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 Semper Ubi Sub Ubi readme:
May, we hardly knew ye…. Seriously. I guess we’ll just call this the Late May Issue, eh, kids? I’d call it the June Issue, but there are people out there paying by the month to read this on Kindles and Nooks and iPhones and iPads and iLord-knows-what other satanic devices, and I don’t want to upset Steve Jobs, ’cause he’s already nuts enough. Anyway, there will also be a June issue sometime before July. Honest.
There is, however, a case to be made for not updating this site at all, ever. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it is, in fact, my frantic attempt to stick to something resembling a monthly schedule that has actually caused a recent series of disasters around here. It started a few years ago when I took a break from formatting this site to go downstairs and install a window air conditioner and was promptly struck by lightning. Then, just a few weeks ago, I was sitting on the couch in my office, again working on this site, when a sudden windstorm knocked half a large tree into the side of the house, missing the window behind me by about six inches. In late May I took a break from finalizing this issue to mow the lawn, and the mowing deck on the tractor went kafloozie, necessitating my spending several days on my face in the driveway trying to fix the damn thing, which isn’t fun when you have only limited use of your left arm and you really need said left arm to pull an idler pulley against a big spring so you can get the goddamn drive belt back on the deck. I ended up wrapping a steel cable around the pulley and getting Kathy to stand ten feet away and pull on it real hard. That was a separate ordeal, incidentally, from the day I spent unwinding the steel cable from the blades last month. Then the guy from DirecTV showed up to replace the satellite dish and turned out to be a major jerk who glared at us silently while he bent our brand-new gutters. Then the basement flooded and I had to stay up all night pumping it out through a garden hose. Then the well pump died on a Friday afternoon, and by the time we got it replaced we were (a) very thirsty and (b) in the hole for $1100 just to get back to where we’d been 36 hours earlier. And that appears to be the theme around here: even the most modest status quo cannot hold. If we could box and market high-speed entropy, we’d be rich, but we can’t and thus aren’t, so please subscribe.
In moments of reflection, which I do my best to avoid, Kathy and I often pine for our old fourth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an insanely cheap (at that time) duplex with a terrace, half a block from Central Park. She came up with a good, if very depressing, analogy a few days ago. Living in this 1860s house with all this land is like being responsible for the physical state (wiring, plumbing, roof, etc.) of our entire old apartment building plus being charged with the grooming of a sizable chunk of Central Park, trees and shrubs included. It’s nuts. No one without pots of money and a full-time lawn crew could manage it properly.
But hey, we now have a bunch of deer living in the big thicket of brush down by the road. I sit out on the front porch in the morning and wave at them. And I know where the chipmunks’ burrows are and where the snakes live. It’s just like the Upper West Side, except that all the people are wearing fur suits. Or feathers. Or scales.
Lastly, thanks as always, for your financial support of this site, and a special my-jaw-dropped thanks to whoever sent me the nifty Acer netbook. It is truly awesome and very useful. In fact, I plan to use it to update this site next time, from a coffee shop safely miles away from here at Disaster Central.
p.s. — It came with Windows XP installed, but I set it up to dual boot with Ubuntu Linux Netbook Edition, and it’s truly a thing of beauty.
And now, on with the show….
Semper Ubi Sub Ubi readme:
Just under the wire again. Awesome. Hey, your high school didn’t issue the yearbook in the first week of class, did it? It took a while for April to sink in.
First up, thanks to all the folks who have generously contributed to my upkeep and the continued existence of this site. Special super-duper thanks to S, J, and E for their ginormous generosity. Your cats are in the mail.
I’ve been noodling around the internet for a long time, long enough that, when I started, the first thing I bought was a primer on Unix commands. I think the reason I’ve managed to avoid a major disaster so far is my natural skepticism, which some people call paranoia, but you can call raspberry jam for all I care. It works. Thanks to my deeply suspicious nature, I managed to use Windows computers for more than ten years and never caught a virus, trojan or spyware. Yeah, I probably deleted a boatload of unopened hilarious and touching digital greeting cards from friends and relatives, but one must be strong.
Lately, however, I’ve felt a weird, inexplicable craving to join Facebook. It comes on at strange times, often in the wee hours of the morning (which, for me, is nine or ten am), and manifests itself in a ravening desire to see what that kid from fourth grade has been up to for the past [mumble mumble] years. I also know gazillions of people who have Facebook pages, and, since I’m famous for not answering email from them, being on the damn thing might make life easier.
But then I actually look at Facebook and it creeps me out. The thought of being asked to “friend” people I barely know and may not actually … like … is bad enough. The stress of just thinking about it makes me wish I drank. Then there’s the distinct possibility that someone I “friend,” just to be nice, will turn out to have also “friended” the Pol Pot Fan Club or something similar.
But then I forget all that and just want to join and not be missing something.
Fortunately, about once a week for the past month, Facebook has stepped up to the plate and proven that I’m not the one missing something. See also this. And especially this. And they’re not even good at being evil. Long story short, these creeps are not your friends, and their promises are worthless.
But let’s look on the bright side of the net. Futility Closet is always fun. The Browser and Give Me Something to Read are good sources of things to, uh, read. And Harper’s offers consistently good stuff.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man is fascinating. The author, W. N. P. Barbellion, was an English diarist diagnosed, in 1915, with what is now known as multiple sclerosis. The preface to the book (free to read at that first link) is by H.G. Wells.
Onward, ready or not. I try to look forward to the coming of Spring, I really do. But I think it’d be a lot easier to do so in New York City. Last week I noticed that (a) our neighbors had apparently been mowing their lawns for a couple of weeks (maybe since January, who pays attention to that stuff?), and (b) our lawn was starting to look more than just a bit feral, like maybe there could be wolverines lurking in there. Snakes, definitely. Plus which Pokie would wander out there and get lost. Of course, Pokie wanders into the living room and gets lost, but this was worse, because she’s both deaf and demented, so even if you spot Pokie and call really loud and wave your hands, she looks at you like she’s never seen you before and goes right back to licking the tree. Pokie likes to lick trees. Pokie also likes to lick the gravel in the driveway. And the rug in the living room. For hours on end.
Anyway, it was about his time that our neighbor stopped by and asked if I needed help fixing My Little Tractor. This is about as subtle as it gets around here, but I was sharp that day and caught his drift. So a couple of days later I pried the garage door open and fired up the beast, or tried to, but the battery was dead. Rats. Well, maybe next year, eh?
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Semper Ubi Sub Ubi readme:
Whew. That was close. It’s still March, right? It must be, somewhere. Australia? By the way (he said, deftly changing the subject), is anyone else still creeped out by having to write “2010″? It seems to have scrambled my noggin so badly that I caught myself writing “1997″ on a check the other day.
Elsewhere in the news, Spring has sprung, of course, sinking its razor-sharp claws into my soul. The good news is that Monroe and Babs, our resident turkey vultures, have returned to the old hollow tree where they nest every year. The day they arrived I walked over to the tree to say hi, and one of them took off, swooped down to about six feet above my head, circled around me, and zoomed right back to the tree. I think they like me. They should. I found a dead mouse in the front hall the other day, so I took it to them as a housewarming gift.
The cats whack mice around here every so often, but I don’t always notice right away because the floor is already littered with platoons of mousey cat toys, many of which are very realistic. If you look closely, of course, you’ll notice that the cat toy mice appear to be a lot happier.
Oh yeah, the bad news is that the grass is growing.
Incidentally, I’d like to take this opportunity to give formal notice to the world that I am no longer paying attention. At all. After being a semi-news-junkie for years, I’ve had it. I think something snapped when I realized that, after intense study, I finally understood credit default swaps, but it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
So I’ve decided to watch lots of TV. So far I’ve taken a shine to a show called Pawn Stars, which is a reality show set in a family-owned pawn shop in Las Vegas. It’s actually a very funny show. Really.
I’ve also started watching House, which is easy to do because it’s carried in reruns on, like, five different cable networks. I had not realized (because I’d never watched it, even though it’s in its sixth or seventh season) that the show was modeled on the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which I’ve always loved. Yeah, it’s a bit silly and formulaic, but I admire House’s cynical attitude and sardonic humor. And, of course, there’s the cane thing.
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