Month: May 2004

Old E-Mail

Excerpts from email written in 1995 or 1996 by Joanna. Benjamin wanted to write a secret message in white icing between two of the layers, so I made him make some cream cheese icing. Someone just rapped at my window. I pulled back the partially closed curtain to reveal Nathan peering at me from the other side of the glass. This might not seem odd, except that my room is on the second floor. “You gonna elope with someone tonight?” he asked. I pulled back the curtain further. He was standing on a ladder leaning against the side of the…

Check Ride

I passed my “stage check” yesterday. I was a bit frustrated when we first started because the guy giving me the check got all upset at me over the fact that I didn’t have a syllabus with me. The problem is, no one bothered to mention that I was supposed to carry it. No where in the syllabus does it mention that I’m supposed to carry it. He vaguely quizzed me over a few things during my preflight and during the flight. He had me take off, track the river, slow down to 50 knots, do some turns at 50…

Blog-Things

Now that I have blogging software installed, I have this fiendish urge to make nothing but bloggish posts. That is: things that no one else could possibly want to read. These take a couple of forms. One of them mimics the Seinfeldish comic routine wherein the comedian says, “Have you ever noticed…” then points out some inanity of daily life which in and of itself has no comic value. But the comedian is certain this his particular blabbering about this observation will be funny. Bloggers do this, but rather than anything remotely comic, there’s just a strange vacuum. For example,…

The Platters

A few hours ago, Joanna caused my MP3 player to stray from its usual random-order playback and instead play Pink Floyd. This was good. Joanna and I both simultaneously noticed and admired the line, “come on you target of far away laughter.” This was odd, since neither of us had previously paid any attention or consciously processed this line in nearly ten years of listening to this song. It’s only got a dozen lines, which for a 12 minute song is a very low lyrics:length ratio. such a ratio is accomplished by either playing lots of instrumental stuff with occaisional…

Izzle! Izzle pfaff!

In the midst of my recent poo-pooing of blogs in general, I’ve stumbled across what might be one of the best of the worst kind. It’s not what I consider a “real blog”, something that exists to link to other interesting things on the web, (A good example might be Slashdot.) but rather more of what “blog” has come to mean now– A journal on the web. And now, even though this isn’t a blog and I’m not a blogger, I’ll do what bloggers do: link to other bloggers. But first, a word of warning. If you happen to either…