to have an immediacy and starkness that other forms of communication don’t have. And I know that people will often say something in an e-mail that they

1. may not even mean,
2. would never say to someone’s face, and
3. will regret later after the heat passes.

Do you ever write out e-mails in the heat of battle and then not send them? Do you send them and later regret it? This stuff fascinates me.

I got back from dinner tonight and there were 12 new e-mails in my inbox.

They were all spam.

The Wall Street Journal attempts to explain the appeal of Ann Coulter in a recent article. (I guess we’re on an Ann Coulter kick today at words mean things.) Along the way, they call her outrageous and hateful statements “flights of fancy” and “raillery.” Yeah, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would have a problem with her statement that she wished Timothy McVeigh would have stopped by the New York Times building.

As one MetaFilter commenter wrote, much more succinctly than I could have:

I can’t help but wonder if the WSJ would have been so accomodating if someone like Michael Moore had said something like, “My only regret is that W wasn’t breakfasting at Windows on the World that day.”

Words. mean. things.

I’m a proofreader – I can’t help it.

“Already this year, Ann Coulter’s ‘Slander’ and Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men’ have been runaway No. 1 bestsellers, proving that ink on paper is one full-proof way to break out as a partisan pundit.”

-from a Salon article on conservative pundit Sean Hannity

My TV made me insane

I was looking forward to the RFK movie on FX tonight, with Linus Roache as RFK. But for some unknown reason, they replaced it with a M*A*S*H marathon, while still running the RFK promos throughout. I’m quite curious to know what would make FX pull such a heavily-hyped project from the airwaves at the last minute – and no crawl notice on the screen or anything.

Also tonight, they were showing “Mrs. Doubtfire” on PBS. I began to wonder if I was having some sort of breakdown, like, what night is it? Are these the right channels?

Then, I switched on the TV schedule crawl channel. They now show ads in the top half of the screen, and lately the audio hasn’t been synching properly with the video. So I go looking for answers about RFK, and I see little kids playing with some sort of Fisher-Price train set. But on the audio track is a promo for John Carpenter’s “Ghosts of Mars,” so as I watch the children playing, I hear explosions and the announcer intoning, “ALL THAT MATTERED WAS STAYING ALIVE!”

I need to go lie down now.