Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


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Friday, January 23 1998
I

  kept pretty busy today with a site for which payment is unlikely. Why? It's not charity, and it's nothing I believe in. In fact, it's a site that embodies -no, unwittingly caricatures- most of the things that I loathe about American culture. But inertia and the duty to colleagues drives me on.

This morning, Matthew Hart was making a big production of cooking breakfast for himself and Angela. The nauseating aroma of eggy slime hung heavy on the air.

A deep fryer full of oil was sizzling away on the floor. We would have been ready had a phalanx of skinheads attacked, though I'm sure it was really intended for the manufacture of french fries (or "chips" as the English say).

Later, though, when the oil had cooled down and been abandoned (the post-cooking kitchen is always a disaster, especially when Matthew is the chef) its aromas caught the attention of Shira the Dog. She evidently lapped up a bunch of it, no doubt thinking she was supplementing her diet with some essential fat. I hear that the Eskimos eat whale blubber straight and dish it out to their beloved huskies too. It takes a lot of fat to make it through an Arctic Winter.

But this boiler fat didn't last long in the gastrointestinal tract of Shira the Dog. She puked repeatedly all over the floor, on the couch, and in Matthew and Angela's bed (I can't think of a more effective message). The grease was impossible to clean up; it soaked into things and clung there tenaciously.

    I had a friend in Oberlin who used to like to masturbate using olive oil as a lubricant. He'd borrowed a friend's futon for the year, but of course by year's end the futon was worthless.

Concerned by what would happen when the oil hit the other end of Shira's digestive tract, I put her outside for much of the evening.

    As an experiment I once drank a half cup of vegetable oil. Some hour later I had an uncontrollable urge to shit. Lucky for me I was outside at the time, because I only had just enough warning to pull down my pants.

Matthew and Angela headed off to Orange (a town somewhere to the north) to do some errand for Theresa, even though Angela was very mad at her sister for trying to put the moves on Matthew last night.

I

  had some fun with AOL Instant Messenger this evening. It's a free download from AOL that allows anyone to chat with other people who are online at the same time (these people have to be either on AOL or running Instant Mesenger themselves). I know there are lots of ways to do this sort of thing, but probably none as widespread as AOL's. I chatted with Katie, the sixteen year old girl whose daddy flew her up for a few hours to visit me on September 1st. She's 17 now, and the conversation became kind of, er, exciting.

I

n the evening I was hanging out with Matthew and Deya watching a Kids in the Hall marathon on the comedy channel.

Matthew kept expecting Sarah Kleiner to come by, since she'd told Deya she'd be coming over after she got off work. He'd get up and check outside periodically, as he always does when he's unsatisfied with his present company. Sarah was, as Matthew explained, our only hope for socializing on this Friday Night, the supposedly most social night of the week. We've all become so apathetic about our social lives that sometimes we sit around waiting for our friends to come drag us out of our house. But our friends aren't as assertive as they used to be, so often we sit around simply watching teevee. As Matthew pointed out, Kids in the Hall was the only thing pumping any life into the evening at all. Matthew suggested that we need to do more work to recruit friends. "There's probably new groups of people we could befriend." He even wondered if we should start frequenting Charlottesville's populous but uninspired rave culture. "I'd take X," he added.

You know, we'd like to have an Aquarius party to celebrate all four of our birthdays this February, but we wonder seriously if anyone would come. Angela has a punk rock band lined up (the Councelors), but it would be embarrassing to have a band set up and play for just us. Anyway, if you read this and want to come to a hypothetical Aquarius party, send me email and I'll keep you posted. If our current dork-level popularity continues, we're going to need all the warm bodies we can find.

Eventually Sarah K. did show up, but she didn't bring her entourage of KC and the Triplets. Matthew mixed her a single screwdriver, which was as much as she could drink considering she had to be her own designated driver. Angela came home while Sarah was there, but then Sarah left. Wow, talk about a wild and crazy Friday night. I went to bed.

B

ut be careful with your wishing for your wishes may be granted. While I lay sleeping, a contingent of people descended on my house. They were Jatasya, Eliza (aka Crispina's sister of large meat pizza fame), and Tad. I guess I dodged a bullet. Here, let me explain.

The girls Jatasya and Eliza are alright, they're fun and interesting and what not. But Tad, oh my god. As Matthew put it the next day, "I had no idea how bad he really is!" Tad is the consumate conversational monopolist. He talks endlessly without listening, and he lingers long after others have departed. He wanted to visit me, but Matthew somehow managed to convince him that I needed my beauty sleep. Sure enough, after Jatasya and Eliza had departed, Tad hung around until he was told he had to go. Oh joy, oh bliss.

one year ago

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