Tiny Bites

Today's blog, just a collection of odd little thoughts.

1) The Hermit of Iapetus really, really misses marigolds. They remind him of home and of his wife, who hated the smell of them but let him plant them anyway.

2) Earlier this week, we got a Christmas card from the big boss at work that's very fitting for individuals working in the nuclear waste repackagning industry. The card features gold glitter that flakes off and gets everywhere. It's all over the book I'm reading. It's all over my gloves. It's all over my bus pillow. I've probably swallowed some without knowing it. If it were polonium, I'd be dead now.

3)It's 18 below zero outside right now.

4) Suddenly something about the premise for the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" bugs me: If the villain in the film is global warming, why does New York City turn into a deep-sea popsicle, rather than just quietly slipping under the Atlantic, thus increasing that ocaen's pollution a thousandfold?

5) I think my left foot is dead. It fell alseep on the bus this morning and got really cold. If it's not warmed up and functioning in another hour, I'm going to have to go to the hospital. I don't want to be known as Stumpy.

6) Part of me wishes Barack Obama wasn't as slick a public speaker as he is. His intonations . . . and pacing . . . kinda remind me . . . of a talking robot, who is -- to tell the truth -- getting his lines . . . from a TelePrompTer. Maybe the back of his suit coat doesn't bulge like George W. Bush's did, but at least Bush sounded, well, human.

7) If you compare climate change to religion, there's not a lot of difference. There's evidence on both sides that what each sides holds as tangible truths exist, but the other side, in general, doesn't believe that the believers' evidence is all that credible, tangible, or reproduceable by the other side, so the other side generally dismisses what is believed, and considers the believers to be delusional, illogical, or immune to "the facts." Not that religion and climate change are on opposise ends of the same pole, mind you.

8) I think what bugs me the most about Terry Pratchett's latest book, Unseen Academicals, is that he's dumped so many characters. Gone are the Bursar and the Dean at Unseen University, leaving poor Ridcully with only Ponder Stibbons to bully. And with Ponder taking on the Bursar's duties and getting really, really self-righteous about it all, the university as a den of interesting characters is a lot less interesting.
 
9) Why are some authors obsessed with sex? Sex, sex, sex, must get sex into it. Sex is boring, if you ask me. It's an author's cop-out. Cant't hink of anything else to write. So must put sex into it. I begin to know how Opus felt. Milo: Any sex in there (the book Opus wrote)? Opus: Barring any copulating bugs in the binding, no.
 
10) I still hate lists that end on even, round numbers.

11) I'm trying to get ahead on my posts for The Cokesbury Party Blog, so blogging there can be light over Christmas. I may also break tradition and skip a few chapters in order to feature Cokesbury's Christmas party a few months earlier than it would fall normally, just to get in time with the season. Not that anyone cares. Since I built the site in May, it's had fewer than 350 visitors. No comments. It's like I'm shouting into the darkness. It's like Twitter, but even lonlier.