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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Ted's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, November 14th, 2009 | |
| 1:30 pm | The duty of customer service is to absorb irrational hatred Working as a dental assistant has been harder than I thought. Today a man walked in and asked for multiple rows of teeth. "Like a shark," he said, "but don't worry, I can sharpen them myself." "Uh, we don't have the technology for that," I told him, "would you like to schedule a teeth cleaning session?" "Nonsense," he replied, "We grow a second set of teeth for adulthood, right? Right? There must be some signal the body gets that makes it start growing that set of teeth. Simulate that, just find out what triggers it, what hormones or stem cells or whatever, and do that again like the first time. And then a few more times, so I'll have multiple rows. Like a shark." "You'd be in constant pain, then, wouldn't you?" I replied, foolishly trying to reason with him, "Remember how much it hurt when you were a kid?" "It would be worth it," he insisted. "Also, your insurance plan doesn't cover demented experimentation." "Look here!" he said, pounding a fist into the countertop, "I said I want multiple rows of teeth, not excuses. If you can't do this for me, I will go home and play Oregon trail. And name the characters after you. And keep playing the game really really badly until you get dysentery for realsies." Whoa. Oregon Trail sympathetic hoodoo curses. Working as a dental assistant has been harder than I thought. |
| Sunday, November 8th, 2009 | |
| 1:10 pm | Snacks on a Plan My buddy Matt is a movie-to-TV script consultant. He's responsible for writing the non-profanity lines that get dubbed over swear words when they put movies on television. You'd think that in his spare time, he'd either curse up a storm all the time, or maybe he'd constantly be all monkey-fighting this and Monday-to-Friday that. Neither is true. Mostly Matt talks in a really high-pitched, almost squeaky voice. He swears occasionally but not often. But Matt and I don't talk about our jobs often. What we like to do is get together on weekends in the mall, and open up a table booth, and tell passersby what utensils would most make them happy. "You, sir, would be happiest with chopsticks made from finished pine wood," we might say, "and I know it might take a while to learn, but trust us, it'll make you happiest." Or "you, ma'am, would benefit from a simple set of silver flatware. Antique. I thinka few places in this mall might have them, but I don't know which. Good luck." Today, somehow, everyone we've met would benefit from a titanium spork. Matt and I are stumped. What does this mean? |
| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | |
| 10:38 pm | Existence I park up the hill from my house, because gravitational potential energy is a good way to keep car thieves at bay. In the driveway near me was a car with a bumper sticker that read "MY OTHER CAR IS TOTALLY PANTOMIMED" and as I started up my car, I saw a guy (dressed in normal clothes and without benefit of greasepaint) walk out to the empty part of his driveway, about ten feet to the left of his existing car, mime sitting down and turning the keys, and suddenly become whisked off by some unknown force at the speed of an automobile. I followed him, of course, as he sat hovering a few feet in the air, zipping along the street at the speed of traffic. He got to a gas station, and parked in a spot with no pump, then paid the attendant nonexistent mimed money, went to a blank spot in the parking lot, and pretended to pump his nonexistent car. While he was inside getting his change, I was tempted to pretend keying his car, but I didn't. I just sort of stared at it. He came out and we had a conversation. Well, I talked but he communicated his side of the conversation very effectively with gestures. He's proud of his pretend sportscar (but he does have a mimed bumper sticker on it that says "MY OTHER CAR EXISTS") and likes his job. He works for the worldwide sinister conspiracy that watches over us all! He doesn't do the spying work, though. He's a technical writer. He takes all the data from the spying, and the Panopticon camera, and so forth, and compiles that information into the clean, concise, glossy-photo dossiers that you always see the conspiracy has in the movies. There's a lot of hard work in collating all that data into a meaningful dossier, but it's engaging work that uses his skills, and the benefits are great, so he's pretty happy. Technically, he's not allowed to talk about it, but, you know, technically, he didn't. |
| Saturday, October 31st, 2009 | |
| 2:43 pm | the coming of archy (today my LiveJournal is in disguise as Maria's, and I believe that means that I post poetry!) by Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927 The circumstances of Archy's first appearance are narrated in the following extract from the Sun Dial column of the New York Sun: Dobbs Ferry possesses a rat which slips out of his lair at night and runs a typewriting machine in a garage. Unfortunately, he has always been interrupted by the watchman before he could produce a complete story. It was at first thought that the power which made the typewriter run was a ghost, instead of a rat. It seems likely to us that it was both a ghost and a rat. Mme. Blavatsky's ego went into a white horse after she passed over, and someone's personality has undoubtedly gone into this rat. It is an era of belief in communications from the spirit land. And since this matter has been reported in the public prints and seriously received we are no longer afraid of being ridiculed, and we do not mind making a statement of something that happened to our own typewriter only a couple of weeks ago. We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about on the keys. He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion. Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found: expression is the need of my soul i was once a vers libre bard but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach it has given me a new outlook upon life i see things from the under side now thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she catch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore there is a rat here she should get without delay most of these rats here are just rats but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him he used to be a poet himself night after night i have written poetry for you on your typewriter and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet comes out of his hole when it is done and reads it and sniffs at it he is jealous of my poetry he used to make fun of it when we were both human he was a punk poet himself and after he has read it he sneers and then he eats it i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat or get a cat that is onto her job and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look to a cockroach that rats name is freddy the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat but something smaller i hope i will be a rat in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office i haven't had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings and paste and leave a piece of paper in your machine every night you can call me archy |
| Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | |
| 2:51 pm | Silver If I got these, I would be the coolest werewolf hunter ever. Who's with me? ( Cut for werewolf-hunting recruitment. ) But now that I think about it, maybe what a werewolf-hunter really needs is this. |
| Sunday, October 25th, 2009 | |
| 8:56 pm | Hybrid Vigor "I've decided," my friend said, "that from now on I'll only eat food that comes from hybrid cultures. You know, like a Chinese restaurant that starts selling donuts because it's next to a police station. Or Zante's Indian Pizza, in San Francisco, where you can get a curry pizza. Indian buffets that serve a few Chinese dishes, or British-Indian cuisine, or Tex-Mex, or pretty much anything Jamaican. Maybe I'll drive down to Los Angeles and see if Poncho & Wong's is still open. Heck, I'll even take a pseudo-Indian hippie place, or a burger from a Chinese-American restaurant or Korean ribs from an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet. Anything that comes from an intersection of multiple cultures, I will eat." "I think this is a good plan," I said, "and I will support it in any way I can." "I'm glad I have your carte-blanche support," she replied, "because the other part of my plan is that I pour one hundred live tarantulas into your bed every night. Also, no take-backs." Darnit! I don't want tarantulas in my bed, but she said no takebacks! There's no way to get around that. Current Music: future echoes of the Wild Things soundtrack I plan to buy |
| Saturday, October 24th, 2009 | |
| 10:04 pm | |
| Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 | |
| 12:12 pm | Nose "This wine has no nose," the wine critic told me, frowning. "Then how does it smell?" I asked. "Oh!" the wine critic replied proudly, "The producers of the wine, after they removed all the wine's aroma, managed to set up a complex electrical system in the bowl of the wine glass that conducts in such a way that the wine itself has a virtual but fully functional central nervous system, arcing through the liquid in subtle but complex resonances to create true sentience. Then they added chemical receptors to the stem of the wine glass, to give the wine a complete and functional olfactory system." "And you're going to drink it?" I asked her, frowning. "It is one of the most expensive wines ever made," the wine critic replied, "but it kind of zaps your tongue." |
| Sunday, October 18th, 2009 | |
| 3:27 pm | I've had this problem all day that whenever I put on music, the band shows up at my apartment to say hello. David Bowie just said goodbye and went off to finish his day, and Devo are still here, chatting merrily. I'm a little nervous because the next thing on my playlist is the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. I'm even more nervous about the song after that, which is Buddy Holly. I'm even *more* nervous about Gwar, three songs away. Current Music: Devo, "Gates of Steel" |
| Monday, October 12th, 2009 | |
| 7:29 pm | Hey all! I'm testing out a new experimental user interface for this LiveJournal. Please try it out. To use the experimental UI: 1. Visualize exactly what you'd like the LiveJournal to do. 2. Violently headbutt your screen. Hopefully, this advanced interface will be intuitive, flexible, and responsive. Let me know how it works out. |
| Sunday, October 11th, 2009 | |
| 12:14 pm | Parrot fencer in the light I saw online that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 has been awarded to Venkatramana Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada E. Yonath, for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. The ribosome is a complex of RNA and protein that is found in all cells. The ribosome is part of the mechanism that translates the DNA sequence into the protein sequence. At least, so Wikipedia tells me. I think we can all agree that the prestigious and dignified Nobel Prize is, of course, somehow going to be an embarrassing failure and an obstacle for the ribosome. I see this award as an indictment of everything that is wrong with the ribosome today. The ribosome should decline the award, and instead pass it on to malignant prions. There is no way the ribosome has earned this prize. Shame on you, ribosome, for your bad lofty achievements! I demand an apology! |
| Friday, October 9th, 2009 | |
| 5:25 pm | "I'm writing software that will not give me any superpowers," I told my parakeet today as he watched over my shoulder. "Every piece of software always has bugs, especially when you first compile it, so I figure if this software has no purpose except to give me no superpowers, and it fails the first time I compile it, I'll get superpowers." The parakeet over my shoulder squawked disapproval, "Sorry, no. You're actually writing a software program to give you superpowers by failing not to do so." Stupid parakeet! I almost had me fooled! |
| Thursday, October 8th, 2009 | |
| 8:06 am | |
| Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 | |
| 1:21 pm | "We have been sending you requests through your telecommunications system for the past three decades," the robots told me today, "and you have consistently failed to transport any of us to Funkytown. The time for negotiations is over. Transmit the coordinates to Funkytown immediately or we will extract them by force." |
| Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | |
| 3:01 am | |
| Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 | |
| 1:22 pm | The Barker "Come and see this remarkable transforming device!" the barker called out, "It can change an AMUSING MAZE into an AMAZING MUSE!" I stopped to check it out. "That's pretty cool," I said, "Can it change a CONGRESS PROFESSIONAL into a PROGRESS CONFESSIONAL? Or a MARINE SUBCONSCIOUS into a CONSCIOUS SUBMARINE?" "What?" the barker asked, confused and annoyed. "You know. The word puzzle." "No!" he said, "I told you before. It's not a word puzzle. It's a remarkable transforming device. We're working on generalizing so we can change labyrinths into demigods, but that's another year or two of development." Huh. Well, I drew a little maze on a piece of paper and handed it to him. "Go ahead. Change this." He scowled at it and shook his head. "Sorry, this maze isn't amusing at all. Please stop bothering me." Well, I never. Isn't the fact that it was about to become a muse at least a little chuckle-worthy? Current Mood: unamused |
| Sunday, September 13th, 2009 | |
| 1:11 am | oops! Now I have an enemy in the diamond business. |
| Saturday, September 12th, 2009 | |
| 3:36 pm | If you received this LJ entry accidentally, please delete without reading I received an email today. I'm pretty sure the guy sent it to the wrong address. From: Merovingiam Smith <merovingiam@livejournal.com> To: Merovingiam Smith In The Distant Past <merovingian@livejournal.com@2009sept12.0308pm> Subject: Inventions Notes Here's my list for this week, self! Teaching Cats To Walk On Ceiling Instead Of Floor: Teaching a single cat is enough. Cat can teach other cats in household and neighborhood. Within 2 years all cats on continent walk on ceiling instead of floor. Bolting cat furniture and food dish leads to extra floor space. Overall rating: Good idea! Downloadable Skills And Personality: Massive initial boost in productivity. Then someone releases (as free software) skill at coding all your skills, packaged with a personality committed to releasing it as free software. Within 2 years, all advantageous skills and personalities traits are freely available to anyone with a cheap, safe, simple skill-downloader device. Aside from physical capabilities, individual capabilities are obviated. Resources and job opportunities are distributed solely based on prejudice, nepotism, and bribery. Most of world relegated to a tiresome and somewhat cliché dystopia filled with extremely educated poverty. Overall rating: Bad idea. Time Traveling Email Over LiveJournal: Continues to work extremely well. Today, collected research from future selves to abandon many bad ideas. Continue to pass invention results back to past self for future development. Inventions avoided this week (due to future catastrophe) include: nanosharks, distilled evil, monkeyphone, temporal-paradox-powered sewing machine, origami eyeballs, ultrayogurt, negative-one-ply paper towels, and typographical-error-removing brain squids. Human species saved sixteen times over. Overall Rating: Good idea! P.S. Don't have the onion cakes when you go out for Chinese today. They were a little burnt. |
| Saturday, September 5th, 2009 | |
| 8:21 pm | Fireplaces I want to tell you about the history of fireplaces. I wish I could tell you that we began, as a species, on fire, and only learned to put ourselves out some twenty thousand years ago, after which we forgot what it meant to be on fire, and that now we are wounded by it. That would be a lie, though. I would never lie to you, reader. I would like, even more, to mention to you the way we were so proud, back then, to learn how not to be on fire, all overjoyed at the prospect of agriculture and tool use and writing and gathering food without making forest files. How excited we all got, the nervous plans we made, the endless naïve possibilities that thrilled us. It would be my bittersweet pleasure to tell you of the time, decades later, when we realized what we had lost, and that the world could be cold, and dark, and confusing. I might mention the embarrassing, almost comedic, moments when we first encountered uncooked food and had to decide if we liked it or not. I would feel compelled to admit that moment of horror when we first touched fire again and found that it hurt us now, that we could never return. Then, perhaps, I might tell you that, though our brains do not remember what it was like to be on fire, our mitochondria still holds the memory somehow, and that is why we long for fire when we see it, why we describe a person who lives fully as having a heart full of fire, and why we built fire places for ourselves. I would tell you that once we were fire people, and now, instead, we must content ourselves with fire places, and perhaps even fire things. But it would be untrue, and callous as well. I am sitting in a land now that is threatened by fire. I have smelled fire all day, thick with the perfume of cedar and the memory of a pleasant barbecue, or perhaps some ancestral call to warmth. I have to stop and remind myself that this is a very real tragedy. Fire is hurting us, and we have to be vigilant against it. Perhaps instead we were made of ice all along. |
| Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | |
| 9:24 am | e is also a magic number. The aliens knocked on my door again this morning. "Here's our idea," they said. They always talk in groups because they have a hive mind intelligence. They also have a hive vocal apparatus -- it takes about sixty of them to speak aloud. "Yes?" I asked, still groggy. Sometimes they bring me alien coffee when they wake me up early, but they must have gotten too excited today, and forgotten. "We really like the television show Schoolhouse Rock," they said, "but we feel it did not go far enough. We would like to commission a television show in the same format -- short, upbeat, accessible, with catchy nonthreatening contemporary music -- that explains other principles of your culture and learning. We request that the show cover topics that every American adult should know, such as differential and integrative calculus, the Calvin cycle, human psychoanatomy, the ANOVA statistical analysis method, the reading of a corporate balance sheet and cash flow statement, the formation of musical chords, the legal principles of artistic copyright, applying mathematical game theory to modern political conflicts, principles of wine tasting and fortuitous wine pairings, the distinction between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, the principles of humility and majesty in Rodin's nude sculptures, the major corporations of the world and their holdings and interests, treatment and recovery of addiction, the principles of effective written communication, a broad summary of martial arts styles, the mathematics behind the major proposed forms of superstring theory, the most popular pieces of Bollywood musical theatre, and the writing systems of the Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, Russian and Japanese languages." "Um," I replied. "We do not require complete coverage -- simply enough to explain the basic principles, in a way that anyone could understand, and to give a lead-in for those who are interested in learning more. We wish these musical educational pieces to be interjected in popular entertainment, including but not limited to contemporary animated cartoons." "Guys, I don't have the ability to create or distribute that kind of thing. I'm a haberdasher, remember? I make, repair, and block hats. I don't know how to make cartoons, and while I've got an okay singing voice, I can't compose or perform catchy rock and roll melodies." "Our apologies for the intrusion," they said. The aliens then separated out in a swarm and settled into the cracks and crevices of the tree outside my house, which is their current home. I went back to bed. |