Tag Archives: Personal Blather

Pasta! Homemade, hand rolled pasta… That’s what was for dinner on Sunday. Hand-crafted little ravioli marvels, full of crab and cheese, and served in a tasty four-cheese hollandaise sauce with extra bits of seafood for flavor. And that’s what’s behind the big gap in posting this week.
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I’m filming a set of interviews with cancer patients, and there are a couple of common themes that are developing. One of the biggest ones has to be the alteration in interpersonal power dynamics that occurs when one person is dressed in ordinary clothes and the other is wearing a paper gown that almost, but not quite, ties in the back.
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There’s been this odd, dark, musty smell that I’ve started noticing at work. At first I thought it was my desk area, but then I noticed it at the conference table, and over by the scanner.

Then I realized that I haven’t worn these shoes all summer. And I remembered why I stopped wearing them last spring.
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If you’ve seen Shanghai Noon, there’s a scene where Jackie Chan beats the living tar out of a group of angry cowboys using only a horseshoe on a rope. The rope-dart is an actual martial arts weapon, available from actual martial arts weapons supply places. And it looks incredibly cool.
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Ok, the post I was going to do about how Gallup polls are officially useless just vanished into the ether thanks to a misplaced “Command-W”. Of course, if it weren’t for a misplaced W being in command, I wouldn’t have any incentive to write about politics in the first place… Anyway, instead of blathering on about some political thing that might interest two of you out there, I’ll write about two fascinatingly hyphenated words that I happened across at Andy Ihnatko’s Yellowtext while I was simmering over my keyboard ineptitude:

“monkey-rider”
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I don’t think I need to eat anything until sometime next month. I have just experienced the horror which is Outback Aussie Cheese Fries. Not that they taste bad! Oh, no. Far from it! They’re dangerously tasty.
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They’re remodeling all up and down the hallway here at work. One of the side effects is that there are occasionally large desks or file cabinets stacked in the hall. Today there are several sets of under-desk drawer units. Now, since this is sort of thing that will eventually be bolted to the bottom of a wood-paneled desk, they don’t bother finishing the surfaces that won’t be visible. And to protect the wood finish from passing traffic, whoever stacked them up in the hall has turned the veneer side toward the wall. The result is several tall, rectangular, matte black pillars at odd intervals down the hallway.

All we need an eerie humming sound when someone touches one, and we’ll be all set…

There’s a beaut of an article at the Register pointing folks to a section of the official website of the Scottish Parliament which is written in Scots. It’s absolutely fascinating, as a non-Scots speaker, to see how much is readable.

Here’s a representative sample:

We want tae mak siccar that awbody is able tae visit the Scottish Pairlament biggin. Wir premises is awready designit tae be as accessible as possible. Hooanever, gin ye are disablit and hae ony specific requirements, ye?re gey walcome tae contact us afore yer visit.

I think my brain is starting to give way under the work stress this week. I caught sight of a sign out of the corner of my eye, advertising the next meeting of the Gastrointestinal Journal society, and for a brief shining moment I caught myself wondering why a group of doctors would be writing about GI Joe.
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So, does Hallmark have a line of “Sorry you lost your space probe” cards for the folks at NASA yet?