This post is pretty gay. I'M JOKING. It's pretty.
The first sentence of 2 gets it exactly right.
You know what's good? Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Especially the sixth letter.
I liked Ogged more before he reset his Tivo.
(Too much?)
What's your name?
(What's your name?)
Who's your daddy?
(Who's your daddy? He rich?)
Is he rich like me?
6: a? I've always been partial to k.
Is ogged Alice Munro? Jack Handy?
We love those posts we love for what they are.
This post brought to you by the good people at Pfizer. Ask your doctor about Xanax today.
Apo, that's what I was thinking at first. But this seems more like a Prozac type of thing. Or LSD.
It's endorphins, naturally. And also? Fuck squirrels.
Not you, John Emerson.
Wait, did I miss something? What TiVo resettage loth?!
No, I missed that. Schoolwork has been seriously interfering with my Unfogged scheduling.
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.
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.
it was the "nice" that got me wondering... I mean!
It's 95 degrees out. I have no time for your cryptic invocations of spring!
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
In the future it will be warm year-round, and the land will be underwater.
Whatever he's doing, he is not effectively mocking the sensibility he was objecting to yesterday.
Ogged has thrown the Rock of Gaiety into our Hornet's Nest of Disillusionment. Now, we shall buzz!
In the future half of us will be "mentally ill".
In the new century, I think we will all be insane.
And this will be different, how?
Ogged has thrown the Rock of Gaiety into our Hornet's Nest of Disillusionment. Now, we shall buzz!
Chopper is SB?
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.
Yesterday we had freezing rain.
Down here in Carolina, this has been one of the warmest winters I can remember.
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.
It's been fairly warm here too, actually. Otherwise I wouldn't even bother to note the *$#@! freezing rain.
My informant from Milwaukee said that there had been no winter to speak of. Ogged must be posting from the Yukon.
Is "buzzing" anything like "banging" (in the Vox Day sense)?
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.
This has been a really mild winter everywhere, methinks. Except for Seattle, where it rained for 27 straight days. Suckas.
There are no icicles a-drip-dripping at Chez Becks.
Heh. Fine, I'll say it before you do: IYKWIM, AITYD.
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.)
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.
I don't think we have enough emphasized how wrong "the laughter of squirrels" is.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm. Finally a spammer who knows his market.
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.
53: My thoughts exactly. Chattering, maybe; scolding, definitely.
I don't think we have enough emphasized how wrong "the laughter of squirrels" is.
What, you've never seen a laughing squirrel?
Here's one squirrel that isn't laughing, despite being full of liquor.
For maximum effect, that decanter should be filled only with red wine.
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.
Ooh, $2.99 for the laughing squirrel. Now if only I knew Ogged's mailing address...
" All the world is in tune
On a spring afternoon..."
Ogged + Apo = Tom Lehrer
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.
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.
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 hate squirrels.
C'mon now, you can't hate this one.
Jackmormon, if apo's squirrel won't cure you of your squirrel-hatin' ways, then you need a healthy dose of the lovey squirrel.
Don't try to appease me with alcoholic, nymphomaniacal, plague-ridden, cracked-out squirrels. Even dead and stuffed, the squirrel is the enemy.
Even mutant Frankensquirrels? Man, you are unappeasable. Maybe you'd prefer them more like this. They at least look like they're suffering.
At least the true nature of the squirrel* seems to be revealed in those arrangements.
*As eeevil.
Oh, pshaw. You're far likelier to be hit by a bus, probably.
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.
That study sounds pretty bogus. Cool idea though.
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.
Damn, now I have a crush on Armsmasher's girlfriend *and* grandma.
And the dog's not bad looking, either.
(I plan to grow up to be that kind of grandma. Taxidermy for everyone this Christmas!)
What a lovely post, Ogged. I love your speed.
84: Is Wreck short for Rex?
Black squirrels have arrived in Boston. They are really beautiful.
Black squirrels are creepy and Mirkwood-like.
They have thinner tails than gray squirrels.
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.)
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!
Also, having a dog named Freckles may fall under the same rule as this.
I'm mindful of that rule. Freckles? Out. Gardening? OK.
Freckles? Out. Gardening? OK.
What about hot man-on-man action? OK or out?
I will never forgive the squirrels for what they did with my shoe and the muffin. Oh, God, the muffin.
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.
Thin tails on squirrles look weedy and mangy. Squirrels should have fat bushy tails and sassy attitudes. These things are the essence of squirreldom.
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.
hmmph. the black squirrels I've seen in boston have perfectly charming, full, bushy tails, and terminally cute head-tilting mannerisms.
#87- Saying you're charming constitutes a full-blown crush? Ok, well, you can smash my arms anyday, sailor.
