fine whine

Spring means rain. Rain means dreary mornings. Dreary mornings mean I don't want to crawl out of bed. Staying up late for no good reason means I really don't want to crawl out of bed (Allow me to point you to a relatively relevant Sinfest strip).

I think I have the insomniac version of a deathwish. I'm not actually an insomniac, but I seem to really want to be one.

Anyway, this morning as I was braving the morning rush along Northwest Boulevard (through Grandview) I was beset on all sides by moron drivers. This I am pretty much accustomed to by now, having honed my driving skillz on the shores of Lake Michigan (Chicago for the geographically uninclined) and also making sure to keep in mind the most useful driving advice ever passed to me second-hand from India:

Always assume that the other drivers are blind.

If ever I drive in India, I'll have to check that one out. Anyway, the moron in front of me this morning veered over from the left lane to mine and slowed down right in front of me, as if suddenly struck by the need to street-park. I immediately realized it had something to do with the oncoming ambulance (which I had seen long before) but what I knew and this guy didn't quite understand is that Northwest Boulevard is a boulevard and as such has a big strip of grass with curbs between the two sides of traffic. There was no traffic in either lane on the either side, so I can't imagine that the paramedics would hop the curbs and speed over to our side, but I guess my pal with the parked Focus didn't quite grasp that. So it was an admirable effort, pulling over like he was supposed to, but really, really dumb. And it slowed me down.

Enough damn haiku
cold March days make me cranky
I want to complain.

I want to complain about a whole bunch of stuff. I want to whine, and rant, bitch and moan. I want to get it all off my chest and then get the sun to rise and everything be happy.

So bear with me.

My cursed computer still won't hibernate, and it still crashes at random when I'm playing Vice city, particularly when I've worked at something for half an hour and could not save my progress. This is only a minor complaint.

Also minor is a complaint directed at myself: haikus? Not just haikus but highfalutin' "seasonal" haikus? For a week? I have to admit that I'm still torn about yesterday's (Snow falling on roads / who forgot to tell the sky / that this is mid-March?), wondering whether it should in fact be "clouds" and not "sky" in the second line. And then I realize, it's just a cheesy haiku. So on to the real meat and potatoes of this whole beef, as it were.

Speaking of beef, why haven't we heard anything new about mad cows and CJD? I doubt all of the prions or whatever they're called just up and disappeared. Dave Louthan is the only source of new information that I've bumped into in my searching, but so far that "searching" has only been confined to occasionally checking his pages. That said, I'm pretty much off the beef until I can figure out how to get me some prime Kobe cuts imported right to my dinner table. Then, Mr. Steak, we will have some words.

But it is not with words but sometimes a horn that I should express my displeasure with fellow drivers. Sure, I get a laugh when I see a license plate bearing  BLSS GOD  (isn't he the one supposed to be handing those out?) but I almost reach for that magical spot in the center of my wheel when I see something moronic like what somebody did in front of me just a block from my apartment. This guy, who had pulled out rather suddenly further down the road, turned right, as I did, onto a street with two lanes each way. He chose the lane closest to center; I took the closest to the curb. For a long time I was a big proponent of the school of Corresponding Lane, but lately I've given up on everybody else on the road. So to see him do that was not surprising in the least, but what he did next sure was. Within ten feet of the corner he slowed down and lumbered across my lane into a parking lot to the right of both of us. Of course my horn is only used in times of extreme frustration and accidental bumping (the wheel, not other cars) so I did nothing to show him my displeasure, but it irked me nonetheless. After all, had I been dialing a phone or checking my hair or eating a beef burrito at that very moment I could well have plowed right into the moron. I guess it's a good thing I've been avoiding the beef, no?

Now Spain. I'm not in the "I don't want to hear anything more about the train bombing" camp but fall more in with "I haven't heard enough but don't particularly care to search for it". I'm curious to know if this American War on Terrorism that has been waged is solely for terror against Americans, as I have not heard about any help being sent over the Atlantic to help track down these bombing bastards. That said, just because I haven't heard it doesn't mean it hasn't happened; my complaint is that I don't even care to check what's happening in the world outside of my quaint little city.

My quaint little city that devours so much of my car's gasoline, that is. Tonight I ended up doubling back not twice but a third time (well, part of a third) due to some bad planning and nasty weather. I dislike doubling back, even if I do get to do the majority of it around 70 MPH. It's the principle of the thing.

And what is the point of standing for principles when it really just means being stubborn? For this site to exist I pay very little to the friendly folks over at Digitalspace and have for more than several years, but all that time I've been putting up with the fact that I do not get a certain bit of information in my usage logs: namely the referrer field that shows what links, google searches and whatnot lead to my pages. For who knows how long I have just sat idly by, not wanting to cause a fuss or put too much into what is a minor matter, but have only now found out that by doing so I've missed out on that very information. By my doing nothing nobody's known that my account just needed to be reset. I wasn't sticking to any principles, per se, but just settling with a less than optimal situation. For that I am complaining.

Also on this site I've been getting more and more comment spammers, leaving their porn and growth hormone links and whatnot. They're bottom-feeders and they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel (to mix metaphors) to do it to my site, but still it bothers me to need to delete and ban them. One left today, though, made me chuckle somewhat:

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Whatever that means.
I am tired and cranky.
It's cold, too. Bedtime.

Normally I'm not one to get all choked up over cars, but today as I was driving home along 670 a silver one caught my eye. It looked to be a BMW 8-series coupe in pristine condition, but along with a surface free of blemishes, it too was free of emblemishments. Not once on that car did it say what model it was, let lone the size of its engine or how it is intercooled or turbocharged. Only the blue-and-white BMW logo.

Man, that's classy.

I almost felt a pang of regret when the it and my lowly Mitsubishi parted ways. Someday, when I'm rich, I'll have an 8-series BMW. They just look so damn good.

Though I'd make sure mine had a trunk lid that closed all the way, not like this guy's which had to be at least 3/8" higher on one side than the other. But it was nice otherwise. Lucky bastard.

Once again I could not fall asleep easily last night. I cannot be sure if it was thinking that kept me awake or being awake that kept me thinking, but I think I had a neat idea for a book. It's a mystery novel, quite possibly in the first person/bankrupt financially and morally/rooftop confrontation/etc. mold. The crime is a string of murders over almost a decade that get stumbled upon and ultimately halted. I'm considering doing it in third person and opening it up to the killer's POV as well (a la John Sandford) but probably won't; I've always had reservations about that style of writing though Sandford pulls it off with a certain finesse I can't hope to achieve. Anyway, the quirk about the book is that everybody in it is named Edgar, to a man (or woman). Naturally I'd provide other details and mannerisms to differentiate the Edgars, but if I can pull it off I don't even want to give them last names. So the killer's Edgar, all of the victims are Edgars as well as any potential suspects. As a bit of absurdity, I'd have the detective wonder "But who is the killer? What is his name?" or something like that that can only be idiotic in light of everybody being named Edgar. I'd picked that name previously for a quick ditty slash character study when an idea occurred to me that had no obvious use—so I made a page for it. It was only after an extra sleepless half hour that I remembered that the award given for particularly good mystery fiction is the Edgar, and to use that name so many times in a given novel could be considered name dropping or fishing. But I don't care. Silly books don't often win serious awards, after all.

In other news, I've targeted my GeoURL information as closely as possible. I believe the coordinates now pinpoint my fridge.

Two observations from the drive home today:

• A van in front of me with a small B&W TV on the dashboard, playing what looked like the news, though I didn't get too close.; Drivers like that scare me and he was obviously the one watching it—the other six seats were empty.
• A personalized license plate TSTGOD: what could this be?
  • Trust God?
  • Taste God?
  • Test God?
  • Toast God?
  • ...Gourd?
  • ...Garamond?

• I'm still stumped. Why did the guy keep the Ohio clipart instead of getting an extra letter for clarity? We may never know.

The previous two entries were a lot shorter than many I wrote lately, and I won't elaborate on them too much now either. I was in the thumb area of Michigan, an hour's drive from Canada, at my in-laws' place. It's a small house in a small town and I can't help but feel considerable distance from everybody and everything there. I don't think it's snobbery or some superiority complex (at least I'd hope not) but I don't feel any kinship with anybody there, her parents especially, particularly when they take us across the border for a day's worth of shopping and a hockey game they expected to be lackluster and then described as worse than boring. Their characterization and opinion of the hockey game would fit my perception of the shopping spree, and I cannot help but wonder if I somehow offended them by not buying anything. I'm not anti-consumer, I just don't want to buy anything right now.

I'm still having trouble getting into the whole spirit of the season thing. In the next weeks I will have to make or break family appointments for holiday time, and that prospect only aggravates me. I came up with a concise statement that conveys exactly what I mean: "Nobody gets what they want for Christmas" which is admittedly an oversimplification but it works for me and is somewhat catchy. I can see it serving as the tagline for a black comedy at Christmastime. It may fit Bad Santa, I don't know for sure but I can watch it to find out; I'd like to see it anyway.

I was reminded of an early topic I'd mentioned once, the Toyota Sequoia. They're still huge monstrosities and I still dislike them, but one gave me a laugh on the highway today. Its license plate was BLIGH and it was all I could do to keep myself from hopping out of the car and adding the missing T with a Sharpie. Well, the fact that he was doing 85 mph to my 75 was another good reason. And incidentally this is only the second (of over eighty) post to use a capital letter, and the first to mention "I" (though there are a couple "me"s here and there). You're welcome for that; I'm just trying to make things easier for the scholars of the future.

What sort of person drives a Karmann Ghia with a little Spider-man in the window? It is that very question I pondered on my way home today, driving alongside such a vehicle. The driver turned out to be a late twenties guy who looked like he couldn't care less to be driving a cool classic car. Bah. VW drivers are a different breed, it seems.

Speaking of which, I then noticed a VW Golf driving toward me bearing vanity plates of LILS VW. Lil, from the looks of her, wasn't very happy to be driving a VW either, and in fact looked downright mean. I tried to think of another vanity plate that would be more applicable to Lil, but the best I could imagine that was under eight letters and not rude or profane was SCRU LIL. Which is probably too lewd to get past the folks over at Motor Vehicles, ever vigilant against sexual or drug references on personalized plates. Some of them have crude language knowledges rivaling the dirtiest of Catholic schoolboys, I've heard.

Anyway, it was the thought of such censorship that led to a general musing on the merits of freedom of speech and its extents on the roadways. Said thought was interrupted suddenly by the realization that the Lincoln Town Car right behind me bore plates reading, simply,  PUCK .