Published March 12th, 2009
in Uncategorized.
My roommate accidentally got the latest issue of “Western Outdoors” magazine forwarded to her and so I course I had to start reading it. It’s about 95% useless to me, just ads for different types of bait & rods, but there was one totally worthwhile article in there, about how excited some dude gets when different types of fish yank on his rod. Sample quote:
Part of the thrill is that dramatic, sudden surge of adrenaline you get when the hypnotic pulsing of the rod tip stops with a THUMP as a king bites down. Time passes molasses-slow as you wait to see what happens next… will the rod tip come back up and start transmitting the lure’s wobble again, or will the salmon hang on to it. About that time, you get a couple of violent headshakes and then the rod tip buries.
Whoa, settle down dude! Also:
While a king eats a plug in a slow, powerful fashion, steelies do it in a psycho, frantic kind of way… as you struggle to hang onto the wildly bucking rod, a silver missle launches itself into the stratosphere. In a blink it’s all over. You’re left with a burn blister on your thumb, some limp line and a memory.
Whatever dude, don’t blame it on the “steelies” if you can’t handle your rod! And finally:
Until a trip to Alaska last summer, I’d always thought the most exciting way to hook a trout was on a dry fly. There’s no doubt that watching a fish rise up and sip your bug is really good stuff, but it pales in comparison to the grab you get when stripping smolt patterns.
Sip your bug? Really? OK, that’s all. Thank you, drive thru!
Published March 3rd, 2009
in Uncategorized.
The New Yorker recently published an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s work-in-progress novel “The Pale King” which, according to reports, is about “a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work.” Jeez, that sounds horrible… Well, OK… it’s a David Foster Wallace book, so clearly that’s not *all* it’s about…
The partial manuscript — which Little, Brown plans to publish next year — expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment, the book suggests.
OK, that’s better. Anyway, the excerpted portion in The New Yorker touches on the etymology of the word “boring” which “appears suddenly in 1766. No known etymology. The Earl of March uses it in a letter describing a French peer of the realm.”
On a related note, here’s an acronym-strewn article about plans to extend subway service in San Francisco. Apparently these fuckers actually have access some sort of boring machine!
Finally, please note that you may want to avoid reading that Wallace excerpt above if you are currently located in any sort of cubi-form work environment as it might make you want to either curl up and die or run amok with automatic weapons, depending on your temperament. Anyway, I should get back to compressing audio data…
Published March 2nd, 2009
in Uncategorized.
According to reports from the CDC, the Tamiflu antiviral drug is becoming less effective at combating this year’s H1N1 strain. Royalties on sales of the drug are worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and in light of this, I submit that mutations in the H1N1 strain should be prosecuted as blatant attempts to “circumvent cryptographic measures” employed by Tamiflu under the DMCA. Until this matter can be settled, the flu should cease & desist from continuing to infect additional persons in the United States of America.
