Tuesday, March 02, 2004
moving to typepadOkay --- let's try this for a while. I won't update here... I'll be over here in the new palacio de badgerbag
posted by badgerbag 3/02/2004 10:34:00 AM comment
testing typepad migrationtesting! come take a look. the categories of post options and seeing comments fly by are quite tempting.
posted by badgerbag 3/02/2004 01:46:00 AM comment
Monday, March 01, 2004
a deep needI have discovered a hitherto unknown deep, deep longing deep in my heart.
posted by badgerbag 3/01/2004 11:33:00 PM comment
Drive Friendly: the gameI invented this a while ago but forgot to post it. It would be an online massively multiplayer game based on driving safely. Stopsigns and stoplights and speedlimit signs all over would have little sensors of some kind and your car would have GPS and a data link of some kind.
Instead of cops tracking you and punishing you, your car would be transmitting your behavior stats to the game server where you would earn high scores by stopping all the way at stop signs, slowing down at yellow lights instead of running them, and going the speed limit. At the end of of the day, or after each trip, you might get an automated email with your stats. Or it could just go into some enormous log file and you could check it.
This would motivate people amazingly -- way more than the threat of getting a ticket or fine. Improving your score and competing with other people would make it interesting.
It might also track your driving times to common destinations, i.e., home to work, so you could try different routes at different times and see which ones are best and which ones you tend to drive more or less safely. You would see your own pattern of rule infractions based on the time of day and your tiredness level.
Also it could be set up to attach to your social network. So you could look at someone's driving record on Orkut. Social pressure would make people behave better.
And you would know never to get into Becky's car, ever. But I already knew that, after the first time I did it.
posted by badgerbag 3/01/2004 09:13:00 PM comment
churnI kind of like this long fucked up poem... I think I just channelled some unholy mixture of allen ginsberg and Nicanor Parra...
because I had to leave my country
i had to leave my country
to find the other countries in my country
if you would like to speak to a customer service representative
dig here
between my legs
for a good time call
GOD
and listen to fire engines answer someone else's emergency
because here
it is predicted to be sunny and clear
I had to check to make sure it was still thursday
and what time was low tide
so that i could hop into my individual rocket powered jet pack helicopter
unimpeded by garbage picking seagulls and teenagers in bondage pants
and fly to work
where all day I feed red legged newts out of eyedroppers and wash oil slicked otters
and practice my spanish on winged serpents
those guys, they've got scales under their eyes
nictating membranes
that flick down to keep out racism
I heard on the radio they can even sleep that way
just like I'm asleep right now
so when I tried to TUNE IN
the radio kept flicking around on perpetual "seek" mode
since I was driving with one hand while with the other hand I sucked down a quadruple blood 70/30 latte made with motor oil and decaffeinated union grapes
I couldn't fix the radio because with my other, I mean my third, hand, I was adjusting the mirror
to see that my nose had developed a bloom of carbuncles like angry flowers or like the la brea tarpits full of bones bubbling in slow motion
and I kept hearing the individual bubbles of radio sound staticking past, whop, whop, zzzt, beep, then seeking again past voices and howly guitars announcing things importantly,
and when I tried to TURN ON
the rearview mirror just laughed and shot me the finger and said that yeah, I was the fairest, blanca, whitey, the queen, the princess of all the realms, and the fucking red legged newts and otters and oily ducks wanted to suck me off, blanca nieva, wishing and wishing in the streetlight forest with my princess dress, sucking my latte and singing I'm wishing with my 2 hands clasped and the third hand on the wheel,
and when I tried to DROP OUT
i kept remembering that the ERA amendment had never passed
and that because of my questionable sexual history
it's easy to get a chokehold on the moon,
throw that loony chick on the ground and stick a dirty finger in there
she's famous
flaunting her ass in that shiny miniskirt up there where everyone can see
and then she wants us all to use the same bathrooms in airports and join the draft doing one armed pushups and cleaning out her fucking rifle with tampax
so that as i drove down el camino and the moon kept following me in the rearview mirror no matter how far I kept driving because I was looking for the good target, not the ghetto-ass target where they never have anything, I kept driving but the moon kept looking at me through her piratical eyepatch and because of this I could NOT become an astronaut, not the first astronaut, not the first girl astronaut, not the first visibly menstruating asronaut smearing blood all over red mars to get revenge for the moon's existence,
and then I remembered it was 1984 and I wasn't in hippielandia
but in somekinda reaganomic planet of the apes AND IT WAS REALLY EARTH ALL ALONG
that's why I was not in my personal jetback rocketboot spacesuit tootling through the air waving at reconstituted archeopteryxes
but just in a beatup pickup truck sporting some faded bumper stickers blasting my air conditioning that smells like mold
I was just doing some errands and going to work like always and wondering if the bridges would blow up today
driving down El CarMeano on an important mission to save the world with my high caliber revolutionary credit card at the Safe Way
I took a swig of my double triple blood latte,
at a light I stopped and the guy next to me had a thumping thumpa bass thing going on and he revved and I revved
I didn't look at him but i knew it was a guy and what he would look like from the music he was pumping
but I was just going to TARget and then to WASH some fucking diSEASED tranked up ANimals
i didn't want to look at the dude
who was making fun of my crap ass rusty old pickup truck
so I ran the light, and a van, the ghost of a WebVan delivery van, plowed into this guy.
I could not believe it!
because of the real estate boom and dot com crash
that guy was running a whole server farm out of that car
and the computer guts spilled out in the road
and stock options laser printed on fancy letterhead flew up like doves, like shards of candy plate glass, and the IRS sent an emergency jetpack helicopter to clean up the mess
meanwhile the guy laying there in the street while the IRS leafblowers got busy with the confederate money blowing around and obscuring the intersection like thick fog
that guy had his whole family in there too
I heard them screaming zhou-laaaaaaaaaaa!
and it was terrible because his HB-1 Visa was smeared all over the road with blood and its feathers
I could see it all in my rearview mirror
so I got off El Camino and tried to circle around to help him out
I never should have run that red light to win the race with him
but i got lost
I think my mapquest was running off the server farm in his car because it went down and I somehow took that left turn and ended up in albuquerque in the middle of a bullfighting ring with bugs bunny
I didn't have on the right kind of pants
I didn't want to disappoint anyone
So I went home
As I left the arena
the crowd pelted me with roses and diamond necklaces to give to the guy in the street if I ever found him again
some other guy played me seis por derecho
he played so good I cried with joy at that golden moment
and wished I could always be leaving places regretfully
But I couldn't find that guy
the radio kept seeking
my mom was worried about me getting drafted into the Maoist army and missing dinner
so I figured it was about time to blast off into inner space
I got out of my car and opened up a manhole
and went down there into the steaming rectum of El CaMano
(figuring that anal health was at least as important as washing ducks for money)
I got my rotorooter out
and made my hand look like a duck and stuck it in there ready to fist the whole fucking world
because I wasn't sure what was going to happen,
whether the sewers and steam tunnels and imaginary railroads and pneumatic tube systems under my everyday life
would suck in my fist, my arm, my whole body, and the rest of me right up to my zillionth kundalini chakra
with all those roses and diamonds I got at the bullfight getting covered in shit,
I was scared
that my head might fall off my body
as it rolled away I'd still be talking with the head part, blah blah blah, bababa, looking, looking, looking,
and writing with the hand part, down below
but the head would have nothing to do with the hand anymore
the hand that wasn't scribbling would be waving "hey!" and "help!" to the head
and the other hand, like a witch tit, would be saying in sign language,
"I had to leave my country
so that I could see that my country was invisible"
posted by badgerbag 3/01/2004 08:51:00 PM comment
not to bore anyoneHeinousness abounds. I have some sort of horrid nostril infection. I can't even go into it. But it's like there are about 10 hideous boils really close together in one nostril that go all the way from the inside to the outside, like a nostril piercing would, except instead of jewelry in there, it's some kind of pustulent, nasty, slime from a horror movie. I think it is carbuncles otherwise known as a staph infection. In my nose. which I have to blow all the time.
Or it could be flesh eating bacteria and soon I will not have half my nose as it will have just fallen right off. It will go great with the motorized glass eye and the hacking cough.
posted by badgerbag 3/01/2004 05:57:00 PM comment
boxesOne cool thing about having boxes everywhere is that I don't have to guiltily hide my new Amazon book boxes from clandestine online book purchasing.
The telltale boxes just blend right in to the general decor. Rook will never notice.
posted by badgerbag 3/01/2004 04:11:00 PM comment
niceness stupidly wastedIf I had not wasted my (rare) health and energy hauling all that crap for the previous owners of this house, I would have gotten more done before getting sick.
I am kinda thinking at this point that I am having just awful asthma type of bronchitis, not really "being sick" bronchitis. i am on the inhaled powder steroid.... and the squirting up the nose steroid... though i have been forgetting the up the nose one. and increasing albuterol. and whatever free samples of Singulair that I have found lying around. I think it is time to go and beg the allergist for more singulair...
I don't want to confess to the allergist that last week while doing the actual moving and when my mom in law was here I took a bunch of oral steroids. a) not supposed to have prednisone just laying around, but i do. b) not supposed to self medicate esp. not fuck around with bad, bad, dangerous steroids, even if they are like magic candy that makes you able to work hard and feel great even when sick as a dog. c) I am a fucking moron and my bones will start breaking and I have high blood pressure when I am 50 and you can all remind me of why, it is because I secretly pop these steroids somtimes. goddamn it. I can't bring myself to throw them away. some doctor gave me a giant overdose of them last year and I had more sense than to take them all. I favor the way where you do the giant burst of them one day, then taper off over 3-5 days. that works great and is supposed to be the correct way to do it. But dumb dr. gave me like, 10 days of a giant high dose of it, with no tapering off (bad! bad! bad!) and I self-adjusted the dose to be right. That is why I have this huge bottle of powerful prednisone left over.
In Greece 5 years ago I was so allergic to olive trees that I took steroids for 3 weeks straight and my face swelled up. So much for being a sturdy peasant.
Anyway. I was just looking at the paltry check for $100 from the previous owners, which I only got because I wrote them an email explaining that it was more work than I had bargained for. I feel like ripping up their 100 bucks into tiny pieces and mailing it back to them. It is my fault for being stupid, having no boundaries, not correctly knowing my own physical limits, and just wanting to be agreeable to anyone who asks me to do something.
I hope I have learned some sort of lesson from this. Lesson one being no helping anyone move, ever again, ever. For example even when I told McCoot I would haul off his dusty old books and computer equipment. That was dumb!
I will lend the truck though.
Plus I was an idiot for not paying movers to pack and move everything. It would have been expensive but duh, we could have written it off our taxes and why am I pinching pennies when we have insane wads of cash right now and it would have maybe helped me not be sick? I know why I did not - it is because the words "I have an insane amount of cash" and "write it off my taxes" are VERY NEW AND STRANGE.
posted by badgerbag 3/01/2004 12:44:00 PM comment
fatnessScary. I wonder if just taking this survey made all these little kids go home and barf up their oreos and juice boxes.
42% of 1st-3rd grade girls want to be thinner
45% of boys and girls in grades 3-6 want to be thinner
37% have already dieted
6.9% score in the ED range
51% of 9-10 year old girls feel better about selves when dieting
9% of 9 year old have vomited to lose weight
81% of 10 year old are afraid of being fat
53% of 13 year old girls are unhappy with their bodies
78% of 18 year old girls are unhappy with their bodies
The #1 wish of girls 11-17 years old is to lose weight
from http://www.eatingdisorderscoalition.org/reports/statistics.html
posted by badgerbag 3/01/2004 10:41:00 AM comment
oh give me a break!Wow... this is... I have no words for it. Awful! "how to avoid becoming a terror victim". Ooo. how about that. This makes me so angry. Far worse than the "how to avoid being raped" advice I got so mad about a couple of weeks ago (the advice pretty much was "stay home" in niced-up language). Oh so very much worse.
I can't believe I wasn't reading this on "The Onion".
I feel very tempted to rewrite it just a tad scarier and forward it on to the moms club mailing list as if innocently protective of our homeland...
posted by badgerbag 3/01/2004 12:14:00 AM comment
