What you say?!
October 6th, 2008 @ 15:38 by NormMonkey
How ur not get what i say
O WIATT I NO
Stoff I wright dotnt get it
BUT IF I YELL OK
ur no bff ok wtf bbq?
They walk among us.
You wouldn’t know, to hear them speak,
of their loathesome keyboard skillzs.
The evil unseen until there their they’re online.
When did schools stop teaching people how to type? What part of the curriculum was important enough to displace English grammar?
Kids these days.
In other news, I just got back from a trip to Boston. Perhaps you’re familiar with this symptom: after a long drive, you desperately must have paper, a receipt; anything.
You have this tenuous collection in your head of random ideas. Tenuous, because as the odometer rolls along ideas beget other ideas in a way that mimics recipe-free cooking. Sometimes the results are frightful, most are mediocre at best, but never, ever can you remember the ingredients you used to make those few delicious thoughts.
A precarious momentum, affected as much by the music that plays and the scenery that unfolds as by the memories of your recent vacation, carries you down your mental track. The threat of de-railing negates the concept of stopping to commit these mental delights to some less tenuous medium.
Fortunately, upon returning to the homeland we decided to stop at Wendy Horton’s where satisfaction lay within a napkin dispenser.
MEMORABLE MOMENTS
* Hunting for parking in downtown Salem, MA (hey, I said memorable, not necessarily delightful)
* The Beer Works brewery. Beer and clam chowdachowder. How can you go wrong?
* Memories of reading The Crucible in school
* A Derby street bookstore
Turn your imagination on. Turn it up a little more; OK, good. Imagine a small book shop. It might be 1 square kilofoot if it were actually square but this is more of a narrow / deep deal.
The book shop currently in your imagination probably has aisles for people to walk and orderly shelves with rows of books stacked horizontally. First you need to shrink those aisles by 25%. If you’re wearing a backpack or weigh more than 200lbs, you’re frightened. OK? Good. Now take those rows of books and make them vertical stacks. Now use your imagination’s ‘clone’ tool and make every available surface filled with stacks of books towering above your head. ‘Eight feet high’ is not an exaggeration. Finally, imagine some of these stacks partially collapsing, but being held up by surrounding structural book-stacks and in some extreme cases, bungee cords (I kid you not).
There’s no particular order to the stacks that I could discern but you know that if you ask, the fellow running the place will unerringly seek a particular spot in some random pile and will, if he doesn’t die in the process of extricating it, return with your book.
I didn’t dare go all the way to the back of the store (I was wearing my camera bag) but I did find a book only a couple of feet from the top of a more accessible stack: the second in Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, “The Subtle Knife”. With my sister’s help I removed the book without total disaster. Seeing no cash register I made eye contact with an employee and pointed at my book. He pointed at a spot near the door.
All I saw were stacks of books but as I walked over, I found that if I positioned myself correctly I could see a narrow gap between the books. If I rotate the book to its thinnest orientation and extend my arm through this gap, a fellow on the other side will take it and put it down, don his glasses to see the price and hand-write me a receipt for 50% off. I waited ’til I got outside before jumping for joy.
* A group of drummers doing their thing for the crowd on Derby St.
* Popkettle corn!
* Walking to the end of a pier, standing at the very tip on the far side of the lighthouse and not getting pushed into the water by anybody
* Missing the duty-free shop due to poor advertising signage and a misconception on my part that it would be closer to the border (remember what I said about memorable vs. delightful?)
* Deciding to save gas by shutting off the car engine while waiting in line at Canada Customs, rolling the car forward with my foot. Then discovering that, listening to music and running the car fan the whole time, I’d run the battery down too low to start the car up. Hooray for push-start standard transmissions!
THE END
My apologies to anybody expecting a photography post. Please don’t run away, though, there is a post about photography coming up - just as soon as I can find the time to visit an electronics supply shop. Got your interest piqued yet?
I would also like to write a little bit (with illustrations!) in the next post about designing and printing DIY wedding not-invitations (a.k.a. Save The Dates). This includes little scriptlets for taking addresses from a Google Spreadsheet my Hunnybear started and batch-printing them from an envelope design in Inkscape. May also include Clavenisms related to Canada Post addressing.
Finally, the next post may reveal some of what got jotted down on a yellow WendyHo napkin.
