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rode my bicycle all the way out to Tate's junk yard to get a side light for my Dart, a replacement for the one Shira the Dog ripped off my car and chewed into oblivion. The only suitable replacement in the whole junk yard was broken, but I figured it would be enough for me to pass inspection. I also obtained a lug wrench I found pressed into the soil (I have a number of lug wrenches, but they're all metric and to change tires I've been forced to use socket wrenches, which are far from ideal). Back at Kappa Mutha Fucka, Angela seems to be doing a good job of cleaning out Jessika's future room. Since she's interested in this stuff, I'm going to set Jessika up with her own computer. It'll be some 16MHz 386 PS/2 Model 80 machine, but maybe I can get it to run Adobe Photoshop. Today I'm taking my ZIP drive on an expedition to UVA to see what 16 bit applications I can harvest. I'm still for hire and my answering machine has zero messages.
fter buying a bulb for the replacement light, I went to UVA armed with my ZIP drive and success was had, however, it wasn't in the 16 bit department. The day was so warm and sunny, it would have been nice to stay outside all day and have the sun bake me into something delicious. Instead of focusing on the the sky, however, I was forced to pay attention to my car. Later I even painted it using some cheap dark blue spray paint. The paint misbehaved itself and drooled in a cold stream over my hands and onto my car in places I wasn't spraying. Cleaning myself off was a major problem. I keep acquiring manufactured items that just don't work right. If my experience is anything like that of most people, very little in this country is satisfactorilly functional. In the evening, Amy the Goth girl gave me a tip about a new UVA computer lab over in Thornton Hall. I went to check the place out armed with my ZIP drive. I guess I should have expected this, but the machines were Pentium Pros running Windows NT and a variety of hobbleware that prevented on-the-fly installation of ZIP drivers (on a Windows 3.1 machine, installing those drivers is no problem, no matter how badly the machine is hobbled). So I accomplished little there. I did so much bicycle riding today that I think the exercise revitalized me. A couple weeks ago I noticed I was getting flabby and a little gut was developing. That was when I had an internet connection and not much need for a job. How times have changed. I'm lean and hungry, not quite cornered, but still ready to attack the face of the world.
ater, back at the house, Deya and I were watching Ellen on teevee. It was a kind of witty show, themed around a dream world where homosexuality was the norm and straight people stayed in the closet. Still, it was of a noticeably lower intellectual echelon than, say, Seinfeld. For the most part, when I watch American comedy I feel like my intelligence is being continually insulted. There are only a few comedy shows that don't do that to me: the Simpsons, Seinfeld, King of the Hill and Ally McBeal. Roseanne was good sometimes too. I don't know why all those comedy shows aimed at an Afro-American audience demonstrate such uniformly groan-inducing humour. I guess it's just yet another form of institutional racism.
ext, on one of those exclusive movie channels we recently "acquired," we watched a modern remake of Romeo and Juliet. The characters, costumes, stage sets and music were all contemporary, but the dialogue was the original Elizabethan English. I consider myself a fairly intelligent and well-rounded individual (I even took Advanced Placement English), but Shakespearean English is impossible for me to understand, and I found watching this remake a painful ordeal. I really wish there'd been subtitles. The original script just doesn't mesh with the necessary contact points in our culture. Time has moved, English has changed, and old language has been left behind. Things written in Shakespeare's language might as well be written in Etruscan. Sad to say, I think literature gradually dies over time unless it gets translated into current working versions of languages. I have the same trouble with the King James Bible. It's boring, it's bad, and it's no fun to read. Incomprehensibility should not be mistaken for mysteriousness. (Furthermore, the hocus-pocus makes no sense, but that's a more fundamental problem.) By the way, I liked Chaucer's Canterbury Tales when I read them in translation. Thankfully Middle English is now largely considered unreadable by most modern people, and devoted scholars have undertaken the necessary translations. Language, and the precise understanding thereof, has always been very important to me. That's why I wrote the Big Fun Glossary. I wanted everyone who speaks English to understand the culture that existed at that yellow house in the blowing fields of Central Virginia.
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