“But as I said during the campaign, we can’t just talk to our friends. As hard as it is, we also have to talk to our enemies, and I’ve begun to do exactly that.”
– President Obama at the White House Correspondents Association dinner
In honor of Talk like a Pirate Day, take some time to read some excellent (and some horrible) pirate jokes over at PirateJokes.net, run by my good friend Cap’n Karakas. Here’s one of my favorites:
A pirate and his parrot, were adrift in a lifeboat following a dramatic escape from a valiant battle. While rummaging through the boat’s provisions, the pirate stumbled across an old lamp. Secretly hoping that a Genie would appear, he rubbed the lamp vigorously. To the amazement of the castaways, a Genie came forth. This particular Genie, however, stated that he could only deliver one wish, not the standard three. Without giving any thought to the matter the pirate blurted out, “Make the entire ocean into rum!” The Genie clapped his hands with a deafening crash, and immediately the entire sea turned into the finest rum ever sampled by mortals. Simultaneously, the Genie vanished. Only the gentle lapping of rum on the hull broke the stillness as the two considered their circumstances
The parrot looked disgustedly at the pirate and after a tension-filled moment spoke: “Now yee’ve done it!! Now we’re goon to have to pee in the boat!”
Oh man, I am loving this courier book Scott got me (The Immortal Class) It’s this guy’s memoir of his days as a bike messenger in Chicago. Which is, apparently, twice as cold, five times as violent, and immeasurably gnarlier than Portland. Couriers get into fights with cabbies, menace belligerent drivers with their U-locks, routinely “skitch” on moving vehicles (Snow Crash-style), do sixty tags in a day… The author knew one Puerto Rican courier who just gave up on pedaling and skitched everywhere on a BMX bike, protected by full hockey gear.
Not that Portland couldn’t be harsh. In summer, hot car and bus exhaust hangs close to the ground, fills your lungs and burns out your sense of smell. In winter, the cold freezes your hands into useless, inarticulate claws. The skin between your fingers gets waterlogged and turns opaque white, like toejam. When you get home, all your extremities are red and novocaine-numb. You strip off all your gear: helmet, courier bag, gloves, rain coat, rain pants, company shirt, t-shirt, soaked and dripping shoes, waterproof booties, shorts, boxers; and stand in a hot shower for a half hour getting some warmth back in your body. Then you lie in a chair utterly stunned for a half hour, seeing pavement and cars rush through you every time you close your eyes.
I never skitched; I even stopped for red lights sometimes (thanks to Gaston the Safety Nazi, who my company employed to keep their insurance down. You would become more and more law abiding as you got close to base, lest he spot you violatin’). My company uniform was bright red, my courier number was prominently displayed on my helmet. I don’t think Portland is anarchic enough to really let you get away with towing on peoples’ cars regularly. Maybe I’m just a pussy, though.
You start out so timid. Ooh, all the big bad automobiles! You almost want to ride on the sidewalk. After a month the continuous motion gets into your head and you weave through moving cars and trucks like they were stationary. The ground turns into a fluid that moves under you. People scream at you to get out of traffic if you can’t keep up; you turn, sneer, and leave them 3 blocks back, stuck behind 80 white vans, 30 SUVs, 20 sedans, etc, etc, the slow-moving glacier of rush-hour traffic. Even in fast-moving traffic, everything is going about the same speed; so relative to you, the cars are stationary. It’s just the ground that’s moving.
When the ground stops moving, you get uncomfortable. You are on an elevator, or at the curb waiting for Base to call. Maybe you’re at a pay phone calling base because your walkie-talkie died. You close your eyes and see a blur of pavement and cars, see a spotlight circle of pavement thrumming through your belly, feel wind eddying around the inside of your body. It even gets into your dreams. I dreamed I was biking through an ocean of rain, so hard the splatter frothed up waist-high and made the pavement invisible. Blurry gray hints of buildings to either side, when a wall of even thicker rain, shaped like the prow of the Titanic, rose up in front of me and I slammed through it. I think this dream symbolizes the fact that it REALLY FUCKING RAINS A LOT here in winter. I also dreamed I was a street pirate, riding with a cutlass in my right hand and, en passant, separating the business-suited masses from their valuables.
M-8 to base, M-8 to base.
Go ahead, M-8Dropped off the Schawbe, I’m clean in the core. Can I go home now? It’s 5:30 and I can’t feel my feet.
Do the DEQ mail run first, M-8, overson of a …! 10-4
Ahh, those days…
ARRRR!
Ha ha I got my Chi Kung teacher saying it!
We were doing this exercise where the teacher digs his fingers into your sternum and cracks open part of your energy system, then throws you chest-first into another student. So I was the catcher, and the dude I was catching outweighs me by approx. 80 lbs, so to psych myself up, “ARRRR!” Tzun Tzun got into it.
TZ: “Arrr!”
Me: “ARRR!”
Tz: “Arr!” *shrugs to the women students* “It’s a guy thing.”
Yarrrr… (I say that quite a bit… Pirate noises are the best). Well, since I last updated, the term has ended successfully! Out of my three classes this term, not one of them had a traditional final. Graphic Design III had a large final project which was due last week, and then we didn’t meet during finals week at all. American History gave me a take home final. That’s right. A TAKE-HOME final. Oh my god. I thought that I had seen the last of those (and multiple-guess tests) in high school. Oh man. It was great. Two essays on stuff I hadn’t read, but I had plenty of time to research the material right in the text. And then in my Capstone class, we had a final presentation on some really simple concepts, and our last class was just doing those presentations. Really informal, there was food. It was cool. And yet, even though I didn’t have any traditional finals, I’m glad to see this term gone by. Only two left now.
I’m broke again. That sucks. I thought I had a couple hundred dollars left to buy Christmas presents with. I stopped by the ATM… $10. AAAGH! How did I miscalculate that badly? Oh well… Annie’s agreed to loan me what I need in exchange for me paying her half of rent next month.
As the term ended, I got more and more wrapped up in getting stuff done. Then I got really really sick over Thanksgiving. Following that, I was too busy doing schoolwork to clean. Then Annie got a touch of what I had, or something different and was sick for several days in a row. Needless to say, the house was a wreck. Garbage all over, papers piled up on the counter, food all over, not a single clean dish in the house. It sucked. Usually, our place is pretty clean, but we just couldn’t clean. So finally, yesterday, we just sat down and did it. Annie did the dishes, and I picked up everything else and when we got done, our house was livable again! Then she baked chocolate chip cookies!
I had the greatest week ever at work last week. Our boss came in and informed us that there was a big pile of surplus computers in the back room that he would let us gut if we wanted. They were all 486s, and we couldn’t take the cases for legal reasons, but the motherboard and all the other components were ours for free! All we had to do was take them apart! Miles and I together snagged about 13 machines, total. Miles got a few Macs in there, and all the rest are PCs. Now, most of them won’t work (they were surplus for a reason), but if we can even get four or five functioning machines out of this, we can put Linux on them and buy a cheap case, and we’ve gotten fully functional computers for free! The parts are lying on my floor in a box right now, waiting for me to inspect them and pass judgment. I can’t wait.
Tons of good ideas on websites lately. Steve and I are working on a new idea to put up on all the front pages of our sites. We came up with a new logo(s) for Fojar that I’m going to work on. I already put up a new front page for yellow5.com. Miles and I aquired big bad fojar and big bad spaceninja to make competing propaganda sites. I’m working on the new CNS page for work. I’m having fun. In the words of Tank from the Matrix: “It’s a very exciting time!”
And hopefully, now that it’s the break, our team will make some progress on Cube Fighter! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, visit play.fojar.com. I’m really excited about the concept, even if Jester thinks we’re wasting our time. What does that punk know anyway? Just because he’s got a job in the “real” game industry. ;)