Four Random Facts:
1) We totally fucked up the moving van, when we went down to Christiansburg to move Jeff and Jessica into their new place. Jeff tried to reverse it up the steep driveway, and the pedal went all the way to the floor without the truck making it even a third of the way up. After he relented, and came up forward, I noticed the river of dark red fluid running from underneath the front cab. We traced it back to the coolant tank, and a blown gasket somewhere in the underside of the truck.
"Is this one of those things where we can just dump water in and keep driving it until we return it?"
"Probably."
"Fuck it, then."
was pretty much the state of things, when I left. I should call Jeff and make sure everything went okay.
2) I found an online store that sells ribbons for my typewriter! http://www.scantracker.com is going to keep me denying what decade it is for decades to come. Amusingly, the ribbons cost over twice as much as the typewriter.
3) I had a really damn weird evening, yesterday. Remind me to tell you about it, sometime.
4) Has anyone else heard of these "Cook's Diode" things (talk about a name ripped from its proper application and questionably reapplied) that you're supposed to carry in your left pocket to ward off the evils of electromagnetic radiation? I found one in Janice's things, and did some online research, trying to find out what the heck it was. What I found made me slap my forehead and sigh, deeply.
Why is it that if you use the word "energy," intelligent people will assume you know what you're talking about, and if you threaten people with cancer they'll pay you $25.00 for a little palm-sized cake of random metal particles in a plastic suspension (which is what this thing is, as near as I can tell)?
What really worries me is that my ladyfriend, not one overly inclined to buy into other people's bullshit (in fact, she's fairly thrifty and cynical about most consumable goods), really does wholeheartedly believe in these things. When I question her about them and she is unable to defend their functionality in factual terms, she attributes this failing to her own poor communication and verbalization skills, rather than to the fundamental absurdity of the practice in question. The problem isn't with 1/4-baked New Age rabbit's-feet-in-disguise, it's with her ability to explain them to me in a way that will make me understand.
I suppose this theoretically could be true. It would take quite an eloquent orator to convince me that all the practical principles of physics that are daily to put to (observable) work in my life are actually wrong. Because the last time I checked, the EMF around the wires in your house extended centimeters beyond the wires, themselves, and certainly doesn't sit there firing beams of itself into your body, as you walk around. In fact, the short range of electromagnetic flux is the whole reason you have to coil wires up when you want to make use of it (in inductors or antennae), to magnify the effects. Ooops...there I go with my white-male-culture, overly-westernized, coldly-divorced-from-all-that-is-elevating facts (an invective that is not directed at my ladyfriend, who would never think of using such jargon, but at the half-dozen or so web pages I perused that are trying to bamboozle people into buying these things.)
But it makes me sad, because it ends up being about her, somehow, instead of about the ideas in question. I end up having to handle with kid-gloves concepts that I should be curb-stomping. If I could eradicate one tendency in the human race, it would be this.
"Is this one of those things where we can just dump water in and keep driving it until we return it?"
"Probably."
"Fuck it, then."
was pretty much the state of things, when I left. I should call Jeff and make sure everything went okay.
2) I found an online store that sells ribbons for my typewriter! http://www.scantracker.com is going to keep me denying what decade it is for decades to come. Amusingly, the ribbons cost over twice as much as the typewriter.
3) I had a really damn weird evening, yesterday. Remind me to tell you about it, sometime.
4) Has anyone else heard of these "Cook's Diode" things (talk about a name ripped from its proper application and questionably reapplied) that you're supposed to carry in your left pocket to ward off the evils of electromagnetic radiation? I found one in Janice's things, and did some online research, trying to find out what the heck it was. What I found made me slap my forehead and sigh, deeply.
Why is it that if you use the word "energy," intelligent people will assume you know what you're talking about, and if you threaten people with cancer they'll pay you $25.00 for a little palm-sized cake of random metal particles in a plastic suspension (which is what this thing is, as near as I can tell)?
What really worries me is that my ladyfriend, not one overly inclined to buy into other people's bullshit (in fact, she's fairly thrifty and cynical about most consumable goods), really does wholeheartedly believe in these things. When I question her about them and she is unable to defend their functionality in factual terms, she attributes this failing to her own poor communication and verbalization skills, rather than to the fundamental absurdity of the practice in question. The problem isn't with 1/4-baked New Age rabbit's-feet-in-disguise, it's with her ability to explain them to me in a way that will make me understand.
I suppose this theoretically could be true. It would take quite an eloquent orator to convince me that all the practical principles of physics that are daily to put to (observable) work in my life are actually wrong. Because the last time I checked, the EMF around the wires in your house extended centimeters beyond the wires, themselves, and certainly doesn't sit there firing beams of itself into your body, as you walk around. In fact, the short range of electromagnetic flux is the whole reason you have to coil wires up when you want to make use of it (in inductors or antennae), to magnify the effects. Ooops...there I go with my white-male-culture, overly-westernized, coldly-divorced-from-all-that-is-elevating facts (an invective that is not directed at my ladyfriend, who would never think of using such jargon, but at the half-dozen or so web pages I perused that are trying to bamboozle people into buying these things.)
But it makes me sad, because it ends up being about her, somehow, instead of about the ideas in question. I end up having to handle with kid-gloves concepts that I should be curb-stomping. If I could eradicate one tendency in the human race, it would be this.