The day has come when Computing Services will wait no longer. They must have my backup PC now, they say. They are clearing all the old, obsolete crap out of their inventory. I resent this characterization, as this was a cutting-edge machine just... well it's been almost 6 years now, but it seems recent enough ( Read more... )

Through the miracle of Google's Babelfish translator, I learn from a French hip-hop website that Tupac Shakur "was mortally touched of four balls."

And now for our next installment of "things the reference librarian doesn't know":

• Why a Norton antivirus security alert is popping up on your laptop screen
  
• How to register for a class after the drop ( Read more... )

I don't care if you are Sting. Don't do it. Also, don't compare love to religion, and don't say you don't need no doctor. In fact, don't write at all. Just shut up and play the bass guitar ( Read more... )

Barnes and Noble publishes el cheapo editions of various classics, and yesterday, I bought a hardback edition of Common Sense at the Union Station B. Dalton. I was reading it while waiting around for M, when I realized, I am reading Thomas Payne a block away from the US Capitol building.

Another dream where I have a kid. And in these dreams, the child is always preternaturally intelligent, or a pet, or a preternaturally intelligent pet. This morning, it's a 3-month old boy who's running around and talking. And I say to the kid, "Do you realize you can walk and talk, and you're only 3 months old?" And the kid says yes. And my ( Read more... )

What idiot decided I need little twigs of rosemary embedded in my sandwich bread? Now theyre embedded in my teeth ( Read more... )

A while back I wrote some not-nice things about my boss and her boss, in a fit of anger that I was using to propel myself through a dreary task on which my job depended. I was doing some other things to get myself through it, too, and they worked. I got it done. But now I regret saying nasty things about them. I like these people most of the time ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I mentioned that special, distinctive, nasty McDonald's smell that I didn't want to think too hard about. I brought it up with a co-worker, who told me she'd read in the book Fast Food Nation (which I once came *this* close to buying) that McDonald's has spent a lot of money researching this smell and precisely recreating it in each and ( Read more... )

There's enough news in the Post today to keep me busy for a week, stories and editorials of significance and portent, both national and global. Presidential debates, recalled elections, diplomatic train wrecks, snipers in the deserts and truck bombs in the miserable besieged cities. But what keeps drawing my attention is the violent death of one ( Read more... )

This morning I had some absurdly detailed and vivid dreams. Sometimes my dreams turn out to be prophetic. Of course, you can slice up the phone book and toss the pieces with some shredded New York Times, and sometimes that will turn out to be prophetic. But just in case, I record these dreams here, so remember where you heard it first.

( Mandrake gestures hypnotically. )