Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

The exterminator came and noticed that one of the walls (though not the one in which my new pet currently resides) is open to the cabinet under the sink. You can see the unplastered slats and everything. It looks like when the new sink was put in (judging from the logo, in the fifties, but from the shoddy installation, probably later), the baseboard was cut out to fit the cabinet against the wall and that gap behind it was never filled in. The cabinet covers part of it, but has no back wall of its own to cover the whole gap.

So, going with the antiques theme, the exterminator left some V for Victory traps under the sink and is coming back next week to fix the hole in the wall. I didn’t know exterminators did their own plastering, but I guess you can’t trust the contractors to get it right.

I wonder if I’ll hear a little squeal in the night…

Some links for Veronica - the rest of you can just move along…

• Alien Song download page (I Will Survive)
• The Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu - unfortunately not as funny as it sounds
• Identical quadruplet calves
• elgooG
• PerversionTracker to switch to “All Sushi” format
• The Right to Read, a story
• The classic game of xbill has been ported to the Mac as MacBill - stop Bill Gates from installing Windows everywhere!

Mac menu of the day: Menu Calendar

The entry title comes from this USA Today article about offshoring in which a guy forced to train his offshore replacement said, “You feel like you’re the guy wearing the red shirt on Star Trek. It’s a very unpleasant situation. It’s unfair. These people appeared, and they’d sit and shadow us and watch what we do.”

Note the utter disregard for human dignity, never mind the economy of the US (or of whatever country sells its jobs overseas). Oh for the robber barons of old, who had the decency to bring the overseas labor into the country before exploiting it…

Corporations are completely immoral entities, so the only way to stop them is to boycott the ones that go offshore. Technically, I guess that means I should be boycotting Earthlink, but I don’t know of a nice local ISP to replace them.

I forgot to mention last time that the repository has been updated too, with a screenshot for comtrya plus a spelling correction for the Secretary of Defense thanks to Jessa.

I’ve put a few stray Stargate drabbles up on the SG-1 fic page. There’s a second Stargate filk in the works, and of course the long-lost Colony is coming sooner or later.

Sorry I couldn’t find the time to blog yesterday, what with that hour so rudely yanked from my evening. (Now there’s an excuse you don’t hear every day!) A recent shipment of educational videos from Jerie didn’t help, either.

My excuse for this sorry entry is a trip with a gaggle of minor cousins to the exhibit of Caroline Kennedy’s dolls at the JFK Library and Museum. Don’t let the low-key website fool you - the JFK Library is a major Boston institution, devoted to Brookline’s favorite son. You know that a spot of ground is holy in Boston when it has a T stop named after it, and the JFK comes first in JFK/UMass.

It’s very rarely that I say this, but the JFK Library is a lovely piece of modern architecture. I could almost forgive I. M. Pei for Government Center after seeing it. That black bit is all glass, with a spectacular view of Massachusetts Bay. It’s also neat, clean and modern inside, setting it apart from other Boston T-stop institutions such as the Museum of Science (Science Park stop on the Green Line), where many of the exhibits are broken and/or haven’t been updated in forty years (really - the museum itself is 174 years old) - or on the other hand, the only slightly less shabby yet far more insolvent New England Aquarium (Aquarium stop on the Blue Line), which is no longer accredited by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association.

I don’t mean to complain about the third-world conditions again, just to point out that the People of the Monarchy of Massachusetts support the royal family first and foremost, in their hearts and in their wallets. As we strolled the hallowed halls, saw the sacred artifacts, heard the timeless speeches, and read the undying words of the nation’s most beloved president, even a lower-case r republican like myself couldn’t help feeling that the king is dead, long live the king.

It’s a Massachusetts thing.

ENT humor of the day: Enterprise Characters plus reviews
VOY humor of the day: Foyager Park - check out episode 3!

Let me say straight off that I don’t like animals. Other people’s animals are ok, but I don’t want any flea-ridden beasts in my home. Living with animals leads to SARS and cat scatch fever and the death of half the population of Europe. In other words, it’s not a good plan.

I was up late last night finishing voting in the VOY catergory of the ASC Awards. When I went to bed, I started hearing things. Scratching, chewing things. I triangulated the noise: it was coming from inside the wall near one of my bookcases, about two shelves up from the floor. I knocked on the wall to discourage the chewer, but it took him a while to settle down.

Today I called the landlord to tell him about my nibbling acquaintance. He couldn’t give me a positive answer but he thought that maybe, possibly there’s a mouse in there. Ya think? Here I was thinking Elvis had entered the building. Seriously, though, Rattus rattus is a bit chubby for getting in between the floors - in my experience, he prefers Red Line subway stops. And decimating Europe.

The landlord said he’d send the exterminator next week. I hope the mouse doesn’t chew through the antique wiring and burn the building down before then. It’s not half of Europe, but it’s home.

Horseman of the Apocalypse: Ghost Town (also here)

So I was reading about a cool browser history browser at slashdot - TrailBlazer. I was wondering, not particularly hopefully, whether it would run on OSX. It turns out it only runs on OSX. Those of us who remember the Bad Old Days sometimes forget that Macs are now Too Cool For Words.

Trailblazer is just a toy, but everyone’s gushing over a new launcher called QuickSilver. It’s amazingly cool and absolutely free - don’t Mac without it. The documentation leaves much to be desired, but this quick tutorial will get you going. MacOS 10.3 is required.