Damn, Its Cold!
I’m exchanging IMs with my father, and I’m reminded of his brother, Uncle Bill, and I’m getting set to tell some strange and wonderful story here, and I’m reminded that you know, mad rambling on and on kind of runs in the family. And it must be genetic because I wasn’t raised by my father, but he imparted that gene for rambling on and on, constantly shifting between obscure topics, he imparted that into me before I was even born.
Well, if you’re going to inherit a quirk, it might as well be mildly entertaining.
Yayoi is out for the evening. She’s spending the night in Champaign. This is just as well, as I’ve got some leftovers to consume. She has a thing for cooking new foods. That’s not such a bad quirk, but with her out of the way for the evening, I can clean the fridge out a little.
Part of my job is checking the Technical Support voicemail in the morning. I called one lady who seemed like she was kind of still in bed, or wish’t she was. I apologised with my understanding that we had a few customers in California, but she said actually she was an hour behind California, up in the great white wilderness of Alaska.
She didn’t call it the great white wilderness, that’s just my penchant for flourishing embellishment. I ramble a bit like a mad man, if you’ll recall.
And I said to her, how cold is it up there? We’ve got twenty five below windchill here. As I explained to Yayoi last night, twenty five below means fifty seven degrees below the freezing point of water. She’s used to thinking in Celsius. But, you figure if we’re fifty seven degrees below the freezing point of water, that’s opposite of fifty seven degrees above the freezing point of water, or ninety degrees Farenheit.
It is really god damned awfully fucking cold in Chicago these past days. Not just like, really really bad god damned cold, but like, worse than that. Real bad. And I asked the lady in Alaska, and she spoke of zero, and twenty degrees, and maybe even getting up towards freezing, but you know, while it is definately really cold in Alaska, “we don’t get that kind of brutal wind chill you get.”
I don’t know if she was just trying to humor me. “Oh that poor midwesterner wants to believe it is that cold down there.” But, well, anyway, it makes a good story at any rate that it is so cold here that people in Alaska say it is warmer up there.
And we don’t even get oil revenue checks merely for living here six months out of the year. Nosiree. But, I can’t complain if they’re giving Yayoi resident tuition.
I have innovated. We got Yayoi’s stuff up here this weekend, and among her inventory was an electric space heater. Well, now we get to do it Japanese style at night. We turn the main heat off and just warm the bedroom. Cutely enough, we’re already sleeping on a futon. So, the rest of the house gets down to about 45 when I get out of bed to turn the heat on. This poor garden apartment just sort of leaks heat. But we’ve got a gas fireplace and a space heater so it aint so bad. Yayoi points out that we probably lose out on the bottom, since heat rises.
Oh yeah, what other random things to share real quick? Moveon.org! I wrote a few words of my own on that matter today:
I am not a football fan. As far as I am concerned, half the fun of the Super Bowl is watching the commercials. If you want people to watch the Super Bowl, you should provide us with entertaining, compelling, and topical commercials that raise interest in the institution of popular culture that is the Super Bowl. The White House anti-drug ads suck – give us all something to get excited over!
First off, if you have broadband, and you haven’t seen them already, see these awesome commercials. Well, they were going to go and air one during the Super Bowl, but in our land of Free Speech, where the Founding Fathers carefully crafted a weak Federal Government that would have limited access to the Abuse of Absolute Power, in this very same nation of ours CBS has declared that it doesn’t air “issue ads” unless of course the issue is whether the big beer companies think men should be inspired to drink more beer by the image of skinny, bikini-clad hot hot babes getting wet to help you cool your manly self off, or, unless, of course, the President of the United States, this very same man who has had one hard-drinkin’, coke-snortin’ year of his life expunged down the memory hole, well, if his office of whatever it is wants to scare kids into thinking that one toke off of one joint of marijuana will destroy you for the rest of your life, that’s okay, but if some collection of citizens wants to remind us all that maybe, oh maybe, lordy lordy lordy god almighty maybe you know, running up this massive Federal budget deficit for no good reason is going to have ill consequences for our childen?
I lost my train of thought.
But you know where I’m going.
And where I went, where I went was over to http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/ to help sign the petition and tell those silly people who make those silly decisions that you know what? It only makes sense to air a cool commercial!
As Howard Dean would say, “YEAH!”
Now, I’m going to get some dinner.
