Author Neil Gaiman has written a small Valentine’s Day poem:
Roses are red,
Violets are purple,
Which is a very hard word to rhyme
And makes me happy that on February the 14th we don’t traditionally have to give each other oranges.
Um, yeah… me, too, Neil.
If you, like me, are showing the world more and more of your skull with each passing year, through no desire or action of your own, and you’re not terribly happy about that state of affairs, fear not, for Bruce Willis knows your pain:
You’ve all seen it, you’ve all read it, you’ve all seen the little things trying to make you feel less of a man because you’re losing your hair, but they can all suck my… you know what I mean? I’m a man and I will kick anybody’s ass who tries to tell me that I’m not a man because my hair’s thinning.
I try not to be too self-conscious about the hair-loss thing — God knows plenty of other men in my age demo have the same issue these days — but every once in a while it feels really good to ball up my fist and let out a defiant shout, you know?
On the heels of the previous entry, here’s another funny: a pictorial representation of the Ten Ways Vice President Dick Cheney Can Kill You, courtesy of Boing Boing. Curiously, none of them involves a shotgun…
I don’t know about you, but I’m having a Monday… I’ve had no particular disasters or anything, but I’m plagued by a general inability to get back into the work-week groove. So naturally I’m killing time on the InterWeb, looking desperately for things that may amuse me. Things such as, for instance, the following quip from TV comedy writer Ken Levine, discussing his weekend run to San Diego:
San Diego’s premiere strip club, the Body Shop is still in business… which is a relief because I still have my lifetime pass from 1974. Only problem is, the strippers from 1974 are still there.
In case anyone is wondering — and you’re probably not, but I feel like telling you anyhow — I found the missing part of my Yellowstone entry this morning. Somehow, no doubt due to the unforseen side-effects of my superhuman PC powers, I ended up with two copies of the thing on my work machine, one in a folder where I keep my blogs-in-progress and one on the desktop. The desktop version was the one I was working on yesterday, but the incomplete folder version is what I mailed to myself before I left the office. D’oh! Stupid mistake, but ultimately no harm done.
I’m hoping to find a moment to finish it today and, if I do, it’ll be up this evening. Hope you’ll come back for it, as it’s going to be, in the immortal words of Ed Sullivan, a rillly big shew.
Hey, kids, just thought I’d drop by and let my three loyal readers know that I did not end up as moose-fodder last weekend, as you may be imagining based on the lack of activity here. Anne and I returned safely from Yellowstone on Sunday night, following two days of driving on snow-packed roads in a mid-size four-door and one day of zipping through a snow-packed forest wonderland on a snowmobile. Since I got home, however, my employers have done their best to discourage me from ever taking another day off by chaining me to my desk, fitting me with a catheter and a feeding tube, and burying me in paper. (I think I prefer the nice, peaceful drifts of snow I saw in Montana to the drifts of former tree-pulp that are accumulating around my desk…)
I do have traveler’s tales to tell, it’s just a matter of how soon I’ll be able to escape from the office and put them down on paper. Er, on screen. Whatever… just keep checking back, I’ll have something about the trip soon…
By the time my three loyal readers see this entry, The Girlfriend and I should be well on our way to West Yellowstone, Montana, where a quick weekend adventure awaits. It’s a long story, but basically, she had some business dealings with a place up there that offered to give her and a guest (that would be me) complimentary lodgings and a snowmobile tour of the park. Neither of us are exactly what you’d call outdoorsy types, but the lure of a virtually free weekend away from the wintertime smog of Salt Lake was too tempting to resist. We said yes about a month ago, we bought ourselves some long underwear a couple weeks ago, and by tomorrow we’ll be looking for moose in America’s first National Park.
However, I didn’t want to leave all you folks in InternetLand with nothing to look at on the dull final Friday of January, so in the spirit of last week’s post — that is, in an effort to clean out one of my bookmark folders — here are a few links you may find interesting. I know I did…
Don’t mind me, kids — I’m just clearing out a folder marked “Weird/Amusing/Interesting Stuff I’d Like to Blog About But Probably Won’t Get Around To.” Perhaps you’ll find something here that will strike enough of your fancy to warrant a click-through:
It snowed several inches last night and, as of commute time this morning, there was still a lot of slush on the roads and sidewalks. This, in turn, helped me to learn a Valuable Lesson: Doc Marten boots suck on slushy surfaces. At least my own personal pair does. Seriously, I don’t think I could’ve had any less traction if I’d been wearing glass slippers that had been slathered in bacon grease. (Don’t think too hard about that image; you might strain something. God knows I did while walking from my car to the train station.)
Anyone know where I can get some of those cleat-thingies the ice-climbers use?
I spotted the following sign on top of a Salt Lake City taxi cab as I walked from the train station to work on Friday morning:
