fine whine

You know what really gets my goat? The fragrance of Palmolive original. I just don't like it.

Make of that what you will.

Also annoying is the fact that I still cannot hibernate my win2k system despite finally having bought a video card supporting hibernation. Why is this? I made the mistake of having 512 megabytes of memory. Hibernating 512 megabytes of memory uses 512 megabytes of hard drive space, and nearest I can tell I cannot change the drive upon which my hibernation file is allocated. This should not be a problem, me with my massive twenty gigabyte hard drive, except that my system is unable to boot to said behemoth and can only operate if I use a one gig drive for the system. One gig isn't nearly enough for win2k and its various system files and drivers if I'm to take out a 512 megabyte chunk for the occasional naptime. So I still can't hibernate the damn thing. This too I do not like.

Jessica and I went over again to Scott and Carina's place and watched The Spanish prisoner. The movie was very good. It was intelligent in all but a few places, and then more because the protagonist was supposed to be dense and/or under duress so as to need to have the thing repeated some fifteen times before catching on. I did notice Mamet has a penchant for repetition. He has a penchant for repetition.

Anyway, I enjoyed watching the film and Jessica enjoyed playing with their cats, which fortunately don't produce the sort of dander and other cat by-products that trigger her allergies.

The pseudo-profound title that I have given this entry stems from something I pointed out during the movie (I did more than a little bit of pointing things out, for which I did apologize whilst the others kept laughing). There was this scene with people in a car, and the camera, shooting through the windshield, prominently displayed the rear-view mirror. I mentioned that it was refreshing to see one of those onscreen, as I had been watching so much Starsky and Hutch, what with its missing mirrors, and hadn't seen one in a while. Well, at the time it seemed significant.

Just as I was trying not to pay attention to license plates and instead watch the rest of the cars around them, I noticed a parked Mustang that looked awfully familiar: good old EA75HT. Before that the best one of the day was A 73 OLDS emblazoning a car that wouldn't look out of place in a Sam Raimi movie except for being painted blue (purists take note: I don't know or care what year car Peter Parker's uncle and Ash drive). Giving me a laugh was a subcompact apparently boasting   43 HP  , which to me sounds like it would be a selling point for a lawn mower.

I probably wouldn't have paid so much attention to plates today had I not stumbled across Eric Meyer's list of interesting plates he's spotted in the Cleveland area. Odd coincidences abound as he and I both live in Ohio, in fact nearby the same highway. Whoa. Moreover I stumbled across his site looking for CSS information and only happened to notice his list of "platelets". If I put any thought into it I could probably knock off his design and have a nifty list like it all my own. Until then, though, I'll just list them here. Most of these I wrote down hastily on an old note of a phone number for which I have long forgotten the context (sorry David Smmmmaher, I'm not going to call you now and please write clearer next time).

It's great to live in Ohio for a person like me who sees words where there are really aren't any, so a state that sandwiches two numbers between pairs of two letters can at times strike gold, as with the Mustang's plate I mentioned before. Here are a couple more that I wrote down in the last two days:

•  DR01TY : droity's not a word but it sure sounds like it could be one
•  FB42GE : with a little stretch of the imagination this becomes "Faberg�" as long as the 4 becomes an A and the 2 an R. Bonus points for having The Answer in the middle
•  AM31XM : doesn't make a word but it's readable forward and backward, which is why it caught my eye in the rear view

  TJ 328   isn't really important for any reason that I've seen the guy's BMW (328i) two days in a row, once each way on I-670. Creepy. I've only seen   OE 603   once and I'm not even going to waste the time trying to figure out the significance of 603, as he was driving a Land Rover.

That same day I came across PSALM81. Verse eleven of Psalm 81 is the classic "I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you up from the land of Egypt. Open wide your mouth that I may fill it." Verse sixteen is more ominous, "Those who hate the Lord would tremble, their doom sealed forever." That's as an uplifiting message to spread with a flat chunk of metal as any I've seen. Unless of course there's the invisible semicolon and the driver was pointing me toward chapter eight, verse one which is rife with life-changing words: "For the leader: 'upon the gittith.' A psalm of David." Let us ponder that for a while.

I'm done pondering now, are you? Next up is a late-model Grand Prix bearing  PLYR 1 . Uh huh. Pimpmobiles are always Pontiacs.

Following up the winner trend is  CHAMPP , the guy who I can only hope isn't known for his spelling bees.

I mis-read  IM CZECH  as "in" and thought it was a pretty neat play on words.

And to leave you all with a puzzler, figure out, if you can,  BOSOX7 .

My day-to-day job sees my flying a desk for a major garment company. I play low man on the totem pole. Naturally, when one of our factories is looking for a fall guy to cover for sliding deliveries, they come to me. I'm still green enough that I don't see completely through the wool they pull over my eyes, but not so much that I don't know that something's going on.

I maintain that I'm not there to play politics but just to do my job. To me that's simple, but apparently to want to just do my job doesn't cut it. I needed to fabricate some career aspirations for my recent performance evaluation paperwork and now came this, this, annoyance. I'd let it ruin my day, but when it comes time to go home I leave my business in my cubicle, because it's just that: business.

I won't deny that the intrigue gets tiresome and the games tedious. As long as I recognize that people are up to something, though, I will survive. And I am making a buck or two along the way. I just would like to know if they're setting me up for more responsibility or an ulcer.

My seventies entertainment binge continues as I trade the Airport series for the first season of Starsky and Hutch. Oddly enough, Lalo Schifrin did theme music for both of them in some capacity.

Driving around today I saw two interesting license plates. First, on a Porsche Boxster (complete with the generic Ohio logo)   WRKFLO. I don't know about you but to me that just screams "my work is my life and I don't deserve this car even though I can afford it". And without commentary, allow me to present S AND M, on an Oldsmobile.