Silicon Valley Redneck

I think this story is a trainload of spiders.

Yes, this story, lately making the rounds.

Hobo gets on train, finds car full of bananas, dozes off, wakes to find car full of horrible hairy spiders.

Hm.

Those bananas would have been loaded on the train by human workers.  Did the workers not notice a massive infestation of huge spiders?

Or are we to believe that the spiders had hatched from eggs, and grown large in a remarkably short time with no food available?  (Hint: spiders don't eat bananas.  They suck the juice out of bugs, or perhaps small birds or unwary dwarves.)

Some years ago, when I finally got around to seeing Alien, a question immediately sprang to mind: how did the critter manage to grow from iguana-size to monster-size without, apparently, eating anything?

The same question applies here, except that we know about the eating habits of spiders.  A xenomorph might feed on radiation from a starship's drive; a spider needs bugs or similar.

I suggest that an insane arachnophobe makes an unreliable witness, and there were just a few spiders.  Or that the entire story, being set in a far-off place in an era with spotty communication, was made up out of whole cloth.

Ah, fashion.

Sometimes, like the Jubjub, I'm ages ahead of it: I've had more or less the same mustache since college, and suddenly it's in style.

At other times, I'm intentionally counter-fashionable.  If ties are out, I may wear one; if they're in, no.

And then there's this: high heels.  For mens.

No.

So much no that... well, up until a few years ago, I often wore shoes with the normal amount of heel for, e.g., sneakers, men's dress shoes, or jungle boots.

But, having developed an ankle problem that was aggravated by such things, I now wear, basically, the flattest darn shoes I can get.  (Though not the silly things from a few decades back, with the toe lifts.)

Far from drag, men are choosing heels for the same reason as women - to feel good

Riiiight.  Feel good.  Ow.  Ow.  Ow.  Ow.

And I can make quite a sufficient impression without adding height.  I may not be tall, but I take up a lot of space.

If I wanted to see over crowds?  I'd carry a stepladder, like Casanunda.  Or a periscope.  Or just stay home, and send a hovercam: I don't like crowds.

Did I forget to pay my USPS bill?

This is the third day in a row of no incoming mail.

Not so much as a sales flyer.

I know the postman did come this morning, 'cause the used Netflik got picked up.

Maybe I should check at the Post Office to see if I've moved?  But that wouldn't affect all the stuff addressed to Occupant, would it?  Unless he also moved, of course.

The things you see in Palo Alto...!

Especially in the middle of the afternoon on St. Patrick's Eve.

I'm still not entirely sure what I saw, but it looked remarkably like a Hasid wearing a sparkley orange plastic hat, like some sort of Scotch-Irish leprechaun.

My phone wants to read...?

Let's just see what I've done with my cellpone today.

Checked e-mail before and after walkies.

Checked and updated my shopping list, and checked e-mail, during post-walkies grocery shopping.

Answered a call from a suspicious-looking number, which turned out to be "Rachel from cardholder services" (click).

Other than that, it's been sitting in my pocket.

A moment ago, I took it back out of my pocket to use the units converter.

It was displaying Google results for H. Rider Haggard.

?

"Pronoun trouble"

So Facebook has gone totally polygender.  Gosh.

Thing is... with all those choices for "gender", they still only offer three pronouns, and of of the three is, grammatically speaking, wrong.  Unless, of course, you're a plural entity, such as a corporation, king, or editorial writer.

Given that at least one of the gender options is clearly neuter, the neuter pronoun ought to be an option.

And, for non-gender-specific?  Why mangle singular vs. plural?  Why not just pick some made-up new pronoun and use that?  The English language adds dozens of new words every year anyway.  (Borrowing gtst for the purpose fails on two counts: it's unpronounceable by English-speakers, and it refers specifically to the stsho indeterminate gender, not to someone of unspecified or irrelevant gender.)

Nightmare

Definitely need to cut waaaaaay back on carbs, and rapidly taper off the caffeine.  'Twas a restless night, with many bizarre dreams* punctuated by intervals of tossing and turning.

In the wee hours of the morning, I had a definite nightmare.  Everyone had been packed into high-density housing, of about the character of the new particle-board condos after a decade of uncertain maintenance.  Dependent on the Government for everything.

And we'd just gotten the news that the Interior Minister had just been promoted to head the Foreign Ministry, and accordingly we had a new Interior Minister, and both of them were women with boring American names to which, on accession to power, they'd added the names of famous North Koreans**.  (This was presented by a TV announcer with a vaguely British accent, who gave the Korean syllables a French pronunciation.)

This reshuffling of authorities was cause for celebration, so we were all summoned forth from our homes and issued beer, and from every government building (of which there were plenty) there burst forth cheering multitudes wearing flashy uniforms.  (Happiness Police?)

About there is where I woke up.  Except that I'm not entirely awake at this point, and I'm kinda afraid to check the news....

 

Update: Half-remembering another nightmare now.  The People's Republic of California had instituted periodic legality reviews.  At intervals, every aspect of everyone's life was to be examined for any combination of actions and events that could add up to a crime.  I think it was on some "voluntary compliance" basis: an annual accounting of all one's actions on a government form, with attestation under penalty of perjury that it was complete... with a few people a year being chosen "randomly" for excruciatingly detailed audits followed by lengthy prison terms either for having violated some law or for having omitted some event from some year's form.  And, of course, no time limit for digging into the past.

 

* One of which involved some sort of office Christmas party, at which I received what appeared to be a gauzy nightgown and cap for a medium-sized redwood tree.

** So, e.g., Martha Kim Il-Sung Jones.  That wasn't one of the actual names, which I don't quite recall, but they were along those lines.

Just how out of touch am I?

Well!

I started on one of those "Which #{movie} character are you?" quizzes on some site or other.

Got stuck on question #2: "Which is your favorite song to sing along to?"

Only one I'd even heard of was by the Beatles, and it's not exactly on my list of favorites.

Yeah, there are things I've been known to sing along with... they generally fall in one or more of these categories:

• Obscure; maybe a few thousand people would be familiar with it at all
• Older than I am
• In a furrin language
• Most likely to be encountered at a science-fiction convention
• Most likely to be encountered on Dr. Demento
• Most likely to be encountered in an opera house
• Tells a story in a reasonably comprehensible fashion (given the linguistic and cultural background)

Any one of which immediately filters out just about anything with the slightest prospect of being on the charts.

But I will sing along with bits of Siegfried.  Or "The Ballad of Transport 18."

Gosh, what a great and mighty organization it must be

El Reg has a story about a crypto-puzzle thingy called Cicada 3301, whereof I was not heretofore aware (I tend not to hear about such things).

Quote:

Perhaps, then, it's just a 4chan prank, but Kenny Paterson, a crypto-professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, believes it's too well organised to be a practical joke:

Um.  What resources are actually, required, though?

Remember, creating obscurity is much easier than piercing it.  So, the team needs:

• A clever and creative person.
• Web hosting.
• A way of getting posters put on lamp posts in various places around the world.

(Keep in mind that my assessment is based on the story I linked, not the deeper links which presumably give much more detail but would eat my day.)

Anyway, seems like the on-line part of it could be done by one person with a lot of time on his hands and quite modest amounts of money.  The lamp-post bit suggests more people, more money, an airline employee, or some social engineering (e.g., mail the posters to on-line acquaintances with a request to post them and report the locations, and use the locations of the ones that do get posted).

[His mind is like a steel trap: full of mice. -- Foghorn Leghorn]
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Dystopian dreaming

Just woke up from a pe-cul-i-ar dream...

Seems I'd done a Rip van Winkle, or a Philip J. Fry, or maybe just spent many years Elsewhere and out of touch before returning little aged since Now.

In any event, I'd returned to the Bay Area, sort of discreetly, and was trying to get oriented and link up with some familiar people, to which end I took a seat at the back of a classroom, which was supposed to be an intermediate step toward meeting up with my actual contacts.

Shortly the Sheriff came in - not the current Sheriff hereabouts, but a sixtyish specimen from Central Casting - and started grabbing people who'd been at someplace I'd never heard of.  A recent company, perhaps?  My cluelessness got me skipped over, for the moment.  He ended up leaving with nearly half the class, at which point most of the remainder self-organized and departed as a group.

Seems (1) the place he'd been asking about was the site of a famous recent battle, (2) the Boer War was on again, (3) the Sheriff was grabbing recruits for the Boer side, and (4) the other group was off to fight against the Boers.

There was also something about clandestine, subterranean, hydroponic coffee farms in the Santa Cruz Mountains (which is how I know all this was set in the Bay Area).

If any of this makes sense to you, please contact the Bureau of Mental Hygeine immediately.