The strangest craving.

I felt the strangest craving this morning to start using Microsoft Word again.

It felt exactly like the feeling one gets when looking back on a relationship where the sex was fabulous but was otherwise horribly abusive. MS Word is very pretty and while you use it you feel like you're getting a lot accomplished.

But when Word gets into a bad mood it gets really crazy. Often, when Word does get crazy, it trashes something of yours, sometimes a piece of work you really value and put hard effort into. Yet, when Word does this, it also somehow manages to make it feel as if the wreckage was all your fault.

Word's gotten worse over the years. These days, it's gotten more bossy and demanding. With it's new DRM thing, it works harder than ever to isolate you from anyone who might convince you that the flash and shine of Word isn't the best thing in the world. Word has a history of bad relationships, as each release has locked out a new generation of some other wordprocessor. Yet Word seems perfectly happy to run embedded viri for you, flirting with every trojan macro that comes along. And really, why hang out with Word? It's gotten fatter and more bloated over the years. Think about how much money you've poured into bling just so you can keep your relationship with Word. Are you doing anything more with Word today than you were in 1995? I mean, really.

I'm sticking with Emacs. Compared to Word, Emacs isn't flashy or hot. It's downright plain and very, very nerdy. On the other hand, Emacs has had twenty-five years to learn how to do safe computing right, and since it's all in plain ASCII I'll never be locked into using a DRM manager and I'll be able to share my work with others. Emacs very rarely crashes, and when it does it's actually apologetic and gives good suggestions for avoiding that accident in the future.

Porn Daze

"Thanks to the Internet, I'm no longer interested in sex." - Fry from Futurama

Well, that's not entirely true, but I'm thinking about going on a porn fast for a while. I liked it better when porn was hard to get to, and not available with a few strokes of the right. The difficulty, unique quality, and essential newness of it made it valuable. Nowadays, there's so much of it that we've become aware that collections of smut of all kinds -- as well as the men and women who make themselves available to the hungry eyes of the audiences-- are as ubiquitous as Diet Coke. It's easy to get excited about the notion that somewhere in your city a beautiful girl might actually be naked before a camera. It's much harder when you know she is and you're not a part of it. The mystery is gone and with it the thrill of potential discovery. There is only the weak leftover fantasy of bumping uglies.

George Carlin once said, "Porn is where you get this hot, temporary girlfriend who a minute later is banging someone else." I'm starting to understand the wisdom of Carlin more and more.

A mellow day

It has been a quiet weekend so far here at the Sternberg Villa. We watched Teenagers From Outer Space, a charming little cheeseball from 1959 with no budget and very little script. The aliens wore mechanics' jumpers highlighted with duct tape and aimed rayguns that they bought from the local 5&dime. The hero was a softspoken young man who had read banned books on his homeworld and had learned compassion; the villain was a sharp-faced extra who enjoyed using the word torture! far, far too much. The monster they brought was a lobster shown in shadow puppetry. The dame was nice for a 1959 dame.

Me.
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

The wine of the evening was a 2003 Chardonnay from Red Bicyclette. I'm sure there are people who like it, but it only confirmed for me that I am not a white wine drinker. We also played a few rounds of Harry Potter Uno, and Omaha thought I looked "handsome" with my reading glasses on. I'm only 39. It's too soon for reading glasses! Kouryou-chan wimped out of the game after one hand and went back to reading the book she had been involved in before we invited her to play.

I have not been sleeping well. Despite going to bed at midnight, I was up by six. This was fine with me; it allowed me to go downstairs and watch a little anime. I'm so far behind on what I've planned to watch, mostly because I have absolutely no TV time at all in my schedule. I watched a few episodes of I Like What I Like, a beautiful boy-on-boy soap opera set in an all-male college and rife with highjinks. I'd totally do Ran in a heartbeat; why Hashibara doesn't "get" him is beyond me.

We had waffles for breakfast. It had rained last night, a lovely thing really since it's been so dry recently. Maybe the grass will have one last chance to perk up before the cold kills it dead. But this gave us a chance to get caught up on housework: I cleaned the kitchen and fixed the downstairs bathroom while Omaha vacuumed the stairs. Fixing the downstairs bathroom involved replacing the broken valve in the toilet. Huzzah! No more climbing all the way up to the main floor during those late-night Doom III sessions.

Kouryou-chan made her own lunch of egg salad, although I boiled the egg for her, and Omaha made an absolutely delicious dinner of boiled shrimp, pasta shells, diced tomatoes, green bell peppers and shallots all mixed in a combination of olive oil, basil, and a few other herbs. I suggested Romano cheese and Omaha agreed that it might help: the saltiness brought out a lot of the basil flavor. It was exquisite.

Tonight's wine was the Glen Fiona Syrah, made in the Washington Columbia valley. $12.00 a bottle and a steal at twice the price: blackberry and very gentle oak, it has a peppery start that's clearly the product of some subtle champagnation, but which fades rapidly upon exposure to the air. Good with food, you start dinner charged and activated but end mellow and gentle, a quality much accentuated by a surprisingly high alcohol content. One glass was more than enough.

We had bought a Rival brand ice-cream maker from one of those massive "off-hand lots" stores, and it broke trying to turn the finally frozen mass of strawberry ice-cream I had thrown together. I'm not even sure I like the ice-cream; it's too heavy, with too much cream. Although it was good when we first made, it has crystallized a little since then. Bit of a shame, but I ate some anyway. I felt a duty to do so.