mcgees.org

I.  Hate.  Insomnia.

But as long as I’m up, I might as well have a go at a request I got today.  I’m supposed to post a recipe.  I shared with my father a couple bites of the chicken I made, and he was positively effusive about it.  My good friend Nathan was a huge fan as well.  Problem is, I don’t cook with recipes and I don’t measure stuff.  If I’m baking bread, I absolutely have to measure everything exactly; I have no gut feeling for the chemistry of gluten and yeast and so forth.  It’s like a really bad chemistry lab or something.  But not chicken.  Absolutely not chicken.

I’ve been requested to try to post the recipe, which I will try to relate while you keep in mind that I’m making up everything numerical as I go along.

So here it is:

2 Tbsp canola oil
4 - 6 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 large ripe (red) serrano peppers, chopped
4 - 5 lbs. boneless skinless chicken breast
1 can chicken broth
1 can coconut milk
3/4 cup sun dried tomatoes
1 Tbsp fenugreek leaf
1/2 tsp cardamom
1/2 tsp clove

1. Sautee the garlic and hot peppers in the canola oil at the bottom of a large stock pot until softened.
2. Add everything else.
3. Cook over medium heat until the chicken is cooked through, about 90 minutes, stirring every 15 or so.
4. Step 4 consists solely of a disclaimer that there is no useful instruction following Step 3.

It cooks itself, essentially.  It’s also very cheap to make.  It’s a one-pot meal that you fire and forget: a great bachelor’s food.  What would I do differently next time?  Well, I’d make sure my ginger hadn’t gone bad.  I intended to add about a 1 in. piece of fresh, peeled ginger rhizome, finely chopped, with the garlic and peppers.  And I meant to garnish the whole thing with cilantro.  But I didn’t do either of those things, and it was palatable.

Fenugreek leaf, though.  I don’t really know what to say about that.  I bought it because I didn’t know what it tasted like, and after tasting it decided it was right for this dish.  I have no idea how to duplicate this without the fenugreek leaf.  Maybe ground fenugreek seed and  thyme?  Check the Persian section of your grocery store, if you’re lucky enough to have a Persian section in your grocery store, and buy some fenugreek leaf.

I wish there were some magical secret to the dish, but no, it really is that stupid.  Philosophically, following this recipe to the letter would be like listening to a Miles Davis album so that you can learn to play every note exactly: it’s better to figure out the logic of jazz, or the kitchen, and just use up stuff you have around.  That’s what I did, the only difference being that I’m no Miles Davis.  The sun dried tomatoes would not have been there otherwise.  There was no special trip to a store to make this.

Keep in mind that the the coconut milk will turn from white to deep walnut brown as you cook the chicken, and don’t burn the garlic.  That’s it.  If something doesn’t seem right, change it.  And you’ll be there.

So, yeah, I’m watching the Transformers movie.  I pirated it.  I’ve been watching it in slices.

And holy cow is it bad.  Like deeply, horribly, eternally bad.  Really really bad.  After the second scene I said, “Damn, this is Michael Bay, isn’t it?”  He’s one of those directors who leaves his stamp on a film, and not in a good way.

Damn.

Why am I watching?  I dunno.  Has something to do with what Ptolemy called “Explosions & hot chicks & shit.”  I figure if it’s good enough for Ptolemy, it’s good enough for me.  I’m not eager to argue with classical mathematicians.

Man.  I’m watching about ten minutes at a go.  And I start to think to myself, “Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Hasbro!”  Presumably it went something like this:

“Hey, how ’bout cars and trucks and helicopters that turn into robots?  Down in Tech, they’ve just figured out how to do the Rubik’s Cube trick on non-cubic objects.”

“Yes, but we need a way to market it.”

“A cartoon is always good.”

“What, a cartoon about cheap plastic toys that turn into other cheap plastic toys?”

“Yeah.  My idea is something something space cubes something something aliens something something racing stripes something something the end of the world.”

“Oh, that’s quite good, isn’t it?”

“You realize I just said something something repeatedly and didn’t offer any actual ideas, right?”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure no one will notice.  Start the assembly lines!”

And thus it was.  Before any of the stars were born, thus it was.  But hey, they reference eBay in the film.  Must be cool, hot and trendy then.

I meant to publish a specific article on 30 June 2008.  Best-laid plans and all that.  So I’ll try to make up for it now.

That date is important, in that Western culture attaches high significance to century markers.  A hundred years previously, the “Tunguska Event” occurred.

Tunguska?  If you’re a fan of the X-Files, you have probably been exposed to a highly fictionalized version of the story.  An object a few tens of meters across — it could be a metallic asteroid or a piece of a traditional comet, but likely nothing else — exploded in the air above a remote area of Siberia.  It is estimated that the yield of the explosion was between ten and 15 megatons, or about one thousand Hiroshima bombs.  Yeah, big, but not uniquely big: the US and the USSR were each planning on deploying Hydrogen bombs on Real Live Human Cities several times as big.

So, it blew up in the atmosphere, whatever it was.  This area of Siberia was (and is once again) heavily wooded, and the blast is estimated to have knocked over an estimated 80 million trees (which contemporary sources allege were innocent bystanders), radially outwards, for about sixteen miles in all directions.

OK, so that was 100 years ago.  A fortuitous location for an impact, with relatively minor effects on civilization.  Which takes us to the K/T boundary.

The K/T boundary is the separation between the Cretaceous (K is for a German word) and Tertiary periods.  It is marked by unusual amounts of certain elements, such as iridium, in the geological record.  Iridium stands out because it’s rare on Earth.  Most of the planet’s allotment bound to iron while the planet was condensing and sank into the core, so big amounts in sedimentary layers tell us something important.  This deposition was caused by another impact.  If you think that we still don’t know what killed the dinosaurs, you are a victim of the time it takes for scientific data to trickle down into public school classrooms, which is about as long as it takes for money to trickle down from a tax cut for the wealthiest citizens to the proles (and, Columbus’s discovery that the world is round attesting, it has approximately the same probability).  This impact killed the dinosaurs.

The K/T boundary event: bigger.  Seriously bigger.  Really, absolutely, seriously bigger.  Instead of an object with width and breadth each equal to the length of a Mack truck, it was an object the size of Manhattan.  Seriously.  It crashed in an area near what is now the Yucatan Penninsula.  And goodbye big, expensive animals; goodbye most plants; goodbye frakking phytoplankton; hello only to tiny annoying shrewlike pests content to dig holes and venture out into the big cruel world only to snack on dead things.  The latter would be unimportant, historically, except they happen to be our grandparents.

The worldview that embraces such sudden changes is known as catastrophism.  And because some scientists (ahem, Stephen Jay Gould, ahem) get absurdly entranced by one possibility and embrace it to the exclusion of all others, very many educated Americans think that the history of the world proceeds in fits and starts, going so far as to think the Cambrian explosion was actually special for a reason other than historical accident (I don’t want to go off on the tangent, so, Wikipedia’s entry on the Cambrian explosion, which I have not yet read.)

That the history of the world proceeds in fits and starts is unlikely.  It’s unlikely for a number of reasons, that (again) I don’t want to get into, that I largely understand and creationists (whether or not they call themselves Intelligent Design — uh — ists?) don’t.  Richard Dawkins thinks it is a capital-letter Bad Thing for scientists to entertain this hypothesis in public.  He thinks this for the same reason he thinks The Brights movement is a good thing, which is that we should be artificially buttressing the apparent number of people that mostly agree with him.

It’s not honest, intellectually, but it’s not totally crazy.  Amidst the blatant incomprehension and more blatant lies of the creationists, there comes the gem that is represented by the line “See, even evolutionists don’t agree about the ‘facts’ of evolution!!!”  Yes, the multiple bangs are implied in their contentions thereof.

The logical response to this takes a bit more time than pretending that all evolutionists agree, but is a much more convincing argument.  Basically, it goes “I may not be completely right about the details of evolution, but a talking snake in a tree is not even close.”  Think about it.  “God created the universe” is not the default position, and even if 100% of your claims about the truth of evolution (in actuality, the proportion of true claims among creationists is around negative 8.3%) are valid, that doesn’t help your case.  Seriously.  This is logically true.  If you think that your “received Word” is, shall we say, gospel truth, and you must only find inconsistencies in other arguments to support your own, you’ve given the game away.  You’ve begged the question in the real, useful meaning of the phrase.  There are as many creation myths as there are historical tribes, and why should yours have special position when “turtles all the way down” doesn’t?

I didn’t start this as another harangue of religion.  So let’s get back to the topic at hand.

When Shoemaker-Levy impacted Jupiter, it gave us pause.  Pause, because that’s really frakking close to us as such things go, and it was unbelievably huge.  Velociraptors — and I’ll entertain arguments of whether this is, on the whole, a good or bad thing — can’t and don’t much worry about impact scenarios.  We do, as humans.  We were steeled by this, and we raised hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with this possible threat, and spent it on really shitty movies.  Like you do.  Fun stuff.

So, next time a batter (Rays?  Seriously, the Rays?  The most common response I’ve heard is “There’s a team called the Rays?”) gets beaned by a ball, think about how much more it would hurt if the pitcher could throw at twenty thousand motherfrakking miles per hour, and a baseball weighed something like a battleship, because that’s what we’re talking about for Tunguska.

And not that the difference would matter much to a Rays batter, but what if it was the size of Manhattan?  Seriously, someone might lose an eye.

I just saw a special-interest election ad on television:

After Massachusetts legalized [interracial] marriage, our son came home and told us the school taught him that [white people] can marry [black people].  He’s in second grade!  We tried to stop public schools from teaching children about [interracial] marriage, but the courts said we had no right to object or pull him out of class.

Do note that these warm-hearted followers of Jesus consider it a mortal sin to detach a bundle of 32 cells from a uterine wall but apparently have no qualms about denying rights to Real Actual Adults.

Fine print on the bottom of these pesky California election ads is insufficient.  It needs to have a pathetic, hateful, and ideally terminally ill old man come on and say “I’m James Dobson, and I approve — and funded — this message.”  I am willing to negotiate about whether he should be forced to wear an SS uniform while reciting the sentence.

It’s rather a good thing that I didn’t get to write the No on Prop 8 tagline, because “Don’t be a fucking Nazi, asshole” is probably not the most even-handed approach to this issue.

mcgees.org has recently been accepted into the Atheist Blogroll, an international list of blogs on atheist topics written by atheists (no, this is not special, and took almost no effort on my part to accomplish.)  A random selection of twenty-five from the list are visible in my sidebar at right (if you’re viewing on the actual site and not on a feed reader.)

If you are interested to join, visit Deep Thoughts here.

Visit the following links to view posts on mcgees.org on the topics of atheism and religion.

OK, so I’m not very indie.  Tally Hall’s debut album was released on a microlabel in 2005, and it just came to my attention now, with its re-release on Atlantic.

What are they like?  Remember when Weezer first came out?  New and fresh, but simultaneously deeply respectful of what came before — and with a musical competence far exceeding what was necessary?  Weezer’s Blue Album could have been ineptly played, and still be a fantastic novelty record.  Same with this record.  It just happens to be full of excellent musicianship.

So, take that music.  Introduce wonderfully sophisticated humor that combines the surrealism of They Might Be Giants, the playfulness of Barenaked Ladies, and the constant surprise turns and lyrical efficiency of The Beastie Boys.  But that’s not all.  All this humor is interspersed with moments of poignancy similar to — I don’t even know.

The sky is deep and dark and eternally high
Many people think that’s where you go when you die

(”Do you?”)

Well, I think you return to obscure
Or wherever you were, before you were
But I won’t let you lose yourself in the rain

And:

Seconds tick like boulders whenever you don’t call:
Does it seem like that where you are, wherever you are?

When they sing “I’ve been living in a cardboard box … I graduated at the top.  I like to take advantage of the bourgeoisie” they aren’t just being clever.  AFAIK, these perennial overachievers gambled the fruits of all their labors on this project — in Rob Cantor’s case, for instance, a full ride scholarship to medical school (according to one source).  And they do it in a deliciously subversive manner — subversive of the middle class they might all easily fall into, were they less reflective.  They all wear matching outfits in their act, for instance, with matching conservative tie styles, except their ties are different colors.  But always the same color on the same guy.  And their stage names are the colors of their ties.  That’s pretty much Magritte right there.

I expect most of you will love every song.  I have to skip one: Two Wuv follows the tropes of cheesy love triangle rock, as the singer tries to choose between the two girls he loves.  The reveal: he’s choosing between the Olsen twins.  Would be funny, if creepy — except my brother and I know a guy who went to prison, and his actual shrine to the Olsen twins, with hundreds of articles and photos clipped from magazines, was used as evidence.  His screen name was “KidsRHot”, and he was caught in a sting involving what has (fascinatingly) been renamed “images of child sexual abuse” in some academic circles.  Kind of hard to laugh at someone stalking the Olsen twins after that.

Maybe one more will bother you, but I don’t think it should.  I’m sure there are people who think Banana Man to be racist.  I would love to argue with you about that.  Actual racism not the source of the poignancy of the song.  The character narrating the song is unreliable, and the more he thinks the song Day-O accurately describes life in Jamaica, the greater the pathos (and some word I don’t know that means patheticness — pretty sure patheticness is not a word) in his return to America.  I could be wrong about it, but I don’t think so.

Have I hyped this enough yet?  How about an Amazon link?

You don’t have to buy it through my affiliate link.  But you do have to buy it.  Do them a favor and buy it new, would you?  I hear they need new cardboard boxes.

OK, readers, you’ve gotta start helping me out by responding to stuff.  I’m starting to feel like there’s Time Enough At Last and I’ve just dropped my modem.

I can be more provocative if need be:  “Hey, being an atheist in America is a lot harder than not being heterosexual!  You folks actually have people in Congress!  And what is up with the whole ‘We’ll adopt a pejorative adjective and apply it to ourselves, but you aren’t allowed to use it?’  Does it have anything to do with talking in movie theaters?  And Sarah Palin keeps asking us who the real Barack Obama is, after twenty months of his campaign, with millions of dollars invested vetting him, and non-meese just met her seven weeks ago!  And the little we know about her is bad!  And Tolkien is overrated!  And when a celebrity commits suicide, it is absolutely ludicrous for one’s first reaction to be ‘His poor family!’  And if you think the Epimenides Paradox is paradoxical, you need to review your DeMorgan Laws!  And there is absolutely no reason why large terrestrial vertebrates could not evolve wheels!  And isn’t that a really good reason not to believe in Intelligent Design?”

Seriously, I beseech thee.  The joys of manic hypergraphia are attenuated without an obsessive readership.

I just took a walk to the little bodega up the street.

I know, I live in the San Fernando Valley, and it’s rather pompous of me to be talking about bodegas, but there it is, bigger than a liquor store, smaller than a grocery store, situated near a bazillion apartments, and I can’t really think of a better term for it.

Anyway, I went.  And walked back.  And outside my building were a couple in a car.  They could not have been younger than seventy.  Listening to music.  Sitting in a parked car, with enormous grins from ear to ear, listening to Tori Amos.  For real.  I’m not this creative.

I walked by the front seats and stopped beyond peripheral vision so I could crane my neck into the backseat — maybe see if there was a twelve-year-old protogoth granddaughter hunched in the back, being humored.  But no.  A seventy-year-old couple, alone, who are either very big fans or very hard of hearing, because they were positively blasting Silent All These Years.

I thought through if there was any way I could engage them about this.  The windows and doors were closed, and I’m huge, and hairy, and strong, and fully capable of scaring elderly people into untimely deaths, especially if they don’t hear or see me coming, and I do something like knock on their car.

So I smiled and walked on.  A huge smile.  They were born in the (First) Great Depression, and were having a driveway moment with Tori Amos.  This is unbelievably awesome.

A former colleague of mine had once written an expert program to help physicians diagnose different sleep disorders.  He thought the coolest (his word) occurred most frequently in otherwise healthy young men from Southeast Asia.  I don’t remember the name, but by his description, it is a degenerative neurological condition in which the sleep center of the brain is slowly destroyed.  One gets progressively more severe insomnia until the sleep center is gone, then is incapable of sleeping and dies (from lack of sleep) within a week.

The only sleep disorder I’ve found in Google that is correlated with being a young Southeast Asian man is SUNDS, but the details don’t match up.

SUNDS, though: “Sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome”.  That has been associated with an extension of the heart’s QT interval.  And I’m on medication that can cause lengthening of the QT interval, such that I have to have regular EKGs.

So yeah, panicked insomnia is fun.  I think, “Oh my God.  I am never going to be able to sleep, and I’m going to die.”  Completely rational, right?

Thought so.

I just knew that there had to be another reason for resenting being Southeast Asian — something other than Henry Kissinger alone.

Think the United States will start supporting the ICC when that fuck dies?

Thought not.

Wikipedia’s list of war crimes.  I think they forgot to list one of the possible crimes against peace: WAR.  Damn.  Am I missing something?  Isn’t war by definition a crime against peace?

Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, aggression, treaties, blah blah.  Can a country (the U.S., to pick one at random) really sidestep this by claiming that another nation (pick one) is trying to weaponize a particular metal?  A metal of which the first nation has already weaponized and deployed approximately 1.86 trillion times as much?  And actually fucking used those weapons on Real Live People?

I did finally get to sleep yesterday, and slept my normal 3.5 hours.  You know how you can cut your foot on a piece of broken glass, and only then realize just how many steps you take in a day? Insomnia is like that.  We tend to take sleep absolutely for granted, like breathing.  And then we forget how to.  Fun stuff.

Craig Ferguson was explaining that he had read that the best guard dogs were actually geese.  They would chase everyone away from the house, he said: even the owners of the house.

“They’re mean, pointless animals,” he continued.  “They’re like feathery divorce lawyers, and the world would be a better place without them.”

(Explanation of the post title.)

This was going to be a comment on the previous post, but got rather out of hand.  So here it is, as a FPP:

I was just being a smartass when I linked to the Wikipedia entry on “Joke”, but now I’ve read it.  Despite being deeply flawed and in need of serious overhaul, it was profoundly interesting.

In the section on joke “cycles” (as a form of literature), the following is noted: “the Rastus and Liza Joke Cycle, which Dundes describes as ‘the most vicious and widespread white anti-Negro joke cycle.’”  Wow.  OK.  Never heard of that.  Exactly what are the bounds of the “most vicious … anti-Negro joke”?  Would it qualify as the “most vicious joke” generally?  So I did a Google search, and could not find a single page that collected such jokes.  Not one.  Are the jokes so verboten that they cannot even be discussed historically and academically?

I don’t think this is a very good prohibition.  To be sure, I do not want, in any hedonistic fashion, to pollute my brain with hate.  But I do think it the responsibility of educated people to understand what the explored limits are, if only to keep them from recurring.  This is the way I felt when I read the plot synopses of the “most extreme” horror films at IMDB, or decided to find out what “putrid pornography” really entails, or eventually, although I am not looking forward to it, reading Mein Kampf.  It’s all nauseating, but so is visiting Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and I think those are very worthwhile ventures.

To show how unusual this belief seems to be, I guarantee you that the previous paragraph will get this entire site permanently banned by blacklisting and filtering technology, as soon as their spiders appear.  Some of you are not going to be able to browse this site at work any longer.  Sorry.

Also from the page: “Surrealist or minimalist jokes exploit semantic inconsistency, for example: Q: What’s red and invisible? A: No tomatoes.”  This is hilarious.  I can’t stop laughing at it.  This probably tells a great deal about my psyche and very little about the joke.

Also, don’t miss the entry for the World’s Funniest Joke, which offers four contenders.  I find only the first to be wickedly funny.  The second is amusing but very predictable, and is not even the funniest Holmes joke, in my opinion.  That was, I believe, provided by John Cleese in The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It (if I’m remembering correctly), in which the entire premise is that Holmes only appears brilliant in Watson’s accounts because Watson is an imbecile.  Consider the following (paraphrased):

Holmes: “I am Holmes and this is Watson.  He understands very little.”
Watson: (Patting him affectionately on the knee:) “Thank you, Holmes.”

Visitors to my home recalling their first introduction to my cat Sebastian may make a connection: I usually introduce him by saying, “This is Sebastian.  (Pause.)  He understands very little.”  This is funniest when familiar with the original.  It is surprising that Holmes should consider Watson feeble-minded.  It is not at all surprising that I should have a poor opinion of the semantic insight of my pet cat.  But it points to the extreme importances of meta-levels to my sense of humor.

The other two, apparently considered the funniest jokes in Britain and Australia are, curiously, funny only in their cruelty to women and children.  I didn’t even chuckle.

Here, for the record, are three of my favorite jokes:

Two lengths of rope walk into a bar.  One goes up to the bartender and orders two beers.  The bartender replies, “You’re a length of rope, aren’t you?”

The length of rope replies, “Yes, I am.”

The bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind in here.”

The length of rope sulks back to the table.  The other length of rope, upon seeing this, irrevocably tangles himself and unravels at his ends.  He approaches the bar and orders two beers.  The bartender replies, “You’re a length of rope, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m a frayed knot,” comes the reply.

The transcription of the second is listed wholesale from Metafilter:

Jesus is hanging on the cross, when he looks down and weakly calls out, “John…”

Wanting to hear the final words of the lord, John makes his way towards the base of the cross but is stopped by guards who break both of his legs and throw him back down the small hill.

After pulling himself up, John looks to the cross and still hears Jesus saying, “John…John”

Again, he pulls himself up the hill towards the cross, but again the guards beat him, this time until both of his arms are broken and push him back down the small hill.

After regaining consciousness, John looks up to the cross one last time, still hearing his name being called. Slowly, but surely, he crawls up the hill while in constant pain, and this time the guards let him pass, thinking there is no harm he can do in his condition.

Exhausted upon reaching the base of the cross, John looks up to Jesus and utters the words, “Yes, my Lord?”

Jesus looks down and then out across the land and says, “John… I can see your house from here.”

Finally:

Q: What’s the difference between a duck?

A: One leg is both the same.

I would contend the jokes are very different.  The first is an effective pun.  The second, while it appears cruel at first, is really effective because it subverts some of the most deeply-ingrained melodrama in our culture: the significance of every moment of Jesus Christ on the cross.  The third is hilarious because it syntactically mimics a very familiar pattern, but does so in a semantically empty fashion.

So, what are your favorites?  And is there a uniting theme to my faves that I am not perceiving?  They are maybe united by being vaguely “surreal”.  But that’s a rather weak inclusion.

Reading Gould just now, I ran across the word molluscan meaning pertaining to a mollusk.

This is so cool.  I haven’t been so excited about an animal adjective since cygneous.

Now I have to quickly learn how to program a TWAIN driver so that I can release a Linux scanning program called MolluScan.  It will, of course, need hooks into the Nautilus file browser, but I can skip having to write OCR functionality into it because no mollusk — not even a cephalopod — can, to the best of my knowledge, read.

(Yes, this is a joke.)

I have a tank of water containing three plastic jellyfish.  Through cleverly-contrived motors, the plastic jellyfish move in lifelike fashion.  To Niall they are beloved pets.  We buy them food at the local aquarium shop.  He always says “hi” to them.

This is the most severely I have ever lied to my son.  There’s no lie even close to this, which makes me extremely uncomfortable about this one whenever he greets the novelty fishtank.

Others in his life have no such qualms.  They lay myth on top of him, thinking that they are giving him charming stories.  Most of the stories are profoundly not charming, and I spend a large portion of my time with Niall trying to undo the Gordian knot of mythos that his grandparents, for instance, see fit to inculcate in him.

Why are they not charming?  Because Niall is hyperintelligent, hypersensitive, and possessing the typical (but still scary) sense of responsibility that frequently accompanies children of his brilliance.

Before the age of five, Niall would pick up every newspaper he saw and start to read it.  Really read it, with total comprehension.  When asked why, he would respond, “I have to make sure that everything is OK in the world.”  Egads.  Niall needn’t be worried about the content of newspapers as a preschooler.  That’s not lying, that’s responsible parenting.  The adults in his life need to take newspapers away from him.  And take myth away from him, I contend.

Of all his myths, he is most captivated — and disturbed — by the Babylonian/Judeo-Christian myth of Noah and the Ark.

In a recent reverie — that’s his default state, much to his teachers’ frustration — he began visibly shaking and was on the brink of tears.  I quickly asked him what was wrong.  He told me that he was “worried about the penguins on Noah’s Ark”, because Noah failed to take any fish onboard, and he was sure that penguins couldn’t go forty days without food.

Funny how this problem occurred to my then-four-year-old and escapes over half the adults in the U.S.

A big part of my education of him is differentiating “stories” from “real life”.  I have used many arguments that I’m rather proud of, but one of the coolest I’ve generated is that stories are fun if we control them and bad if they control us.

And he gets it.  Mostly.  He has come up with a charming alternate world called Character Land, for instance.  In Character Land, he explains, there are no real people, but every character (yes, he uses that word) from stories lives there.

I love this.  I was creating worlds by his age, too, and they are great tools for imagination — far better than those insipid, preachy, parochial Thomas the Tank Engine stories he likes.  I encourage him in this pursuit, and ask very leading questions.  Such as: “Wow!  So Nemo, Pooh, and Noah all live there?”

“Noah from the ark?” he asks.

“Yes,” I reply.

“Um, yes!” he responds.

Which is all very good until the next weekend I see him, by which point he has either forgotten my tutelage or been reinfected by sharp-clawed religionists.

So, parents: really, really, really think about the content of the stories you are ladening your children with.  Just because we were raised on them doesn’t mean you need to pass on the memes.  I am sure you don’t want your children to lie awake at night asking, “Why did God turn her into salt for looking at something?  Why did the woman amputate the tails of three disabled rodents with a carving knife?  Why is a fat man going to give little boys and girls lumps of dirty coal for Christmas if they’re naughty?”

To close with Thoreau, my son’s middle-namesake: “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.  No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”

So, that was a fun night of soul-crushing insomnia.  As opposed to sole-crushing, which are already flat, whether you’re an icthyologist or a podiatrist.

I had begged for four more hours of sleep to augment the 3.5 hours I had been getting.  Like the old joke about the fortunate Russian balloonist, something got mangled in the transmission, and I actually got 4 fewer hours of sleep.

Yes, I had a night of -0.5 hours of sleep.  Or, as my Pentium claims, -0.499838 hours, which is apparently close enough for non-scientists.

As you can see, negative sleep leaves me in a state in which my only means of conversation is bad jokes (”Did you hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the dude wearing lederhosen?  You see, the dude wearing lederhosen thought the golfer thought himself to be Arnold Palmer.  He absolutely had no grapes, though, which is funny because horses named Thorndike can’t talk.”)

Successively blunter mechanisms — we are now at “cinder blocks” — have been wished for to pound my brain into submission.

Sigh.  Which is actually more characters in HTML (<b><i>Sigh</i></b>) than ””Sigh””, but is paradoxically much easier to remember.  I don’t want to hack Wordpress right now to give me four actual straight single quotes around that, so please use your imagination.

A certain patient Mississippi Penguin will wonder whether I succeeded in finding legal papers in the allotted interval.  The answer is, “No, that would be absurdly responsible.”

””Sigh””.  That’s “double-secret-bold-italic”.

Have I gotten a joke in for all my subscribers?  Answer: No, not close.

Quick, what’s the difference between a duck!?  Answer: Mohammad Chung.

III.I.72, which is entirely different from the cryptic percentage at the bottom of my sidebar that has been so far incomprehensible to readers, although if no one else, Karina should get it.  Entirely different.

Behold sentence fragments. Another.  Good device.  Will be used more later.

As Alan Ruck would say after being handed the phone: “Oh, darn….”

♪I had negative sleep, negative sleep, negative sleep, and I’m profoundly not stoned.♪

Shame on your browser if you see something different (and uglier) than the musical notes above.

Check the Passing the Torch post for what is actually more intelligent writing than this.  Give me four more hours: I’m going for Outlaw’s record, which I will rehabilitate with a eulogy for a dead hamster.  A mixed-race hamster.

Maybe it’s time for the serious stuff: a memorized Eddie Izzard DVD.

(My guess: the Russian balloonist is bothering you most.  Should we have a contest to determine who is most conversant in bad jokes?  The answer is not found in Mission: Impossible, but it’s worth entering anyway, as I’ll snail mail something bizarre from my apartment to the winner.  Honorable mention [and imaginary prize] to the person who successfully counts the number of obscure references in this post.)

Python.  Flight of the Conchords.  Python.  Tenacious D.  Python.  Barenaked Ladies.  And did I mention Python?

Tally Hall.  Brilliantly, amazingly, infectiously, almost irritatingly awesome.  You have been warned.

Three days ago I cut myself on a clean, dry, stainless-steel knife.  The wound was on the deeper side of superficial.  I have been applying Neosporin several times per day, and there is no obvious sign of infection.

I have been experiencing moderate to severe joint pain in my left jaw joint for 24 hours.  I also have sensitivity along the vein adjacent to the cut, reminiscent of post-surgical vasculitis I once had.

I believe my last tetanus booster was no more than six years ago, when I was already an adult.  I expect that I have a minor cut and that I’ve been clenching my jaw due to divorce-related stress and that the other pain is unrelated.  But a part of me is worried.

I currently have no health insurance.

Thoughts?

I read once that specific food cravings can signal nutritional deficiencies.  I think they cited this on “House, M.D.“, too.  I don’t know if it’s true or not.

In related news, I’ve drunk a liter of lemon juice today, straight from the bottle, and wish that I had more.

In my apartment complex, the interior-facing above-ground-floor apartments have balconies of sorts: little stucco protrusions from the balustrade.  Walking back to my apartment tonight, I saw an attractive Mediterranean-looking young woman leaning over one and saying something quietly.  Presumably no one but she could make out the words.

I had my mouth open to exclaim, “She speaks: O, speak again, bright angel!” but bit my tongue — not so much for “esoteric” as for “creepy“.

There’s a great lyric in the Queensrÿche song Bridge, written by Geoff Tate [correction from reader: Chris Degarmo penned the lyrics].  I use it as a rotating quote on this site.  It reads, “And so I sit here through the night, and write myself to sleep — and time keeps ticking.”

In such a position I find myself tonight.  I am outraged to the point of violent nausea by what happened today with Jennifer’s attorney.

As regular readers know, Jennifer has filed for divorce.  She has retained counsel — wholly appropriately.  Jenn scheduled an appointment last week (and just told me about it) to meet in his office.  Alarm bells went off.  Why should I go to his office?  Every experience I’ve ever heard is of divorce attorneys serving one with papers.  Plus, I was annoyed.  So I told Jenn I wasn’t going.

We’re still on last week.  Jenn called me from her mobile, in his office, and handed the attorney her phone.  The attorney told me that I needed to come to his office to get everything notarized.

“Why can’t you serve me with the papers and let me notarize them?” I asked.

“You might not do it right,” he said.

Hm.  I told him I’d think about it, and to call me on Wednesday when I had made up my mind.

Jenn was distressed.  Jenn, through this whole thing, has honestly, honestly been working in what she believed were the best interests of Jenn, Niall, and me.  Awesome.  I wanted to recognize this for her.  But she has been fed a line of malarky by the attorney, with fire and brimstone warnings about what would happen if I didn’t go into his office to fill out the paperwork.  I could completely lose custody!  Jenn would lose all say in the uncontested divorce and a seventy-year old judge would (not could) rule against me, drive me further to the poorhouse, and keep me from seeing my son.  The attorney had fully convinced her that she had no say in this matter.

Yes, absurd, I know.  But stick with me.  I’m not writing this to defame Jenn in any way.  Stick with this.

Jenn called back to get my address for the service of the papers.  I gave it to her, and told her I would be expecting the papers.

Jenn then called my mother to try to convince her of the absolute necessity of following the attorney’s advice.  Jenn was upset.  My mom was upset.  My mom, in the nicest way possible, tried to explain to Jenn that she was being sold a line (my mom and I hadn’t talked about this yet — this is independent.)  My mom then called me to pass on what Jenn had said.

OK, so Jenn thinks she needs it.  She thinks she is acting rationally and in my best interests, and it’s worth recognizing.  I still didn’t want to walk into the lion’s den.

Jenn called to plead that I attend the new meeting, scheduled for Friday (today).  I acquiesced.

I don’t have an operational car right now.  I needed to finagle a ride.  From Woodland Hills.  To Santa Fucking Ana.  I tapped my dad to chauffeur.

“Explain to me again why you need to go to his office?” asked my dad warily.  “This whole thing stinks.”

“I know,” I said.  “I’m doing it for Jenn.”  My dad picked me up in the early morning to drive to Orange County.

When I first got into his office, I was not completely off-put.  He told me he would validate my parking ticket.  He seemed personable.  I sat down.

The first form he set in front of me was a statement of my debts.  I was told to sign it.

“How do you know my debts?” I asked.  He told me that I had filled it out six months ago.

I asked to see it.  “These numbers have changed.”

“So?” he asked.

“You’re asking me to sign this under penalty of perjury that everything is correct.  These are not correct any longer.  We need to correct it,” I said.

He got flustered.  “Well, if you change your numbers, she’ll have to change her numbers!”

“OK,” I said.  “Let’s change them both.”

He changed them, under my guidance.  He didn’t change hers.  He asked me to sign it.

“I’d like to run this by my lawyer,” I said.

Jenn and the lawyer both got upset.  He started to browbeat me.  “You just gave me these numbers.  I put them on the form.  What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “That’s why I want to run it by my lawyer.”

More pressure.  Dunno why, but I signed.

The next form was to attest that my list of assets had been correctly filled out.

“Could I see it, please?” I asked.

“See what?” he said.

“The list of assets that you have.”

He handed me a list.  It listed my bank account balances (all wrong), valued my car at six times its actual value, and for other assets, listed a value of zero.  That’s for all other stuff, like household items and collectibles.

“These aren’t zero,” I said.

More upset lawyer.  Honestly, I had no idea why.

“What happens if I have assets that aren’t listed on the page?” I asked.

“Then we would be — er, she would be — entitled to a hundred percent of them,” came the response.

So we fixed the numbers.  We were about to finalize them.  I said that I had two lawsuits in litigation, and asked if I needed to list them.  I was told that, yes, if I didn’t list them, even as “unknown”, “they” would be entitled to 100% of them.

I asked Jenn if she was planning on making a claim to that money.  I expected the answer to be “no”.  The answer was “yes” — she was making a claim, that she hadn’t disclosed and we hadn’t discussed.  I again said that I would like to run it by my lawyer.  More upset people.  More browbeating.

Actually, at this point, I can’t remember if I was browbeat into signing it or not.  But I was already getting queasy.

Another exchange that can be omitted for brevity followed.  I’m trying to get to the piece de resistance.  As follows.

I was asked to sign a form saying that I agreed with their description of the case.  Which I hadn’t fucking seen.  Let’s be clear.  I hadn’t seen the damn thing.  I requested that, hey, maybe I’d like to read the fucker first.

I started reading it on his monitor.

Here it gets good.

There was a paragraph attesting that both Jenn and I were in good health, able to work and earn our full income.  He was trying to slide past this one.

“Whoa,” I said.  “That’s not true.”

“OK, we’ll take it out,” he said.

“No, actually I’d like it to state that I’m disabled and unable to work.  That’s the truth,” I said.

The lawyer got a wicked smile.  “I’d advise her against that,” he said.

“Then I’m not signing it, at least until I run it by my lawyer,” I said.  After all, this could jeopardize my pending lawsuits, being subpoenable by opposing council.

“I’m not going to put down your disability without proof!” he thundered.

“OK.  That’s fine.  I’ll go to a doctor this week, get the proof, and fax it to you,” I said in honest equanimity.

He leaned forward.  “You know what, I’ve been really patient with you.  But the truth is you’re not a very nice guy.  I’ll see you in court.”

I smiled a wry smile and held up my parking ticket.

“No, I’m not going to validate you!” he near-screamed.

“OK, I said.  Bye!”  I stood up and walked out the door.

I was two steps past, really leaving, and the lawyer said, “Josh Josh Josh!  Come sit down!”

I spun and glared.  “That’s Mr. McGee,” I said.

“Mr. McGee, come and sit down.”

“I’m not going to sit down,” I said.

“Come and sit down!”

“I’m not going to sit down,” I said.

“If you take this to court, it will cost you ten thousand dollars.  You don’t have ten thousand dollars.”

“Let me understand this,” I said.  “Your plan is to insult me, then threaten me?”

“I’m not threatening you.  Come and sit down.  You don’t want this to go to court.”

I stood and equivocated.  I finally said, “I’m stepping out for five minutes to make a phone call.”

I walked (wrong direction, twice, which kinda ruined the moment) to the lobby and called my dad.  I told him what had happened.

“Get the hell out of there!” he said.  “Go back, tell him ‘Fuck you!’, and walk out.”

I hung up.  Actually I pushed the red button, which isn’t quite as dramatic.  I decided I wasn’t even going back.  I went down the elevator, got in the car, and called Jenn from my cell.  I told her I wasn’t coming back.

“Do you really think I’m trying to screw you?” she asked incredulously.

“I trust you,” I told Jenn (mostly true).  “I trust that lawyer about as far as I can throw him.”

We had a surreal conversation, which could be distilled to one statement.  Not hard to choose, because it’s the one I said five times.

“You have three options, Jenn.  You can have this lawyer serve me with papers, I’ll have my attorney review, and I’ll return them.  Or you can fire this lawyer, have a new lawyer serve me with papers, and I’ll run them by my attorney and return them.  Or you can set a court date.  If you don’t want this to go to court, this ball’s in your court.”

Let’s go back a bit.  I’m not a very nice person?  What, is he going to tell on me to the playground monitor?  Not be my best friend any more?  Tell people that I wear Spiderman underwear?  What the fuck?

“Like my reason for being here is to get you to like me,” my dad said later, playing me.

“I wonder how many people that works on,” my mom said later.

What?  The?  Fuck?

An epilogue.  Jenn is not a stupid person.  But she has a dramatically miscalibrated bullshit detector.  She was probably socialized this way, as a female in a religious family.  But she trusts too easily.  Way too easily.  One time, when she had a flat tire, she called me (panicking — she wouldn’t do that now, to her credit) and I talked her through getting someone to call out and change it (she was about eighty minutes away).

“What should I do with the tire?” she asked.  I pictured a shredded tire.

“Put it in your trunk, or have the tow truck driver take the tire away,” I said.

She chose the latter option.  Almost.  She gave the driver her wheel.  He was happy to take it, which is probably connected to the fact that buying a used replacement cost hundreds of dollars.  She was happy to send it away.

So, trusting.  Great, in a friendly, well-monitored twelve-year-old.  Not so great in an adult woman who is making choices to affect peoples’ lives for at least the next thirteen years.

I don’t know if Jenn still reads my blog.  I have no reason to expect her to read it.  I don’t read hers.  But I dearly hope that she will reflect on this.  Or ask her dad.  Or her best friend, who’s a trial attorney.  Get someone to fill her in on why I might distrust her attorney, who is counseling me not to retain counsel.  She is not stupid.  She really, really isn’t.  And I know she’s not trying to screw me.  I just want her to realize her power, fire this scoundrel, and let us get on with this in a reasonable fashion.

I’m not sure if writing this helped.  I think it did.  I’m not as nauseated.  And you’re welcome to post, or (maybe better) send me private email.  If any reflective person thinks I’m unreasonable, with a better bullshit detector, please tell me.

But I’m not wrong.  Shit.  I’m not wrong.  What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?  What indeed.