It’s the very rare day like that that makes the two-sided
fireplace (gas) in the Sunnyvale Public Library make sense.
Or it would if they hadn’t reorganized the area to
hold book shelves instead of armchairs. It’s really odd—you have to edge your
way around the new books on display to get close to the fire.
As you know, as an antidote to a completely and utterly crap week (which seems to have slopped over into the past couple of
days; but I’m counting it as overflow from before and therefore banishing it
to the past), I checked out the complete series DVDs of Due South from the Mountain View PL, and have been watching them,
episode after episode.
I’ve not yet got to one of my favorites, “All
the Queen’s Horsemen”, which features Leslie Nielsen doing his looniest
best to “maintain the right”. But I’ve been thinking about the song they sing
in it: “Ride Forever”—it’s the RCMP’s Musical Ride, see, and they’re on this train
about to be gassed by an Insane terrorist. Well, watch it yourself.
But, while I’m waiting for a new external DVD/CD
drive for my laptop (just don’t ask, okay?) to arrive from Amazon, I’ve watched
a couple of YouTube clips with the song in it:
As something of an aside, I sometimes slip a cog
when it comes to picking up words in lyrics. I was beyond voting age before I
realized the opening line in that one chorus from Messiah is “All we like sheep” and not “Oh, we like sheep”...
So for some reason, although I did hear the Mounties
proclaiming “you can’t keep horsemen in a cage”, I swapped out the G for a V, and started wondering why you can’t
keep horsemen in a cave? You could, you know. If it was a big enough cave.
Depending on how many horsemen you actually, you know, had. And whether or not they had their horses with them. I'm just sayin'.
But then I started wondering what other letters I
could swap in for the G to find things you can’t keep horsemen in.
Cake—kind of hard to keep horsemen in a cake. Unless…no,
I’m not coming up with any kind of a cake you could keep horsemen in.
Cane—nope, can’t do that.
Care—well that’s just being silly.
The one that I kind of like, though, is cape. You can keep horsemen in capes, can’t you? I
would actually like to see horsemen in capes.
So, it’s looking as though Prince Harry may be off
the hook, since the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have announced that they
are expecting a child, who will be (either male or female, thanks to recent
changes to the rules of succession) third in line to the British throne.
I personally find all the media hoo-hah a little
extreme. According to this report
in the Guardian, there’s been
round-the-clock coverage of the “event” of the sort you’d expect for a
cataclysmic earthquake or presidential election. Except that there’s no one to
interview and nothing to report beyond (apparently) that the Duchess is glued
to a throne of a different sort.
Yes—the cat sneaked out of the bag because Kate has
been hospitalized for severe morning sickness.
Evidently broadcast executives have decided that
they need multiple news teams on the scene—at a hospital to which they have no
access—in order to speculate six ways from Sunday (boy? girl? name(s)?) about
things that in a normal world wouldn’t be considered news outside of a zoo with
a pregnant panda.
Even the Guardian
itself managed to hawk up a hairball of nonsensical factoids: “It is understood
she is less than 12 weeks pregnant, possibly only two months. The duchess is
likely to be taking anti-sickness tablets and have a drip in her arm so she
can receive fluids intravenously.” (Plus: look at all their sidebars.)
Well, duh! This is worth scrambling “11 production
crew for the hospital watch” by ABC? Our
ABC, not the Aussies’?
I’m just seriously dumbfounded that people are losing
their minds to this degree over something that has less and less relevance to
the real world. (Talking about maintaining that whole monarchy thing as
anything other than a symbolic nod to tradition.)
On the other hand, Harry’s probably out with his mates
downing a few and feeling massive relief that there’s soon to be one more
body between him and the throne.
I’ve been working with an organization
that’s trying to help people shorten the job transition time & consequently
lower the economic & emotional cost of being out of work. I mostly like it
because what I’m doing as a product manager has a visible effect on the service,
& I think it’s a worthwhile effort.
But it’s not without its challenges.
I’ve described the executive director as being like
a puppy at a barbecue—always running off after another scent. When I mentioned
this description to a person in the psychology business, she commented, “Sounds
like he has attention deficit disorder.”
Well—I guess that would be the clinical definition
of being a puppy at a barbecue.
Those who know me will get a laugh out of the karmic
kick of me having to continually bring another CEO back to the topic at hand at
every meeting, & having to continually make the same case for something he’s
agreed to in the past but wants reconsidered within the intervening 48 hours.
But I’m thinking it’s hard to top the three-hour meeting
I had with him the day before Thanksgiving, when I mapped out some new
functionality by filling up a wall-to-wall whiteboard three times (draw it out,
photograph it & erase it) with functional flow & arrows looping all
over the place for a new feature set he wants in place by the end of December.
As I was working on the last layer, trying to see
what might be missing, & continually asking, “What happens then?”—he suddenly
chirped: “What is your degree in?”
“Hanh?”
“What’s your degree in?”
“I have a bachelor’s in European studies & a
master’s in US history.”
“It’s just that you have…such a logical mind.”
“Well—the whole point of having a liberal arts
education is that it teaches you how to think.”
“Yeah—but you think so logically. For not being an
engineer.”
NaNoWriMo
ended officially on Friday. My final tally as of then was 75,031 words.
I still have miles to go—I reckon I’m about halfway
through the plot, and I still have a lot of blah-blahs to fill in. And a
shedload of research required to finish both. And then I'll have to edit the living daylights out of it, because this sucker gives new meaning to the term "rough draft".
Still—I’m pleased that I hit my goal, that I got
started & that I can still drive my malignant narcissist bastard bad guy
into the ground.
