Short Stories, Long Odds

I saw a car today that was covered in the bumper stickers you might imagine would accompany a shoe-polished message on the back window that said, “World Peace or Bust.”  I didn’t feel like breaking it to him because he looked like he was having an alright time.

The bumper stickers I see around the square in Denton, where I work, vary in size and intensity, much like nova planets or migraines. They all articulate the essential message that whomever has applied them to the backs of their Fiats or Fords has a message so important that you need to receive it even when they cannot communicate it to you personally.

Campaign stickers are different than a sticker that says “Eat The Rich” or “GOD IS PRO-LIFE AND SO IS GEORGE BUSH” or something similar. Even though I work in politics, it was a big step for me to put a political bumper sticker on my car this last election cycle, and it still felt a little weird. I did it, though, and it was only my second bumper sticker. I had my first one on my van in high school. It said, “Hagfish Rocks Your Lame Ass.” Now that’s a message I needed to communicate even when I could not do it personally.

It isn’t just bridges, or the power grid. Its mines and roads and about a hundred other big-ticket things you can think of that are aging and important.

My brother-in-law points out my unfortunate Karaoke Revolution habits, and the forced undoing of those habits by Activision:

Also, the Karaoke part of the game will now include a phoneme detector. So no more humming or singing “Nickelback” through entire songs

The game is Rock Band, and if my weekends were ever imperiled by the possibility of competitive, scored karaoke happening in my living room, now my punishment for avoiding the foibles of Guitar Hero is to be presented with Drum Set Hero and implored through longing looks to whip out the sauce on Tom Sawyer.

Its really mean of them to have put Tom Sawyer on there in the first place. Although really, if you’re going to put something impossible to play for most people in your game, why not go all the way and do YYZ? Skip “mostly impossible” and go straight to “we can barely even program this.”

Worked from home due to leg. Would you believe that, as I am also not doing anything fun tonight (re: due to leg also) that I will instead be spending time with journal articles about hijacking contagion theories from authors that brandish phrases like “descriptively rich but analytically barren?” That end up doing things like “disaggregating for outcomes” when they aren’t even punishing someone?

Good things that happened yesterday:

1. my dog learned how to jump on the couch.
2. We got picked up by Reuters WorldWire. (Way to go, Betsy!)

Thing I could have done without:

1. Another excision, another hole in my leg.
2. Still behind on term papers