Congratulations to my betrothed on being noticed by all those cool kids in the creative class. Enjoy it now, as their attention spans tend to be a little on the short side.
I hate lawyers.
I don’t, really. I have in-laws and friends who are lawyers, and I don’t hate them. I guess what I really hate is the sort of institutionalized bureaucracy and down right idiocy to which some lawyers are more prone than are members of the general public. Like today, for example, when I had to drive to Reidsville to pick up a personal item from my uncle’s estate. The firm told me it was much too large to ship, so I had to come pick it up and sign some papers while I was there. I made an appointment for 1:00 today, because that was the least objectionable time for me this week.
Of course they “lost” the appointment, and when I called to say I’d be about five minutes late dute to misjudging my travel time, they asked if I could come later this afternoon instead. I informed them that I’d already driven an hour to get to Reidsville from Winston-Salem, and I had no intention of lurking around for a few hours with nothing to do but sit downtown and watch the rednecks stroll by. So they said I could come on in.
When I arrived, I saw that this “big” item was in a surprisingly small box that would’ve cost between five and seven bucks to ship to me. The item itself was of minimal value. Thus, I wasted almost three hours, and between fifteen and twenty bucks in gas to complete a transaction that could have been handled for the price of seven dollars and two faxes. No wonder it’s taken fifteen months to settle this relatively simple estate if everything they do is this bloody convoluted. I shudder to think how many hours of this shit they’ll be billing for and how much of the final amount they’ll wind up with.
Meat Puppets
Backwater, 1994
I can’t remember the last time I felt quite as stressed and weary (and whiny?) as I do right this minute.
Maybe I was just overreacting to a really long, really bad day. Don’t worry. I don’t think I’ve peaked yet. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunity to get even more stressed and weary (and whiny?) in the next few weeks.
That said, I’ll probably skip the comic relief of tonight’s vice presidential debate.
Liddy Dole’s latest campaign mailer manages to successfully display not only her contempt for those who don’t meet her religious specifications, but also her distaste for all those godless homosexual scoutmasters who primarily get involved so they can molest little Billy or Bobby. While simultaneously stealing Christmas, of course. It’s a pity she couldn’t score the trifecta and somehow sneak gun control into the message as well. Maybe something about how all those scoutmasters want to keep nine-year-old boys unarmed so they won’t be able to fight off atheist homosexual predators?
Today’s randomness courtesy of the ALA’s weekly newsletter:
I want a Flexible Fred:
But these days, the 5-foot-tall, 200-bone plastic skeleton slumps on his roller stand in a corner of the Delaware County Law Library. Taped to his clavicle is a sign that reads: “We have had a neighbor complain that Flexible Fred is scaring her children. Please do NOT put him near any windows.”
I keep reading about this book and I think I must have it:
So begins Rick Wartzman’s “Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ ” (Public Affairs Books, $26.95, 310 pages). The title comes from a comment by powerful Kern County farmer Bill Camp, who said Steinbeck’s book was “obscene in the extreme sense of the word.” Camp would supervise the burning of “The Grapes of Wrath” a few days later in downtown Bakersfield.
A couple of these nifty new free WordPress themes may actually convince me to use WP rather than Joomla or Drupal for the new version of Groceteria.
A few months ago, Harris Teeter started running TV commercials featuring Isaac from “The Love Boat”. Today, I heard a Food Lion radio commercial based on the famous turkey giveaway episode of “WKRP in Cincinnati”, and featuring what seemed to be the actual voice of Les Nessman.
North Carolina: where B-list TV stars from the 1970s go to die promote supermarket chains.
Agent Orange
Bloodstains, 1983
Somehow I managed to pick up the raging cold of death this week. Mark had a less intensive version of it first, but I think I got the full-strength edition. It started on Tuesday with a sore throat. By Wednesday morning, I sounded like Brenda Vacarro on steroids, but I felt a lot better by nightfall. It came back on Thursday and Friday, though. It didn’t help that I was alos having lots of trouble sleeping. I’m still not sure whether I felt so bad because I couldn’t sleep or I couldn’t sleep because I felt so bad. Either way, I felt like shit and I was really sleepy.
I think it may finally be ending soon. But I tought that on Wednesday, too.
Anyway, I have lots of exciting reading to do on archival theory, but I just wanted to take a second to put these exciting photos from the fair last week, because I know you’d hate to miss the special librarian cake and the pig races:
