I'm worried. Things are going too well today. 1. I got a new Mac computer in the office about 8 months ago, and it's been malfunctioning for at least 5 of those months. The problem is that it wasn't "broken enough" to warrant sending it back for replacement. Today, I realized (just realized today because I never use the damn machine) that they sent me a DVD drive instead of the CD-RW I ordered. Called Apple, and they're replacing the whole computer system, free of charge, with a better system. I figure at this rate, I'm due for a crisis any second. *looks up to watch for falling anvils*
2. I started a campaign a few months back (complete with giant, dissertation-like memo and supporting documentation) to rid our office building of The World's Most Evil Copy Machine. Today I was informed that because of said memo, they're replacing the machine.
3. My boss just called to say that Human Resources called her to let her know that my revised job description/salary reevaluation (in the works for 5 months now) is nearly complete. Boss won't tell me exactly what's going on until everything's finalized, but she told me that it looks "extremely positive."
posted by Kate at 1:11 PM link/comments
Cartoon Network has this segment called Adult Swim on every Sunday and Thursday night. It can essentially be categorized as "neurotic cartoons written by weird adults for other weird adults." As a weird adult, I'm a fan. There's Home Movies, which is brought to you by the same folks who brought you the now-defunct Dr. Katz cartoons. It features the same style of "shaky" animation and exceptionally funny, droll dialogue. Those folks of Katz fame are in it, too. Jonathan Katz does the voice of the main character's best friend's father, and H. Jon Benjamin (who was Ben Katz on Dr. Katz) voices Coach McGurk, the soccer coach with "anger management" issues. Apparently, the show started out as a prime-timer on UPN, but got cancelled. Goes to show you what kind of taste UPN has. These are the people responsible for the new Buffy series, for chrissakes. *stands firm, waiting to be flogged by 'Buffy' fans* I don't care what anyone says. I hate Buffy, and I fail to understand why it's reached cult-classic popularity levels. However, if you're reading, and you're a 'Buffy' fan and feel the need to explain to me why you feel it's something more than a waste of airwaves, send in your arguments. If anyone manages to convince me that it's worth my while, I'll mail them a present. I digress. Back to Adult Swim ... If anyone's really looking for a show that makes their eyes squint in bewilderment, and makes them turn to whomever happens to be in the room to say, "What the hell is this?", watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It's an animated series about fast food menu items that fight crime. Whaaaaaaaa?
posted by Kate at 9:48 AM link/comments
Uh-oh. You're right, Linda. I am a threat to running water everywhere I go. Water ceases to flow in my wake. I wonder if I can use this power to do something really cool, like part Lake Erie and take a Moses-esque stroll over to Canada. Or maybe my powers are limited to causing droughts. If that's true, I have the world's most useless super power. I'd like to say I saw you wave, but the best I can do is say that maybe yours was one of the planes I look up at through the glass t-tops when I'm stuck in traffic and think, "Plane. I'd like to be on one of those, going somewhere."
posted by Kate at 9:13 AM link/comments
Thursday, November 29, 2001
I know I haven't been around on the Blog lately - many things to do, lots of family stuff including TWO trips to Detroit this month. I got all excited when I figured out (with Mr. Grumpy's help) that the city we were flying over was Cleveland. Did you see me wave Kate?
On another matter - weren't you visiting us at our loaner beach cottage when the water ran out? Hmmm...
posted by lindathemum at 4:07 PM link/comments
Here's what I love about England. The officials in the city of Chester have put up a feedback form on their site to ask residents what they think of the town's new street furniture. Cities around here never ask its residents what they think (beyond requisite lip service) about new laws and policies, much less about public opinion regarding street furniture.
posted by Kate at 10:44 AM link/comments
I cannot begin to express exactly how much I am enjoying cable television. I'm paying a mere $20 per month, and in return I get immeasurable joy and a perpetual feeling of being much smarter than the rest of the population. It's fabulous. Last night I watched Crossing Over with John Edward on the Sci-Fi channel. For those not familiar with the program, John Edward is a hot-shot psychic who can purportedly communicate with the dead. He has these "gallery readings" where he fills a studio with people, then somehow harvests dead people energy, picks someone from the audience, and claims to be talking with their deceased kin. People scream and cry. I'm not going to speculate on whether this man is really able to communicate with the dead, because frankly, there's part of me that would like to believe there's an afterlife, no matter what my atheist/cynical leanings would like to tell me. The point is this: Last night, John Edward did a private reading with none other than former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach. He looked just like he did during those "Youth Gone Wild" days less than 15 years ago, except now his hair's lighter, and he's put on some weight. He had his wife with him, who was this bleach-blonde all decked out in skimpy leather attire. The two of them, with John's aid, had a chat with Sebastian's grandmother who had "passed," as John likes to put it. Sebastian's grandma was recounting for everyone how much she used to like going to Skid Row concerts, standing in the front row next to "smelly ratty guys who had 'Ozzy' tattooed across their foreheads."
posted by Kate at 10:29 AM link/comments
Wednesday, November 28, 2001
Yup. And I'm going to go completely raging mad if he uses the word "evil" one more time. Does this man really think Americans are so dumb as to think he's actually good at this job, and not simply a great big flesh-and-blood puppet being operated by government staff who are clearly much more intelligent than he? Erm. Wait. Don't answer that question. The answer would only upset me. In other news ... I did it. I caved. I got cable tv. Years ago, I purchased industrial-strength tv-top rabbit-ear antennae. Until now, they've served me well, enabling me to tune in at least 5 or 6 channels. Apparently, however, the innards of my new apartment's walls are stuffed full of magnets, causing all radio and television signals to flee in horror from my home. With the antennae, I could pick up two stations fairly well, and a third if I elected to stand in front of the tv for at least 15 minutes at a crack, manipulating the rabbit ears in ways god never intended rabbit ears to be manipulated. "Hmmm. Maybe if I twist them into a double helix ..." I ordered basic cable, which surprised me by being a) fairly cheap, and b) far more extensive than I had anticipated. The last time I checked, "basic cable" meant "you get the same channels as you would with an antenna, except the picture's much clearer." Not anymore, by gum. I now have 70 channels. Most channels fall into one of the following several categories: As if that weren't enough, I also have the Catholic Channel (a.k.a. "Nuns on Parade"), the Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, and some channel that plays a different international news show every hour. I saw part of the Vietnamese news last night. I would have watched Slovakia, too, but it was late, and I would have hated to waste all the excitement in one night.
1. Psychotic Consumerism Channels Featuring Clownish Women Who Get Really Excited About Teflon Cookery and Ugly Jewelry (QVC, HSN, MSN Shop-O-Rama (or something similarly titled), ValueVision, etc.);
2. Our Elected Officials: Arguing Nonsensically on the Floors of Congress Channels (C-Span, C-Span 2, C-Span 3: This Time It's Personal);
3. Continuing Coverage of The War on Terror Channels(alternately "Reporters Who Have Been in Afghanistan for Six Weeks Yet Managed to Maintain Ruggedly Handsome Looks and Perfect Hair," or, "Gnarled, Haughty White Men With Names Like Wolf Have Something Very Important To Say.");
4. Hi! We're Your Cable Company! Let Us Tell You Why Your Life is Barren Without the Benefit of Pay-Per-View and HBO! Channels;
5. Public Access. My favorite. Last night I watched a show where some local guy ran around local bars and talked to local drunks. It was great. It went like this:
Host: Hi! Having fun tonight?
Wan, Scantily Clad Girl #1 (hoisting cup of beer above head in celebratory manner): Yeeeeaaahhhhrrrrr. Heeeeyyyyy. Whooooooooohooooo!
Host: You, sir! What's up!
Frat Boy (doing mock pro-bodybuilder/pro-wrestler muscle flexes): Yeeeeaaaahhh. Rawwwwwwwr. Whoooooohoooo!
Host: Hey, girl! You look fiiiiine!
Wan, Scantily Clad Girl #2 (waving her hands in the air like she just didn't care): Yeeeeaaahhhhrrrrr. Heeeeyyyyy. Whooooooooohooooo!
posted by Kate at 12:14 PM link/comments
Tuesday, November 27, 2001
Bush is an idiot. This week, he commented about the cloned human embryo fiasco. He said something like, "we shouldn't grow things just to kill them." Hello -- what about the entire cattle industry, the entire meat industry, or, for that matter, agriculture in general, plants OR animals -- you know, all those things we grow and then kill...when he said that, he was responding to a reporter's question, so his handlers couldn't get to him in time to halt the usual flow of babble. And if I hear him refer again to the war as America "smokin' 'em out of their caves," I'm going to scream....
Anyway...your purple coat sounds fabulous. Everyone needs a purple coat.
posted by Jen at 5:29 PM link/comments
Monday, November 26, 2001
If I were to list here what I think of world events these days, I could go on for pages, but I'd bore the hell out of everyone. Besides, I wouldn't have anything more to say than has already been said by countless others. One small nitpick, though, because I'm in the mood to be pedantic. Speaking about today's wave of Marines who entered Afghanistan, Dubya said this: “This is a dangerous period of time, this is a period of time in which we’re now hunting down people responsible for bombing America." WE WEREN'T BOMBED. Airplanes flying into buildings may yield the approximate level of devastation as a bomb, but AIRPLANES ARE NOT BOMBS.
posted by Kate at 4:10 PM link/comments
Hey, speaking of pizza cutters, my mom just gave me a brand new one. This means I don't have to cut pizza with a bread knife anymore. Hooray for life's simple luxuries. Thanksgiving: We haven't had any sort of liquid precipitation 'round these parts for some time, so my parents' well went dry, leaving their house waterless in time for the arrival of 9 guests for Thanksgiving dinner. My brother stole water from the neighbors' garden hose and brought it home in milk gallons. As for me, I was in the shower when the water spat its last. Nothing like standing in the tub, covered in soap and shampoo and thinking, "Hey. Um. How the hell am I supposed to get these suds off me?" Other than that, though, the holiday was lovely. LindaTheMom bought me an early Christmas present ... a furry purple coat. It rocks harder than any coat has even dreamed of rocking. I put it on and the fashion gods bow before me. No joke.
posted by Kate at 3:24 PM link/comments
Saturday, November 24, 2001
My Thanksgiving Break has been filled with movie-watching and living-room-rearranging and pondering over school work to be done. Melinda, it's good to hear you survived airports and airplanes. I will remember to leave my pizza cutter at home. Paul and I are gearing up for our air voyages to Ohio in December and already I'm not excited about it. Crowded tense airports, holiday hoo-hah...at least my tickets were cheap...
posted by Jen at 11:37 PM link/comments
Thursday, November 22, 2001
Entering the turkey-tryptophan haze to wish everyone a happy holiday. Celebrations here (I'm in Boston for the annual Weatherlow gala) don't begin until tomorrow but I wanted to extend wishes to all.
The flight up was mostly uneventful. The only stark reminder of the radical shift we've gone through was seeing a two or three year old toddler, a little blond thing with spiky pigtails, being wand searched and patted down at the security checkpoint. She just looked bewlidered. As did we all.
That, and the kid who got busted for carrying a pizza cutter in his backpack. Mom was ranting and raving,"i've had that pizza cutter for twenty years! I told you to take it out before you came! It was a school prject from last week! Why are you still carrying my pizza cutter? You do realize I'll never see that pizza cutter again, don't you? Twenty years I've had that!" So, be warned, folks.
posted by Melinda at 9:36 PM link/comments
Tuesday, November 20, 2001
Warning: dangerous timewaster ahead
here
Be whimsically judgemental about celebrities - go on - you deserve it......
stolen from meg
posted by billyjoe noodle-bob at 9:12 PM link/comments
So, just for all of you who do not know, my Xmas present to myself is to quit my job. I haven't turned in my letter of resignation yet, I have two more weeks before I have to for adequate warning. I figure, if they fire me I get unemployment so I might as well wait and hope. Work is more fun when getting fired is your goal. I'm not doing anything as obvious as Police Academy or anything, and my work ethic, weak and struggling as it is, requires me to basically do my job as long as I am getting paid for it. What it doesn't require is for me to care, or to kiss anybody's ass. Oh, was it time for me to be leaving as I was pouring my second cup of coffee? Oops. Ha.
posted by Holly at 12:09 PM link/comments
Saturday, November 17, 2001
Hooray for Thanksgiving Break...Was at a grad student get-together last night. Sometime after midnight, someone thought it would be a good idea to break out Trivial Pursuit: Genius Edition. Numerous drunk grad students reluctantly gathered around to play. What followed was a half-hour of arguing and put-downs as a bunch of English majors, too smart and intoxicated for their own good, attempted to play. Furthermore, imagine Paul doing his best Regis Philbin "Who Wants to be A Millionaire" routine every five seconds. Game was abandoned after the host's border collie puppy attempted to herd the game pieces off the board.
posted by Jen at 6:01 PM link/comments
Tuesday, November 13, 2001
Ha...After the young love exchange, I couldn't quite wrap my mind around what had happened. The girls in the class were all giggly and sharing their blushing with Lisa. The guys were making mental notes to someday lavish attention on their girlfriends in a crowded classroom. They were like, "hey, that was pretty cool...He's gonna get some tonight..." I was like "Why didn't he hug me?" I'm the teacher, afterall.
posted by Jen at 5:32 PM link/comments
Ah. Right. Not wrong to take stuff from the web. It's perfectly OK not to formulate your own ideas and words, just as long as you're not stealing from a physical book. My reaction to the boy running into your class, Jen, and kissing his girlfriend went like, "*eyes roll* ... damn kids ... except ... well ... *sigh* ... how come nothing like that ever happens to me??!
posted by Kate at 10:36 AM link/comments
Monday, November 12, 2001
Plagiarism update, for all who care...guilty student cried and said she didn't realize it was wrong to take stuff from the web. In my class today, this one girl -- I'll call her Lisa -- her boyfriend came into class just as I got started, and he gave her a big hug and kiss and embarrassed her extensively. Then he dashed out of the room. Young love...
posted by Jen at 6:48 PM link/comments
Thursday, November 08, 2001
Not much going on here...Paul caught one of his students plagiarizing...she pieced together her paper from four different sources on the web and Paul, super-sleuth that he is, found all of them. He hasn't talked to her yet about it. D-day is Monday, he thinks, when he'll give her a chance to explain herself. There's going to be some crying, I bet.
posted by Jen at 5:34 PM link/comments
*walks into blog, looks around, sneezes while brushing dust off everything, clears throat* I'm a sorry excuse for a blogmaster ... no posts for a week. Mea culpa. The latest news here is that I've become hopelessly addicted to the BBC World News Channel. "But Kate," you're saying, "how could you possibly be addicted to the BBC when you're clearly nowhere near the UK?" The answer, my friends, is this: broadband. If you head on over to the BBC homepage, you can click your way into a live tv feed (and a high-resolution one at that). I've been so happy for the past three days, sitting here at work playing with websites while watching all sorts of world footage and listening to the British pronounce "Pentagon" as "Pent-a-gin."
posted by Kate at 10:27 AM link/comments
Monday, November 05, 2001
Speaking of clothes...Paul's mom sent him a box o' clothing this weekend. There was a t-shirt (normal), those mesh basketball shorts (for all this b-ball games Paul plays), a vest, which delighted Paul beyond all normalcy since he claims he's never owned a fleece vest, and finally, the capstone gift, a triple extra large plaid lumberjack type winter jacket. Paul's mom is pretty sure that living in the Pacific Northwest is equal to sawing down five or six pine trees before dinner. Maybe she named him Paul after Paul Bunyon.
For your amusement, here are two tragic mistakes from recent freshman papers:
"Liberals want to redistribute the welts." (attempted word was "wealth.")
"Our country will soon be bank rubbed." (attempted word was "bankrupt.")
posted by Jen at 7:53 PM link/comments
Thursday, November 01, 2001
I'm sitting here at my desk in the apartment while the local news drones on the TV behind me (I usually keep the TV or stereo on while I'm on the computer for "company," as my grandmother says). Suddenly, I hear the newscaster say the following: "It's playtime for the plus-sized!" This was apparently an intro to a story about some fashion-for-people-over-size-14 event that was held in town today. Yeah, Ms. Size Zero Local Reporter Who Clearly Got Her Job By Sleeping With Producers (trust me; if you'd ever seen this broad on the news, you'd agree with me that she sure as hell didn't get the gig on brains and talent), it's one big happy frolick for these women just because there's an event that recognizes that bigger women should have some selection of clothing beyond the mumu/tentlike crap they sell in KMart. If I ran the world, this would be my lead-in: "Holy hell! It's about damn time someone made nice clothes for women who don't look like a stiff wind could blow them into the next county!"
posted by Kate at 11:33 PM link/comments
Ooooohh. I like night flights. They're great. You get on board, they give you the here's-what-to-do-if-we-plummet-into-the-ocean song and dance, then they turn down the lights and pass out pillows and blankets. Then you konk out along with everyone else on the plane. It's comforting ... feels like being at a big sleepover. Then again, if you're not like me, and can't render yourself comatose during air travel, you feel like the kid at the slumber party who had too much Pepsi and can't sleep.
posted by Kate at 11:21 PM link/comments
I just bought airline tickets home to Ohio for Christmas. I especially liked the "don't you dare bring a knife on board" warnings and my subconscious decisions to book flights at odd hours to avoid being hijacked in broad daylight. I fly out of Seattle at midnight! No meal on that flight...
posted by Jen at 6:25 PM link/comments
Happy birthday, Lindathemum! and many more happy, healthy years to you!
posted by L at 5:10 PM link/comments