Category: Life

Memorandum to a neighbor:

Dear sir, and undoubtedly you are a sir and not a ma’am, I understand that the weather was nice in Casinoport, Missouri today, with a temperature reaching seventy-one degrees FARENHEIT, but what on earth prompted you to go to your shed or garage, get out, and start your lawn mower on the second of January?

Pray tell, how much shorter did you want your brown lawn to be?

Plenty of ink is spent reminding you each year that firing guns into the air is a dangerous way to celebrate the holiday.

As a public service announcement, we at MBJ remind partiers that firing guns into each other is not a good idea either.

Thank you, that is all.

Did anyone else type 0 NEW at the end of high school programming class to teach someone in the next class that he or she should really clear the memory before typing in his or her own program with line numbers starting on 10 and running it?

Oh, come on. You never even thought of it?

Riiiiight.

Michele at A Small Victory has her Vic 20 skin up.

I saw it, and I had a flashback.

In the immortal words of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones:

10 POKE(53280,0)
20 POKE(53281,0)

You damn kids won’t get it, but you old school geeks will.

Except you Apple II geeks, but we’ll be talking to you in the playground after school.

MSN’s dating expert offers some advice for dating a celebrity.

Hey, my beautiful wife is becoming rather popular in the cool blogging cliques, so perhaps I can pick up some tips. Here’s the points:

1. Assume it will end.
2. Protect yourself.
3. Enjoy all that celebrity jazz.

Man, that’s depressing. All pessimism and exploitation.

Perhaps I should wait for the advice for marrying an immortal goddess of beauty, baking, and bicyclery column.

Bob Rybarcyzk says:

So last weekend we got our first real snow of the season here. I like snow and all — it’s real pretty and covers my questionable lawn quite nicely — but snow has serious drawbacks as well.

Dude, autumn already takes care of that with leaves. I mean, I had to snatch some from the brown lawn bags at the end of the neighbor’s driveway since I don’t have any trees in my front yard, and then I had to manually spread them on the lawn much more evenly than Nature would have, but it covered the weird desert camoflauge colors that Soysia takes on in August when you properly scalp the lawn to two inches in the summer drought.

So my lawn still looks good even now that the good old fashioned Wisconsin Snow has been replaced by the Missouri Snow, which is what Wisconsonites call “rain.”

I absolutely love the Trivial Pursuit DVD Pop Culture Edition that you got me for Christmas or for my birthday next year, or maybe Christmas next year.

Well I’m gonna be forgiven
If I wanna spend my living
With a long cool woman in a black dress
Just a 5-9 beautiful tall
With just one look I was a bad mess
‘Cause that long cool woman had it all
Had it all, had it all, had it all…

Day two thousand, four hundred, and seventy-nine two. Surviving on beer, popcorn, and cherry flavored Craisins.

Hurry home, honey. I miss you.

Neil Steinberg relates wisdom in his latest column:

Elias wrote an excruciating book about surviving Auschwitz. I heard her five years ago, so can’t quote her, directly, but she ended her speech by saying something like this:

I have this dream. I dream I am walking up to my family’s home in Czechoslovakia. The windows are all lit up, and I know that everybody is well, and there, home, waiting for me. And then I awaken, and it’s so sweet, because they were all there, clearly, and so sad, because it was only a dream. And that is what I’d like to tell you today — if you are lucky enough to be going home later, and the lights of your house are bright, and your family is all there, waiting, you should stop and savor it as the precious gift it is, because someday it too will be just a dream.

The holidays present a quick and convenient way to donate to charitable causes, particularly the Salvation Army. Outside every retail outlet, it seems, a volunteer has set up shop with a bell and a kettle. I usually pitch the change from my transaction into the kettle (as if you didn’t know I use cash!) when I encounter one of these bell ringers. I know it’s a little bit, but cumulatively a lot of little bits add up.

However, I don’t care to put the money in an unattended kettle. I don’t know where the bell ringers go, but I find a lot of kettles that had previously featured the melody of unenthusiastic and sometimes almost-frostbitten bellringing accompanied by a rousing rendition of John Cage’s 4’33”. I don’t know what NLRB regulations dictate for professional bell ringers, or what union benefits they enjoy, but they get a lot of warm-up, cigarette, coffee, and/or lunch breaks.

Now, it’s not that I want to be any less a nice guy when this happens, but I don’t want to throw change into an unguarded repository. Partly, it’s because I don’t want it to get stolen. Also, partly it’s because I don’t want to just be a Pavlovian dog. I refuse to respond to the stimulus of the red kettle unless I hear the bell ringing.

Honey, I just want to apologize in advance for the coming time when the Department of Homeland Security kicks in our doors with drawn weapons, when they put a couple of nine millimeter slugs into our nine pound tabby because they feared for their safety, they haul off our myriad computers, and interrogate us for hours on end to prompt us to admit our non-existent guilt or plead guilty to unspecified charges because of what I did today. I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way.

You see, honey, I went to the opthamologist’s office today, and when they called me by my name, I followed the technician into an examination room. She hit me with the requisite salvo of eye drops that rendered me a nocturnal creature in the middle of the afternoon, and then she input my information directly into a workstation. Wow! What an advanced place! A workstation in every exam room! Then the technician told me that the doctor would be in shortly, and then she left the room. Without locking the workstation.

After the doctor saw me and assured me I would not need an eyepatch just yet, he asked if there was anything else. So of course I told him the lax security his enterprise offered, leaving patients alone with access to his computer network and his patient records was a very bad thing. He said that restarting the computer would take too long, and he’d have to cut the number of patients he saw in half–not explicitly stating his perceived dilemma of patient information security versus his bank account. He also said that sooner or later you have to trust people, and he trusts his patients wouldn’t do anything like that. Hell, I trust people, but we lock the doors here in la casa Noggle even when we’re home.

So I am sorry, baby. Because when some hacker, cracker, or whatever the bad man terms himself finds himself sitting in that chair while the doctor politely answers all of another patient’s questions, this bad man will see what he can do. And if the bad man’s not careful, someone will know that someone’s been hacking the good doctor’s computers, and the good doctor will remember one name was concerned with his security: Noggle.

So this will be the thanks I get for trying to spread a little cheerful-but-relevant paranoia into the non-technology fields. Maybe I’ll get the lucky double whammy of having my personal information stolen, too. Of course, it’s not clear what a bad man would do with my cornea thickness, and I surely didn’t share my SSN with anyone unless I’m getting money from them.

Honey, I hope you can forgive me. And remember to do some off-site backup of your critical documents because we won’t see those PCs again.

Want to know what to get me for Christmas? Any of the stuff at Napping.com, of course.

(Link seen on some poor Caps fan’s site.)

Brought to you by Harvey of Bad Money:

Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.