The Bolters (sounds like something I'd have done as a kid)

You should have seen your face! You looked like you were inverting the bald-headed four-legged flambé.

A friend of mine’s brother is having a weird problem. He bought a house last year to remodel and then sell, and has been living there during the project.

Three times now, someone has stolen bolts from items in his yard. That’s right, bolts. Once was a couple of bolts from his motorcycle, for example.

Recently he was working in the yard with some piece of gardening gear… maybe a leaf blower, I forget. It had two tubes joined by bolts that formed the main attachment. The phone rang and he put the thing down. Inside the house he talking on the phone for a minute, drank a soda, and then went back outside again. When he picked up the blower, the tube fell apart… the two bolts that held it together were gone. In the ten minutes or so that he was outside, someone stole the bolts off the thing.

He bought the house from a run-down little church next door. The church had been using it as rough living quarters for about a dozen political/religious refugees from Ethiopia, but they were ejected from the property by the police for health reasons. The pastor of the church decided to sell the house to raise money for some church improvement projects. After selling the house, the pastor announced he was retiring to do missionary work in Zimbabwe. A couple weeks after he left, the guy with the missing bolt problem ran into the pastor’s brother in the neighborhood and asked if the missionary post had started yet. The pastor’s brother looked baffled and said, “No, we’re buying a used-car dealership together.”

Give me something magic

A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar.
The bartender says. “What is this, some kind of a joke?”

For a project, I want to include a listing of a bunch of magical ingredients: stuff like bat fat, fly tears, etc. (Got going with this list)

I’d like a bunch of these, and I’d like you to create them. This is an open solicitation, and you can pass it on to anyone. 🙂

Each ingredient should be no more than a dozen words or so. I don’t want a ritual or a procedure, just an ingredient. Don’t write them in the form of a sentence, but a phrase. So for example:

Fly tears collected on the night of a full moon.

is fine. But:

You need to collect fly tears on the night of a full moon.

is not.

Have fun!

On that note, I’m going to beddy-bye. nightynight.

Assorted Cat-Blather

Newt On Mt. Scotto... note fuzzy sasquatch chest hair at bottom

The little orange guy that lives with me is named

Newton

His name is not:

Neutron, Neptune, Neon, or Newman… I’ve had confused people call him all of those. (I don’t really mind, but I do correct them. You know… Fig Newton? Sir Isaac?)

nicknames I have seen that I like for him are –

Newt (Also: Noot, Gnut, Nute.. all pronounced the same), Nudie-Newtie, Nudist (He is naked, after all), Noodles, Jellybean, Dreamsicle, Fuzzybutt, Fuzz-bucket, Slacker, Moose, Nut, Goober, Monkey-boy, Ape-Cat, Monkey-kitty, Flying Monkey-Kitty, Shark-kitty, Newtie-bear, Newtzilla, Nude Beach, Uber-cat, Beastly, Newfie-Slayer (in honor of tarpo), babe magnet, Neutered, Golden Boy, Little Piggy, Stinkpot (when he was still on formula his dung was the stenchiest… I’m glad that passed, pardon the pun), Lovey-boy, Stripey-snack-cake, New Zoo Review, Son, Boyo, and sundry others that aren’t coming to my addled mind right now.

Random scotto factoid – I once wanted my own radio station, callsign WMBT- The Wombat. Once I get my backups done, Big Brain (Now Queen Bee) will be Broadcasting via Shoutcast. A childhood dream come true! I want to get Newton’s purrs recorded at full bass… I think it’d be neat to hear it broadcast.

The super-unsinkable tugboat. keen! I bet that was quite a ride.

Watching TV… learned about baby penguins! So cute. Animal Planet is the way to go for daytime tv. Pet stories, Wildlife Emergency, that’s my baby. I’m glad my sweetie turned me on to the channel. I’d love to get a job working with that company.

On an unrelated note –

Labia is plural for labium.

I want pancakes, preferably buttermilk or blueberry, with a side of home fries.

Me and Newtie

azrael / newtiepapa smurf / me

Hmm…my brother is coming by tomorrow to help out around the house. Taking my laundry and bringing some supplies. I found that he had more troubles than I knew on the Island when he was there… I’m glad those times are mostly behind him. I’m going to help him out with rent until his IRS check comes in later this week. I drew myself up fairly tight with the phone and power bills, cab rides and meds…It’s just as well I’m staying in this week.

I’m feeling a little mopey today, but that’ll pass. I think it’s from poor sleep, and being perhaps over-anxious about the meds, and the situation in general. I’m fortunate to have a few beacons to help me on my way. 🙂 Newtie is being very good about snuggling and purring. My back’s doing pretty well at the moment, and I’m curled up comfortably.

Something that just made me laugh… a guy’s name… “Dick Hyman“… master of jazz piano. I’m so juvenile, sometimes.

Yes, *DOMESday*.

Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

The Brain Trust at Sandia National Labs is attempting to design an entire landscape around the nuclear waste dump of the great Southwest – one that will say “go away” to humans for the next 10,000 years, regardless of changes in climate or culture. Among the more descriptive proposals are: Landscape of Thorns, Menacing Earthworks, and Forbidding Blocks. Artists’ concept sketches can be found near the middle of the document.The more I read this, the more I got visions of Mordor, the land of Scorch (from Wizards), the ancient complex of the Great Ones under Antarctica from Lovecraft’s The Mountains of Madness, and strangely enough, the rock formations from the ’80s movie Dune. Creeeepy.

Ancient Domesday Book Outlives Electronic Version

In 1086AD, somebody thought it would be a good idea to write down all kinds of stuff about the King in a book. That document has endured for nearly a thousand years and is of great interest to historians. In 1986, somebody thought it would be a good idea to make a modern-day equivelent, preserved in the latest, indestructable technology, for the next millenium’s historians. That document lasted about 15 years, and is now almost completely unreadable.

Contrast our ability to preserve and disseminate our culture to the kind of legacy we’re leaving for the next 10,000 years. Remember how the futuristic Legion of Superheroes always says that few records survived from our time? And you thought it was just so that DC didn’t have to give away the endings…

Went to the doctor, and he gave orders for me to stay in bed until I next see him — in a week. He wrote me a note for work, and three scrips for pain and anti-inflammatory.

for those following in the meds department, I’m now on oxycontin(20mg tabs) (not one I’m fond of… its addictive, and I don’t like putting stuff like that in my body.), supplemented with oxycodone,(325 mg tabs) (related and also habit forming) and naproxen (500 mg, maximum dosage) as the anti-inflam.

Variants on Percoset, which has been prescribed to me in the past… fortunately, I had no addictive cravings for it.

Some interesting stats on abuse.

I’m supplementing those meds with meditation, nag champa, soft lighting, thoughts of my sweetheart, Newtie-purrs, and Mr Chan’s Chinatown Almond Cookies.

My current upset is my awe at a doctor that schedules folks for a 1pm appointment, and I don’t get to see him until 2:15. That, and apparently Foundation Health is a horrid insurance company…that’s why I didn’t get better care at the ER. Looking into a better group soon. [update] It looks like Blue Cross / Blue Shield is the way for me to go, same price monthly, but a $500 deductable.

awwww! Llamas for sale!

Here’s the funniest thing I’ve read all week, a beautiful, savage skewering of a journalist whose laziness and presumption are a wonder to behold.

Watching Adult Swim and thinking of my sweetie…l’m in a very placid state… nearly floaty. Nag Champa burns while Newt purrs in my lap. I think my mind is about 5 feet to the left of my body. I have the urge to drink something with rum in it, and maybe a paper umbrella.

The trees hide the mountain,
The mountain hides the temple.
Vines’ shade is deep;
Cloud shadows, ragged.
Afar the bell sends off the falling sun.
Weary birds wing homeward
Cold light is sodden
With a smear of mist
I ask the rude monk
Where he wanders ‘neath
The moon morning and evening,
Early and late.
“I come with my lute here
strolling in search of a poem.”

– Hsien-Yu Pi-Jen

Ugh, my spine. Going to the doc tomorrow again to get this ironed out. The weather is shifted a day late… I could use some rain today, not tomorrow, to rest to.

*though of while doing obe meditation, mild rewrite*

On a scrap of typewritten paper –

until the host accepts them completely. Once established they grant the host heightened sensations, but at the cost of inhuman urges. These urges are often more strange than dangerous, but one wonders whether an untrained mind can distinguist between its own thoughts and those slipped through the back door of consciousness. Perhaps they are entirely benign, as the hosts claim, or perhaps the belief that they are benign is merely implanted by the parasites. It is not inconceiveable that they actually learn the mental patterns of their hosts and then devour their minds (and brains), mimicking the now-dead hosts and aquiring complete control of the bodies. A thorough autopsy of a host is obviously necessary, as are neurophysiological experiments on living hosts, but they are extremely secretive about their nature and protective of their dead. Cremation is universal among them.

So far, they have shown no coherent political activity, though perhaps their activities are simply too subtle for us to follow. The only thing that can be called a “policy” is that of paranoid secretiveness, which is understandable even if the beings are benign. Indeed, without projecting astrally, I would never have realized the existance of the Betellians, let alone determining details as to their habits and those of their human hosts.

This paranoid need to protect their identity is what makes me fear for my life.

Argh… going to lay down in a few…while I’m doing the Oso back-rest, you might want to check out this….

Enron actually built a fake trading room on the sixth floor of their Houston HQ. A slick Hollywood production with 36 inch flat panel monitors and faked video conferenced rooms.

According to former Enron employees, on the sixth floor of the company’s downtown headquarters was a set, designed to trick analysts into believing business was booming.

“It was an elaborate Hollywood production that we went through every year when the analysts were going to be there to be impress them to make our stock go up,” former employee Carol Elkin said.”

“Elkin said that it was all an act, and that no trades were actually made there. The people on the phones were talking to each other.”


There is a lesson to be learned here for writing conspiracy fiction. The things that are possible with money are more numerous and versatile than you would imagine. Just think, the 7th richest company in the US actually built a Big Store room in their corporate HQ, staffed with legit employees and routinely bamboozled authorities, analysts, reporters and investors with a virtual dog and simulated pony show.

“They would ask us to go alternately, in like hour shifts down to the sixth floor,” Elkin said. “And sit and pretend that we lived and worked there.”


Caught up in the dream, employees voluntarily, even enthusiastically participated in the deception. It was just good business. Sort of like a live-action commercial.

When I wrote about a month ago (I’ll redirect a link later) that no one knew what the heck Enron actually did, this is what I was talking about. Yes, they traded in commodities and futures. Duh. What no one could figure out was how Enron could make so much profit from doing it when everyone else quickly discovered that brokering a trade of vapor for BS results in a percentage of nothing. Gee, maybe we just weren’t doing it right. I guess that’s where the spiffy Enron philosophy and corporate culture and leading edge thinking outside of the box paradigm shifting came in.

I was beginning to suspect that I was getting a bit grandiose with my musings about the Kilroy Org. Now I realize I was thinking small.

Newt went to the vet! checked out with flying colors!

newt at the vet
[update – 3/2/03] http://www.printroom.com/ViewAlbumPhoto.asp?userid=scottobear&album_id=57101&image_id=6 (printroom direct links now dead)

more piccies here

I’m glad Newtie’s doing well… I’m having a mildly tough day. I think I’ll spoil myself, get some good delivery food, and slack some, work on writing some fiction, and tweaking that code… take things at my own pace. Minor walkies earlier. My Yahoo and ICQ have been funkier than george clinton’s socks after a 25 mile hike, lately. people appear off and on, including myself. weird.