fine whine

Today's tidbit of knowledge comes from my desktop "Fact or Crap" calendar (which is based on the game of the same name, what a shame). This is an actual fact, according to them, and not crap: "Gorillas do not drink water." They go on to explain thusly:

Gorillas' diet is based on fruits and stems, and these succulent foods provide neough water to sustain them. Gorillas also eat some invertebrates, such as ants and insects, but they have never been observed hunting or feeding on any other animals.

What a neat idea, getting water from fruits and other parts of plants. If this is true, why do so many people eat salads with a bottle of water next to them, I wonder. I suppose I should hoard some apples at my desk since as of late I haven't been getting nearly enough water to drink during the day.

As for the gorillas, reread it up there where it says that they "have never been observed" eating animals. This sounds like a hedge to me. I'd much prefer that the calendar stated "Gorillas don't eat meat" but since they didn't I'll now be watching over my shoulder for the unseen omnivorous ape about to make me his meal. I suppose if I hide out in drinking water I'll be okay.

Today sits squarely in the middle of a three day work week for me. I only get some seventeen days (136 hours, actually) of paid time off, and while that sounds like quite a bit (three work weeks plus two days) that comprises my vacation, sick and personal time for the whole year.

I don't get sick very often, though, so I tend to have a lot of days to burn around late fall, and such is the case for me this year. I took two days off last week to hang out over in Hueston Woods with Jessica for basically her only vacation for some time, and I won't be working another four or five day week until the one that bridges November and December, in which I am skipping that Monday to hopefully finish up my novel.

I don't really like taking these days off, though, since I tend to accomplish little at home and end up needing to do extra work to catch up for my absence when I return. Too bad we don't have the option of cashing in on our PTO and getting paid for the time, instead of getting the time itself. I doubt they'd do that, though, since the majority of people here, sad to say, would take them up on it wholeheartedly.

I've never quite known what to do with stuffed animals. I've amassed some ten or twelve of them over the years, and they tend to just sit around here and there. I have a stuffed lion, a home-made Pound Puppy-lookalike, a number of zoo souvenirs, a stuffed bear bearing a sash reading "Pave the whales" and more. They just collect dust.

If I really did anything with stuffed animals, though, I'd want some of these: Ugly dolls by wishingfish.

Don't ask me why, I don't know.

I was sifting through my CDs tonight and a little tidbit about me popped back into my mind. Before I was attempting to write things down I did a lot of things that remain mostly forgotten until a moment like this, where something just pops back into my head.

Anyway, my freshman year in college was a big one for me, at least when you look at my CD collection. That year I'm pretty sure I continued the yearly doubling of my CD collection.

I'm serious. I went from having about fifteen at the end of my freshman year of high school, to about thirty the next year, to just over sixty, to just over 120 at the end of high school. Those last two numbers come to mind readily as that year I somehow won two matching 60 CD towers and filled them quickly. Midway through the freshman college year I bought another one the same height but unfortunately not the same design. After that I gave up on individual slots and picked up some plastic units that held 200 each (50 to a shelf, four shelves) that could be taken apart and rebuilt easily for moving.

In two years I'd outgrown them as well. I've long since stopped the annual doubling, and I haven't done an official count since 2001 (when last it was around 615 or so) but now I don't have them on anything at all but instead they are in three large boxes (and spread around the house also, one here and two there) in my living room (I'm working on shelves for them, really. Just not right now).

Anyway, tonight we watched United states of Leland, and a lot of the music in it sounded pretty familiar. Sticking with it to the end credits, I discovered that one of the tracks was "Undone" by Imperial teen. I'm pretty sure I own one of their albums, but I didn't know if the one I had was the one from which this song was taken, so I tried to find it. I couldn't in my couple minutes of quick scanning, but two hundred CD spines is a lot to look at, upside down no less, and it wasn't that important for me to find the disc. I can always look it up later.

While putting them back, though, I glanced past my small collection of Lightning seeds discs and recalled briefly my detective work on the song "You showed me".

You see, before I was a connoisseur of cover and remake songs I hadn't known about the Turtles' original of the song "You showed me", but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was listening to internet radio, via some service that has long since folded no doubt, when a couple seconds of a song triggered a memory of another one. The song I heard was "Turtle soup" by DJ Food. Every so often there was this orchestral bit that sounded just like a riff in a song used on the MTV show Daria. In the episode about (ironically named) Alternapalooza, the song "You showed me" was played long enough for me to evidently remember hearing it at least half a year later.

For that matter, I'm pretty amazed to be remembering all of this now, having all but forgotten it until tonight.

Even then I had the internet at my beck and call, and it wasn't long before I tracked down the Lightning seeds track. Moments later I had downloaded it (these were the days before Napster, so I likely found it with oth.net on an FTP site) and within a week or two I'd ordered or bought a used copy of the CD. It was another month or so before I went back online to figure out the meaning of the title of "Turtle soup", and then it was a matter of time before I cashed in on some coupon or other to get The Turtles present the battle of the bands from Music Boulevard or CDNow.

And that's my story. I hope you weren't expecting this to have a point. I just like to reminisce, even if it is over something so trivial as why I own a CD.

And in unrelated news, now I've done it. I beat X-com: UFO defense for something like the fifth time, and now that I've got that particular monkey off my back I can get back to the stuff that matters. Like the novel that I'm, oh, 48,000 words or so behind on writing.

We've had the cat now for a week, though we're still working on the pronouns issue. Half of the time I refer to her as a "she" and the other half as an "it" but neither is entirely correct. I fear that I am in fact still allergic to cats as occasionally I find myself sneezing violently for no other apparent reason, but Jessica's too attached to her already for me to send her packing (the cat, that is). Most of the time Yantar (Jessica calls her Ginny and I never really call her at all) sleeps somewhere nearby us, such as tonight when we were watching Ben Stiller's expose into the male fashion model world, Zoolander.

I didn't get it for me, despite being in the fashion business and knowing a couple male models, but for her. Jessica's a big Will Ferrell fan, and she responds better to modern nutty comedy than I do. For that matter, she like Ben's Meet the parents while I found it to be cringeworthy if not painful at times to watch the extent to which they will "embarrass" someone ostensibly for my entertainment. There are a few genuine laughs in the film, but I came away from it wanting to know two things: What was the song Owen Wilson kept cueing up instead of "Relax" at the end, and is Ben Stiller capable anymore of making a movie that doesn't have a whatever-off in it at some point? I don't look fondly upon the Starsky & Hutch movie (some would call it a travesty), and in particular the dance-off strikes me as something they're probably enjoying on screen and slapping each other on the back for thereafter while we just gape agog at it and hope it ends.

Kinda like the whole movie, you know? Boy, I just can't wait to watch Dodgeball. I bet that one's a real winner.

Today I played Axis & Allies for the first time. I'd heard of it before but always mentally lumped it in with the hexagonal-mapped scenario stuff that took weeks to properly play, and was a little surprised to see the board that largely reminded me of Risk. There was a bit more to learn and no Roman numerals (but little planes and human beings instead), but I think I got the hang of it. I was lucky to be playing the US of A, and as we had in the actual WWII, I sat around until the Japanese came and hit me in Hawaii. Sure, they took my holdings in China almost immediately, but I'm not sure what I was doing there in the first place. I watched as Russia fell, but with a strong ally in the UK (he was bombing Germany almost from the get-go, and plundering the Fatherland's cash every turn to build more bombers) we eventually drove out the Axis powers and saved the day.

Well, Japan conceded, but after eight hours you'd do the same. I'll play it again, if they'll take me.