Category: Before

My forensic investigation/car cleaning reveals the following about the strangers who were driving my car 250 miles between Saturday night — when they stole the car — and Monday night — when they were arrested for robbery and the car was impounded.

They accessed my car using a lock pick on a key chain. They ate at Jack in the Box and McDonalds and used the cup holders as ash trays. They bought drum sticks and Miller Genuine Draft beer at Safeway on Sunday at 6:00 pm. Some portion of their traveling was done at very high speeds. (Corrected in comments.) They filled the tank at least once and added at least one quart of motor oil to the engine. They emptied my CDs out of the CD changer and replaced them with their own, but they put the CDs in upside down, and listened to KUBE 93.3 FM instead.

The car is smelly, but probably fine. When accelerating from a stop, the engine makes a new puttering noise that makes me nervous. I’m hoping that will be it attributed to low oil, rather than some strain on the engine.

My new license plates say “TPS“. That’s one good thing.

Two things about National Public Radio:

• This morning NPR reported that it wasn’t clear whether the cloud of smoke that was released from the Sistine Chapel after the second Papal vote of the day was white or black. A white cloud would indicate that a new Pope had been elected. A black cloud would indicate that the Cardinals hadn’t arrived at a consensus. Then the Sistine Chapel bells were rung and the new Pope was announced, and NPR started reporting that the cloud had been white. A Pope was elected and that meant that, regardless of what color it had been, the cloud was white.
• NPR provides a live news roundup at the begining of every hour. At a certain point in this news feed, the news reader announces his or her name and leaves a short pause before continuing with the headlines. This allows a graceful transition for stations that air a few minutes of local coverage in place of the second part of the national feed. During the daytime hours, KUOW provides local headlines in place of the second segment of the national feed. In the late evening, they air the complete national feed. The news reader for many of the late evening reports is Shay Stevens. I find myself tensing up whenever the pause approaches in one of her broadcasts. I hold my breath as she says, “I’m Shay Stevens,” and I listen for the almost inaudible sound of her swallowing a gulp of water before I start breathing again and she continues with the next headline.

When I went out this morning to get my car, I found a yellow pickup in the spot where I’d parked. It had been stolen. It felt like there should have been more to it, but I don’t what I would expect that “more” to be. I paced around the neighborhood looking for it for twenty minutes, though I was certain that I’d left my car in that spot.

Half past a busy weekend, I stop at Bauhaus to catch my breath.

Somebody’s homework is spread across the table next to mine. But no one has been around to work on it since I sat down.

On my other side, a guy is typing an outline on his laptop. He stops to take a call on his cell phone. He talks first about lawn mowers, then about bunnies.

At the windowside bar, someone brings two glasses of iced Kool-Aid Italian sodas to the windowside bar. As she sets them down, they briefly catch light from the setting sun and focus two bright flashes of red light in my eyes.

I’m bringing the Using Books Weblog out of stealth mode with a response to Phil’s Book Meme post.

Now I have two weblogs to neglect.

It’s Friday. I just walked the two blocks to the post office to drop off the day’s packages and then walked half a block back to Vivace to relax and to try to do a little work. I open my laptop and it connects to the wireless network. I put together two emails, hit send, and get two error messages back: can’t connect to the mail server. I try loading a few different sites in a browser and can’t connect to anything. A neighbor is pecking away at a Google search result. He’s connected, so I poke around in my network settings. Airport status shows a yellow light: I’m connected, but I’m not connected. Reboot and nothing’s changed. At this point I could just work on something offline, but I can feel my brain going soft in my head and my drink isn’t caffeinated enough to get me recharged. I skim through help files, blindly change a couple of settings around, and reboot twice. In the end I’m online again. I’ve abandoned the thought of work. I load Bloglines and there’s nothing there for me to read. You can call that last one kharma.

A crow weighs down the end of a branch on a naked chestnut tree. With its beak, it snaps a twig from a smaller tributary branch and lets it drop to the sidewalk. It flaps over to another weak branch, and in a few short hops, makes its way to the branch’s narrow end, breaks off another twig and lets it fall. It repeats this two more times. On it’s last round, it finds the stick it wanted. It takes flight, carrying its stick away toward the west. It doesn’t return for its castoffs.

Since we were probably already on the topic of death anyway: What happened to the stand-up comedian who once spent the last ten minutes of his act reciting one-liners while lying on his back on a stage that was scattered with prescription pain reliever pills? I’d give you three guesses, but you wouldn’t need them.

Ask MetaFilter readers can find the post-mortem for my April Fool 2004 stylesheet cloning prank here.

Guess which one of the following stories is true:

• When I was in fifth grade, I loaded the game Math Blaster on the classroom computer using a swear word as the username. This was discovered later in the day and the game was banned.
• I was once actually turned down for a job selling Cutco knives.
• I saw Francis Ford Copolla standing alone in the parking lot of the Camlin Hotel on the night before the WTO riots.
• Using Books‘ bestselling title has been Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative.
• When I was very young, whenever I scratched an itch, stubbed a toe, or simply brushed up against something, I would have the compulsion to create a matching sensation in the same spot on the other side of my body.

Update: Answered in the comments.