While doing my weekly bit of library work (OMGWTF it's been 6 months already!) I came across this book. The title? "Watch Out For the Squirrels!"

Clearly, they're starting to catch on.

Regina never ever ever gets to say I never quote her ever again. Ever.

Got that?

Good.

[17:03] starflier06: heya.
[17:04] TontoMarius: 'lo 'lo.
[17:04] starflier06: Anyway, you.
[17:04] TontoMarius: Me.
[17:04] starflier06: I figured out your scheme and I'm not having any part of it.
[17:04] TontoMarius: It.
[17:04] TontoMarius: Them.
[17:04] TontoMarius: Roo?
[17:04] starflier06: You're going to indoctrinate me, bit by bit, with all your movies, music, and cultural references.
[17:04] starflier06: Until I am your minion.
[17:04] starflier06: Then I will become your pawn in the you v. marechal games of power. I see where this is heading!
[17:05] TontoMarius: Agh! She's discovered secret plan 36J!
[17:05] TontoMarius: Damage control! Damage control!
[17:05] starflier06: Do you want to know how I discovered it? It's pretty entertaining.
[17:05] TontoMarius: I'll bite.
[17:05] starflier06: 11 am, Saturday morning, Florida.
[17:05] TontoMarius: *gnaw, gnaw*
[17:05] starflier06: I'm bored, checking TV guide, and see, somewhere in the list of programs, Bill and Ted.
[17:05] TontoMarius: Awfully early in the morning to be that profound.
[17:06] TontoMarius: Bill and Ted!
[17:06] starflier06: I laugh to myself, turn it on, and proceed to watch it with my grandmother.
[17:06] starflier06: SHE was amused.
[17:06] TontoMarius: Yay!
[17:06] starflier06: This is when I realized I was merely your pawn.
[17:06] starflier06: And you were using me to spread your indoctrination.
[17:06] TontoMarius: Not yay.

Right, so about that update thing. Since absolutely nothing of interest has occurred in life in the past few days except that I ran the tractor out of diesel, and how exciting is that, I shall simply post excerpts of the ICQ conversation Cam and I had. And you shall fall down in amazement. Or something.

------------------------

...

Me: Also the guys to pump the gas for us, which sure is great, because you don't want to see me try to do it. IT GOES EVERYWHERE.

Cam: Gas ranks on the low end of difficulty you know.

Me: My incompetence with fuel knows no bounds.

Well, ok. I was doing great until I had to rescue the cap to the diesel can. That's when the diesel went everywhere. *sigh*

At least I can change a tire. ph34r my l33t automotive skillz!

Or something.

Cam: *laugh* You know the first time I tried to change a tire I tried to take the axle off? I've never lived that down.

I have much better skills now, but I'm not naturally mechanically inclined.

Me: Um, wow. How did you manage THAT?

Cam: Well, after you unscrew all the regular lug nuts.. there's the center part that can be unscrewed with a power tool... I didn't have it and i was trying to get it off... little did I know that it was the axle I was trying to unscrew.

So yeah, that was embarrassing.

Me: We can establish from this that Dwip n' Cam's Gas and Auto Repair Shop isn't happening any time soon, here.

Cam: *grins* Nope... not unless you want to create a novelty shop like the restaurant where they curse you.

Me: *snicker*

"You LIT MY CAR ON FIRE!?"

"I didn't think that was the gas tank, but..."

Cam: *laugh* Yeah! That would be a FUN job! Maybe almost as fun as working for like Game Informer or PSM or something.

Me: *laugh*

The lawsuits might not be so fun, but I'm all about making cars explode in new and inventive ways.

Cam: Well... the dumbasses would have to sign a waiver saying that no matter what we did to their car, we had no liability as to it's drivability afterwards.

That would give me a chance to do things like put permanent nails in the driver's seat sticking up, or super glue on the drive stick... or maybe lock the brake peddle... and then when they bring it back , you can blow it up.

Me: Heh.

*guy pulls up to the pump* "Fill 'er up."

"Here, sir. Sign this."

"Huh? Ok."

*car explodes*

"YOU BLEW UP MY CAR!"

"Sorry sir. We cannot be held responsible for the loss."

"MY CAR!"

"We're sorry for your loss, sir."

Cam: Now THAT would be a fun job.

Me: Right up until everybody caught on.

Cam: Psh... you gotta bring up the bad parts...

Me: I'm just a killjoy like that.

Cam: You need to look at life more positively like I do.

Me: I tried that. Then I didn't win the lottery anyway, so I was like "What's the point?"

Cam: *snort* You're a funny man.

Me: Well, you know. The whole point is to be all happy, and you get stuff, right?

BUT I DIDN'T GET ANYTHING.

*cries*

*whines*

*writes epic livejournal rants complaining about everything in life*

Cam: Haha... I tried to blog... but I suck at it.

Nobody really gets my sense of humor or my attempts at funnies.

Me: And that is why we have invented our friend, the large stick. Say hello, the large stick.

The Large Stick: Hello.

And if they don't like what you've posted, why, Mr. the large stick will give them a talking to. And he likes doing that, don't you?

The Large Stick: Yup!

Me: And since I apparently need to come up with my own blog material, I think you're about to get quoted.

[EDIT]

Cam: It says something of my good character that the things people remember about me are Lesbian Puking Sheep and Razor Bladed Dildos.. and the Squirrel Alienz of course.

[/EDIT]

So, as part of my continuing efforts to get into grad school for the whole HS teaching thing, I got to take the Miller Analogies Test today. Now, you've all done these things at one point or another. But here's 120 of them to do in 60 minutes.

Not so bad, really. I happen to r0x0rz standardized tests, as it were. While waiting to start, I was having flashbacks to the SAT, my last super-huge test, wherein I walked in without studying a minute and got 640/580 on it, which was more than adequate for a thing that got me up at 7am and screwed with me a lot. I figure the MAT will likely be the same way, though there were some...interesting spots:

1. There were two seperate questions like "Primary is to First like (blank) is to Quaternary." I am perfectly aware of the fact that the quat- prefix has to do with the number four, thanks. I think I've known this since, you know, first grade.

2. There was a question involving the dwellings of rabbits. Alas, there was no answer choice for My Evil Base (Which Glows Like Minas Morgul), Containing My Legions Of Doom And The Ultimate Power In the Universe. So I had to go with the rather more pedestrian hutch.

3. There was this odd shift in difficulty from "ludicrously easy" to "the questions not meant to be answered by mortal men." This unfortunately coincided with a dramatic increase in noise level from the class next door, who were laughing and having a great time, unaware of how perilously close they were to me going over there and machine gunning them. However, leaving the room voids my test results, so I didn't do this.

4. One of these questions was the following. I can't figure it out, and my parents can't figure it out. If YOU can figure it out, do please tell me.

(a. Den, b. Smoke, c. Odor, d. Roast) : Emu :: Burned : Perfume

Where : = "is to" and :: = "as".

Jason will be purged for providing me with this link, come the Revolution. Purged for being the kulak burgoisie capitalist exploiter of peaceful working rabbits that he is.

Click Me!

On the subject of that whole "Know Your Roots" thing, and I have no idea why I'm bringing this up now, but:

Yes, I'm about 3 in that picture. And, uh, wow. There's been carpet on that floor for a long time now.

Also:

I'm still about 3. And that door is still my desk.

And this isn't exactly about knowing your roots, but it prompted the whole photo album trip:

Obviously I was enjoying breakfast.

And not that this bears any relation to anything at all, but:

They tell me it was pretty good, actually.

Also, there are a distressing number of pictures of me in nauseatingly awful 80s clothes. In fact, everyone else is wearing nauseatingly awful 80s clothes too. I sense a conspiracy...

Because, well, I can't sleep. So instead of laying around in bed going "Dude, this totally sucks" a lot, I figured I'd do something useful, like blog.

So Regina's silly little quiz (you can find my answers somewhere in the comments) got me thinking, funnily enough, about, well, what IS my favorite book? And while I ended up saying something like what Regina said, namely that there are way too many to list, the thought hasn't gone away, and I think it's interesting enough to post about. If not about my favorites, then at least the most influential, which may be one and the same.

The first book I can remember reading is James Clavell's Shogun, and this would've been, I dunno, 2nd or 3rd grade. I may have been all of 8 at the time when I snagged my parents' copy of it. It wasn't my first exposure to the story, really, as I have memories of watching the miniseries at some appropriately low single-digit number like 4, but the book is really what made me utterly fascinated with fuedal Japan, though oddly enough I didn't really persue the thing until college and an assorted four East Asian history classes. Shogun, for the record, was the first of a handful of books I've read so many times that the book disintegrated on me.

The second major book of my childhood is Alex Haley's Roots, which I suppose I started about the same time as Shogun. While it was my first exposure to such things as slavery in the American South and race relations, Roots was also a fantastic and easy to follow adventure story, and I took to it immediately. If I haven't exactly worn the book to death, it is perhaps on its last legs, courtesy of my reading it and Shogun 2-4 times a year for at least 5 years.

I was always fascinated by war and warfare. I have no idea why that came about, perhaps it's just one of those things boys go through, but it's never quite left me behind. We played with a lot of GI Joes and pirate Legos and such back in the day, and I have a very vivid memory of being in 2nd grade, running around and playing war in the back field of the school with such fervor that literally the entire school joined in. 'Twas great fun. In any case, as my reading progressed, I naturally started reading military-themed books, specifically a certain variety of short paperback histories of various World War II campaigns that got sold in supermarkets in the late '80s. The one I remember best is a memoir of a Japanese-held POW called Give Us This Day, which I can remember reading during recess one day in 5th grade. The other big one was The Navy's Fliers of World War II, which contained a wide variety of stories about guys doing fun things in aircraft, and upon getting shot down, had exciting adventures in life rafts and with cannibals and such things. Great fun for a 10 year old boy, though I imagine not so much for the pilot at the time. But this leads us to a third book, The Time-Life Atlas of the Second World War. It was either this book or my Rand McNally Atlas of the World that turned me into a map junkie. I remember tracing maps out of the second just for kicks, and following the flow of the greatest struggle of the modern age in the first. I loved how I could somehow look at a map and transport myself to some other place, as if suddenly Rommel's Afrika Korps was racing across the desert in my living room. Also, it was a great way to kill time in school. Grade school was terribly dull. (Too, I had this gigantic fixation on the AK for a while. I used to draw the little palm tree and swastika symbol on my little toy trucks and such. Then we started figuring out that the Nazis weren't such nice folks.)

The last of childhood's great non-fiction works was, well, the 1979 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, which still takes up an entire cabinet downstairs. Once I figured out that it could answer lots and lots of questions, I started reading it all the time. Sometimes I'd just open up bits of it and start reading at random for a few hours. I still do this when reading encyclopedias and when researching for things, which gets me in trouble, but sure is interesting.

On a rather more fictional note, I can't remember when I first read Lynne Ried Banks' The Indian in the Cupboard, but the idea has stayed with me since then. Little English kid finds a cupboard that will transform anything plastic, like, say, plastic soldiers or indians and cowboys, into real miniature little people who once lived. That's cool. That's still cool. Why do I read things like Island in the Sea of Time now? Blame this.

We can blame my reading of fantasy on Jason's giving me a copy of David Eddings' The Diamond Throne some time around 6th grade, which anybody who has ever read Eddings will tell you is the perfect time to read him. Knights? Magic? Adventure? Bloody conflict wherein the good guys win? Yeah, we're there. Also, the writing is really, really amusing.

The serious side of fantasy has roots in Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World, which I recieved along with Dad's recieval of Lord of Chaos in something like 1994. I hated it at first, but decided to give it a chance, and I'm glad I did. If ever books have inspired me to create worlds, these have done so. The first five Wheel of Time books have also joined the elite Read to Death Club. I finally replaced them with hardcovers, save for my copy of The Eye of the World, which still soldiers on.

I read a lot during high school, but much of it is utterly unmemorable, or unworthy of inclusion here. On the lesser note, I shall mention that I read a whole bunch of military memoirs from common soldiers, and of those, David Donovan's Once a Warrior King is I think the best of them, simply because what he did (run a district advisory team living with villagers in South Vietnam) was so unique.

The other of the great high school books is one many of you should recognize. Mom gave me Colleen McCullough's The First Man in Rome one year when I was, say, 16 or 17. It immediately took me back to where Shogun and Roots had taken me, which is to say that for those pages, I lived fully the life of an ancient Roman. If I owe my degree in history to anything, it is likely the desire to be those people, and to do the things that they did. That book has taken me many places, and to other great books, not the least amongst them Michael Grant's History of Rome, Xenophon's Anabasis, and John Julius Norwich's histories of the Byzantine Empire. It has also, in the process, taken me to Rome itself. I might perhaps owe the author a thank you.

While many of my textbooks have been interesting in one way or another, one of the best historical works I read in college was one I just sort of picked up, and that's Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which went a good long way towards thinking of history not in terms of the wars and the leaders, but also of the people and the social movements. Another book by the name of Daily Life in Ancient Rome (and the subsequent paper), completed the task.

I would be remiss for not mentioning both SM Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time here, because more than any story I have read in the past few years, it has interested me and made me dream once more of those other worlds that exist only in the imagination.

Too, though it is not, in the strictest sense, a book, I should also mention Megatokyo here, because in the year and a half I've been reading it, I have found that it profoundly echoes something about who and what I am. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is open to debate.

I could probably toss in a few more things here and there, but I think that'll cover it. I'm sure, were some of us inclined to, a fairly interesting discussion could be had about this list, other people's lists, and the differences between them. (And I'm thinking, in specific, that you will not find any religious, spiritual, or philosophical works above. The same likely does not hold true for various others of you.)

For the moment, however, I think I may actually be tired, so I think I'll attempt some sleeping action, or inaction as the case may be.

Our title is, apparently, somebody's name on the MT forums. Just so you know.

In tribute to our misbegotten MUDing past, I quote Cole:

"something of note, i just threatened Xorith with the spamming of his e-mail addy with ads from "Cam's Lesbian Puking Sheep and Razor Bladed Dildo Emporium""

Maybe you had to be there, back in the day. But the same mind that gave rise to the squirrel aliens also came up with the LPSes and the RBD.

Fear. With great fear.

Harking back to the days of yore, let us note a few things.

Firstly, when putting down vinyl flooring in one's bathrooms, remember that less glue is good, 20 years down the line when the time comes to replace the stuff. Because in that choice between spending 10 minutes banging a putty knife between the floor and the vinyl, only to take up a 4"x10" section, and spending 10 minutes banging on a crowbar, taking up the entire bathroom's worth of vinyl, well, that's not really a choice which one to prefer. Though it should be noted that however much fun you thought ripping vinyl up was previously, let me assure you that in reality it is likely somewhat less fun.

Secondly, however much fun you thought removing a toilet was, let me assure you that in reality, it is likely way way less fun. I in fact urge you to give the whole mopping up water from the bowl with a towel thing a miss. Also, toilets can be heavy.

Thirdly, plastic toilet seats are the evil. Just so you know. Also, when designing the bathroom for your new addition, make sure to actually think about how you're laying the thing out, and do not do so in a fashion that will make you want to commit seppuku ten years down the line when it becomes apparent that only midgets and contortionists can use the thing.

Lastly, while laying down tons of black plastic to kill the plant life where you want your deck isn't so fun, and while carrying around concrete post bases is way way WAY less fun than previously imagined (you may notice a trend here), playing with weed eaters is cool. Because you too can be the Death of Plants, laying a great swathe of devastation around you with fast-spinning plastic stringy stuff[1], enacting the Plant Apocalypse.

And, after all, have we not all dreamed of doing such things as small children?

[1] - We also have one with a table saw blade attached, but in true evil overlord fashion, I was attempting a balance between, you know, stone weapons and the Death Star.

As pertains to last night's BT gaming, and also because I love the quote:

"But noooooo, the WoB is crap and MWDA is crap and the Clans are crap and why can't we all just go back to 1986 and shoot an AC/5 at a light 'Mech for six hours without hitting more than twice!" - Quentil on the CBT forums

And because the random video gamage what takes place at the shop reminds me of this Penny Arcade.

Also, I'm fairly happy about completely and totally jacking my MW3 party Friday night in new and inventive evil ways. And apparently they enjoyed it reasonably well, so that's all good. And I made up for that time, way back when, in my first D&D game at Rema's, when his assassin tried to death attack me with a slaying arrow in the neck.

Because satchel charges to the cockpit are fun.

It freaking hailed earlier. Little balls of ice covering the ground. Followed by a torrential downpour.

Welcome to June. Enjoy your stay.

We'll get around to some substantial bloggage of substance at some other point.

Clyos: our chocolate gummie bears pwnzorz all you stand for

Clyos: or sit for

Me: Since I stand for sour gummi bears, no.

Clyos: choclate covered gummie bears r0x0rz j00

Me: Our sour gummi bears do not tolerate such heathenry.

Clyos: at a dollar a pound, they cant' do a damn thing about it

Me: No, they can use the word "heathenry" in a sentence. You lose.

Clyos: Bah, my gummies wield the vorpral blade of cholately goodness

Me: *snicker*

Because, as Whir said, "Chocolate gummie bears? Who's the blasphemer who'd ruin a good gummie bear by covering it in chocolate?"

I don't really expect you musical heathens to understand my ecstaticness about this (robed and hooded rabbits with Billy Corgan icons indicate Regina, who is dragged off), but I now have the entirity of the Smashing Pumpkins' Mashed Potatoes set. All 5 CDs worth of early Pumpkins ownage.

Good find, Whir.

"I know who I am...and who I may be, if I choose."
---Don Quixote