Month: January 2012

Here again are some of the Facebook (and Google+) status updates I’ve been writing in lieu of actual blogging. This is what happens when your longest available nugget of creativity time is five minutes.

• Inexpert phlebotomist. Ouch.
• Damn him, just as I’m about to write him off, Obama goes and says all the right things!
• I chose “super saver shipping” for my Portal 2 preorder? Curse my sense of economy!
• [On the death of bin Laden.] Message to terrorists: do not fuck with us! If you try to bankrupt us or destroy our freedoms, we will BANKRUPT ourselves and DESTROY OUR FREEDOMS in singleminded pursuit of your overdue and meaningless demise!
• Saw an 800-year-old copy of the Magna Carta at the Legion of Honor. PFC. (Pretty cool.)
• A key to happiness: park sooner, not closer.
• I forgot how much fun it is to peel a sunburn! Kinda makes up for all that pain a couple of weeks ago.
• Archer does a pretty good Marvin the Martian now. “I claim this planet in the name of Mars!”
• Now I know what NFS stands for. “Not fast. Slow.”
• Groupon’s attempts at Woot-like clever sales copy cause me actual pain.
• Just when the day was shaping up to be blah, along comes the headline, “Arkansas weatherman found in hot tub with naked dead man wearing dog collar.”
• [For my puzzle-loving friend Wes.] I feel a birthday limerick coming on!
  There once was a fellow named — guess!
  The last letter of his name is an S
  The rest of his name
  Is spelled just the same
  As a homophone for the French word for yes.
• Me, at the wax museum yesterday: “That’s Gandhi, he was an important leader in India. He helped show people how to get what they want through peace instead of fighting.” Archer: “How? With puppy-dog eyes?”
• Prepping for the CERT class final tomorrow — and watching episodes of Emergency! from 1972 with the family! Life is good.
• I am a California certified disaster service worker.
• Another day, another certification: have just completed an American Heart Association First Aid/CPR/AED course.
• Andrea. Bob. TV food celebrities with the initials A.B. We got it covered.
  
  
• Less tolerant of misspellings today than usual. And that’s saying something.
• A weekend that ends with the family driving home, singing along with side 2 of Abbey Road, is a pretty good weekend.
• What am I doing up so early on my birthday, rather than sleeping in? I started my day standing in my driveway in the darkness, a hot cup of coffee in my hands, neck craned way way back, enjoying the Orionids: a birthday light show put on for me by debris from Halley’s comet. Now that’s how you start a birthday. Orionids Meteor Shower 2011
• Today I’m 45. But every morning in the shower, by force of habit rather than necessity, I still use the amount of shampoo of a man half my age.
• S! is for super
  U! is for unique
  Z! is for Zamfir, master of the pan flute
  A! is for awesome
  N! is for no way is my baby sister 42
  N! is for no way is my baby sister 42, weren’t you listening?
  E! is for even if my baby sister were 142 she’d still kick all our asses, including Zamfir’s, in super unique awesomeness
  What’s that spell? SUZANNE! What’s that spell? SUZANNE! What’s that spell? SUZANNE! Yaaaaaay!
• Viruses invade my cells. They hijack my cellular machinery to copy themselves. They subvert my immune response to cause me to sneeze and cough them everywhere. Then they invade someone else’s cells. Ah the circle of life!
• “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.” is the new “My God, it’s full of stars.”
• The promise of grilled cheese is never quite matched by the reality.
• The rainy season arrived yesterday. So the kids started asking, “When can we watch Singin’ In the Rain?” Raised ’em right.
• “Locking nuts” my ass.
• I get it now. It’s not that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, per se; it’s that the old dog’s attention is divided into slices so thin that no one of them is suitable for learning new tricks.
• Yes, its stated goals (save taxpayer money, solve more crimes, and protect the innocent) are all excellent. But my favorite argument in opposition to the death penalty is that there are things worse than death, and there are some criminals who deserve them. SAFE California
• Lord of the Rings + A Midsummer Night’s Dream + The Wizard of Oz – any sense of things mattering or making sense = Willow
• Things change, and here’s the proof: the teenaged me thought “48 Hrs” (the Nick Nolte/Eddie Murphy film) was a rollicking good time, but the middle-aged me is appalled by it.
• Two full weeks to do nothing but exercise and practice guitar. Is that too much to ask?
• Each morning I arrive at work and park my car in YouTube’s garage. There are hundreds of spaces on multiple levels, and on any given day I’m as likely to park on one level as on any other. I’m somewhat absent-minded — in the shower I often cannot remember whether I’ve shampooed yet — so you’d think I’d constantly be forgetting where my car is. But almost without fail, at the end of the day, I ask myself, “Now where did I park?” and can recall the spot I pulled into that morning — not the morning before or the morning last week. Why am I able to do this?
• Reamde: finished! It’s as if someone complained to Neal Stephenson that too little happens in Anathem and it takes too long to get going, so Stephenson, taking this as a challenge, said, “Oh, yeah?” and rolled up his sleeves and wrote this.
• How do you complain about a great employee perk like a fancy new smartphone every year? Like this: I lost all my Angry Birds levels!
• When your kid makes a series of unreasonable requests, and you have to say no again and again, and then he makes a perfectly reasonable one but you say no anyway, without thinking, that’s “nomentum.”
• Archer, watching football: “What does NFL stand for?” (and then, before I can answer) “I think the N stands for National. The F stands for… the F word. And the L stands for linguine.”
• I do hereby pronounce 2012 to be a year of love, happiness, and prosperity for all.
• If I lived in Manhattan I’d eat at Grey’s Papaya for lunch every goddamned day.
• Is it my imagination, or did bananas used to be easier to begin peeling?
• Who is the mad genius who first came up with chicken-fried bacon?
• Tonight I had the opportunity to say, “I remember Husker Du.” But no one got the joke.
• I love Paul McCartney as much as the next guy — for his talent, of course, but also for his famous down-to-earth genuineness. But there’s no way that’s still his natural hair color.