There I was, sitting at the computer, doing nothin’ to hurt nobody, sipping the cold dregs of my coffee and wondering if I should make another pot. I’m taking tomorrow off work, so…

…so I hear this cracking noise outside. Sort of a thump and a crack together. Didn’t sound like it was at the door, exactly, more like the bottom of the stairs. I get up to look out the diamond window, see nothing but shadows and lamp-lit gravel.

It was a creepy cracking thump, though, so I stare longer than is strictly needed. Finally satisfied, or telling myself I’m satisfied, that nothing and no one is out there, I step away. I go back into my bedroom for a bit.

There’s a familiar crash as a fan falls out of my living room window. I go in to return it to its place and decide, for the hell of it, to check out the window again.

And I notice that my front door is slightly ajar.

Now that’s fucking disturbing.

I spent yesterday learning the barest basics of Final Cut Pro’s interface. It’s ridiculously non-intuitive if you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re doing, but its intended audience might find it a marvel of UI design, I dunno.

So today I cut together my little four second clip. I almost all of two days hunched over various monitors, all for four seconds of crappy, crappy animation. And then I couldn’t figure out how to export it into a .mov file that would actually play, so it looks like I have another hunchy day tomorrow.

It’s been one of the most enjoyable, exhilarating pairs of workdays in memory. Damn, I love this stuff, even when I objectively suck at it.

Also, there’s a bare glimmer of hope on the job front, and a long shot in Birmingham I’m applying for. Now if only my grocery store would remove the 70% discount from their most delicious cookies, I might be able to get back on an even keel.

The Office, while one of the funniest shows currently on TV, never struck me as particularly racy.

But then, early in this episode, one of the main characters said he was off “to get laid.”

!!!

When I was a sprat, the phrase “getting laid” was tantamount to blasphemy, something you wouldn’t hear outside an R-rated movie and certainly not on a popular sitcom.

Update: Damn, I wrote 3 minutes too soon. After coming back from commercial, they made a very strong, unironic nod toward Very Special Episodeness.
And then they included a couple of shots that clearly established a secondary character was snorting coke in a club.

Ah, but it does look like they’re establishing his drug use is actually a drug problem–not in a Very Special Episode way, at least, but still causing inappropriate behavior. Ah, well, I guess at least a little Puritanism lives on.

Just pointing this out makes me feel like a cranky old man, by the way, even though I’m not actually offended by it. I like it, it’s funny, but I have to admit both of the things I mentioned above were shocking. They’re just not the kind of thing I expect to see on American sitcoms.

Why, they hardly seem like booze at all. You can–and should–take them on the rocks, though, so they don’t seem as sissified as daiquiris even if they are pretty much as sweet.

I find they vary tremendously from place to place, but they’re almost always good. Well, maybe not “good”, but I’ve yet to meet one that can’t be swilled.

They may lack the elegance of, say, a good gin and tonic, but they definitely deliver the booze. And, really, that’s what matters in the end, yeah?

Hopefully the (possible) problem with the comments will be resolved now. Fingers crossed.

Somebody drop me a line? Anybody who’s not a spambot? Thanks!

Last I heard from him was…wow, six or seven years ago. That was when he got mixed up in a bit of business on the way to Ouija Mannluv’s wedding, having to pick up that renegade houri (who’d been working with her sisters in a specialty brothel after they fled the patriarchal hell of Paradise) as an escort because, as I recall, a seriously pissed off Valkyrie was on his tail. He ended up tangled in the mechanicals of an opium-smuggling wizard’s warehouse down in the Mississippi bayou, and then he just seemed to fall off the map.

He had a good run, I guess, even if his handling of the oven-cleaning fiasco did likely result in George Bush taking the presidency in 2000. You really can’t blame him for that, honest; nobody could have seen it coming.

I like to think he’s doing OK, even if he never writes and never calls. He never had a lot of spunk, but he did have a way about him (as they say) and he benefited from some remarkable luck. Not good luck, mind, just remarkable. I hope that he’s still out there having mad adventures, or that he perished in one of the ridiculous deathtraps he kept stumbling into. It would break my heart to think that he’s spending his evenings watching TV, waiting until he can justify going to sleep in order to rest up for the weak-tea job that allows him to pay for cable and a bed.

From a New York Times article about the lawsuit against the dude who is quite possibly ripping off JK Rowling with his Harry Potter lexicography:

The librarian, Steven Jan Vander Ark, had the mild-mannered demeanor of Ron Weasley, and the intelligence, charm — and haircut — of Harry Potter.

Hrm. In reality, or at least the fictional reality of the books, red-headed Ron is alternately a firebrand and a sullen emo boy. Potter, on the other hand, is conspicuously average-at-best in matters intellectual, succeeding instead through pluck and derring-do. So is this a backhand attack on dude, or is the author just being stupid?

Read this post and all will be revealed. It’s the love for Martha Jones over Rose Tyler that sealed it.

The search for position I’d been craving officially opened yesterday. One of my duties as interim sort-of-holder of that position was the posting of the job opening to the library’s website. While giving me the info I needed to post, the search committee head emphasized strongly and several times that she’s really, really interested in hiring a brand new person for the job. Le grr.

It was in the 60s last Friday, then it snowed all day on Saturday and Sunday. I now have a head cold and allergy complications simultaneously. And somehow the top of my head feels sunburned, which I totally can’t explain. Perhaps aliens were involved.

I’ve done one-on-one sessions with students on both Monday and today, and both went great. Sometimes this job really does rock. Very small, infrequent times, but some times nonetheless. There’s another one coming up Thursday which should present an especial challenge. Yay!

Those of you with recent university affiliations will be aware of the trend toward national food-service providers opening kiosks student centers. Our coffee shop is now an Einstein Brothers emporium, and I am more than a little disturbed by the cartoon Hasidim who prance around on their branded materials.

The primary food service, on the other hand, comes from a variety of in-house brands owned by the contract holder, Chartwell’s. The chow is on the whole pretty tasty, much better than the assembly-line crud served up when I was an undergrad. It’s of higher quality than fast food and “casual dining” joints like TGI Fridays, at least, and the cooked-to-order stir-fry dishes are awesome. For some reason, the students universally loathe it. This I can’t figure out.

My Fox affiliate broadcasts from St Louis, which I think qualifies as a metropolitan area of significant size. On Sundays, when I’m lazy on the remote while watching the cartoon block, I end up catching several promos for that night’s newscast. After the one just now, it occurred to me that a non-trivial number of their teasers are of the form “Foo is coming. How will this effect your commute?”

Damned hackers. Or hackerbots.