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I’ve waited long enough, I think, for the second installment.  One of the better rock treatments of the perils of stardom and success:

Misunderstood, from the 2002 release Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence.  Lyrics by John Petrucci, to music that builds from soft chord strumming to full-bore metal to cacophonous tension in simultaneous, different time signatures.

Waiting
In the calm of desolation
Wanting to break
From this circle of confusion

Sleeping
In the depths of isolation
Trying to wake
From this daydream of illusion

How can I feel abandoned even when the world surrounds me?
How can I bite the hand that feeds the strangers all around me?
How can I know so many,
Never really knowing anyone?

If I seem superhuman,
I have been misunderstood

It challenges the essence of my soul
And leaves me in a state of disconnection
As I navigate the maze of self control
Playing a lion being led to a cage,
I turn from a thief to a beggar,
From a god to God save me

How can I feel abandoned even when the world surrounds me?
How can I bite the hand that feeds the strangers all around me?
How can I know so many,
Never really knowing anyone?

If I seem superhuman,
I have been misunderstood

Playing a lion being led to a cage,
I turn from surreal to seclusion,
From love to disdain,
From belief to delusion,
From a thief to a beggar,
From a god to God save me

How can I feel abandoned even when the world surrounds me?
How can I bite the hand that feeds the strangers all around me?
How can I know so many,
Never really knowing anyone?

If I seem superhuman,
I have been misunderstood

I found my hat.  Or someone found it.  It was sitting in the hallway outside the coat closet, so I picked it up, and I’m wearing it right now.

You don’t know what a big deal this is.  This is the only hat I own that has ever fit me.  Baseball caps, even large ones, fit like yarmulkes.  I groan every time I find out that the free giveaway at an event is a hat.

My father, who stands several-plus inches shorter than I (and is shrinking, I think), has an even larger head circumference.  He once spent approximately the GNP of Finland on a custom Stetson, I believe, and it comically rests on the bridge of my nose when I try to wear it.

This is the curse of the McGee head.  These massive skulls.  My brother has one.  My son has one, the uncomfortable details of which I’m sure my wife could inform you about.  And yet — and yet — I was treated for a Chiari Malformation last year.  My brain was literally too big for this head.

Don’t worry, I won’t let that fact go to my head.

In the past six months, exactly, I have received exactly 160,928 pieces of spam in my inbox.  If every one of those had come in the mail, in addition to all the dead trees, I would have kilos and kilos of stamps to sell off as a “mission mix”.  A pretty nice one, with Russian and Chinese and Nigerian stamps in there.

But of course spammers don’t pay for their mailings, instead making you pay for their mailings.  That’s why they exist, and that’s why they are scum.

We need an efficient micropayments scheme in the world.  A way in which we can give fractions of cents to people.  We could have wireless agents and web agents do the negotiation for us.  Set your phone so that if a beggar asks for money, it automatically gives them a nickel without showing up on your radar at all (this is a plot element of the sci-fi novel I’m writing.)  We could, instead of challenge-response, just charge people a tenth or twentieth of a cent to email each of us.  Nobody legitimate would notice (you’d have to send 2000 emails a month to have it cost you a buck) but it would stop the spammers dead in their tracks.

There’s more, but I’ll save it for the novel.

The presumably-foreign spammer who keep asking me to go to their site to talk to a pretty girl have a list of names they are pulling from, apparently.  Clue: you won’t pique my interest by talking about a girl named Hellga [sic].

I have been making up my worldwide stamp albums, at long last, and by far  the 4″ D-Ring binders at MyBinding.com are the best deal I have found.  The company is great, the shipping is free, the customer service can’t be beat, and their binders are top-of-the-line.  I also ordered a paper trimmer, which arrived perfectly, and I expect everything else you order would be perfect, too.

It has come to my attention that a significant proportion of my readership are not reveling in the lyrics and music of the progressive rock / progressive heavy metal band Dream Theater.  I think I’ll try to go about changing that.

What is the role of a rationalist when he confronts the faithful?

The Silent Man, from the 1993 release Awake.  Lyrics by John Petrucci, set to an acoustic guitar suite.

A question well served:
“Is silence like a fever,
“A voice never heard,
“Or a message with no receiver?”

Pray they won’t ask.
Behind the stained glass,
There’s always one more mask.

Has man been a victim
Of his woman, of his father?
If he elects not to bother,
Will he suffocate their faith?

Desperate to fall
Behind the Great Wall
That separates us all:

When there is reason
Tonight I’m awake
When there’s no answer
Arrive the Silent Man
If there is balance
Tonight he’s awake
If they have to suffer
There lies the Silent Man

Sin without deceivers
A god with no believers
I could sail by
on the Winds of Silence
And maybe they won’t notice.
But this time I think
It’d be better if I swim

When there is reason
Tonight I’m awake
When there’s no answer
Arrive the Silent Man
If there is balance
Tonight he’s awake
But if they have to suffer,
There lies the Silent Man.
There lies the Silent Man.

I was a dick at the pharmacy yesterday.  My doctor called in a refill of my Compazine as I’m still on Flagyl, the latter causing nausea.  I drove up to the pharmacy window.

Tech: Josh, it’s too early to pick up your prescription.  You had a ten-day supply filled on the 27th.

Josh: What’s the dosage on that?

Tech: One pill every eight hours.

Josh: Which is three pills a day.  Seven days.

She picked up a calculator.

Tech: Well, to me, seven days is 21 pills.

Which of course just proves my point more.

Josh: OK, six and two-thirds days.  I should be able to pick it up.

Tech: The person who put this into the computer put it in as a ten day supply.

Josh: The person who put that into the computer isn’t very good at math.

Tech: (chuckling) I hope it wasn’t me.  Can you come back later?

Josh: You know, I’m really up a creek here.  I need my Compazine to deal with the nausea from my antibiotics.

So I called later, and spoke to a pharmacist.

Josh: You know, there is a real problem here.  If your staff can make this kind of error, then they can make a dosing error with something I give to my child.

Pharmacist: (broken English) No, it was computer error.

Josh:  Uh uh.  A computer did not divide twenty by three and get ten.  A person did that.

Pharmacist: No, sometime computer make mistakes, and we have catch up.

(I’m really hoping her Latin is better than her English.)

Josh:  Oh, so the computer made this error, is that right?

Pharmacist:  Yes.  We have to put numbers in right columns or computer makes mistake.  I’m very sorry.

So that’s apparently the definition of a computer error.  An “ID-ten-T” error.  I think I need a new pharmacy.