Twisted Spinster

Okay, one good thing about not having a job is apparently I’m avoiding getting this year’s really bad flu.

Hey, I’ve got to look on the bright side. (Via.)

Well, kids, I don’t know what’s up with me but all weekend I’ve been under attack by something — I have the achy sinuses and the weirded-out innards, but not the fever. It could be I’m allergic to something. Possibly to being jobless and broke. It doesn’t help much that I had to take the older cat to the vet this past week — there went almost a hundred bucks. (She’s fine — just old and afflicted with thyroid disease.) As for the job situation, I found out from some friends that I’m not alone — even supermarket cashier jobs are hard to find. This doesn’t make my backup plan to apply at Publix much of a backup plan. As it stands I am not planning to re-sign the lease on this place. I am hoping to make it to the end of my lease, which is April 30. I’m not sure I’ll make it that far, but I don’t have much choice — I don’t have a job, so getting a new place won’t be easy. (Does unemployment count as “real” income? Urgh.) Anyway, I am going to be lowering my sights for my next place of residence: I’m going to be looking for a one-room studio or even converted garage-type room. All I require is my own entrance, bathroom (I’ll even accept a shower-only bathroom; I used to hold out for a full bath, but I don’t take many baths these days), and some sort of kitchenette with its own sink. I can deal with a small fridge — I find the huge honking things all apartments have to be too large anyway, mine is never even half full. And I don’t need a dishwasher — I have hands. Oh yeah — and whatever the place is must accept two cats. I’ll have to sell or store most of my furniture, but such is life.

Anyway, those are my life plans so far. I hope I’ll have a job by move-out time; otherwise I’m not sure what I’ll do. (PS: any donations to the links to the right will be much appreciated, etc.)

Hurray! And for the record, I wouldn’t miss Florida one bit.

I’m not going to say anything, except that I agree with Steve H. Well, I will say this: I don’t think that any Western country outside of Israel (which is a Western country despite its location) will break free of the dreamworld notion of a “violence free” academic environment any time soon, so I’m not holding my breath waiting for gun bans to be dropped from more than a handful of institutions. We simply have too much cultural baggage invested in the idea that university is a place where people focus on scholarly and spiritual pursuits — a.k.a. “the life of the mind” — safe from the mundane problems of the crass and grubby “real world.” I used to believe in that fantasy myself, despite also knowing for some time that colleges and universities have become (if they haven’t always been so) nothing more than holding tanks for people who aren’t ready to leave high school (this includes most of the instructors).

That amazing, magical, incredible computer monitor. My favorite one is the user who insisted that her non-color-showing monitor was just “out of ink” and probably needed a new cartridge. I found the above via this page on TV Tropes whereon among other mistakes they complain about one scene in the new Doctor Who that drives me crazy — the part where, in the “Smith and Jones” episode, the Doctor starts looking for a “backup” drive by poking his sonic screwdriver thingie at the back of the monitor; and in fact, any episode that needs the computer to be controlled by his magic wand — I mean sonic screwdriver — will show him pointing it in the direction of the monitor, never at the actual CPU (which never seems to be attached anyway — the show follows common tv computer display rules by having every PC that isn’t a laptop seem to consist of a monitor and a keyboard, though once they showed the Martha character’s mother actually attaching her mouse to her computer, which however was a laptop and therefore should not actually need a mouse*). Anyway, I know this is only a television show full of impossible pretend “science” and such, but that’s no reason for the show’s creators to treat a scientific invention that has become a common and even mundane household tool with the same breeziness with which they treat concepts like time travel. Especially when they have the main character brag on every other episode about what a genius he is. (And especially when they have him say on the very next episode, “Gridlock,” that he is “brilliant with computers.”) I can handle little things like giant car-and-people-eating crabs, hauling an entire hospital of people to the moon, the poetry of Shakespeare being used by evil alien witches to destroy the Earth, etc., but the mundane mistakes pull me up short.

Oh, and speaking of that hospital, two things: 1) How did the electricity stay on? I can accept the forcefield holding in the air supply, but there was no explanation as to how all the lights stayed working — not to mention the MRI machine — after the connections to the Earth-side electrical grid were severed. And 2) there was no change in gravity after they were transported to the moon. Russell Davies (the show’s current guy in charge) is my age — he’s old enough to remember the moon landings and has probably seen the same footage of the astronauts jumping around like fluffballs in the moon’s much lighter gravity as I have. But when the hospital in this episode is rather violently transported to the moon, objects fall as swiftly to the floor, and people walk and run with just as much effort, as they do on Earth. Couldn’t they have written this in somehow? Then again, the Doctor’s standard handgrab-and-“run!” command to the girl wouldn’t have as much dramatic kick if followed by the rather comical slo-mo moonwalk that people in real life have to do on the moon. Not to mention the force needed to run on the moon in actuality would end up with the characters braining themselves on the ceiling. See, it’s bad to let me watch tv — I start thinking of things.

*Full Disclosure Update: my only working computer is a laptop, and I do happen to have a mouse attached to it. I find the little toggle thing on this IBM Thinkpad to be a bitch to maneuver, so I bought a little travel mouse. Which by the way fits my hand better than a normal mouse. But anyway, it’s just funny that the one time a tv show has a character use a mouse attached to a computer it happens to be the one model of computer that really doesn’t need a mouse.

I’ve been on a CSI/Doctor Who jag, but never mind that — what I can’t understand are the jags everyone else is apparently on: or in other words, what is it with all these Sturm-und-Drang-filled, fire-breathing diva-chef restaurant-setup shows? Is there really an audience for this type of thing? I can’t imagine anything more boring than starting a restaurant (or a clothing store, or any other type of small business, sorry but this subject just bores me, at least as a spectator sport), and I can’t imagine anything more unpleasant than an hour or two of watching an unpleasant man (say, that Ramsey bloke on Ramsey’s Kitchen Disasters or whatever the hell it’s called) berate sullen or sobbing cooks, waiters, and restaurant owners while their misbegotten meals burn on the filthy stove, etc. It’s not funny, it’s not interesting, it’s just nasty, and gives me the squirmy feeling that comes from walking in on your neighbors while they’re in the middle of a degrading domestic argument. There’s another one, also on BBC America, called “Last Restaurant Standing,” and it looks like it will be just as squick-making, only the drill-sergeant chef is an unpleasant Frenchman instead of an unpleasant Brit. There were or probably still are some similar shows on the Food Network, the Fine Living Channel, and so on.

The fact that this sort of “confrontational” television has become so popular puzzles me, but then a lot of things about popular culture puzzle me. My different drummer marches to a different drummer — I am the sort of person who rarely is attracted to a trend. “It’s not for you” is the message I usually get. Here’s another example: a show called “Intervention,” which is on A&E. It’s another “reality” show, only this time no one’s on an island — the loser drug addicts who are the focus of the show have agreed to invite the viewing public into their own homes so we can wallow in their degradation (and that of their sobbing relatives) along with them. I am afraid that I am heartless and cruel, and my only response to the spot of the drug-addicted arthritic woman sprawled on her kitchen floor next to the pet’s water bowl was to laugh. Also to vow never to let someone film me while I am collapsed in a drunken stupor on my kitchen floor next to my cats’ water bowl.

Then there are all the ghost shows. You know — “Paranormal” this and that, cashing in, rather belatedly, on the Blair Witch/Amityville Horror craze. Or so I guess; I can’t understand what else could have caused studio heads to okay hour programs consisting of dull, ordinary people stumbling around in the dark followed by a shaky camera, every once in a while shrieking when their own shadow startles them. The bad lighting, the crappy “real life” clothing everyone wears, the flat, ordinary tones of the “real” people talking about their ghosts — and a set of boring, commonplace ghosts they are, the usual dead kids and evil old women. If you’ve grown up on real horror movies that were done with a care towards atmosphere and style, not to mention contained actors such as Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, then this sort of thing is just sad.

By the way, did you know that rain! Real rain! In Florida is now the reason for breathless, dramatic reports on the news? We’re apparently getting some disturbed weather hereabouts because of a cold front moving in, and you’d think a hurricane was on its way. Oh — there was a tornado in Brevard County earlier today that tore! the! roof! off a condo and dumped it onto another condo. “We’d just had it repaired from Hurricanes Jeanne and Frances” said the rueful (tossed-onto) condo owner. “Oh my God!” sobbed the newswoman, as if she’d just learned a cruise ship full of starving orphans had been swallowed by a giant shark. Of course there is a tornado warning for the whole of Central Florida now. It just finished raining in my location. It was soft, gentle rain. But! That! Could! Change! (Cue ominous music.)

Sorry, I’ve been singularly uninspired this week, so there’s been nothing. Maybe I’ll link to another Youtube video that caught my fancy. Or not.

Yep, a t-shirt for me.

Anyway, I caught the tail-end of BBCAmerica’s obsessive coverage of “Super Tuesday” last night, and listened to a few minutes of Obama’s speech. He has a good voice, but what I heard — vague stuff about “change,” something about how we need to help kids playing next to a boarded-up apartment building (which just made me think they were waiting for their meth to finish cooking), and a slogan consisting of the empty phrase “Yes we can!” (which the hopped-up crowd chanted enthusiastically) reminded me nothing so much as the Doctor’s sensible questions to Martha Jones and Captain Jack Harkness on why they thought the Master’s hypnosis-enhanced campaign for Prime Minister of Britain sounded so good: “What were his policies? What did he stand for?” After all this time Obama’s appeal is more elusive to me than the flimsy plot of science fiction story.

Or… is John McCain really the Master? Check it out:

McCain!

The Master:

If he whips out what looks like a pen, duck.

Steampunk Darth Vader. Kewl.

Let us dance like children of the night!