5.14.2003


A couple of things:

-I'm glad to know that I'm not alone on that barbiturate thing. Judging from my unscientific* poll, two-thirds of us had no idea that there was an r hanging out in the middle of that word. I lost a bet to my mother (who is a nurse and never bets, so I really should have known better, yes) on that one.

*It's not really unscientific, so much as it's bad science. And why is it that polls are the only things that are called unscientific? I have a friend who I suspect is a very-bad-to-mediocre scientist and he doesn't have to preface everything he says about his work with, "given my somewhat limited intelligence..."

-Did you read the Adam Gopnik piece on the new Matrix movie in The New Yorker? Boy howdy, does he have a hard-on for the first Matrix. I liked the movie (the 1999 one), but because it was fast-paced and it seemed to be making fun of Keanu Reeves the whole time (I can get behind that). I didn't think it was a thought piece on disassociative states. Gopnik goes on and on doing this Valley Girl E.M. Forster routine: "Only connect?"

-At a baseball game two weeks ago, I sat near a father and son. A couple of times during the game, when there was a pitch that was close but called a strike, the man said, "He really hit the paint with that one." Now, as near as I can tell, he came up with that idiom for pitching all by himself (a search for "hit the paint" & baseball yields no results). Which of these do you think is the most likely (another poll, because I like polls):

The man knows the baseball idiom paint the corner, and is taking it one step further: first, the pitcher painted the corner, then he hit the paint. The man has made an error through analogy with the basketball idiom hit the paint, meaning "to try to rebound the basketball." The man is making an inappropriate sexual joke regarding the catcher's mitt. None of the above. (view current results)

..:.:11:40 AM:.:..

5.12.2003

Which is the correct spelling: barbituate barbiturate (view current results) (talk about the poll)

..:.:5:21 PM:.:..

5.5.2003


I have a PDA which I use only occasionally. (It runs out of batteries and then I stop using it because who really keeps AAA batteries around? I keep thinking that I'm going to discover the magical battery cache in my apartment, because it seems like I always buy big packages of batteries, use two and never find the rest. Is it possible that I have an annoying, 100% repeated pattern where I always place the batteries in one place and never look there when I'm in need of a battery? The PDA is out of batteries now, so maybe I should do an exhaustive search and when I find the battery lair, leave a note in there for my future battery-leaving self that reads, "FUTURE BATTERY-LEAVING SELF- PLEASE LEAVE ANY BATTERIES ON THE MANTEL WHERE YOU'LL THINK THEY ARE IN THE EVEN MORE DISTANT FUTURE!" Why am I screaming?) When I got my new work computer, I decided that instead of using the crappy Palm desktop application, I'd use the bloated Outlook one. Through a function devolution that had a lot to do with getting a more PDA-like phone, I now use Outlook solely for the calendar. Today, I was entering into Outlook a bunch of times, phone numbers and addresses which I'll need this weekend and I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if there was some way I could have this information this weekend without having to print out the page and carry it with me?"

[PAUSE]

I'm taking some solace in the fact that I eventually remembered about the PDA.
..:.:3:10 PM:.:..

mark@markand.com
aim: mdanderson45