The End of the Conversation

Since we painted our master bathroom last autumn, I’ve been meaning to recaulk around the tub. It’s starting to break down and show its age. Not that the mold spores mind. They’ve found a good home and some tasty latex upon which to feast. But I’ve meant to recaulk this tub since about spring, but I haven’t had quite the stretch of time to devote to it. Several hours at least, non-stop, to devote to the project. How could I find the time, when Civilization III called?

But since I had a personal day on Christmas Eve, I had a long block of time available. Particularly since I could not leave the house until the FedEx truck delivered Heather’s Christmas gift (which is another story entirely). So I got into the bathroom and began removing the existing caulk. I think a previous owner just applied a layer of latex caulk over an existing layer of silicone caulk when it came time for him/her to do the deed. So it took me almost five hours of intermittent scraping, cursing, and swearing to get all of it off. Once I got the old caulk off, it was a breeze to apply a new ring of caulk.

So although I was reluctant to perform this much-needed household maintenance, I’m still proud to have done it. But why is it that the casual conversations end when people ask me how my holidays were and I answer:

“I spent Christmas Eve in the bathtub with a razor blade and wondered if I really wanted to go through with it.”

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Fad? It’s a Life Style!

This evening, I proved my contemporary nature to impress my wife by participating in a faddish flash mob.

Tonight, at 5:24 pm, I joined a group of strangers whom I have never met before, and we came together on Interstate 270 just north of Dougherty Ferry Road in St. Louis County, and together we stopped our cars for no reason and sat there listening to the radio.

After two minutes of immobility, for no reason whatsoever, we started driving again.

I am hep, dig?

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The Shidoshi of Paranoia Speaks

So my beautiful wife has bought a shredder so that she can get rid of old, possibly sensitive documents from her files. So she’s running credit card statements, bank statements, and other good stuff the bad men want through the shredder before disposing of them.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming fairly easy to reconstruct shredded documents, even ones cut into tiny little pieces (see Church Street Technology for visual cues). Essentially, the bad men (or the government) can scan the shredded documents and then put super computers, like the latest “e-mail only” machine at Best Buy (if not now, then in the next year or so, werd) onto assembling them like puzzle pieces until the little ink smudges make glyphs which then make words or numbers or credit card numbers or evidence that yes, once you did accidentally have a copy of 2600 in the house (but it all was a mistake, sir, I thought it was a magazine about my favorite game console).

Your Shidoshi of Paranoia knows of only one way to truly, effectively, and cheaply dispose of your sensitive documents:

Ingestion.

The human body can process, and pass, your documents in an unreadable form, whether by human eye or machine. You can consume several pages of documents a day, enough to easily accommodate the day’s receipts. Processing your document elimination in this way is economic and ultimately the only way you can be sure no one will even want to examine your sensitive information.

You ask, “But Shidoshi, how does one eat these documents?”

I am a master in the realm of document salad. Look at this beauty.


Ingredients, you ask?

Bank statement, laterally torn and then shredded.
Credit card bill, ripped into pieces.
Note to self, minced.

I usually drizzle this with balsamic vinegarette, if you consider 1/2 a cup a “drizzle.” Also, don’t forget to pile on the salt. Goes well with a bottle of Les Bourgeois Riverboat Red wine, particularly if you have had most of the bottle before you start on the salad.

Of course, if you have a higher volume of document destruction needs, you can include them within more of your diet or as part of your family’s overall nutritional plan. Remember, wood pulp contains fiber, and a lot of things are printed with soy-based ink, so that’s got to be good for you, wot?

And on a personal note, it’s during file-cleaning season that I am glad that we have five four cats.

Your Shidoshi has spoken. Pay mind.

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Compulsion…taking over….Cannot…stop…myself….

As part of the “engagement” curriculum in my Honors English I class in high school, the teacher roped us into a discussion of the short story “The Scarlet Ibis“. However, instead of extensive discussions of the white patriarchal hegemony’s oppression of the differently-abled which a true “college prep” curriculum would have enjoyed, we got to do a mock trial that prosecuted the narrator of the story in Doodle’s death.

I got to play the defendant, which sucked because my public-defender quality lawyer didn’t object enough. The prosecutor kept pulling out information from within the story that only the defendant would know. As a seasoned veteran of many Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, I knew how to expose “player knowledge” from “character knowledge” in other players while masking my own exploitation of this systemic flaw. So, to make a short story long, the defendant was convicted.

So what’s my point? (Ahh….here…it….comes….) That although the Internet has made cheating easier, as early as seventeen years ago, public schools were formally teaching

Play Jurism

(Ahhhhh…..compulsion….relieved……)

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