Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-07-27:

"I'm encrypting shit like every single day;
Sending it across a network in a safe way;
Protecting messages to make my pay;
If you hack me you're guilty under DMCA."
 
-- MC Plus+, self-proclaimed "#1 greatest computer science gangsta rapper ever", quoted by Wired News.

Oy vey. It's so annoying to dream that I'm reading. Every time I trip over a typo and scan backwards to check context, the text I'd just read changes. If a sentence poses some interesting puzzle or inspires a tangential thought, when I resume reading the entire paragraph may be about something else, or (more often) may have become so jumbled as to no longer make sense. After a few rounds of that, I might get annoyed into waking up enough to realize that my eyes are closed (though sometimes I have to manage to wake up a little farther than that to fully understand that it means the book or magazine I was reading didn't actually exist). And when I make note of an interesting turn of phrase I wish to quote, it likely fades with the rest of the dream in the course of waking up enough to realize I'd been dreaming. And then, of course, there's the problem of half-remembering something a week later as, "I recall reading somewhere that ,,," and not being certain whether I was holding a magazine, or curled up under my blanket with my eyes closed near the end of some night's sleep, when I read it.

So a few minutes ago I woke up trying to reconstruct the riddle that amused me when I figured it out but which I forgot key parts of in the process of realizing that the magazine I found it in didn't exist and I needed to wake up to pee. "Why is [something] like root beer?", and the answer being that they were each one changed letter away from a financial term having to do with automobile loans. I can remember the layout of the page, its background colour and paper type (glossy but thin), and a wrinkle where something had creased it before I got my hands on it, but not the missing word nor why it seemed to make sense.

So is my unconscious telling me that I need to spend more time curled up with books and magazines instead of reading on the computer, reacting to the fact that I spend so very much of my time looking at text in general in any medium, or just being annoying for the sake of being annoying?

And how is what like root beer, dammit?

Yes, I'm finally getting around to posting photos from Tuesday night's hit-and-run. Here's my car (all of these photos link to Flickr pages with larger sizes available):

The photo I took before my test-drive (not included here, because the daylight photos came out so much better) has the broken-off part of the wheel cover up and the remaining part down -- so it looks like the upper half of my wheel got smacked at least as hard as my fender. So the handling problems I observed are really unsurprising. I'm nearly certain that the alignment is out; I just have to hope that there's nothing more serious than that as well (folks have suggested lost wheel weights or a bent wheel -- if that means a bent rim, then I'm figuring those probably aren't any more serious than needing a front end alignment). I was told informally by the person I spoke to at my insurance company that on a seventeen year old car, if there's any suspension or steering damage, the car will be totalled. Which was what I had already guessed. It just doesn't take very much to total a car this old, no matter how nicely it ran beforehand.

Finally, here's the car that did all this damage. Around the time I finished talking to the police, I heard that the car had been located not far away. So when I took my test drive to evaluate the damage to my car, I stopped there to take some photos. That was where I found out that the car had been taken by the (if I'm remembering the relationships and who was who correctly) owner's daughter's boyfriend. I overheard the police saying something about how it "wasn't stolen" because the ignition was intact (someone later clarified that as the distinction between "theft" and "unauthorized use" of a vehicle ... lawyer friends, have I understood that correctly?); the owner was calling it stolen, saying that the boyfriend had swiped the keys; I heard that in the driver's statement to the police he claimed to have been given permission to borrow the car (but, uh, what else would you expect him to say about that[**]?). I'm waiting to hear from the owner's insurance company whether they're going to cover the damage to my car and my neighbours' cars, or treat it as a stolen-car situation and kick it all back to be covered as uninsured-motorist claims.

As you can see, it was the driver's side doors, not the front bumper, that slammed into the Miata. So the driver must have somehow gotten it moving at an impressive speed up Lombard St. sideways. We didn't hear a skid before the thump, and the road didn't seem that wet when we were standing around waiting for the police (and the remaining ice was on the sidewalks and in the eastbound parking lane, not in the travel lanes or behind the Miata), but it was raining and the street was at least a little wet. I've no idea how fast the car had to have been moving.

A thought expressed several times that night: it's a wonder he didn't kill anybody. It's lucky nobody was hurt.

Looking for a silver lining to all this: I got to meet more of my neighbours and got email addresses for a couple of them. And, well, I got a story to tell (not that my life has any shortage of those!).

[*] Our best guess as to how the broken glass wound up inside the Miata is this: while the crumple zones fore and aft were crumpling, the passenger compartment probably flexed and then sprung back. It probably flexed enough to make a gap between the convertible roof and the tops of the windows, through which the broken glass flying from the other car entered. After the impact, when everything that was going to rebound had rebounded, the passenger compartment was again closed up as it had been before, but with glass from the other car inside. Does ayone who know more about automobile crashes care to comment on how likely this hypothesis sounds?

[**] For that matter, what could you expect the owner to say, assuming she knows how her insurance works, other than that the car was stolen? Although I've got a pretty strong gut feeling as to whether the (unlicensed, IIRC) driver had permission to use the car, I'll play it safe and just describe this as a "he-said-she-said" situation until the police and/or the courts and/or the insurance company figure it out with more certainty.

Hmm. I'd wondered when the overnight-predicted precipitation would arrive, and in what form. It's now snowing in big, fluffy, soft-looking flakes. It started while I was finishing up the crash-pics entry, but I didn't feel like adding this observation there.

FWIW, my mood has improved since the last time I mentioned it, though I'm still feeling anxious and frustrated about the car situation, and the fibromyalgia pain has been especially bad the last couple of days. My back's been killing me (along with my legs being very bad yesterday and my right arm being excruciating this morning). The pain is terribly distracting, but hey, I finally managed to get all those photos tweaked for uploading, a Flickr account created, the descriptions and other info on the Flickr pages filled in, and that pics-post posted. (Now I just need to go back and correct all the formatting errors I'm just noticing...) It feels good to have gotten that accomplished.

And Perrine's coat is extra-fluffy this morning, cloud-soft.

Hey, waitaminute ... why is the snow only sticking to the sidewalk I'll have to shovel later, not on the other side of the street?

Photo taken ~11:40

I hear cars spinning their tires, trying to get moving again after stopping for the traffic light. It sounds as though some are having real problems with that. I also hear voices shouting to each other, and go to the window to see what's going on ...

There are children playing with snow shovels. One is scooping random swaths of the sidewalk across the street (yes, the snow did eventually start sticking there) and flinging shovelfuls of snow willy-nilly, while the other two are -- more entertaingly than effectively -- shovelling the middle of the street. At one point they were facing each other with their shovels slightly offset, looking almost like a strange twist on a hockey face-off.

I went out to clear my sidewalk earlier, hoping to keep it from gathering too many turn-to-ice footprints (it's that type of snow here), but it's still snowing too heavily, and my work was covered nearly as quickly as I cleared it. Too early.