Jenn was visiting family yesterday.  I always sleep a bit strangely in her absence.  A bit strangely.

Last night, I retired at midnight and set my alarm for 7 a.m.  Now, post-Chiari, I can actually sleep when I want!  This time, though, I awoke at 5.  I was naked, on top of all the sheets and blankets, perpendicular to the bed, with my legs hanging off one side.  I was having a bizarre dream that involved lying on something smooth, hard, cool, and undulating while drinking a one liter screwdriver made of Absolut® Vodka and Sunny Delight®.  It also involved a shovel or something.

This (the undulating screwdriver thing) is not something I would normally do, partially because I no longer drink alcohol, and partially because it’s just plain weird.  In any case, Jenn will be home tonight, and would severely punish any attempt to “go perpendicular on [the bed's] ass”.  How welcome.

…at 59% of my current weight.

Either there is sky-splitting thunder and lightning in the next valley, or the Inland Empire is being bombed.  I suppose I’ll know tomorrow.  Or later today, that is.  I still can’t fucking sleep.

You can use my utility to generate a random English word.  You are welcome to call it from scripts.

I’ve upgraded my Random TinyURL script (it was giving a lot of “not found” errors, and I think I figured out why: “o” and “0″ are not present in any assigned TinyURLs).  Try it out, and please report the TinyURL of any TinyURL failures (not 404s).

Is there a date that you accidentally date intervals to, when you are determining how old something is, instead of using the current date?  For me, when I see something was produced in, say, 1976, I first think “That’s almost twenty years ago,” not “That was thirty years ago.”  Some part of my brain is still locked in the mid nineties.  Never to escape?

It’s difficult for me not to dress all in green every day.  Many mornings I pick out my clothes, lay them out, then realize every article I’ve selected is green.  Some days, like today, I give in to it: green Levis, green Polo sweatshirt, green hemp shoes.  My t-shirt’s black, but you can’t see it.  This has been going on for over a decade.  When it started I was in high school, and my mother would warn me that I end up looking military, like I was dressing all in camos.  These days I just make sure the shades are slightly different so that it doesn’t end up quite as imposing.

I’ve known several people who never dressed in anything but black, but green?  That’s weird.

A British columnist is making fun of Americans for their obsession with competitive dog shows.  Something about residue on cooking vessels?

I startled myself by getting 7 out of 10 correct on The Guardian’s How much do you know about the Commonwealth? quiz, garnering a score of “impressive”.

If you’re thinking of being clever and adding a few drops of essential oil to ink to make scented ink, don’t.  It doesn’t work.  And if your next question is whether I ruined $13 worth of ink with this experiment, the answer is yes.

127 mph over the speed limit?  Who knew radar guns went up that high?

The PowellsBooks newsletter has a bizarre and addictive feature called, and I’m quoting this literally, “Fup. Store Cat.”  Yes, the periods included.  As far as I can gather, Fup is the name of their store cat; that’s a picture to the right.  “Fup. Store Cat.” is like a train wreck: you can’t quite pull your eyes away, even if you want to.  You see, every newsletter presents a new “chapter” (just a couple hundred words) about Fup’s adventures.  In each chapter Fup, joined by compatriots Bear, Zooey, and Wiggums, adventure their way through unwieldy prose:

Let’s follow a path in the sun,” Bear purrs.

“There are no paths in the sun,” Wiggums reminds him.  “You’re sitting in the last patch of sun we’re liable to find for three days.”

Up and up the fir trees go, so far beyond the leafy pockets nearer to the ground that there’s no telling where they stop. Their tops end somewhere in the sky, is about all you can safely say.

“We could climb until we’re above the tree line,” Fup suggests, “but that would be an odd thing to do, seeing as it’s trees we’re looking for.”

“Trees you’re looking for?” someone says.

Fup looks at Bear.  Then Fup and Bear both look at Wiggums.  An echo would be the most natural explanation, except that they hadn’t noticed an echo before.

Fup repeats herself, but a little louder this time: “Trees we’re looking for.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

Down by the creek, Zooey begins to growl.

They search the woods around them, but it’s like trying to find fish in a deep lake, Fup realizes, staring into the tangle of leaves and branches.  She notices for the first time how loud the bird chatter has become — or had she not been listening before?  She can’t see a single bird for all the leaves and branches, but suddenly birds are all she can hear.

Each time the newsletter arrives, I’m presented with my WTF moment for the day.

If you are bored, you can make a model Starship Enterprise out of an old floppy disk.

It was 103°F (39°C) in West Hills when I left for work this morning.  This is quite interesting, as long as this temperature represents a normal variance and not the effect of global warming.  Perhaps more interesting is that half an hour away in Thousand Oaks the local temperature was only 88°F (30°C).

I went to Weather.com to check for averages and records for 29 May.  The average high is 83°F (28°C).  The record highs for 28 and 30 May are 104°F (40°C) and 106°F (41°C), respectively, putting 103°F in the region of the record highs for adjacent days.  But the record temperature for today, 29 May, is 113°F (45°C), set in 1984!  This temperature is also the record high for the entire month of May.

The Weather.com weather shows Thousand Oaks now at 96°F (35°C).  Its record high?  Also 113°F in 1984.  I am glad I was in Japan at that time.

I present a couple of cheesy mnemonics that for some reason jumped into my head from years ago.  Sailing vessels have two sets of running lights, colored differently on each side so that one can tell in which direction the vessel is sailing.  Many people have trouble remembering which side (port or starboard) matches with which color light (red or green.)  So: “Port wine is red.”  For some people this is not much assistance as they cannot remember which side is port and which is starboard.  So: “Port and Left each consist of four letters.”

You are now all set if you want to head off to sea.  But if you want to pack persimmons to take with you, you face another challenge.  In the stores one regularly finds two kinds of persimmons, Fuyu and Hachiya.  One is sweet and can be eaten out-of-hand, the other is highly astringent and is good for cooking.  So remember: Fuyu persimmons are shaped like tomatoes and are sweet like tomatoes, while Hachiya persimmons are shaped like acorns and are astringent like acorns.

If the reader knows all of this already, this probably counts as the most useless post ever to appear on mcgees.org.