The Kids Are Alright

I've just heard what is, quite possibly, the greatest poop joke in the history of television. Now, I realize there are a handful of curmudgeons who don't find defecation to be funny. Most people over 12, for instance. I, on the other hand, can't even type the word 'defecation' without laughing. I've typed it twice now and I'm still grinning like Norm MacDonald three sentences before his own punchline. I'm watching a very old rerun of Saturday Night Live, and Gilda Radner has just finished delivering her commentary on the unimportance of saving endangered feces. If you were in the room right now, you'd see that typing 'feces' also makes me giggle.

Having outed my Philistine sense of humor, it's a good thing poop amuses me. I had a very long night at work, with a good number of the problems being bowel-related. Not a bad night, just unexpectedly long. It's quite difficult for me to calm my guys down, too, when I am visibly amused by their antics. For example, I was giving one of the girls her meds, and after she swallowed them there was still water left in her mouth. The obvious solution to this? Spit it down the front of her shirt. I don't mean to laugh at this sort of thing, I know it encourages bad behavior, or behavior at least perceived as bad, but it was funny. I laughed at her, she laughed back at me, stuck out her tongue, and reached for the glass to do it again. I got to the glass before her, I didn't want her to completely soak herself, but she did it meaning to be funny and it didn't hurt anyone, so I think, in retrospect, it could have been disrespectful not to laugh. Okay, that's a lie. But I will continue to be amused by the same things as elementary schoolers for the foreseeable future.

Brief thought: I switched the TV to Cartoon Network, who aired a commercial proudly proclaiming that the show was "brought to you by Coca-Cola Classic." I barely remember New Coke. I do remember not liking it, telling my parents "this tastes bad," and hearing them respond something to the effect of "yeah, we're sorry, we won't buy it anymore." The 'Classic' tag was sort of an apology, a way of telling people "hey, we screwed up. Here's what you really wanted." How big a screw-up was it if Coca Cola is still apologizing 20 years later? When will enough time have passed to reasonably presume that no potential customer will see Coke sans the 'classic' label and think it's the new formula? 1985 should not just be remembered for New Coke, though. It also blessed us with Wrestlemania, four-more-years of Ronald Reagan, and the intentional sinking of a Greenpeace ship. On the plus side, 1985 brought us Calvin and Hobbes, the Domain Name System, and in a three-way tie for the best thing to come out of the year, Tetris, the US release of the Nintendo, and the absolutely stellar film Brazil.

I think periodically about getting CDs of the Monterey Pop Festival, but it seems like slightly less of a good idea now. On the way to work today, the local NPR affiliate aired a show called Cypress Avenue, on which they played a good number of songs from the Monterey Pop 5-CD set. They were all amazing, but when they got to Jimi, they first played Foxy Lady. I'd only once before heard this particular version of the song, and it had the same effect as this time: the goosebumps started on my arms, then my scalp started to crawl and I had to pull over as I started feeling light headed. I sat on the shoulder of the highway for a minute or two waiting for the sensation to pass, but it lasted nearly the entire song, just a dizzy euphoria, a bit like hyperventilating, only giggly and ecstatic. For just a few seconds I teared up a little bit. I'm afraid if I do buy the set, the handful of songs that affect me in this way will stop doing so through familiarity, like when I see SLC Punk more than every 3 to 5 months or so and the ending stops affecting me so profoundly as it generally would, so I think I'll let them continue to be happy circumstance on the radio. Speaking of which, I should make sure to take the DVDs out of my Netflix queue. I'll surely leave the Isle of Wight discs in, though.

While looking for a good link for Monterey, I came across a year-old article, through which I learned that it is Black Music Month. The article states early on, "Despite the speculation behind who started the genre, African-Americans can count themselves amongst the originators of rock ‘n’ roll. Like jazz’s hybrid origin, rock music includes elements of several black American music styles." This is a valid point, but I would contend that rock and roll, despite its multiple influences, is the blues. A bastardized, anglicized blues, claimed by Elvis after stealing it from Carl Perkins who stole it from any number of black musicians in and around Memphis, most notably in my mind being Robert Johnson, but at its heart the blues. All other influences, though important, are sort of grace notes. If you disagree, feel free to say so, I'd love to discuss it with someone who feels passionately about it. If you agree, even better. I love having my beliefs reinforced by the opinions of others. If you have no opinion, go to Memphis and spend a few hours walking around downtown. Listen for a tune you like and walk toward it. You'll find a bar where someone is playing outdoors in a no-cover-charge, open-air garden where you can sit and listen. Then pay a visit to Memphis Music, and drop by the Gibson guitar factory (where, incidentally, I saw one of the greatest concerts ever at a semi-private party, and met Carl Perkins' son, Stan, and Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records. Also the tour guide who invited us to the party gave me directions to the crossroads.) You'll leave Tennessee with an opinion.

Let's Make Contact...

I recently started reading The Salmon of Doubt, the "missing novel" by Douglas Adams. It's actually a compilation of, essentially, the best of what was on the hard drives of his collection of Macintoshes. (Macintoshi? What is the correct plural form of Mac?) He had several Macs. It is an awesome (awesome as in awe-inspiring, not awesome as in dude-speak) collection of Adams' musings, magazine articles, and unpublished writings. As I read tonight, I began bookmarking pages with passages I found to be exceptionally good or profound or funny, or in a couple of spots with things I wished to Google later. This effort soon proved futile, as I was tearing my paper-scrap bookmarks smaller and smaller to facilitate the marking of every fifth or so page. As much as I love the Hitchhiker's novels, as well written as they are, there is a beauty, depth, and mastery of the craft of writing to Adams' writing not even hinted at by of the astute jokes of Arthur Dent, the uncanny but true observations of Ford Prefect, the selfish humanity, despite not being human, of Zaphod Beeblebrox. This is on no way meant to say his quality of writing was in any way hampered by being comedy: even his serious pieces were humorous. Several times so far I have laughed out loud, twice such that I had to briefly stop reading. I will soon have to purchase my own copy (this one belongs to the local library) so I can make markings in the margins and leave it full of post-it notes. If you have the opportunity, please read this wonderful tribute to the late, great Adams. Pay special attention to the article "Riding the Rays."

After the last upgrade of Firefox on my desktop box, most of the extensions stopped functioning. All of them, actually, though a couple were soon updated and resumed their normal functions. Most of them were fairly non-essential, but I've been missing my AdBlock. I don't block all banner ads, but disabling those horrible "swat the fly" and "shoot the papparazi" or whatever type of ads with the obnoxious noises was quite nice. So tonight I installed Firefox on the decrepit laptop I use at work while I'm busy staying awake all night. I was trying to think of ways to streamline my browsing and speed up my use of the 28.8 dialup (not that I'm complaining about the speed, it's free dialup.) AdBlock popped back into my mind, and I grabbed the latest version. I opened the preferences window and set "*" as the default blocking rule, thus blocking all ads, images, Flash, scripts, basically everything except text and hard-coded colors, borders, and frames. This sped up my browsing tremendously. Seriously, pages load nearly as quickly as my parents' bottom-tier cable, and equally as quickly as browsing with Lynx, without the incredible inconvenience of browsing with Lynx. One problem: any button or other item I may need to click, if it is anything except text with a hyperlink, is not there. Things like, say, the "new post" button. Since I've already said this whole narrative was tonight, I guess there's no point in trying to pretend it was the cause of three weeks (three? Has it really been three weeks?) of no posts. Even if I have to frequently change the default blocking rules, its still faster than it was.

At this job where I have to stay up, I am known as a "Life Skills Trainer." Or maybe I'm not, there have been so many changes lately to job titles around here I'm not entirely sure what anyone is. I do know my manager is now my team leader. Our mutual supervisor, though, is still our supervisor. I brought up the job so I can tell a little story. As a life skills trainer (LST), or whatever I am, I work at a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. All of my guys (guys in the generic, we have both male and female clients) have mental retardation, and several have autism as well. One of the guys with whom I was working tonight is a young man with autism. He is never shy about his desires, and tonight, like most nights, one of those desires was to lean through the slats of the picket fence and urinate in the front yard. I sympathise. I have the occassional outdoor urge, usually in a yard or a parking lot. I never do it unless I'm outside of town, like in the woods, or a field or something, but I feel the strong want to do so, so I can appreciate what he is going through while I am forced to prevent him from doing so. I am consoled by the fact that, although he doesn't often choose the back yard, I am allowed to let him pee in the back yard. If it wasn't for the traffic, and the fact that a police officer once came to the door of another house to inform me of another of my guys urinating in the front yard, ("I wouldn't bother you with it, but two old ladies saw him,") I'd let him go whenever, wherever. He did grow up in a rural area, it was normal for him as a kid.

I wanted to rant for a while about the recent expansion, *deep breath*, EXPANSION of the Patriot Act. I'm not going to actually discuss the expansion here, because honestly I'm just too pissed to think coherently about it.

It had to happen sooner or later. Some genius committed murder over a computer game, specifically over the theft of some virtual property therein.

I forgot to mention in my last post, the New Scientist link about dinosaurs was given to me by Lisbeth, without whom the last post wouldn't have existed. Not just because she sent me the link, but because the post started as me cracking jokes about the article in real life, then saying I should blog about it, then forgetting the whole incident until she reminded me. Also, on a competely unrelated note, Lisbeth and I had a great time yesterday reliving a small piece of our childhoods by watching the first two episodes of 3-2-1 Contact, thanks to the internet. Oh, Internet, how I love you so. Sometimes you ruin my memories of television shows I once watched, sometimes you make me late for work, but when you do something right, you really do it right.