Whose Faulty Vision

Maybe Traveling?

So here it is Tuesday evening, and I don’t know whether I’ll be spending Wednesday night in NYC or in Atlanta. There’s a meeting where I really need to be present in person, down in Atlanta, and the client keeps stringing us along as to when it’s going to happen. The latest word is that we should “keep Thursday morning free”, but still no definite on the meeting.

So I’ve talked to the woman who handles my travel (wow, how cool is that), and she’s going to get things ready, so that if I need to get on a plane, I’ll be able to.

Crazy, huh?

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

Molly: Perry, no one’s pure evil! I mean, yeah, some people have a hard outer shell, but inside, everybody has a creamy center.

Dr. Cox: There are plenty of people here on this particular planet who are hard on the outside and hard on the inside.

Molly: So they’d have more of a nougaty center?

Dr. Cox: Lady, people aren’t chocolates. D’you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.

-Scrubs

Coney Island in January

I went down to Coney Island yesterday to take some pictures. I figured that Coney Island on a grey day in late January would be pretty much deserted, so I should be able to get some nice “desolate beach” shots.

Turned out, not so much. There were a lot of people on the boardwalk and the beach–not as many as in July, of course, but a lot more than I had expected. I still got some interesting shots (they’ll be popping up over on my photoblog), but not the desolate landscape I was hoping for.

Oh, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Nathan’s was open (and had a line, yet), so I got a hot dog before I headed back.

Poem: Warning

And hey, since I referenced it, and it’s a great poem:

Warning
by Jenny Joseph

WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN I SHALL WEAR PURPLE
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Poem | Comment (0)

Aging

So Christmas and I were talking last night about getting older, and I had a pretty good idea, that I think she might enjoy too. Being young is fun, most of the time. And being old sounds like it could be fun if you do it right. See the poem “When I am old I shall wear purple,” or the example my grandparents are setting. But being middle-aged seems kinda boring. So I think I’m going to skip the whole “middle-aged” thing. I’ll just go, one day, from being young to being old. One day I’ll be doing karaoke and playing video games, and the next day I’ll be sitting on my porch in a rocking chair waving my cane at those damn kids. Doesn’t that seem like a good idea?

The fact that I don’t plan to have kids should help–from my observation, it seems like nothing makes you middle-aged faster than having kids.

Poem: Too Many Daves

Too Many Daves
by Dr Seuss

Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons, and she named them all Dave?
Well, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do.
You see, when she wants one, and calls out “Yoo-Hoo!
Come into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one.
All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!

This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’
As you can imagine, with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that, when they were born,
She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn.
And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm.
And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.
And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey.
And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.
Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.
Another one Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face.
And one of them Ziggy. And one Soggy Muff.
One Buffalo Bill. And one Biffalo Buff.
And one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed.
And one Paris Garters. And one Harris Tweed.
And one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt.
And one of them Oliver Boliver Butt.
And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate . . . .
But she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.

Perception of Time

An interesting article from the BBC on the perception of time includes some research that I’d heard about before, and one really fascinating study that I hadn’t. People often describe a subjective experience of time slowing down when something really scary is happening to them–say, just before a car crash. What these researchers did was to set up an LCD screen that was flickering rapidly in a way that made a random number on the screen completely unreadable, even if you concentrated on it. They then had someone look at the screen while freefalling 33 meters. When he was in the freefall, he was able to read the number on the screen–his perception sped up a little (which would feel like time slowing down) so that he could see past the flickering. How cool is that?