Attack of the...Object |9:51 AM|
(The following were written for another place, but I'll post them here in the proper order)
There's an object, of unknown origin, sitting in the handicapped spot outside my place of work.
It appears to be one of those regular sized paintcans, painted all back, wrapped in celophane. (It's pissing down rain, so that's likely to protect it)
There's no construction around, there's no work being done. No reason I know of to have something like that sitting in the parking lot.
In Fox News Land, this is clearly a terrorist plot. I do work inside (if not for) the second largest computer company blah blah blah.
Now, even if that whole goddamn can was an incredibly powerful explosive, since it's a paintcan, I'm safe here in the building. If it's a chemical/biological agent, it'd have to be a robotic can, with little legs and a spray gun to get to me in here.
So, I'm safe. My boss and I discussed it, and we let the fantastically lazy security people know about it. In case some handicapped people make handicapped faces at it while trying to park. More than likely, said security guy went back to jerking off to mouse on moose porn, or whatever the fuck they do.
Current ideas are "Poke it with a large stick from great distance" and "Throw rocks from great distance". We don't have a stick long enough (and my dick is not being put on the line here. Not even for national security), and have you ever looked for good rocks to throw at shit? It's like the landscapers went around and found all the rocks that could be used to peg assholes and took them away. You can't find proper rocks for a great distance.
|9:50 AM|
(This was written 30 minutes or so after the above)
A month or so after 9/11, some jackass left his briefcase behind at the Time Warner building right by my apartment. I used to work there, so I still knew a bunch of people. I and a friend stopped by to pick up pizza or something and lo-and-behold, everyone in Time Warner is standing outside while the big armored bomb squad truck is trundling around.
That poor bastard's briefcase had a fucking catastophic reality failure a few minutes later.
Hmmm, I guess the police know that they can "detonate" anything if they add enough of their crazy law-abiding explosives to it.
I went out there with my itty-bitty digital camera, found the thing, and realized a couple important facts:
I was perfectly safe, this was not a bomb.
This was not left here on purpose, it was accidently dropped
It's a package of black plastic plates, SOLO brand.
What the FUCK?
I mean, yeah, from the side, it looks vaguely sinister with the celophane and all that. But C'mon! The stoner that works with me walked by while I was out there, staring in a dumbfounded fashion at the plates, and he managed to ID them as plates at a slow amble. (For visual reference, think Shaggy).
Plates. I'll be sure to write up a full fucking report for my boss. And what if security checks it out? I'll never be able to go to the cafeteria again.
Guard: "Whoa there, pal, don't you want us to check those trays out before you serve yourself? They look sinister!"
Other guards: *GUFFAW*
Christ, it's almost enough to make me go build a shitty pipe bomb and switch to the two. Fuck.
Updates all around. |8:43 AM|
That guy I was talking about earlier was visited by management of various levels, and determined to be a "Twerp". His problems were pitiful.
I will now update the below entry on the trip to Houston with some information. You can scroll down, or if it's no longer here you can click a link I haven't made yet.
I'll have diagrams about an interesting crowd effect I witnessed, soon enough.
Talk talk talk |3:38 PM|
This guy spoke for two and a half minutes about how the regularity of the printer being down was unacceptable.
His issue? It was running out of toner.
I apologize sir, that I have not yet invented a toner cartridge that does not run out. I'll jump right on that.
I remained totally silent until it started to become uncomfortable, and dismissed everything he had said with "I'll have someone go take a look at those paper tray settings."
If he only understood the massive intertia that he was fighting against. He thought with a few minutes of babbling that he might begin to affect 2 years of negotiations, hundreds of thousands of dollars of deployment, and uncounted man hours of labor. The difference in his attempt at change and what it would actually entail is staggering. It'd be like a man in Mammoth Caves pushing on the ceiling a foot above him, and hoping to trip someone walking around on the surface. Like an ant fighting God.
I think I'm just a bit loopy from not having eaten. I'm really quite hungry. I wanted to update the front page and update this blog with actual information.
Green Cecil needs food badly.
These comments work. Probably. ->
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Sunday, February 16, 2003
Museum |9:32 PM|
Went to Houston yesterday, to see a variety of great Polish works, (as well as some French masterpieces that Moscow collectors had purchased) including a work by Da Vinci. I had no idea that Lady with Ermine was a Da Vinci.
I loved this painting well before I knew who had painted it. I thought it was masterful before all the "baggage" of knowing it was a masterpiece.
(Insert about the crowd, breaking the crowd here)
The trip up there took 2 and a half hours, I drove Portalstar, her roomate, and the boyfriend of said roommate. That we spent 5 hours in a car together and didn't end up eating each other speaks very well of how we get along.
A moment of note on the trip there. Once you leave Austin and head into the wilderness you quickly enter Bumfuck, Texas. We stopped at Cracker Barrel for breakfast, and besides the bad vibes that Portalstar's roomate and the roomate's boyfriend were getting for being "interracial", we heard the following exchange:
Woman: "They seat black people at this resteraunt?"
Man: "Yeah, it's sort of a college town, they're a lot more liberal here."
What the fuck?. How do you even attempt to counter act the generations of dumbfuckery that went into that statement?
But that was a low point of an otherwise really exciting (if tiring) trip. The museum we visited clearly had done a lot of work for the exibits, and their automated tour system was worthy of mention. Small devices with a keypad were issued to each patron, and when the number next to a painting was typed in, a great deal of additional information was played on good quality headphones. All in all, it was a remarkable presentation.
Portalstar put up with a lot of my questions, and I managed to learn a great deal about what went into each work. I had no idea that some of the larger paintings were not done exclusively by the painter himself, that they often had studios of assistants helping to do the more repetetive tasks. Or that tempera consists of raw pigment mixed with egg whites, and that "roaches love it". PortalStar also pointed out something I hadn't thought of at all, that a part of the excitement at seeing these works first hand is that the actual artist worked with this very object. That when you viewed it, you were standing the same distance as him or her, when they made it. It took a bit for me to grasp that, that it was a physical link to that work so many hundreds of years ago.
The drive back was uneventful, a draining day all around.
