Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I'm amazed that the logic of a simple AI tree in a piece of home electronics has become indistinguishable from the logic of entertainment production. It really is programming by the numbers." -- axiomaxiom, 2005-04-01, "A TiVo Production"

Not my best day. Did not in fact get out of the house last night. Every time I tried to sleep, leg cramps woke me again within fifteen minutes, so I stayed up a third of a day longer than I'd planned, uncomfortable and groggy the whole time. Then this morning I got a $42 sleeping ticket, because when I finally did fall asleep, I slept through the "move the car for street cleaning" alarm on my cell phone. (Could've been worse. Sleeping through the "move it back" time in the afternoon means a much more expensive tow.) I've punted all the out-of-the-house errands I'd hoped to get to today, with the possible exception of going out to buy cough drops (whee, pollen season ... not entirely certain the loratadine still works for me, and cough drops are easier to replace than albuterol (except when it gets bad enough that only albuterol will do) even if they're worse for my teeth).

Currently having one of those "it's supposed to be convenience food from a box but I get bored waiting for the water to boil so I chop stuff up" breakfasts -- mac & cheese w/peas & carrots & barely-fried onion (just enough for it to not be raw) & garlic & habanero pepper & basil & oregano, with a little bit of real cheese added to the instant orange-powder stuff.

Not yet caught up on LJ. Hope to get to that before things fall off my "this is how far back you can scroll" friends-page limit.

The first three or four times I heard, "The Pope is still dead," I thought, "Yeah, yeah, inevitable classic Saturday Night Live reference, almost cute, call it obligatory." Today, turning on the radio and hearing about nothing but the Pope for the first quarter hour, being reported as news, not just commentary, I couldn't help thinking, "And in breaking news, the Pope is still dead," myself. It really did feel, at least to my underslept brain, a lot like a SNL sketch. Oh, I commprehend the reasons why this is such a long-running story, and how descriptions of the funeral are new-news even if reporting his death really isn't, and I understand how many Catholics there are on the planet and how even more signifigant this period is to them than it is to me, and how the Vatican's influence on politics all over the globe makes this important even to non-Christians ... but at some point my skull overflowed and the spillage seems to have reconstituted some dried parody-powder that was clinging to the sides of the overflow tank, and there I was sitting in front of the television in my parents' house watching Belushi and Radner and Ackaroyd and Curtin and Newman with just the one detail changed.

Oh, I never got around to responding to the comments about the backwards "Jenny Pluck Pears" on Wednesday night. Yes, it was a cassette, and since the tape isn't twisted I figured the head must have shifted to read the wrong tracks (apparently all the way to the other side of the tape, since I didn't hear a forward left channel and a reversed right channel ... but maybe there was silence on the other side of the tape at that point, I'm not sure). I'd just never witnessed that particular failure mode in a cassette deck before! And I'd thought the parts in that section of the mechanism were too sturdy to flex that way. But since then I've realized one more thing: it's an auto-reverse deck, which means the head must have four pickups in it, not two; so the head didn't have to move, it just had to have the wrong pair of pickups selected for the direction of tape travel. Still damned mysterious though. And I hope it doesn't spell the end of that tape deck. (Not that I've had working cassette decks in my past cars, but I've gotten used to having this one ... and the air conditioner wasn't blowing cold air on Wednesday, so it's not fair to have two luxury options die on me in the same week, is it?)

I'm not sure whether I would've recognized the tune backwards without the hurdy-gurdy in it (ah, pardonnez-moi: «vielle à roue», par les notes), but I'm sure the drones made it more difficult.