Month: January 2001

Yesterday I was in a particularly morbid frame of mind & was going to post these links. But Blogger was down again, so here they are now – out of context & such:
My favorite Maakies.
The fish came back.

A Big yellow school bus (once again, what other kind is there?) maneuvers itself at 10th/Broadway & Roy. A girl, sevenish, is seated near the back of the bus, window seat. As the bus pulls away, she turns her head smiling to look at a woman on the corner.

Both the woman & the girl on the bus have purple hair. The hair colors are close enough that they may have come out of the same bottle. I don’t know if:
1) The woman is a stranger to the little girl & the girl is giddy about the matching hair.
2) The woman is the little girl’s mother & the girl is making a “hello” smile.
   A) They’re both on their way home.
       a) The mother’s schedule is regular enough that the daughter’s school bus passes the mother near that spot most days.
       b) The daughter was surprised to see her.
   B) The mother accompanied her daughter to the bus stop. The daughter got on the bus & the mother headed up Broadway. (Not likely since this was 4pm.)
3) The woman is the little girl’s older sister.
   A) The older sister got in trouble for dying her little sister’s hair.

Maybe you thought One-Click was a questionable patent. Maybe you’re angry that US agriculture syndicates are claiming patents on centuries-old wheat strains from India. Well I have strong feelings about the so-called sealed crustless sandwich patent.

The patent holder seems to claim three innovations. They’re paraphrased below & followed by some editorializing:

1. They’ve created a mechanism they use to seal the outer edge of the bread.

Fair enough.

2. “[U]pper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.” (ie: Put a layer of peanut butter on both slices of bread & a layer of jelly in between the two layers of peanut butter. This way the jelly isn’t touching bread & therefore won’t make the bread soggy before lunchtime arrives.)

Though I have no documentation to prove it, I arrived at the same conclusion at some point early in my PB&J years (which were roughly 1979-1999). This is a forgone conclusion for anyone who has spent a lot of time around peanut butter & jelly.

3. “Many individuals enjoy sandwiches with meat or jelly like fillings between two conventional slices of bread. However, some individuals do not enjoy the outer crust associated with the conventional slices of bread and therefore take the time to tear away the outer crust . . . . Hence there is a need for a convenient sandwich which does not have an outer crust.”

Here is documentation that proves people have been following the un-American practice of cutting the crust off their sandwiches for awhile.

Written in the margins of a copy of the Stranger at Bauhaus in loopy cursive: “unstable uncomfotable unconditionally. ~>unbiased. no strings attached. ~unsuccessful”

Well, I mean, not all cigars are big. There are those little ones that Joe used to(?) smoke. They were small. But maybe they were technically cigarettes. I don’t know much about these things.

This morning a crow sits on the phone line outside the new office window with a good-sized wad of pink meat in it’s beak. There are little sillouetes on some of the window panels, little pictures of animals & things. I have a hummingbird & two children holding a big umbrella. Another window has an elephant in circus gear & a squirrel (with nut).

Clarification: 1/6 “Chomping a big cigar.” The cigar is actually regular cigar size. It’s big in the sense that all cigars are big, not big in a huge novelty size or a Smell of Steve, Inc way.

I received some kind of a social security statement today (Appropriately on my first day at work).

Apparently my taxabIe income in 1989 was $206. I guess, since I was 13, I’ve been contributing to a retirement fund that will dry up at least 3 years before I’m eligible for those benefits. Oh well.

Now, who was putting me to work when I was 13?

There are a lot of crows hanging out in the park across the street these days. There are always a few around, but there’re more than usual, a few dozen at least.

Every few months in the building’s board of directors meeting minutes, there’s an item that says something along the lines of, X board member suggested that we remind Tom not to feed the birds near the building. The bird droppings cause damage to the garden. When confronted at house meetings, Tom always says that he now crosses the street to feed the birds. It’s true, I see him every couple of weeks headed for the park, scattering bird feed, chomping on a big cigar.

Seva & I once tried to predict an earthquake based on crow behavior. I told him that a crow had been stalking me for several blocks – it would fly out ahead of me & wait in a tree or powerline half a block away, wait for me to pass, cackle, then fly ahead of me again. He said that, the day before, a crow had taken a swipe at him – it flew down & grazed his hair. This, we decided, was a sure sign of impending earthquake (didn’t happen, of course).