Given the quip in a recent post about precious prose, I am led to ask the question of intent and motive. Is Ogged
a) Calling our collective bluff?
b) Being incredibly brave and putting his own sentimental being up for inspection and stuff the coolness, already? or
c) In the early stages of some significant otherage and blind to the pretty folies etc?
For my part and for the record: Getting into the office on a miserable January morning and being smacked in the eyes like this actually did give me a warm fuzzy feeling. So there.
Ogged, I've been waiting for the right moment to share this with you. You probably don't know who Elizabeth Clare Prophet was, but her message could transform your life.
Down here in Carolina, this has been one of the warmest winters I can remember.
Ditto for New Jersey -- there have been a couple of cold days balanced by a couple days of borderline t-shirt weather, but by and large it's been mid to high 40's.
Actually, Seattle in the summer (the one summer I was there) is actually rather nice. Not an incredible about of rain (I don't remember anything that stood out more than any other place I've lived), and long, freakishly long, days.
The coldest I've seen it in Minnesota during the daytime is -3, and it's been around 20-30 most of the time. People can't drive their cars on the lakes because the ice isn't thick enough.
Average Minnesota temperatures for January so far are 10-20 degrees above normal.
We've had bitterly cold weather and very warm weather. I did actually hear birds chirping the other day. It was 59 degrees outside. Today it's pretty warm too, but the warmth is always accompanied by rain.
15: Apostropher, as someone who works in the PHRMA-related sphere, you have to know that no company in its right mind would pay for an advertisement encouraging people to ask for a generic drug.
Okay, apo, technically that's true, but it is available as generic Alprazolam, and unless your doctor specifies that the pharmacy not substitute, you're going to get the generic. Rarely do pharmaceutical companies advertise on behalf of their off-patent drugs unless it's gone over the counter, e.g., claritin.
Given that ogged lives somewhere where he's swimming outdoors and getting a goggle tan in the middle of winter, this post has got to be cruel mockery of those of us who live in cold climates. The wind in NY today is something special -- it woke me up at about 5:00, worrying that it was going to pop the windows out of my apartment.
Man. I wish I had the webspace to put up the video that my classmates and I did in college. But it's something like 400 megs (maybe I can shorten it now). damn it was good.
This winter has been a disappointment. Twenty with plenty of snow and sunshine is so much better than 35, muddy, drizzly and gloomy.
I've always thought early spring is the ugliest time of year, after the snow has melted and before the new growth has started. Without the snow you see the bare earth of plowed fields and the trash that has collected all winter under the snow.
I hate squirrels. In the West, more than half of them carry bubonic plague, and in the East, they're addicted to crack, and since people leave trash out and heat the great outdoors, the squirrels never hibernate. "Laughter of squirrels"?--more like the maniacal cackling of squirrels. Thanks for awakening deep-lain terrors, ogged!
I have a nemesis squirrel in a certain New York city park. Every time when I sit down with my lunch he tried to steal it from me. A few weeks ago he went so far as to jump on my lap and sit there for a good twenty seconds while I yelled at him to shoo. He even recognizes me when I pass without food, and engages me in staring contests. I am absolutely serious about this last.
Jackmormon, meet my dog Wreck, scourge of all squirrels. Rodents, specifically squirrels, are the only things that matter in this world to Wreck. Don't try to tempt him with a kitty; he won't bother.
Because my grandma is a little loopy, she'll buy me things like taxidermied animals for Christmas. Once she bought me a miniature lonhorn (no relation to the Longhorns, at least, not to her knowledge) made with real squirrel fur, which I stood on top of the television. Wreck actually couldn't sleep so long as this thing was in my house.
Wreck does not discriminate. His hatred knows no racial boundaries.
(I'm afraid to say, then, that when we adopted him, his name was "Freckles," and Wreck was the only workable name we could distill that he'd answer to.)
Black squirrels almost destroyed the graduate student career of one of my sister's friends. Her field research involved tracking a smallish black squirrel population in a forest. Problem being that since the squirrels were nocturnal, and black, and there weren't a lot of them, she spent about two years wandering through the forest with see-in-the-dark goggles and bird seed for no data.
Another of her friends, doing research on plague in ground squirrel populations, got hauled in to sign a homeland security waiver--and then managed to write bio-weapons-related-program-activities grant proposals to get triple the money.
Earlier tonight the topic of Yggdrasil, the Norse world-tree, came up, and I mentioned that it was inhabited by a Cosmic Squirrel, but they did not believe me. They were then pwned.
This is your best post, I think.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:44 PM
This post is pretty gay. I'M JOKING. It's pretty.
Posted by Jim Thompson | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:48 PM
1 gets it exactly right.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:52 PM
Now more than ever.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:53 PM
The first sentence of 2 gets it exactly right.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:54 PM
You know what's good? Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Especially the sixth letter.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:56 PM
I liked Ogged more before he reset his Tivo.
(Too much?)
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:56 PM
Mien Gott.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:57 PM
What's your name?
(What's your name?)
Who's your daddy?
(Who's your daddy? He rich?)
Is he rich like me?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:58 PM
6: a? I've always been partial to k.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 10:58 PM
Is ogged Alice Munro? Jack Handy?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 11:00 PM
Mien Gott.
A demeanor deity.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 11:01 PM
We love those posts we love for what they are.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 11:21 PM
Squirrels laugh?
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01-17-06 11:42 PM
This post brought to you by the good people at Pfizer. Ask your doctor about Xanax today.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:01 AM
Apo, that's what I was thinking at first. But this seems more like a Prozac type of thing. Or LSD.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:05 AM
It's endorphins, naturally. And also? Fuck squirrels.
Not you, John Emerson.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:17 AM
Wait, did I miss something? What TiVo resettage loth?!
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:22 AM
You didn't see this?
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:27 AM
No, I missed that. Schoolwork has been seriously interfering with my Unfogged scheduling.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:31 AM
Given the quip in a recent post about precious prose, I am led to ask the question of intent and motive. Is Ogged
a) Calling our collective bluff?
b) Being incredibly brave and putting his own sentimental being up for inspection and stuff the coolness, already? or
c) In the early stages of some significant otherage and blind to the pretty folies etc?
For my part and for the record: Getting into the office on a miserable January morning and being smacked in the eyes like this actually did give me a warm fuzzy feeling. So there.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:06 AM
Oh, and its Mein Gott, people.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:08 AM
it's. sheesh!
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:14 AM
Now I remember. This has happened before.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:25 AM
Ogged, I've been waiting for the right moment to share this with you. You probably don't know who Elizabeth Clare Prophet was, but her message could transform your life.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 4:38 AM
21a.
Tipofffs: "pretty," "nice," "happy" "fresh," "big hug."
No one writes like that seriously, at least not after the age of twelve.
Yesterday we had freezing rain.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 5:04 AM
it was the "nice" that got me wondering... I mean!
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 5:08 AM
It's 95 degrees out. I have no time for your cryptic invocations of spring!
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 6:09 AM
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 6:23 AM
In the future it will be warm year-round, and the land will be underwater.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 6:45 AM
Whatever he's doing, he is not effectively mocking the sensibility he was objecting to yesterday.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 7:12 AM
Ogged has thrown the Rock of Gaiety into our Hornet's Nest of Disillusionment. Now, we shall buzz!
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 7:43 AM
In the future half of us will be "mentally ill".
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 7:51 AM
In the new century, I think we will all be insane.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 7:55 AM
And this will be different, how?
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 7:56 AM
Ogged has thrown the Rock of Gaiety into our Hornet's Nest of Disillusionment. Now, we shall buzz!
Chopper is SB?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:00 AM
I wish.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:04 AM
No one writes like that seriously, at least not after the age of twelve.
But he could be writing unseriously ... with a wink. "Ha ha, only serious.". We're a cynical lot, after all.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:09 AM
OT.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:12 AM
Yesterday we had freezing rain.
Down here in Carolina, this has been one of the warmest winters I can remember.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:21 AM
Down here in Carolina, this has been one of the warmest winters I can remember.
Ditto for New Jersey -- there have been a couple of cold days balanced by a couple days of borderline t-shirt weather, but by and large it's been mid to high 40's.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:26 AM
It's been fairly warm here too, actually. Otherwise I wouldn't even bother to note the *$#@! freezing rain.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:27 AM
My informant from Milwaukee said that there had been no winter to speak of. Ogged must be posting from the Yukon.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:28 AM
Is "buzzing" anything like "banging" (in the Vox Day sense)?
Posted by Dr. Omar | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:33 AM
Today is one of those special NYC sideways-blowing-rain "isn't it so cute that you think an umbrella might make a difference" days. Blah.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:38 AM
Ogged lives with Becks!
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:40 AM
My life has not been in vain.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:44 AM
This has been a really mild winter everywhere, methinks. Except for Seattle, where it rained for 27 straight days. Suckas.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:45 AM
There are no icicles a-drip-dripping at Chez Becks.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:45 AM
Heh. Fine, I'll say it before you do: IYKWIM, AITYD.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:47 AM
Tweedle: So the weather in Seattle has also been summery, no?
(Kidding, I have nothing against Seattle. And in Pittsburgh it rained every day of November 1986.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:48 AM
Actually, Seattle in the summer (the one summer I was there) is actually rather nice. Not an incredible about of rain (I don't remember anything that stood out more than any other place I've lived), and long, freakishly long, days.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:50 AM
I don't think we have enough emphasized how wrong "the laughter of squirrels" is.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:50 AM
The coldest I've seen it in Minnesota during the daytime is -3, and it's been around 20-30 most of the time. People can't drive their cars on the lakes because the ice isn't thick enough.
Average Minnesota temperatures for January so far are 10-20 degrees above normal.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:52 AM
We've had bitterly cold weather and very warm weather. I did actually hear birds chirping the other day. It was 59 degrees outside. Today it's pretty warm too, but the warmth is always accompanied by rain.
15: Apostropher, as someone who works in the PHRMA-related sphere, you have to know that no company in its right mind would pay for an advertisement encouraging people to ask for a generic drug.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:52 AM
BG,
A generic pharmaceutical company would. Do you work in Boston, or outside of the city?
Today I went outside in only a raincoat. No gloves or anything. The weekend, however, was bitterly cold.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:55 AM
55: Xanax isn't a generic drug.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:57 AM
55: This reminds me of a funny story. Once I made some crack to my mom about bored, disaffected suburbanites.
M (indignant): Not all suburbanites are so discontented. I live in suburbia and I'm not discontented.
T: Mom, you're on Zoloft. You don't get to be the poster child for emotional fulfillment in suburbia.
M: Oh yeah.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 8:59 AM
Hmm. Finally a spammer who knows his market.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:00 AM
Okay, apo, technically that's true, but it is available as generic Alprazolam, and unless your doctor specifies that the pharmacy not substitute, you're going to get the generic. Rarely do pharmaceutical companies advertise on behalf of their off-patent drugs unless it's gone over the counter, e.g., claritin.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:02 AM
53: My thoughts exactly. Chattering, maybe; scolding, definitely.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:22 AM
I don't think we have enough emphasized how wrong "the laughter of squirrels" is.
What, you've never seen a laughing squirrel?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:23 AM
Here's one squirrel that isn't laughing, despite being full of liquor.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:26 AM
For maximum effect, that decanter should be filled only with red wine.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:31 AM
Given that ogged lives somewhere where he's swimming outdoors and getting a goggle tan in the middle of winter, this post has got to be cruel mockery of those of us who live in cold climates. The wind in NY today is something special -- it woke me up at about 5:00, worrying that it was going to pop the windows out of my apartment.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:33 AM
Man. I wish I had the webspace to put up the video that my classmates and I did in college. But it's something like 400 megs (maybe I can shorten it now). damn it was good.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:34 AM
Ooh, $2.99 for the laughing squirrel. Now if only I knew Ogged's mailing address...
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:35 AM
66: It was about squirrels.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:36 AM
" All the world is in tune
On a spring afternoon..."
Ogged + Apo = Tom Lehrer
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:38 AM
This winter has been a disappointment. Twenty with plenty of snow and sunshine is so much better than 35, muddy, drizzly and gloomy.
I've always thought early spring is the ugliest time of year, after the snow has melted and before the new growth has started. Without the snow you see the bare earth of plowed fields and the trash that has collected all winter under the snow.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 9:50 AM
Agreed, early spring is completely hideous anywhere where there's such a thing as a real winter.
All the more reason to avoid those "real winter" kinds of places and move to the southwest, where spring is lovely.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 10:11 AM
I hate squirrels. In the West, more than half of them carry bubonic plague, and in the East, they're addicted to crack, and since people leave trash out and heat the great outdoors, the squirrels never hibernate. "Laughter of squirrels"?--more like the maniacal cackling of squirrels. Thanks for awakening deep-lain terrors, ogged!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 10:34 AM
I hate squirrels.
C'mon now, you can't hate this one.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 11:36 AM
Jackmormon, if apo's squirrel won't cure you of your squirrel-hatin' ways, then you need a healthy dose of the lovey squirrel.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 11:41 AM
Don't try to appease me with alcoholic, nymphomaniacal, plague-ridden, cracked-out squirrels. Even dead and stuffed, the squirrel is the enemy.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 11:50 AM
Even mutant Frankensquirrels? Man, you are unappeasable. Maybe you'd prefer them more like this. They at least look like they're suffering.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 11:57 AM
At least the true nature of the squirrel* seems to be revealed in those arrangements.
*As eeevil.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:06 PM
How can anyone hate squirrels?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:19 PM
Easily.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:23 PM
Oh, pshaw. You're far likelier to be hit by a bus, probably.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:25 PM
OT - Study: Men Enjoy Seeing Bad People Suffer. Why they like torturing nice people like Jack with pictures of mutant squirrels, I still can't say.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:26 PM
That study sounds pretty bogus. Cool idea though.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:29 PM
I have a nemesis squirrel in a certain New York city park. Every time when I sit down with my lunch he tried to steal it from me. A few weeks ago he went so far as to jump on my lap and sit there for a good twenty seconds while I yelled at him to shoo. He even recognizes me when I pass without food, and engages me in staring contests. I am absolutely serious about this last.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:30 PM
Jackmormon, meet my dog Wreck, scourge of all squirrels. Rodents, specifically squirrels, are the only things that matter in this world to Wreck. Don't try to tempt him with a kitty; he won't bother.
Because my grandma is a little loopy, she'll buy me things like taxidermied animals for Christmas. Once she bought me a miniature lonhorn (no relation to the Longhorns, at least, not to her knowledge) made with real squirrel fur, which I stood on top of the television. Wreck actually couldn't sleep so long as this thing was in my house.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:40 PM
Damn, now I have a crush on Armsmasher's girlfriend *and* grandma.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:46 PM
And the dog's not bad looking, either.
(I plan to grow up to be that kind of grandma. Taxidermy for everyone this Christmas!)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:50 PM
ming has a crush on me, so nyah.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 12:55 PM
What a lovely post, Ogged. I love your speed.
Posted by Maureen Dowd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:07 PM
84: Is Wreck short for Rex?
Black squirrels have arrived in Boston. They are really beautiful.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:16 PM
Black squirrels are creepy and Mirkwood-like.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:22 PM
No, they are simple and elegant.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:37 PM
They have thinner tails than gray squirrels.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:49 PM
Wreck does not discriminate. His hatred knows no racial boundaries.
(I'm afraid to say, then, that when we adopted him, his name was "Freckles," and Wreck was the only workable name we could distill that he'd answer to.)
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 1:50 PM
They have thinner tails than gray squirrels.
and your point is?
Wreck is a much better name than Freckles. Wreck is a name you can call in the park and not be mocked.
Fweckles!
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 2:01 PM
Also, having a dog named Freckles may fall under the same rule as this.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 2:07 PM
I'm mindful of that rule. Freckles? Out. Gardening? OK.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 2:16 PM
Freckles? Out. Gardening? OK.
What about hot man-on-man action? OK or out?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 2:22 PM
That might be a little
gay.Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 2:31 PM
I will never forgive the squirrels for what they did with my shoe and the muffin. Oh, God, the muffin.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 2:55 PM
Black squirrels almost destroyed the graduate student career of one of my sister's friends. Her field research involved tracking a smallish black squirrel population in a forest. Problem being that since the squirrels were nocturnal, and black, and there weren't a lot of them, she spent about two years wandering through the forest with see-in-the-dark goggles and bird seed for no data.
Another of her friends, doing research on plague in ground squirrel populations, got hauled in to sign a homeland security waiver--and then managed to write bio-weapons-related-program-activities grant proposals to get triple the money.
All squirrels=bad news.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 4:45 PM
Thin tails on squirrles look weedy and mangy. Squirrels should have fat bushy tails and sassy attitudes. These things are the essence of squirreldom.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 10:11 PM
Earlier tonight the topic of Yggdrasil, the Norse world-tree, came up, and I mentioned that it was inhabited by a Cosmic Squirrel, but they did not believe me. They were then pwned.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-18-06 10:14 PM
hmmph. the black squirrels I've seen in boston have perfectly charming, full, bushy tails, and terminally cute head-tilting mannerisms.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 8:16 AM
#87- Saying you're charming constitutes a full-blown crush? Ok, well, you can smash my arms anyday, sailor.
Posted by ming | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 4:19 PM