Joe

06:40 pm: Or don't try again, even better.
A brief note to young girls writing pop songs:

If you are in deep, epic, teenage-angst-ridden love with a boy, but can't be with him because your parents don't approve, then yes, this bears a passing resemblance to the story of Romeo and Juliet, if you pass it at speed and don't look too closely. Staggeringly unoriginal, but what the Hell -- it's been unoriginal for over 400 years, and the story still seems to have some wear left in it.

However, if your beau's solution to this classically-tragic problem is to square things with your daddy, buy a nice ring, and propose to you on bended knee, you're not Romeo and Juliet -- you're Ward and June Fucking Cleaver. So how about you tear up the song and try again, yes?

06:29 pm: Star Wars
I've been thinking, for awhile, of reading some of the various Star Wars novels that have been written by them wot knows how to write (ie: not George Lucas). However, I don't have the vaguest notion where to start, and figured that, out among the folks on my friends list, there are likely to be some suggestions.

So: these I now request. If I want to get into the Star Wars novel universe, where should I start?

02:19 pm: I don't bike, and I couldn't stop laughing at this.
I'm cross-posting this from mizerychick, because it reminds me very strongly of things I've read by andygates and especially ravenbait:

A few things from the bike shop

01:41 pm: Verily! So much for all that.
So, I just finished Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. In all, I thought, pretty well written, and now I'd like to see the movie adaptation of The Golden Compass, if only because there are aspects that seem at best difficult to incorporate into a movie less than five hours long, it ends in a cliffhanger, and it seems exceedingly unlikely that the producers figured they could get the whole trilogy filmed without excising huge tracts of the plot which would get very bad play in the flyover states.

However, the plot and cosmology got progressively more Baroque as the story wended onward, and the ending left me entirely cold. It was -- and this might be a bit spoilery, though abstractly; you'd need to read up until about 50 pages from the end to know what I'm talking about, and by that time you'll already see it coming -- heartbreak for the sake off adding poignancy to the narrative, very much like the much-reviled Joss-Whedon-hates-love school of story composition. Heartbreak which is very clearly being wedged into the story, could be avoided by characters who are less than 1/3 as clever as our protagonists have proven themselves to be, and which manages to feel like nothing more than the author flipping his readers the double avian. Indeed, it would be my personal benchmark for such events, if not for how Stephen King included actual berating of his readers into the ending of The Dark Tower.

Well, you know what? Fuck that. I'm reading something where the good guys win. Not win in some abstract way but spend the rest of their lives miserable, but actually win. Something well-written, funny, and triumphant. There can be poignancy, but it needs to show up on its own as a function of the story, not get nailed on for shits and grins. Hm. Hey, look, there's my copy of Men At Arms. Sold, American.

11:55 am: Well, at least I'm symmetrical now.
So, just got back from the dentist -- I now have neither of my upper wisdom teeth. The one on the right was pulled about 4 years ago; the last time I was at the dentist before a few weeks ago, when I was brushing my teeth and found some chips and grit from my upper left wisdom tooth, which has been falling apart for awhile. Well, as it was, as it were, falling apart a bit more actively, I decided it was time to see the dentist.

So, went, was chastised for not going in so long, had 4 years of plaque removed from my teeth with a backhoe, and scheduled an appointment with the oral surgeon. Then, the appointment was postponed, as apparently he's not around that often. So, showed up today, and was taken immediately.

The extraction itself wasn't so bad; the novacaine injections hurt a bit (especially the one on the tongue-side of my teeth -- felt like someone was trying to inflate a beachball inside my gums), but that's to be expected, and it beats the heck out of trying to go without. The surgeon didn't quite have to put his knee against the side of my head to get the tooth out, but I felt it was a very near thing. The amusing part came right after the tooth came out: he told me to blow air out my nose. I was perplexed at this request, but figured, hey, he's the one with the initials after his name. As I was doing so, his hand shot forward and clamped my nostrils shut, causing me to snort in alarm and confusion. "Sorry," he said, "had to make sure there wasn't an opening between your sinuses and your mouth now that the tooth is out."

So, here I sit, biting on gauze and waiting with some apprehension for the numbness to wear off. But, in all, could be a lot worse.

02:20 pm: *gasp!*
Blue sky! I saw a patch of blue sky! By the Powers, the Thrones, and the Principalities, blue sky!

...Um, the near-constant rain around here has been getting to me a little bit.

04:36 pm: "Absolutimentay."
On my way into work this morning, I saw some posters stapled to a few telephone poles, advertising computer repair. They also claimed proudly:

"Se habra espanol."

Um, are you quite sure?

10:53 am: Plague of [insert critter]
"And all manner of things that flyeth, that runneth, that skittereth upon the ground and, lo, that crawleth beneath it; all these things shall be turned against you."

Yeah, I made that up, but it sounds authentic, yeah? Anyway, while sitting at the computer this morning, I heard a sound from our storage space (which is out under the slanting portions of the roof on the second floor). That sound was, unmistakably, the whirring of panicked wings, and the thumping of small birdiness as it caromed around in the dark, seeking egress. I'm not sure how it got in, though thinking on that for too long displeases me (hole in the roof? Yay.), and even less cognizant of how we're going to get the thing out. I don't fancy opening the door and getting a faceful of apoplectic sparrow, but I'm not too hot on the idea of just letting the poor thing ricochet around in the dark until it brains itself, either.

So, if you're keeping notes, the various forms of wildlife that have invaded our home in the relatively brief time we've lived there:

- mice
- rats
- yellowjackets
- birds
- fruit flies

We shouldn't have disturbed the wards. I really wish I'd realized that when we found them.

11:54 am: "Motorcycle cop" is a sweet nothing?
So, yesterday, we were dashing around the house, trying to get it into a reasonable state (which job we succeeded at, but that's not why I'm writing). eafm paused in the middle of one transit of the living room and mentioned "There's a cop at the door." Then the doorbell rang, and we wandered over to see what the nice man wanted.

What he wanted, in short, was for us to move our car. "You can't just leave it parked somewhere for 4 days," he asserted. This declaration was sufficiently confusing that we didn't answer at all. The conversational vacuum, thankfully, pulled on him. "There's an abandoned car law in New Jersey that allows a car to be declared abandoned if it's been left on the street for more than 48 hours," he explained. "Someone complained about your car."

Groovy. So, go out to move the car. This wasn't quite as simple a project as one would hope.

( Why it wasn't so simple )

But, thankfully, the car started without issue (though I have to manually disengage the shifter lock every time) and I was able to move it. I'm aggravated, though, that apparently I can't leave my car in an entirely legal parking spot without an asshole neighbor calling in the cops to enforce an idiotic law.

01:43 pm: And pretty decent production values, too.
Snarfled rudely from funwithrage, I give you We Didn't Start the Flame War. Not so much safe for work.

09:44 am: Mysterious cat ... is mysterious.

You Are a Lynx

You are a quiet observer of the world around you. Your wisdom comes from listening carefully. You've always been extra sensitive and aware. And it's made it difficult for you to fit in. You see past people's outward personas. You are able to penetrate a stranger's soul. What you've learned about people is both beautiful and ugly. And you keep these secrets to yourself.

03:38 pm: Life with eafm: Firing solution
(Patting pockets, on the way out of Chuck E Cheese's)

"Where did I put my guns ... no ... keys."

11:25 am: I aten't dead.
I realize I haven't posted in awhile, but this is important and requires that I break my (entirely unintentional) silence:

Watchmen. Is beautiful.

01:30 pm: GAAAAH!
So, I'm at my mom's, and Mom has FiOS, and the FiOS modem has a built-in wireless access point. I have with me my wee small Asus Eee, which I'd like to set up to work with her access point. To do this, I need but to connect to the FiOS modem through her desktop machine and read said WEP key. Which would be pretty easy if I could authenticate to the fucking FiOS modem.

I set it up with a username and password before, but alas, when she had a much older machine. The newer one I set up, which has newer versions of apps, is not so happy. There's some flaky Javascript in the web interface to the modem which is screwing up the password as I type it. I hit one key, and four appear in the password box. I hit another, and two more appear. Three disappear on the next letter, then five appear, and so on. Not surprisingly, it doesn't accept whatever the fuck is eventually showing up in the password box. I've spent quite a lot of time installing browsers other than Firefox -- Galeon and Konqueror to be precise -- and both of them do the same thing. I even tried the w3m text-based browser, but while it doesn't behave strangely in any obvious way, neither does the modem accept the password -- not sure if w3m even runs Javascript, though, so that's not really that surprising.

Stupid piece of crap. Like you need goddamned Javascript for a fucking password box. How about, I don't know, just using the authentication mechanisms available in HTTP? Is that too damned high-concept?

*mumble curse mumble kick bitch moan whine*

ETA: And, if you turn Javascript off, I can enter the username and password unmolested, but can't get the form to submit. If I load the page with Javascript on, then turn Javascript off while I enter the username/password, then re-enable Javascript to submit, whatever it's supposed to do with the password doesn't happen, and authentication still fails.

EATA: Or, it could be that I'm just an imbecile, and didn't realize that I had written "u:" in front of the username, and not "u" as the first character of the username, and so have been putting in the wrong username the whole time. With the right username, oddly enough, it works just fine. Some days, I'm so stupid I wonder that I can even get my underpants on the right way around.

08:42 pm: The Further Adventures of the Inept Homeowner
So, I just went to the basement to put water in the boiler, that we might turn the heat on and make it less cold in our house. I'd only been filling the boiler for a few seconds when I got a loud vibration in the pipes. It had been my belief that this happened when the water heater was empty, or near to, when I was trying to fill the boiler. The only times I've heard the sound was when we have, on occasion, not completely closed the valve into the boiler and overfilled it.

Now, we haven't used any hot water in a few hours, and thus I wouldn't think the tank was still empty. Unless, that is, it only refills the tank when the tank is empty, which seems not the smartest way to do things. Or perhaps the vibration happens when I'm filling the boiler while the water heater is taking in more water to heat.

I suspect I could use Google for figuring this out, but I like asking my knowledgable homeowner friends. Makes me feel all kinds of retro (almost as retro as I feel because we have a steam heating system).

09:57 pm: "That kinda makes you proud, doesn't it?"
Sarah: What did Daddy say?
eafm: I won't tell you; you might accidentally repeat it.
Sarah: Daddy is contagious!

09:35 pm: PVC Sisyphus
No, not that kind of PVC.

Anyway, I wrote a few days back about a leak under the sink, and how I got new bits to try to stop it, and stop it I did. Well, mostly -- there was some dripping, but not very much. Well, the spot where the J-bend joins with the outgoing sewer pipe came loose just now, and of course a lot of water came out.

Now, however many times I look at the setup, I don't see how this kind of thing ever holds. The end of the sewer pipe has a kind of gasket-shape molded onto it. However, of course the nut that screws onto the J-bend itself has to fit over the gasket-shape, and so said gasket-shape is unable to keep that nut from coming off. That is, if the purpose of the nut is to pull the J-bend tight against the molded gasket-shape, it can't possibly do that job, because the nut will always be able to be pulled over the gasket-shape. So, I'm unclear as to how this arrangement ever works, and that is likely to be precisely my problem: it clearly does work if it's done right.

So, anyone with past experience on this one? Can you explain how it's supposed to work, using small words?

ETA: Okay, it occurs to me that a visual aid would be favorite. Take a look at the image here. This is exactly what I have. See where the outgoing pipe is, on the right, with the beveled wossname? The nut on it, which screws onto the J-bend, is larger than the beveled lip. And so can slide off. And so can't hold the J-bend in place.

04:04 pm: The Tale of the Sink, continued
So, when last I was prattling on, there was a leak under my sink, roundabout the J-bend (for apparently it is a J-bend, and not a U-bend, as I was calling it). The place where the J-bend connects to the outgoing pipe was leaking, and rather copiously, if you didn't bother to set aside memory space for that detail -- and believe me, no blame attaches.

I took myself to that locus of wisdom, The Home Depot, with a little bag of the bits I pulled off the sink (all of which looked fine to my untrained eye -- no obvious cracks or wear in any of the PVC). There, I found their Master of Pipes and Drains, who alas I had trouble understanding and who had trouble understanding me, as our native tongues were not the same and we each had only limited command of the other's. (Oddly enough, even four or five years of Spanish in school leaves you woefully underequipped to discuss the nuances of plumbing. Not that I remember enough to even discuss the weather, mind you, unless it happens to be warm or cold. If it's raining or snowing, I'll just have to wait until it stops if I want to talk about it.)

Anyway, the nice man observed that the pieces I brought looked to be in good shape, and thought it was probably a clog (and, truly, I did pull about half a pound of hair, half-rotted food, and assorted bits of popsicle sticks and plastic forks out of the J-bend when I removed it), and so sold me some industrial-strength drain cleaner in a plain white bottle (which substance likely violates any number of FDA regulations and several of the Geneva Conventions). On my own, I picked up a J-bend replacement kit which included a flexible accordion connector, as the things seemed a bit misaligned when I was poking around, and I figured things being constantly shoved sideways can't be good for maintaining water-tightness.

So, got home, buried the drain cleaner in a lead case filled with concrete and graphite, and affixed the new J-bend bits to the sink/sewer bits. The end near the sewer still seems less than ideally secure, and still leaks a bit. However, it's only a very little bit, so I figure we can at least live with it long enough to do the ziggurat of dishes left from Christmas. After that, I might try taking the bits off and seeing if I can get them more sturdily connected. And, to this end, I put the word out to you, my LJFriend Hivemind: any suggestions? All the pieces that are supposed to be there seem to be, and none of them are cracked or likewise damaged. Should I try putting in one of the extra washers I now have (despite the fact that the diagram for attaching the bits don't have one there, and the end of the pipe does have a sort of washer-esque shape molded onto it)? Live with the drip?

09:58 am: Aw, come on.
So, just went under the sink to get something, and found that the little bucket we still keep there (since the last leak) is, well, full. No water appears to be coming from the incoming wossnames, and yet water drips regularly from the U-bend. The sink is empty of water, and when I ran the water earlier there was no backup. So, what? It's coming back *in* from the pipe out to the sewer? Not that I'm complaining, but if there were water coming in that way, shouldn't the various drains in the basement be backed up? I think a call to the plumber might be in order. Groooooovy.

ETA: Thankfully, greenquotebook's husband (who is much handier than I am -- though that might be damning with faint praise) reminded me that a U-bend has water in it all the time, so it leaking when no water is running isn't necessarily any kind of problem (more than it leaking, period). He suggested replacing the U-bend before calling a plumber, which plan I concur with. I poked at it a bit, and of course made the leak worse. However, it's definitely the fitting past the U-bend, where it connects to the outgoing pipe. I'm going to try taking it off tomorrow, getting a replacement for the Despot, and seeing if I can make with the Teflon tape and suchlike. If that doesn't work, I can still call the plumber.

01:58 pm: Awesomeness.
Go ye forth and watch. No, I won't tell you what it is, though I will assure you it's work-safe. Unless you work somewhere really, really weird.