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tell-tale moves of sodomy
Tuesday, March 19 2002
(I left this entry saying simply $0m3th!n6 $0m3t!m3 and it looks so cool I think I'll leave it there.)
Gretchen needed some more alone time and, since my batcave wasn't quite ready for use, I set off into the wet streets of Brooklyn on foot to run errands and perhaps get some fresh air.
After dumping off a pile of real estate documents and W2 forms at an accountant whom Gretchen had recommended, I did a number of time-wasting activities in and around Park Slope. There was the slice of pizza I devoured at the Big Pizza Café (sitting in the narrow booth by the window). There was also the bagel and cup of coffee I consumed at Ozzy's. Like the Big Pizza Café, it seems Ozzy's is a popular destination for the stroller-pushing breeders gradually usurping Park Slope from its native lesbian inhabitants. One such usurper parked her larval progeny only one table away from mine, and I had to split even before I'd finished my coffee, so unbearable was its monotonous squalling.
I ended up at the Brooklyn Public Library, hoping to maybe look at some magazines. I haven't had much use for libraries since the invention of the World Wide Web, but there are things in magazines that one just can't find on the web. Strangely, though, it didn't seem that the Brooklyn Public Library actually had any periodicals - the periodical shelves were almost entirely bare. I actually went into the periodicals room twice just to confirm for myself that there were in fact no recognizable magazines in there. There were a fair number of people in that room reading magazines, mind you, but there weren't enough magazines being read to fill the empty shelves.
I went up to the second floor to see if I could find a book about Flash and, not surprisingly, came up emptyhanded. In amongst the dogeared Netscape 2.0 references there was a battered Flash 4 book of some sort, but the stuff I'm doing in Flash puts a premium on the latest, most in-depth information, much of which I've had to discover on own through experimentation, since it's all completely undocumented.
Overall, I have to say my experience in the Brooklyn Public Library was a bummer, befitting today's cold rainy weather. The building and its contents have the shopworn hallmarks of an institution that is overused and underfunded. Brooklyn is an important place in America, but I keep getting the sense that its people and institutions aren't a priority for anyone in our country's power structure. It's not even that Brooklyn is poor (parts of it are, but parts of it are upscale too), it's simply eclipsed by its proximity to Manhattan. This has its upside as well; there probably are no terrorist plots afoot to crash a plane into the beautiful Williamsburg Bank Building.
Despite the drafty clamminess down there and some unresolved asbestos issues, I did several hours worth of work in the batcave this evening. It was a good environment for focusing on my Chat project, and I managed to build some rudimentary scrollbars for its text window. Later I also added some sound so it can alert you when a post is incoming. The sound I chose for this was a sample of George W. Bush saying the word "people" during his September 20th, 2001 address to Congress. You remember that celebrated speech, don't you? I understand it has pretty much supplanted the Gettysburg Address as an example of great American presidential oratory. Anyway, I took our President's voice, reversed it, put an echo on it, reversed it again, speeded it up slightly, and fed it through a filter to make it sound like it's coming through a telephone. Perfect.
I don't know about you, but I find the collapse of the Larsen Iceshelf in Antarctica an unnerving reminder of the fragility of the planet. As revealed in Greenlandic ice cores, the stability of global climate over the past 10,000 years has been something of a freakish anomaly, and many scientists are wondering when the good luck that allowed civilization to blossum will finally run out. Such spectacular changes as the collapse of the Larsen Iceshelf are only supposed to happen every several thousand years or so, but it seems this is the second (and largest) major collapse since 1990. Coming as it does on the heels of the failure of the American Congress to pass a responsible CAFE standard for American automobiles, this collapse has the ominous quality of a message from God. Indeed, the iceshelf's collapse happening now is the most convincing evidence yet for "Intelligent Design"!
Gretchen and I ate dinner at Hunan Delight, the Chinese restaurant near the corner of 6th Avenue and Union Street where we'd celebrated a Jewish Christmas. The staff at Hunan are pleasant and attentive enough, but they have a tendency to jump the gun in their eagerness to take your plate away. Generally, if you're a waitress, it's a good idea to at least wait until the customer has stopped chewing before grabbing his or her plate.
On the walk home, we ducked into the Colon Market to pick up some provisions, particularly icecream and beer. Things are weird in there, and we could find none of the products we normally buy. As far as I could tell, they only sold single beers, not six packs. There was a four pack of an unfamiliar beer called Mississippi Mud, a lager brewed in Utica New York, so I bought that. Gretchen managed to find a pint of an icreceam-based-product that cost about a dollar. The guy working the cash register couldn't keep himself from drumming the counter constantly. "You have the wrong job," Gretchen observed. "That's because I'm a percussionist!" he said. He claimed he used to play in a Merengue band and everything, "But now," he admitted, "All I have time for is the store. It's family."
The rain had stopped and the weather had warmed by the time I took Sally for her midnight walk in the Long Meadow. As we came up along the wooded part of the Long Meadow where the picnic tables are, I could see in the halflight off in the distance two guys hanging out at the picnic table farthest to the north. Then I noticed that one of them was bent over the other going wooka-wooka-wooka in the tell-tale moves of sodomy. Yeah. My biggest concern was that Sally would run up to them and cause me to have to go over there and get her, so I made a big loop away from them and headed home.
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