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?

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

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.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

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……)

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

My Kind of Month

According to the Onion today:

Shape Magazine Declares July ‘Let Yourself Go’ Month


WOODLAND HILLS, CA—Shape, the women’s fitness magazine, has officially declared July “Let Yourself Go” Month. “You’ve toned those abs and burned the flab in time for bikini season… Now it’s time for a meatball sandwich,” wrote Shape editor-in-chief Barbara Harris in her ‘From The Editor’ column. “Come on, live a little. Don’t be a tight-ass with a tight ass. Eat, lounge, and slouch your way to a happier, more satisfied you.” Features in the issue include “Girth Equals Mirth: Six Sure-Fire Techniques For Broadening That Belly,” “Wrinkles: The More You Have, The More You’ve Lived,” and “Reduce Unwanted Stress By Not Giving A Fuck.”

By reprinting this, I realize I have just become an R-rated blog. Sorry, Ms. Igert. But look on the bright side. Apparently, the Onion uses American rules for putting commas in quotes even when the commas don’t appear in the article titles, unlike certain stubborn son-in-laws.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories