Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The thin yet muscular bodies we are used to seeing up there are actually quite rare down here. In real life, few people are like that. Isn't it weird that we never use ourselves to sell something to ourselves?" -- Margaret Cho, 2005-08-27

Sitting next to anniemal on the end of her bed, and Jamie (black poodle) and Mel (fluffy black cat) just walked in, side by side, stood next to each other facing us, and looked as though they were about to say, "The union has discussed some matters which we wish to bring to management's attention."

Then they changed their minds (or realized they don't speak English) and asked for scritches instead.

Bits and pieces I meant to write about days (or weeks) ago and kept forgetting ...

Internal Dialogue

Does this thing I composed fit on a fiddle playably? [picks up mandolin] Hmm. If I switch the octaves of the two lines from how I do it on guitar, it can be fingered ... [plays a bit] Okay, sounds different but still has some of the effect I wanted. [starts writing it down] Oh. Whoops. Double-stops on violin, unlike the mandolin, really only work if the two strings you're playing are next to each other, don't they? Playing the first and third strings together isn't going to cut it. [pause] I guess I should score it for two fiddles instead of one, and one will be a little bored. Or maybe I'll just label this a mandolin part instead.

Olfaction

A week and a half ago I was digging in the back of the freezer because (for various reasons) I'd kept putting off grocery shopping. A few nights I had spaghetti with frozen vegetables mixed in, and I usually just dumped a handful of veggies into the boiling water to thaw while the spaghetti cooked. One night I decided to warm the veggies in the microwave and add them after the pasta was drained, instead.

Oddly, the frozen broccoli smelled like death as it warmed up. Deadness, dead-thing-itude. It didn't smell like it was rotting, it just smelled dead. It didn't quite smell like garbage, and it didn't smell anything like the normal "glad it tastes better than it smells" scent of broccoli being cooked. It just smelled ... dead.

Dead-plant dead, like grass that got too long before it was mowed, and then got rained on, and hasn't started to rot/ferment yet but smells completely different from living or fresh-cut grass. It definitely pushed a button somewhere in the neighbourhood of my olfactory nerve that lit up a sign saying, "Dead/Death" in my brain.

(Fortunately that impression went away once tomato sauce was added. But it still wouldn't have passed for fresh broccoli, of course.)

I wonder how long that package had been in my freezer with a twistie holding it closed. That was the last of it though.

Back when I became a vegetarian, a few weeks in there was a stretch of time when meat, especially cooked meat, smelled like garbage. Rotting garbage. Yes, this made eating next to someone who was eating meat uncomfortable; no, I didn't make a fuss about it, because I figured it wasn't really their fault and I didn't want to impose. Eventually that went away (it comes back sometimes, but usually only for a few hours at a time, and not often), and meat went to simply smelling like not-food (with a few exceptions). This episode with the Dead Broccoli reminded me of that, though it was not as intense. I'm not sure whether this was a) something about that particular bag of frozen veggies, b) something I'm going to notice about frozen broccoli being warmed in a microwave in general, or c) just a bizarre and passing sensory quirk.

Photo Lab

The Sparcstation at the photo lab is up and running. I never did figure out what was wrong with both his CD-ROM drives, so I put my Sun CD-ROM there and took one of his home to tinker with. But then the Sun wouldn't come up at all, not even to display the ROM monitor. Well just before Thanksgiving I made it out there again -- the owner had gotten the screen to display the boot prompt but couldn't get it to load the OS -- and after a bunch of fussing with it, all of a sudden it started showing a GUI and a login screen. When I left, it was talking to the film scanners again. *whew*

Chemistry

Acetic acid turned out to be no substitute for the universal solvent after all. Acetone has been suggested. Or I guess I should ask Google what other people use for this task.

Sifting the past four and a half days worth of mail that CRM114 rejected as spam, just in case it's still getting any false positives, I ran across an amusing subject line on a message that was properly classified as spam: "The Bouncer takes the gravity out of sex!"

There is a seriousness to sex, but also a great levity. This reminds me of the bumper sticker I found confusing, which says, "Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing," leaving me to wonder, "whaddayamean 'without laughing'?"

I'm not going to bother looking to see what they're selling, but I've got no trouble imagining plenty of possibilities for things called a "bouncer" that would inject an extra dose of giggles.

Wait just a minute -- the television news just came on, and they opened with the weather: "Could Baltimore be about to get this winter's first snowfall?"

No, it absolutely could not! Or ... what the hell was that inch of white stuff I had to sweep off my car before a midnight grocery run a couple of weeks ago?

Sheesh. "First". Harrumph.

Addendum: half an hour after that news bit I griped about, I wandered upstairs to see what was going on with the siren I'd heard and a series of thumps. Snow is falling quite dramatically (I guess they had to get that "will it snow?" thing in just under the wire before the weather answered it for them), and it appears the basement of a vacant house catty-corner from me is on fire. There's one fire truck and two police cars, thick smoke is pouring out of a basement window as far as I can tell (the fire truck is in the way, but that's where it looks like it's coming from), and folks seem to be standing around wondering what to do.

(The snow is predicted to turn to rain and wash away tomorrow, if I correctly heard the forecast I was only half listening to.)