Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Have you heard? Turns out the married gays are still on the march. No longer merely a coastal phenomenon, undeterred by the economic recession, as yet unsmited by God's redneck fury, these bizarre, relentlessly loving creatures are now invading the heartland. Will the nightmare of love never end?" -- Mark Morford, "Fear the rainbow!" (SFGate, "Notes & Errata", colummn dated 2009-04-10 but there are comments to it dated 2009-04-09)

This week's mail brought something delightful and something icky: a package of chocolate bars from Canada, and another frightening electric bill from BGE.

The parcel of chocolate had been squeezed through the mail slot, and either at that point or somewhere in its route through two postal systems, the bars got broken up a bit ... which isn't a problem, since I'd break them up to eat them anyhow, but it did produce an interesting effect: in a solid chocolate bar, with no discernable layers or seams, some of the fractures were halfway through the thickness, parallel to the large faces. The chunks that didn't split sheet-wise didn't show any visible features that would explain a fracture along that plane (and those brakes were smooth and straight for multiple-centimeter distances, no curves, rough spots, or jaggies, unlike many of the ordinary lengthwise and crosswise breaks.

I've never seen a chocolate bar cleave that way before. I'm wondering whether it was an unusual manufacturing defect, or a result of the particular stresses the bar experienced on its way through postal sorting equipment and my mail slot. In hindsight, I should have taken measurements and photographs to guide experiments later ... but I'm having a very rough week, and failed to resist the attraction of the theobromine, sugar, fat, and dark, dark cocoa flavour, so the sample got consumed. (Maybe one of the other bars in the parcel will have broken the same way ...)

Treats and a puzzle -- food-yum and brain-yum both -- whee!

The other night we had rain that sounded pretty heavy (I didn't get out of bed to look), as well as a tornado watch for some counties (not here in Baltimore) ... and neither DTV converter got decent reception on channels that I thought I could count on them to get. Bleah. I still have to get around to trying a better antenna than þe olde rabytte eayres, so maybe DTV can be made to work reliably, but so far I continue to be unimpressed. I'll grant that when it does work, the picture is remarkably clear, and I like getting that classic movies channel attached to one of the local Sinclair stations and the second dose of PBS, but not knowing whether I'm going to get the shows I've set the timer to tape annoys me quite a bit.

Maybe I'll get lucky and when they repeat the episodes I missed, they won't be opposite something else I want to tape (since by then it'll probably be after mid-June and my analog tuners won't work any more). If DTV were mostly a big improvement, that would take away a little of the sting of cutting back the number of working tuners I have, but so far it is at best a mixed bag, not it's not often enough 'at best'.

Not that my bitching about it accomplishes anything, of course. Well, it lets me blow off a little of my frustration, and gets me complaining about something other than my health, so I guess it accomplishes something.

( Weather + DTV; unusual chocolate structural failure mode; what a rotten week I'm having )

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