Sunday, October 15, 2006

late morning

A Good Lesson, With Help From Stephan Pastis

For more Pearls Before Swine, the best comic ever - click here.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

mid-afternoon

I Feel Like The World’s Worst Friend

Can you sell someone out who didn’t seem to tell you a truthful fact about most of their vital information?  You’d sort of think not, wouldn’t you?  I contacted a reporter because I was told the reporter was her “friend”, and I did it “off the record”.  Only when the “real” person confirmed that it wasn’t her, did I give the okay for the story.  Now, I’m sitting here terrified to see the damned thing.  I wish I could take it all back, even though I’m not guilty of anything.  So real L or SL, I’m sorry.  Hey, maybe something will happen and a better story will come along for Michele.  I never wanted any publicity.  This is how it all started, “This is going to be a weird email, but I need you to hang in there until the end.  I’ll try to be brief.  Also, I need this to be completely off the record.  Actually, not being a writer or a lawyer or whatever, maybe I should just send part of this to you before I go into detail about it.  I feel like a creep writing it, but if something super weird is up, I’d feel like more of a creep if I hadn’t written it.”

And it ends with me sitting here regretting being lied to, I guess.  Regretting telling someone else that I was lied to?  I don’t know.  But I’m miserable.  Whoever you are, if you’d told me the truth, I wouldn’t have told anyone.  And frankly, I don’t think I would’ve even cared.  Others of you reading, don’t think this is license to lie to me now.  This was lying with special circumstances.  I’m not sure what they were, but for some reason they didn’t matter.  It was someone I never planned on meeting in real life, so certain things didn’t make a difference.  But, I just wanted to find out what was true, and what wasn’t.  I wish I’d left it a big weird mystery.  I’m sorry.

updated - okay, the article wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.  It was quite reasonable.  Thanks, Michele.

evening

Happy Birthday, Kelly, La La La

It’s a weird weather day here in Las Vegas - I hope it’s better in Canada.  We had stay up late and get up early because of thunderstorms (our back yard is a HUGE puddle) and sissy Eli.  Leigh-Ann is now trying to sleep off the hours she missed doggiebabysitting.  I’m hanging out cleaning up Cricket diarrhea.  Oh, we sure know how to celebrate your birthday (and anniversary); it’s a rockin’ party here in Vegas.  Come, come join us!

Your birthday is shared by LOTS of, uh, interesting people :  Abul-Fath Djalal-ud-Din, 3rd Mogol emperor of India, 1556-1605 ; Joseph AF Plateau, Belgium, physicist, blinded-stared at Sun 25 secs;, Ralph Lauren; Thomas Dolby; Lourdes Marie Ciccone Leon, daughter of singer Madonna; Nelson Van waes, CFL defensive linebacker for the Saskatchewan Roughriders; Rashid Latif, cricketer, Pakistani wicket-keeper; Greg Evigan, actor, BJ-BJ and the Bear, Melrose Place; John Dean III, former White House counsel, Watergate figure; Dwight D Eisenhower, Denison, Texas, R, 34th President, 1953-1961, /Gen, WW 2; Constant van Crombrugghe, Flemish monastery founder; William Penn, English Quaker and founder of PA; e. e. cummings, Cambridge Massachusetts, poet, Tulips and Chimneys; had enough yet?; and Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks.

Whoops, I had a script embedded that had “today in history”, but apparently you can’t pick a particular day, so it was going to keep changing.  Hrumph!  So, here’s a direct link to Events That Happened on October 14th

Friday, October 13, 2006

early evening

Okay, I Want A Do-Over

Like that book.  I actually ended up sending it to a total stranger.  Go figure.  Uh, hi total stranger (and total stranger’s lawyer), I hope you like the book...and really, who couldn’t use a few do-overs? Man, life is crazy sometimes.  From now on, I only befriend ordinary average everyday people who I can meet or who have met people I already know.  No more friendships with strangers in far off lands, ones that get snow, eh?  Oh, I say that now, but I’m sure in a week or two I’ll run across another interesting blogger who seems nice and normal, and whose lies I’ll only find out in the distant future.  In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the friendship, assume everyone is who they say they are, and happily live in my fantasy world of honesty.

SL, if you’re out there anywhere - ya got me.  Totally suckered in.  However, I can’t be all that mad because you gave me fantasy football and The Daily Show.  Seriously, you deserve a prize for just that.  I hope you’re somewhere not doing harm to anyone though.  You don’t need to lie - your personality was fine all by itself and you didn’t need to be anyone else.  Of all the people who lied to me online, you did the least amount of damage to me.  I’m more puzzled than hurt.  Why would someone who was so smart and had such a wide variety of interests, need to be someone else?

Thursday, October 12, 2006

late evening

Replay - One of The Two Coolest Books I’ve Read

I recently sent a book to a friend.  I wanted to send something entertaining, and I wasn’t looking for anything particularly deep.  This book is one of my two favorite books of all time.  My brother and I have both read it numerous times.  It vaguely resembles “Groundhog Day”, but it’s about a man who dies of a heart attack at the age of 43, and is reborn at 18, knowing what he knew at 43.  He gets to relive his life until he reaches 43...each time.  The first time I read it, I fantasized about making lots of money in the stock market with the current knowledge I have.  Now that I’m older, I just think about do-overs.  There are a few things I’d like to fix, like college.  I’d like to actually try and get a degree.  I’m not dumb, I could’ve actually made something of my professional life.  Well, okay, I’m redoing that now, but it sure would’ve been easier had I done it when I was in my twenties.  Alas, the things you know when you’re in your forties are so not the things you know when you’re in your twenties.  In my early twenties, I knew all the lyrics to Olivia Newton-John songs, how to write terrible poetry, how great Iovino’s bbq chicken was, and I really really liked Tom Cruise.  I also had really poor taste in most of the people I chose to date.  That probably relates somehow to liking Tom Cruise.

I didn’t mean to send any sort of deep message to this friend, but I suppose in afterthought, maybe there is a message.  Luckily, sometimes do-overs are still allowed in life.  For instance, me getting an actual career at 42.  It’s not the career I would’ve chosen at 18 or 25, but it does have some significance now.  Anyway, whether or not the book has any sort of meaning (and I didn’t plan it that way), it’s just a good entertaining book.  So, read it.  And if you’ve already read it, let me know, so together we can wait years and years and years for them to finally make the movie.  By the way, ironically, the author died in 2003, of a heart attack.  At least he made it to 59 this time.  But, maybe he’s coming back as an 18 year old.  That would be super cool for him.

See, I even liked it in last year’s book meme.  But now, I have the fifth meaningful book to add to that meme - Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger.  So now you have my two favorite books of all time in one, one blog entry.

The book description from Amazon, if my vague insistence that you buy it isn’t doing it for you: Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn’t know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again—in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle—each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: “What if you could live your life over again?”