Friday, October 3, 2014

7 Quick Takes, Vol. 38

1.     Missed the last few weeks for the usual reasons, so some of these are left-overs from earlier attempts. As always, hosted by the marvelous Conversion Diary. If you came here from there, I sincerely apologize for the lack of cute children on this blog. 

2.     Remember how last time I said I was in the market for a gas mask? Well, I got one! That military surplus store came through (though it was a bit farther away than I had anticipated). The staff was friendly, laid-back, and helpful, and I walked away with an Israeli civilian model mask that fits over my glasses and beard (which I hadn’t even considered until the clerk brought it up), a filter, a hydration straw, and a couple of old field manuals: one on first aid, the other on setting booby traps (let’s see people ignore that “no solicitors” sign now!). Actually, that inspired me to go on something of a bug-out bag shopping rampage, and I ended up with a few more tools for my car, an extra roll of duct tape (forgetting I’d already gotten one), lots of rope, and a blanket for my car (getting ready for winter). Now I really should get the actual bag part, but I’ve been spending way too much lately and need to go on a freeze for a while (look, there was a rare DVD of The Return of Godzilla available and a complete eleven-film set of the Gamera series: I wanted to grab them while I still could).

3.     I’m listening to a biography of Calvin Coolidge at the moment, which I’m enjoying. The more I learn about him, the more I relate to Coolidge: the quiet, introverted, bookish lawyer who made friends slowly and eventually rose to be an extremely successful President. He also had an amusingly deadpan sense of humor, as in the famous anecdote where his response to the lady who informed him that she had made a bet that she could get more than two words out of him during the evening was “you lose.”
Oh, and I find this picture of him and his wife to be an absolutely hilarious image of the principle “opposites attract”:

She looks like she's about to start flirting with the cameraman, he looks like he's severely constipated. True love, ladies and gentlemen!

4.     By the way, there’s one particular set of invoices at work that have been the bane of my existence for months and now are possibly almost done. There are three of them (all for the same PO), two of which are released for payment while the third and largest sits there with no word on what the holdup is.  Interestingly, the numerical designation of the company they come from starts off with “666.” Coincidence? I think not.

5.     This week I learned that some people can not get around to reading emails for months on end. I honestly didn’t realize that. See, since e-mail is more or less my equivalent of Stephen Hawking’s voice box, I have my email up pretty much all the time as a matter of habit, whether at work or home (sad, I know). So the idea of missing an email for months (heck, more than a day or two) is completely foreign to me. This actually makes me feel a lot better about the oft-long waits between correspondents’ replies (“they’re not ignoring me! It’s just that they’re just normal and I’m not!”).

6.      Today I once more indulged my odd habit of making dark jokes out of historical figures. Gives you a pretty good idea how my mind works. Here are a couple samples:

“Startling new evidence has emerged proving that the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole was actually created in a fit of bitterness by Robert Falcon Scott as one final "F you" to Roald Amundsen.”

“Well, that could’ve gone better.”
-J. Bruce Ismay upon landing in New York, April, 1912


7.     And we’ll round out with an actual quote:

“Some people misunderstand evil, and believe it will relent. And because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent. It must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed, that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.”
-Odd Thomas, Odd Apocalypse

 Vivat Christus Rex!
  

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