I. After some ever so frustrating moments spent trying to figure out how to disable my Verizon provided home voice-mail so that I could utilize my new answering machine, Daniel suggested that I set the number of rings so that the new answering system takes priority. It just so happens this is a better solution than my original intent, due to the fact that when the new answering machine is full the caller will be punted to the old voice-mail. As the Ivory soap wrapper I used to have tacked up near my computer read, “Making the complicated simple is brilliant.”

II. Tuesday, September 16^th, 2008 will be a good day for me. Both Who Killed Amanda Palmer? and the abbreviated, first season of Pushing Daisies are going to be released. I have them both pre-ordered on Amazon. Speaking of Pushing Daisies the Pie Hole is coming to a town near you. I am wondering if I should brave the inevitable crowd. I guess it remains to be seen just how far I’ll go for free pie.

III. Today is the 45^th anniversary of the March on Washington. In the grand scheme of things, not all that long ago.

Although I had given some thought to getting a cordless phone for my home number, I had not done so until today when I made an impulse buy of a pretty, shiny, cordless phone. I liked the juxtaposition between it with all of its bells and whistles and my lovely, classic, 500 set:

In unrelated events, I must say that the customer service at Charles & Marie is top notch. My aforementioned cute cactus decided to free itself from the soil. I managed to get it out of the tube and plant it. So now Audrey, Jr. II is safe and (hopefully) sound:

I e-mailed the company to let them know and I just got an e-mail letting me know that Audrey, Jr. III is on its way.

News of the Dumb:

Atlantic City casinos feeling the squeeze from the economy have decided to cut back on comps to the average customer and focus on high roller types. Apparently they feel the way to ride out the economic downturn is to alienate the majority of their customers who will also be the ones hardest hit by inflation. Anyone who has set foot on a casino floor can tell you there are far more 25¢ slot machines then there are high-stakes poker tables. That’s a brilliant plan.

News of the Unexpected:

Wandering around Bed, Bath & Beyond the other day I observed a couple of things. First, they sell condoms there now. And, second, Collective Soul was playing on the sound system.

News of the Sweet Mother of God that’s Creepy!:

This commercial for Orangina is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen this month. Someone said that it was a popular drink with kids, apparently the company is now trying to expand into the furry niche. The truly demented part starts after an anthropomorphic doe on a swing straddles an anthropomorphic bear. It only goes downhill from there.

August has been the month of the key-chain accessories for me. First there was the “blow-up doll” key-chain from Target. She was a PG version, clothed in a bikini and with her mouth demurely closed. It was the fact that she was actually inflatable that was the appeal, unfortunately it was also her undoing. The first popped as I was trying to inflate it. The replacement held on for about a week or so, but then suffered the same fate. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

The next key-chain accessory arrived today and it is even cuter than I imagined. I present to you the world’s cutest cactus:

It is watered once a month by way of some holes in the bottom. I did so just now and it sucks the water right up. I’m very pleased.

I heard a song from the new Oasis album which is scheduled to be released in October. I kind of liked “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” when it came out in the nineties and then someone or something turned me off to it. Since I no longer remember who or how or why, I thought it might be about time to give that group a second chance.

But while it was a legitimate criticism of that earlier album’s lyrics to note that they were laced with drug references and frequently incoherent (coincidence?), I can still relate to the concept of “slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball.” In contrast, the Shock of the Lightning is chocked full of meaningless statements for example, “Love is a litany.” Love is “a ceremonial or liturgical form of prayer consisting of a series of invocations or supplications with responses that are the same for a number in succession”¹? Oh well, put it that way and maybe it does make sense, but I simply can’t relate to the line, “Love is a time machine.” Love isn’t a time machine, it just isn’t.

So if I should decide I want to hear Oasis again, I guess I’ll be buying a copy of their first CD on eBay for fifty cents. Speaking of eBay, I have decided that instead of buying another DVD rack I should get rid of the ones I am never going to watch again. I started tonight by listing a handful of movies split almost evenly between chick flicks and porn.

¹ dictionary.com

Today I was told about an acquaintance of mine, a business owner, who had the following experience last week.

At some point during the business day, while he was working alone, a group of individuals showed up at his store. Some of these individuals were armed. They demanded the keys to his store and locked him outside. They emptied the cash register. They came back out and demanded to know where the safe was and he told them, truthfully, that he did not have one. They said, “We don’t believe you. We’re going to search you store.” They searched the store and failed to find a safe. Then they demanded he give them $5,500 right then or they would shut him down. They would not take a check. He called his wife and she put together enough money to get a $5,500 bank check and brought it to her husband. They then returned the keys to his store and told him he could stay in business, but that he now owed them $10,000.

This being New Jersey, I guess this story isn’t all that unusual, except that in this case it was not a gang or the mafia. This was a representative of the State of New Jersey’s Division of Taxation accompanied by New Jersey state police officers.

It figures that only someone who worked for the government would think that a good way to get money out of someone is to take away their livelihood. You would have to be an idiot to think that a closed business may somehow be a better source of revenue than an open one. Clearly, this is solely a form of extortion. Only in this case it is the government saying, “You have to pay us to protect yourself from us.”

My acquaintance is not the only one this is happening too. In this diner’s case it took a week for them to reopen.

Windows has set up a website documenting the “Mojave Experiment“. It is now advertising said experiment in short commercials appearing on hulu.com and perhaps elsewhere as well.

The commercials consist of an experimenter asking people what they had heard about Window’s Vista. The subject would then say it was full of problems and that they would never ever use it themselves. Then the experimenter would demonstrate an operating system. Said subjects would then rave about what they were seeing and say things like, “I want this,” and the experimenter would respond rather smugly, “This is Vista.” Then a close-up of the subjects looking appropriately surprised. The tag-line should be something like: “We’ll convert you too!”

I would expect even Microsoft to be able to manage to get their programs to run correctly in a controlled environment. So the interesting aspect of this is not the so-called experiment, but the felt need to conduct and then advertise it in the first place.

In the last seven days I have worked fifty-eight hours and in just over eleven hours I have to be back at work for another twelve-hour shift (which is an improvement over last night’s which was fourteen). There’s a real possibility that I will need to work another twelve-hour shift tomorrow night and I’m already scheduled to work a twelve-hour shift on Sunday. So perhaps the large floating iridescent green dot which momentarily appeared in the center of my vision as I was driving home this morning is not cause for much concern.

I say all this not only to complain, but to explain my current state of mind. This job has isolated me from all but a very small core of individuals who understand and/or put up with both my perpetual moodiness and my schedule. But that realization doesn’t take the sting out of coming home again and again after twelve or fourteen hours to find that no one has called while I was away and that the cat is so happy to see me I have to lock him out of the bedroom so I can sleep just so I can go back into work.

There’s an athletics field which I drive past on a fairly regular basis. I was curious about the thin, black silhouettes of dogs that were positioned around the field. Initially I assumed that the field was used for some sort of agility competition, but someone told me they were there to keep the Canada geese from congregating in the field. I wondered how well they actually worked as geese are a notoriously tenacious lot.

On Sunday evening I drove past the field and noticed that the dogs were gone and a huge flock of Canada geese were milling about. This morning I drove past and now that the shadowy dogs had returned there was nary a goose in sight. When the dogs are away, the geese will play.

Addendum:

This evening I drove past the same field, both the dogs and the geese were present. Either the geese are reading this blog or they figured out that those dogs were too skinny to have ever eaten a goose.

When playing poker on-line, I also engage in a sub-game of attempting to guess the nationality of various players based on their screen-names, though I’m really only good at picking out the Americans. “Steve McKing” was definitely an American. I would have thought “ShakeMyAZ” was as well, since I read that as “Shake My Arizona” — a somewhat odd, but funny moniker. However, it turns out he or she was actually from Belgium, and so the moniker is probably not a reference to shaking up Tuscon, unless of course “Tuscon” is a posterior euphemism of which I am not aware.