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crackhead lamp base
Thursday, January 17 2013
I wanted to make Gretchen a ceiling lamp for her first floor office to replace a ceiling-fan lamp that predates our administration. (Gretchen thinks this fan is ugly, though I do not.) Any such lamp would need some sort of mounting plate to bolt to the connection box from below, though I couldn't find anything suitable anywhere in the house except for an cylindrical aluminum colander that Gretchen had put in a box of things she is hoping to give away. Perhaps I could attach a series of sockets around its perimeter and make something interesting. So I used a drill to extract the rivets attaching the two handles (which on their own could used as drawer or window pulls). But as I worked with the colander, I gradually came to the opinion that it wouldn't actually make for a very good base for a lamp. Part of the problem was that it was made of aluminum, and anything I would attach to it would be made of copper. These series of decisions followed the typical trajectory of a crackhead project, mostly because I was under the influence of a recreational dose of 120 milligrams of pseudoephedrine at the time.
Today Gretchen was at her occasional job across the Hudson, so I decided to make us a dinner based on bean glurp. Lately I've been preparing it with bits of vegan sausage, which I'd originally tried as a mushroom replacment when I couldn't find any. It worked so well that this time I didn't even add mushrooms.
Later this evening, I watched Shipping Wars, my emerging favorite reality show (well, after the various Friday night gold mining shows). I've soured on the various incarnations of Storage Wars, particularly after learning that producers seed some of the storage lockers with antiques to heighten the excitement. Shipping Wars, where the same old personalities vie for various wacky shipping assignments, is probably just as fake, but since it's not as obviously fake as Moonshiners and not as discredited as Storage Wars, I can continue to enjoy my honeymoon with it. My favorite Shipping Wars personality is Jarrett, who bumbles his way through almost every job. He often shows up at the pickup site with an inadequately-sized truck, experiences numerous mishaps along the trucking route (some of which are his own damn fault, like when he put a huge Paul Bunyan statue on his truck feet-first, tripling or quadrupling his fuel requirements), and then bungles the delivery (in at least one case sending someone to the hospital). The general conceit of reality shows is that they allow ordinary Americans in the audience to feel superior as they watch other ordinary Americans fail, fail again, and keep on failing in an endless quest for fame. For this reason, Jarrett will always be a Shipping Wars star, as will the idiots in the Hoffman crew on Gold Rush. Oddly, though, one finds ones self rooting for the idiot stars anyway. Just once we'd like to see him catch a break, which would mean anything is possible in this cold, harsh world.
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