So, white on white on white is the new blog. NOT THAT ANYONE WHO COMPLAINED ABOUT THE LAYOUT AT METAFILTER HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.

(I lie. It does. A lot.)

Hey, it was time to brush things up around here anyhow. However, being as the template is written in ancient Sanskrit or possibly Romanian (or is it Klingon?), it takes a while to bulk up the nads enough to make changes, but thank ye gods for the 'preview' button and the ability to dump all changes and simply REVERT REVERT if something doesn't work out. Like, that time I thought I was changing the header border padding and all the POSTS disappeared? Eeeeyeah.

So, what do you think? Is the plain white a crisp new change that'll keep you coming back for more because it's like a breath of fresh cool air on a hot summer afternoon, or is it the most unimaginative thing EVAR and should be done away with as soon as possible in favor of something in the black or patterned family so that you're feeling 'the edge' whenever you spend a bit of time here?

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Punch list of possible topics that I didn't write about:

• wasted potential
• sushi
• Biff's band
• orange tea
• the continued saga of the company takeover, which involves gossip, innuendo, wild guesses, and the accidental distribution of confidential emails. Good times!

And that's just from today!

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Thing 1 was studying for a German quiz last night, the topic was 'modal verbs' and the theme was 'proper forms of durfen and konnen to use with different pronouns.'

(and dang - does anyone know how to inset an umlautted 'u' or 'o'? It's bugging me)

So, he's in the living room going over the following list:

ich darf kann
du darfst kannst
er/sie/es darf kann
wir durfen konnen
ihr durft konnt
sie/Sie durfen konnen

And after about 5 minutes there was a nearly audible brainpop as he shouted "hey! I think I see a pattern here!" ORLY?

Don't you think his teacher would have TAUGHT them that pattern by now? Seriously folks, he's been taking this class since the end of August and only now it's coming to him (on his own, mind you) that there are RULES to verb forms in German?

Mein Gott.

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Lastly, we recently installed ad-block plus on FF so that I didn't have to wait forever for pages to load. Works great, I think, except for that when ABP is on, Facebook pages simply refuse to load, I can't leave comments, and I still get popups.

That's not really an improvement, is it?

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Have a schwangin' afternoon folks. They've turned off the heat in the building in order to prepare for some facilities maintenance this weekend, and I have to go do some actual work to get the circulation going in my hands again. Like blocks of ice are me fingers! BLOCKS OF ICE!

Well. After the high DRAMA and extreme EMOTION and parabolic HYPERBOLE of the last post, I'm exhausted, so this post is being turned over to you.

WTH is going on here?


And I'll be back tomorrow, after waxing the new crop of franchisees and depileating a duck's back. So much to do...

Couple years ago, there was a big ol’ brouhaha regarding a blogger friend who accidentally walked into a bathroom door, busted an eye socket, got methicillin-resistant Staph aureus in the eye, which had to be enucleated, which didn’t stop the infection, which eventually killed him.

It was sad, so very very sad. Many of us who ‘knew’ this person were sad, and mourned the loss of a creative, fierce, funny, forthright individual. While we’d never met him in person, the pain of the loss of one so young (only 47!) and our sympathies for his family were keenly felt.

Not long after, a MetaFilter board lit up somewhat with the story, and many people there had the ‘holy shit’ moment. Then, as the suspicious and cynical will, people started doing some digging, doubting the story, casting aspersion on the reality of it and the convenience with which the tale unfolded. Foreshadowing, rapid turn of events, high drama, and the lack of an obituary were all put on the table as proof that the events were faked. Some said that the blogger ‘killed his persona’ in a way that took all his friends and most interested parties for fools.

Some of us joined MetaFilter to protest after their snark started leaking onto our comments, took the hit of outing ourselves as one of the possibly duped, tried to rebut their doubts, and accepted the occasional condolence on behalf of this person and their family, who we assumed were in too much shock to repsond appropriately to the smearing of the blogger’s name. All in the name of friendship and a sense of chivalry that we thought was the right thing to do.

(It was perhaps the only time in this blog’s history that hit counter approached 500 a day. Such is the power of Metafilter. Shame that none of those folks stuck around and became a follower…..but I digress.)

Two years ago, the death of this person that many of us considered a friend was a shocking force, a reality check, a sobering notion.

As it turns out, we likely wasted our efforts, as the death may in fact have been a huge fake.

Just....take a minute to wrap your head around that one. Consider please as you do that during this time there was post after post about the injury, the hospital treatment, the enucleation, the medicines, fevers, worries, anxiety, the ultimate collapse and death, sometimes written by the sufferer himself and, at the end, by his family, his wife and son, his poor brave family….

So it appears now that dude and his family, if new information is to be believed, went about faking his death on the interent. Faking death instead of just signing the fuck off of whatever new secret blog was invented to ostensibly escape the notice of your awful bosses. Faking death instead of simply disappearing, or shutting down, or leaving a final cryptic message. Faking death, involving the hearts and minds of people far and wide who will mourn for your family’s loss, put themselves out into a harsher sphere to stand up for your good name.

Faking your own death is one option if you want to be left utterly alone (because really - who’s going to call a dead man?). It’s a bad one, but not unforgivable. The unforgivable one would be if someone who has some vicious twisted streak is now attempting to resurrect someone who really honestly truly IS dead. What if some bizarro Bob or Betty is hinting at the the hope that this person is still alive by creating fake websites with pictures, creating fake YouTube ‘stations’ with videos, creating fake comments on people’s sites with notifications that the dead have arisen. THIS would be the unforgiveable thing, the sick and wrong thing, the head-scratcher to end all headscratchers because DAMN, if this is the case then there are people out there with way too fucking much time on their hands and need to find a dang job or write a book with all that creativity or maybe come see me because after I’m done ripping them apart boy have I got shit they could do with all the time they’d otherwise spend tearing the WTF out of people.

So now I’m not sure which is worse: 1) someone faking their own death and leaving their circle of virtual-world friends to make fools of themselves in mourning and THEN coming back and admitting the lie (oh and hey, ‘sorry’ probably isn’t enough, an explanation would be lovely), or 2) someone who is creating a fake resurrection (in which case NO explanation would make anybody feel better because that’s some sickass shit).

Whatever the case may be, herein lies my overall response:

WHATEVER.

If they’re alive, yay for them. If they’re not, them that’s too bad.

WHATEVER.

Dude, you know who you are. If you’re really alive, take the multiple personnas and your massive capacity for duplicity, and don’t let the door hit you on your way out of my life. If in fact the dead are lying in their grave being lied about, then the perpetrator of that bit of nastiness can go pound sand.

WHATEVER.

I for one am done with you. Whoever you are. Ain’t enough hours in the day to spend more than half of one responding to whatever drama you’re trying to stir up. That burner’s cold baby. Have a nice life.

So, I’m pretty sure I don’t ever want to be a zombie. Seriously. I don’t care for runny scrambled eggs, AT ALL, and to be facing a deathtime (not lifetime, obviously) of eating nothing but icky goo-brains? Put a silver bullet though my head or a stake through my heart please, because THAT menu ain't happenin'.

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Someone in our building is firing up what sounds like a jet engine right now. The sound is deafening.

Of course it’s NOT a jet engine, because, really, that would be stupid, but still. Something very loud is happening in the lab next door and I’m hoping it doesn’t end in large pieces of metal shrapnel being forcibly ejected through the lab walls and into my head. Or the heads of any of my coworkers. Even the new girl.

That last statement brought to you by my overwhelming sense of fair play.

If I happen to turn into a zombie though (see above), being decapitated by a high-speed lab accident might be a cool way to go.

-

Once again work is threatening to eat me alive, and once again I have dealt with this situation in the most responsible and mature way possible: by ignoring it.

There were things that could have been done this weekend, projects to ‘get ahead on’ vast tracts of updates to conquer, but did I? No, no I did not. What’s the sense in that, after all? Where’s the glamour in being on time, on schedule, on top of things? That’s not sexy nor does it make a good story. Far more interesting is the ‘time I worked for 24 hours straight just to get done what I had a week to do,’ right? Makes for a good war story, as long as nobody alludes to the BACK story of hours and hours spent doing far more interesting things, like playing games on the internet or challenging your liver to a little games of ‘keep up.’

Sadly, the cushion time done, and all waste-able time has been wasted. Now it’s all about productivity and putting out product so that my pasty white butt can keep its place in the cushy office chair to which it has become accustomed.

What I lack in self-motivation I make up for in panic productivity. So there’s that.

-

Y’all enjoy your day, mmkay? Think of me as you go about your business in a calm and dignified manner. If I don’t get my cranium sliced open by a razor-sharp piece of autoclave, I’ll be spending the rest of today actually working for a living.

Yep - Hell should be freezing over any time now.

Imagine, if you will, what it would smell like if you walked through a steamcloud emanating from a bubbling pot of old sneakers and rotten wood.

Then imagine that this is the smell of someone’s lunch in the cube farm.

Oh yes they did.

Bleah.

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Right here’s the spot where I wrote something that bored even me. Holy shit, you KNOW it’s bad when even the author can’t get excited by what they're writing.

Is that what hookers feel like? What they do for a living is supposed to be thrilling, exciting, adventurous, even creative, and yet they do it so much it becomes as common as tap water. How do they work up any enthusiasm at all?

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The new girl in the cube farm….just….wow.

She looks a little like Gollum, but with lots of hair. She sounds like Linus Van Pelt, only with a gravellier stuffy-headed voice. She talks almost ALL the time, and, here’s the kicker, she cusses right out loud. At work!

Also, she takes personal calls in the cube, discusses any and all subjects RIGHT THERE, sniffles constantly, GROANS as she works, and crunches chips at 2:30 every afternoon.

Is it just me, or are those behaviors FRIGGING ANNOYING?

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You know you might listen to a little too much NPR when the family 12-YO can mimic the correspondent’s signoff lines stone-cold perfect.

<-----This one’s his favorite. Can’t say as I blame the lad.









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OK - this is grinding along to a shuddering halt under the pressure of lack of inspiration, talent, or interesting things to talk about (except of course the Sea Monkey and Unicorn Farm opening), so I’ll sign off for now. Must go gather the undercoat from Snurfle the Party Dragon so I can start those Christmas gifts!

Y'all have a great day.