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29.4.02
TERMIUM Plus®
Whoops. Meant to look at the blog, not add to it. What the hell. One of the upshots of the harrowing driving experience yesterday was being stark awake at 3 a.m., unable to sleep and worrying about money, life in general, etc. etc. Mel was also awake wired on moving-stress and end-of-term stress in general, and I told her a story to get her to sleep, the touching tale of a cat named Moofy who leaves home because the little girl there pulls her ears. Moofy tries living in a house with an old woman who wants her to eat mice (but Moofy likes mice), a hunter who wants to hunt Moofy (obviously a bad idea for Moofy), a dwarf with sixty-three other cats (Moofy likes some independence) and finally, a really nice lady who treats Moofy well and pets her and gives her special food. After a while, though, Moofy realizes that although the little girl pulled her tail and tugged her ears and rubbed her fur the wrong way, it was still her little girl and she had to go back home. So Moofy went home.
Either a touching story for kids, or a harrowing approval of domestic abuse. Make of it what you will! It was 3:30 in the bloody morning.
NP: Still Occhipinti.
Matt Shepherd 29.4.02
TERMIUM Plus®
A nightmarish day yesterday, involving moving all of my girlfriend's belongings from Lennoxville to Sherbrooke during a 90-minute time envelope to rent, load, unload and return a 24-foot cube truck in the midst of a mighty bloody blizzard. In all honesty, 24 hours later it all seems like a strange dream -- two solid hours of adrenaline, fevered anxiety and cars skidding around like Disney on Ice. Quite possibly the worst experience of my entire life -- no, that's hyperbole. But worth commemorating with haiku:
Moving day is here.
An unseasonal blizzard
Stupid fucking truck.
NP: Michael Occhipinti, "Creation Dream"
Matt Shepherd 29.4.02
26.4.02
MOTREC
"Okay, men. We need to hit the Jerries hard in that bunker -- get all over 'em before they know what's going on. Jenkins, you try to get up top there, toss some grenades through the slit. Jasper, Harries, you guys back him up. Lasker, you cover us. Ready?"
"Yes, Sarge."
"You got it, Sarge."
"Uh..."
"Uh, Jasper?"
"My leg's asleep, Sarge."
"What?"
"I can't run across that field when my leg's asleep. I'll be all stumbly and stuff."
"Jasper, what the HELL --"
"Well, jeez, Sarge, we've been crouched in this trench for almost fifteen minutes. I musta sat on my leg wrong. It's all tingly."
"Walk on it, Jasper."
"I can't walk on it, Harries, you stupid. If I stand up, they'll shoot me. Give me a minute. Rub my leg, would'ya, Sarge?"
"Get bent, Jasper."
"Naw, really. I gotta get the circulation back."
"Okay, okay. Better?"
"Yeah. Think I can run now."
"Okay, men. We're gonna do this fast, before Jerry can get a bead on us. One -- two --"
"Ooh! Ooh!"
"What is it, Lasker?"
"My arm's asleep now."
"WHAT?"
"Well, I was getting all ready to cover you and holding the rifle and everything, but I guess I held it wrong while you guys were messing around with Jasper's leg, there. Now my arm's asleep. I can't cover you if my arm's asleep, I won't be able to aim or nothin'."
"Judas Priest."
"And my foot itches, Sarge. I think it's the water in my boot."
"Look, men, we have to take that bunker out. I don't complain about my bunions, do I?"
"You have bunions, Sarge?"
"That's not the point."
"Sometimes I get the bursitis real bad."
"Oh? My mom used to use raw steak and lemon juice on my dad's shoulder."
"Hey, great idea."
"CAN WE PLEASE ATTACK THE BUNKER?"
"What?"
"The bunker. We need to recapture it from the Germans."
"I thought it was some guy named Jerry."
"That's what we call -- never mind."
"Hey, the Germans are leaving."
"What?"
"Yeah, they're all coming out of the bunker and stretching their legs. I guess it gets all crampy crouching in there all day."
"I don't believe this -- well, shoot 'em!"
"What?"
"Shoot 'em!"
"That doesn't seem very sporting, Sarge."
"What sporting? They're in a concrete bunker with six-inch walls! We're in a hole! Shoot, already!"
"Huh. Good point, Sarge..."
RATTA TATTA TATTA.
War is HELL.
Matt Shepherd 26.4.02
22.4.02
MOTREC
Sorry 'bout the lack of posts lately, people. Busy as a dog on speed.
From a recent e-mail to The Phil of Skinny Panda:
The truly amazing thing about Webcomics is the sheer number of people
"publishing." Would I be writing a comic strip to self-publish little wee
booklets that I staple together in the basement? Nah. Would 75% of the
amateurs (not using the term in a derogative way) out there have stuck with
it for three or four years (which many have now) if there weren't this
medium? Probably not. All over the world, the presence of the media is
generating more art, and better artists. I think that's rather wild.
np: quiet...
Matt Shepherd 22.4.02
12.4.02
Gone And Forgotten
I deeply and desperately wish Captain GAF would get off his &?%$ ASS and do another installment of Gone And Forgotten, the only thing on the Web that has ever made me -- no poop -- literally WEEP with laughter. Now, you have have to have the same grounding in Silver Age comic-bookery as me to truly dig the GAF groove, but if you're a comic book kind of person (or even not, probably) between the ages of 22 and 35, you may just pee yourself laffing. God, I wish he'd get back on the stick, because we can all use a few more laughs in these days of Venezuelan turmoil.
Matt Shepherd 12.4.02
Skinny Panda
I wanted to bring you a perfect bit of sunshine, snapshotted on this ideal spring day, a sprightly piece of wonder embedded deep within my braincells and spirited over to you. But then I got sleepy, and lost it, and now it's buried under some old G.I. Joe cartoons and kind of muddled up with some question about Aristotelean philosophy. So a perfect piece of sun shines on Aristotle in the muddled rotten basement of my brain, but I had been trying to save it for you. But the sun still shines, and there's the chance that I might be able to catch another perfect moment when these trucks stop rolling past...
Matt Shepherd 12.4.02
10.4.02
Putting the Id back in idiot
Ever get the weird feeling that if you cut off your TV and the Internet and the radio and lost all your books and magazines and...well...completely isolated yourself from all media, and just existed in a small confined area and wrote and wrote and wrote, that you'd consume your own imagination? Thinking and writing in smaller and smaller concentric circles, a diminishing spiral of data, until you got down to your core ideas, or even one core thought, your mantra, upon which all else is built and grows out of.
Me neither, really.
NP: Bjork, Homogenic
Matt Shepherd 10.4.02
Todd and Penguin--the comic strip now with more Penguinny goodness!
Polar bears.
There's the problem.
Not enough polar bears.
If there were more polar bears, see, they'd eat more fish, and scare more people. And if there were more polar bears, they'd start being forced further and further south by overpopulation, and start evolving to be more, like, capable of living in non-Northern climes. And if the polar bears started to evolve to live further south, well, who knows when they'd stop? They'd probably get smarter, too, and funnier, as part of the whole evolution process, because they'd be competing against smart funny humans with Ski-Doos. And as they evolved smarter and funnier and capable of driving Ski-Doos, they'd become better stunt drivers and better able to act, too, because a good part of stunt driving is acting, right?
So we'd wind up with all these clever, funny polar bears stunt-driving Ski-Doos and putting on community theatre shows of things like Leaving Home and other Canadian theatre classics, and developing a keen sense of pathos and desolation, the two prime requisites for Canadian Drama. With such a sense of pathos and desolation, it would only be a matter of time before a particularly clever polar bear with typing skills would produce the Great Canadian Novel, and be interviewed often on CBC television. Taken in by its wit and charm, all Canadians would want to befriend these charming, witty, community-theatre producing polar bears, and would rapidly all get eaten.
Polar bears.
Let's go.
NP: The Orb, Cydonia
Matt Shepherd 10.4.02
8.4.02
Neil Gaiman's Journal
Just read some of "The Most-Read Journal On The Internet."
...yeah.
NP:
Matt Shepherd 8.4.02
Putting the Id back in idiot
See below, and tell me I don't just exude "I just saw a performance of 'Under Milk Wood' last night." I won't believe you if you do.
NP: Mingus Big Band, "Gunslinging Birds"
Matt Shepherd 8.4.02
Amarillo Bay presents The Book of the Dead by James Strickland
And we slept then, nestled in dustgrey comforter and curled like cats in the unsun of midnight, blinds open to receive the darkness and let it splay over us like a sob. We hugged in our sleep, myself, forty-seven and drunk on salt air, and her, whom I loved so much that I'd burnt her name in my arm with a white-hot poker some fifteen years before, on a bet and a dare and mad with panic and loss. She'd come back to me eight years later, midway through the interim, when the burns on my arms had healed into a shining puckered scrawl and she could barely make out that it had been her, burnt in, and then best only when tracing my cold smooth scars in the pitchblack.
We slept like those who had spent life without waking, born to a half-century slumber on beds of wire and water, slept like alcoholics having their first long drink after fifty years of abstinence, slept like sheep in the darkened folds of the shepherd's cloak, whisper-quiet in the mediterranean night.
NP:
Matt Shepherd 8.4.02
7.4.02
Wotta mess.
So over breakfast yesterday, I was talking to Her Melness about Alan Moore and his interesting off-the-cuff analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde being a symbol of repressed homesexuality in Victorian England; mainly marvelling that Moore (one of my favourite authors, and one that apparently inspires alliteration) came up with this introspection and tossed in a few supporting facts completely off the top of his head. Mel said that it wasn't all THAT hard with classic English literature, so I decided to re-align Moby Dick as a parable of man's search for God (pretty obvious, considering that God is big, and so are whales).
Three minutes later, things were getting eerily plausible -- not quite 100% on-thesis, but close to. Consider that 'Moby Dick' may be not the story of Man's quest for God, necessarily, but the struggle of Jesus on the cross, and the futility of vengeance against the divine. Ahab is Jesus, see, and he's got a wooden leg -- the cross -- because of Moby "God" Dick (Moby bit his leg off, if you don't know the story). So God has nailed him to his cross, and he is on a mission of hateful rage, spurred on by the demonic 'foreigners' on board the ship, to destroy God. He is aided by pagans and good Christenfolk alike, all of whom fear and loathe God as being inscrutable, almighty, and, well, worth a lot of money if they catch Him (???).
And so on. ANALYZE SOME CLASSIC LITERATURE TODAY, KIDS! It's good for the blood and gets your brain all hotted up.
NP: Nothing. It's quiet (7:30, but 'really' 6:30 because of Daylight Savings) and Mel is still asleep.
Matt Shepherd 7.4.02
5.4.02
Welcome to Catholic.net
Discovered while translating: Catholic schools are most appropriately referred to as "confessional schools" as a group name.
Why not just call them 'guilt schools' and get it over with?
Matt Shepherd 5.4.02
nutrition
As an experiment, I decided to spend a month recently eating only liquid foods: yogurt, drinkin' boxes, soups. I decided to include some borderline foods like chili and mashed potatoes. My criteria was pouring. If I could pour the foodstuff in question, it was edible. I wanted to spend a full thirty days consuming pourable foods.
By day three, I had made a quick intuitive leap: most foods are indeed pourable if you want them to be, and if you're willing to invest a little time and ingenuity into making them so. I did not have a wide variety of fancy kitchen tools, but thanks to ongoing renovation projects, had enough hardware to make do.
Steak, for instance, could be rendered drinkable through a fairly simple process:
Start by deboning the steak using a filet knife or a small hacksaw.
Then cut the steak using a reciprocating saw, band saw, or electric mitre saw. A plane can be used to flake well-done steak, but the operation quickly becomes slippery and slightly dangerous.
Once the steak is finely chopped, put it in a blender and set it on 'high' for fifteen minutes. If you do not have a blender, you can use a Makita 7.5 amp cordless drill, an old apple juice tin, and a large spade-headed drill bit used to make one-inch holes in plywood.
It should be mentioned that in the interest of hygiene, it is wise to buy new accessories, bits, blades etc. for your tools, so as not to mix your renovation supplies with your food supplies. This is useful on two fronts; you do not want to consume rust, and you do not want bits of meat in your windowframe as that will attract ants and possibly other vermin.
Using similar techniques and a variety of other common home tools, such as a drill press, lathe, and the turbine of a small-engine aircraft, I was able to liquify most of my favourite foods such that they would be drinkable.
As the experiment wore on, I noticed that my life was changing in surprising ways.
First of all, I was sleeping less. While I had previously required seven to nine hours sleep to wake up feeling alert and refreshed, I now found myself sleeping only five or six. My bedtime remained ten o'clock sharp, but my waking hours shifted from six a.m. to five, and finally settled at 4:30 a.m., no matter how late I stayed up, and I always felt delightful upon opening my eyes. I attributed this change to the excess energy produced by my body that was no longer required to process solid foods -- the lack of strain on my stomach and intestines was having an immediate and noticable effect on the amount of rest I required to refuel each day.
Secondly, I found I was much more productive. After a week on my liquid diet, in a fit of inspiration, I went to a sporting-goods store and purchased what dedicated off-road cyclists call a "camel pack." This is a backpack with two four-litre soft-bodied cannisters attached to it, connected to a long tube. Mine had a harness that I could strap to my head, to keep the tube constantly close to my mouth. When you are on a long bike trek, say across the Carpathian mountains in Eastern Europe, and you want to take a drink, you merely suck on the tube. By having a priest bless your water at the beginning of the excursion, you can even foil vampires either by drinking massive quantities of blessed water, blessing in turn your blood, or by confronting said vampires and sucking and spitting the holy water on them. Unless the presence of water in your body removes the holiness from the water, which doesn't seem likely, but I digress.
I drilled a larger hole in the camel pack and inserted a wider tube than the one included, allowing me to suck larger quantities of fluid out of the pack in thicknesses far greater than that of water. I found that by sucking hard, I could pull even the most thick and viscuous chilis and stews out of the storage pack on my back and into my mouth.
I had also begun to spend a lot more time in the washroom. I was urinating more frequently, and my stool had become loose and rapid -- it was almost like having diarrhea, but with slightly more warning time and better consistency than completely liquid stool. All of this was to be expected, but was, regardless, a little disconcerting.
As a result of the camel pack, I found I could free up more and more of my day by making huge masses of soups, stews and chili -- all with abundant vegetables to avoid scurvy -- in large pots or in my slow cooker, transferring a few litres of food to my camel pack twice a day. Without the need to cook, do dishes, or sleep as much as before, my free time increased abundantly. After two weeks, I timed myself and found that rather than sleep eight hours and spend over two hours per day preparing and eating food, I was sleeping four and spending only twenty minutes a day washing my slow cooker and preparing new food in it. I had liberated over five hours of my day through liquid food.
I finished my novel (now at the printer's) and began to take long walks through the countryside, punctuated only by the constant nagging need to defecate.
Week Three saw more of the same, but with looser stool. Loath to give up the benefits of all the added time in my day, I underwent a simple surgical procedure to have a colostomy tube attached to my colon, storing my waste matter in a container strapped to my right thigh. I began to file and organize a complicated series of bags in my house: two for the camel pack, ingoing, one for the colostomy container, outgoing, and several to be boiled and hung to dry after use. The system worked, but took quite a bit of time to maintain efficiently and accurately. After one late-night accident hooking a camel pack hose up to a colostomy bag, I realized that compatible hose sizes were a mistake and put an adaptor on my colostomy hose so that the camel hose would no longer fit it. Despite the loss of time in the bag-sorting process, including time invested in developing a hook-and-hanging system involving old clothes hangers and a series of dowels loosely connected to the kitchen ceiling, bags being folded and stacked when dry in my now-unused food cupboards, I was still up four hours a day or perhaps slightly more from my solid food days.
In week four, I began to develop a constant nagging tingling in my mouth. A visit to the dentist confirmed that my teeth, after a month of disuse, were beginning to loosen in their gums. The dentist also recommended I visit a doctor after I complained of a peculiar stabbing pain behind my eyes. The doctor diagnosed me with Harbrecht's Syndrome, a rare affliction targeting the internal organs; a general shrivelling effect resulting from weeks of misuse. Apparently, my diet was relieving so much strain on my inner organs, depriving them of so much wear, that they were physically atrophying inside my gut. There was also some concern about enough blood reaching my brain, the lack of solids also resulting in some sort of brain-blood-anemia. Stethescope firmly planted in his ears, the doctor waved a fat finger at me and demanded that I go back on a regular solid-food diet immediately.
How dare he, I seethed internally. How dare this fat doctor tell me, who had never felt better in his life apart from sore teeth and stabbing pains behind my eyes, that I had to abandon this time-saving method, this creative mecca, this whole new life? Before I knew it, I had unstrapped my colostomy bag and was squeezing it, spraying my liquid feces around his office, yelling "solid food is the devil!"
I seemed to swim into consciousness some time later in a cell, I assumed in the local lock-up, and began to reflect that my usual mood swings had become perhaps even more extreme and unpredictable over the past month, and that perhaps whittling my sleeping hours down to fifteen minutes a night was not a balanced life decision. I had vague memories of swearing at the cat, and doing something on my neighbour's lawn, but I began to discover significant and frighteningly large memory holes sporadically scattered throughout the last week. I remembered wearing the chiffon gown, and vaguely recalled dipping it in chocolate sauce and leaving it outside the door of the truck driver that lived in the apartment below mine, but had no idea where I had bought it, or even if I had indeed paid for it. And the full rack of police car lights flashing in my living room, which i had never thought twice about, suddenly became a great source of concern and mystery. Maybe it was time to get back on 'real' food -- starting with steaks and liver, something to get the iron in my blood back up.
The telling blow came when a guard showed up, dragging a skinny teenage boy behind him. The kid was bedraggled and obviously terrified. There were red welts on his face and arms, and he was trying to pull away from the burly guard, but lacked the strength. The guard threw the door to my cell open and shoved the kid in, shouting "if you want to fight in the yard, you can sleep with the blood-drinker! Good luck, Carlson!"
The kid threw himself against the bars, whimpering piteously, as the guard stalked down the hall. It took me a few seconds to catch on that I was the blood-drinker, although I had no idea why. Rubbing my chin, I realized that my camel pack was gone, and there was some sort of dried crust on my face. Picking it off, I looked at it -- dark rust-orange, like a...scab.
Oh. So that was it. I checked myself for bite marks, and found none -- only my colostomy hose, dribbling steadily onto the floor, and a rash on my right leg. Whose blood had I been drinking? Who knew?
Still and all, there was no need for this 'Carlson' to fear, now that I knew I'd be rejoining the solid-food world. I smiled disarmingly as he scuttled, crab-like, into the furthest corner. "Don't worry," I said, "I've decided to start adding real meat to my diet."
I was aquitted of the murder after it was conclusively determined to be a one-hundred-percent natural heart attack, and released back into the community. I began to eat solid food again, starting with small and simple things like peas and beans, and now I am almost all the way back to steak and beef jerky. The dentures fit fine, and the stabbing pains have almost entirely abated.
As an experiment, I am considering spending a month eating only food starting with the letter 'C'. We'll see how it goes.
NP: Keith Jarrett, "Whisper Not." Excellent piano-based jazz.
Matt Shepherd 5.4.02
4.4.02
From a straight 'support whats youse like' perspective, I'm seriously considering Blogger Pro, as I've really been enjoying Blogger for the past month or so. I know I tend to start projects like this and drop them, but the convenience aspect is a real winner for me when I have a few free seconds at work (or even when I don't, but there's a big-ass idea burning up in my brain). $35 US a year...I wonder if they'd accept Canadian Tire money?
Canadian Tire money -- Canada's Secret CurrencyTM. There's an ad campaign in there...
Matt Shepherd 4.4.02
It's interesting to consider that while most people consider the fourth dimension as 'time,' one might more easily look at time as irrelevant and reconstrue the fourth dimension as 'data.'
Part of this off-the-cuff after-lunch theory stems from Michael Crichton's "Timeline," in which Our Heroes journey to fourteenth-century France (actually an alternate dimension in which exists fourteenth-century France, which doesn't quite explain how things get sent from that past to our present over hundreds of years, and Crichton sort of waffles the point with a bit of fast hand-waving and repeated use of the word "QUANTUM!") through the miracle of quantum physics.
Rather than alternate dimensions, though, consider that there might be only one dimension, this, and an infinite number of datasets comprised of all the quanta in the universe. "Time travel" would merely be the rearrangement of quanta to insert your quanta into that of the dataset of the past...rearranging a large number of air molecules in 1942 Chicago to precisely match my quanta arrangements at this moment in time, for instance. My effects on particles at that point in time would alter all residual datasets both 'before' and 'after' my insertion simultaneously, as data does not travel but merely exists.
Am I making any sense? I think I am...essentially, time is only our perception, and we perceive it based on shifting data. Imagine a large shallow box filled with pieces of black and white sand on an oscillator. The oscillator moves the box, constantly shifting the sand. If you wanted to send one grain of sand "back in time," it would merely be a matter of removing that one grain, arranging the sand in the box to precisely match that of a pervious state, then reinserting your time-travelling grain.
Problems: one, if you remove one grain of sand, you can never precisely duplicate the earlier sand configuration; two, if energy can neither be created or destroyed, just swapping bits around like that might be pretty disastrous.
Solutions: big, big computers. Hey, it worked for Crichton.
NP: monkeyradio.org, which I am very much enjoying these days.
Matt Shepherd 4.4.02
3.4.02
TERMIUM Plus®
For utterly no reason, I've been scoping out the Dave Sim: Misogynist controversy in my spare (!?) moments at work today. Whoa, Nelly! I was a Cerebus reader back in the 'day, but never thought he'd gotten this whacked out. Not that I have too much time to invest in the "How misogynist IS Dave Sim?" investigation, but...
...actually, I guess there WAS a reason. I was promoting Man-Man by putting up a HYPE announcement on rec.arts.comics.misc (anyone else remember Usenet, or am I showing my age?) and there was a long Cerebus thread I checked out for old times' sake.
To Mr. Sim's credit, I hafta say that very few of the 'wottan evil misoginwhatever' arguments actually specifically refute his Male Light/Female Void argument except to say that it's bad...which tends to lend some ugly credence to his (paraphrased) claims that misogyny is just a word women use to avoid facing the facts. Certainly nobody tacking the issue (and there are a surprising number of websites dedicated to just this) displays his degree of, well, poetry. He paints some powerful, if nasty, images to get his point across. Hate is a creative enabler, kids!
Good Lord, I just said something vaguely positive about Dave Sim. I must be...a MISOGYNIST!
No, no. Only foolin'. I eat meat.
NP: monkeyradio.org. Check it out!
Matt Shepherd 3.4.02
2.4.02
KeenSpot Forums - View Topic
I live in fear. Do you?
Really? What a coincidence! What gives you that churning dread that persists in your gut all the live-long day?
Wow! Me too! Hey, do you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night just strangled by the fear, choking on your own terror, feeling your sweat-drenched pillow slip underneath you like a baby hippo?
Oh. Must just be me, then.
NP: Ruben Gonzales, 'Introducing Ruben Gonzales'
Matt Shepherd 2.4.02
TERMIUM Plus®
Passing thought over breakfast with my darling Mel: wouldn't it be neat to have a creature, or race of creatures, which solidify over time? The conversation sprung from me talking about Mel's bus pass, and how she'd have to get a 'real person's' bus pass when she graduated. She objected to me designating students as non-real people, to which I responded that it would be neat if they were only 75% real people, and they would be pretty solid, but you could shove your hand right through 'em if you tried. Sort of like Jell-O.
So that led to the thought that if there was a race of beings that were asexual, they could be born as full-sized intangible wisps, and gradually solidify over time. Death would occur when they eventually became statues after years of slow, slow, calcification.
NP: Modern Jazz Quartet, 'Django'
Matt Shepherd 2.4.02
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