Defying Entropy

For a while this week, I toyed with the idea that the foundations of my house might actually be held together by the dirt, but eventually I was able to reach more or less solid concrete in all the corners and angles, and start painting.
What it was, was that for the last two years I [...]

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Thieves’ Oil

Recently I surfed up a reference to a compound called Thieves’ Oil, for which there seem to be several recipes: an essential-oil antibacterial and antiviral supposedly used prophylactically by thieves robbing dead plague victims, an inarguably germy pursuit. You can get a trademarked formula, but since I have a fair sized library of essential oils [...]

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T-Shirt Friday, September, 2009: I Almost Blew It

It is painting week at the House of Sled (before and after pictures going up soon) and I almost forgot it was also the last week of the month. Nursemyra’s tradition of T-shirt Friday is a favorite of mine, and I had this one all set aside.

The weapon you see held in my right hand [...]

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Bat Woman, Again

A friend sent me this terrific article in the Daily Mail. A fellow with more time than I have, but more importantly an ingenious approach to night photography, caught all these photos of bats lapping from his garden pond in Surrey.

Now I’m fantasizing dreamily about the little bats diving down for a drink from my [...]

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Malapropism

Some stories, even though quotidian and circumstantial, should not die with the original teller.
When my late and former husband was still living with his parents, they had a neighbor who was good-hearted if a little simple, and one day she arrived at the door with an expression of acute distress. It appeared that another neighbor, [...]

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Professional Ethics

One of the gym’s perennial denizens is a fro-topped, vaguely Italian-American character who goes by the name of Dino and performs some of the goddamnedest workouts I’ve ever seen. I don’t think he owns a lifting belt and he seems to love nothing more than bracing himself with his back arched while pumping large weights [...]

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Let’s All Queue Up To Kick God’s Ass

If you recognize that quotation, you are in the inner circle of an Inner Circle — the people who have actually read not only the novels of Philip K. Dick but the divine hommage penned by Michael Bishop, The Secret Ascension (or, Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas).
The line forms to the left after the [...]

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Advertalk

As long as I am designing special hells for various people, I need to think one up for the folks who write rhapsodic advertising copy about stuff that is nothing special.
Have you noticed beer isn’t made or bottled any more? It’s “crafted,” even if it is sold in suitcases of two dozen foil-thin aluminum cans [...]

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Purple Parts

The gym is turning into a casualty ward. The location manager, a gargantuan Olympic lifter who looks kind of like the Thing in the Fantastic Four comics, only less cheerful, has been working around a torn glenoid labrum for a while (that’s the gasket that holds the arm in the shoulder socket, but since the [...]

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Calling Todd

I don’t know how far this has circulated, but it deserves universal distribution.
Australian, according to the person who sent it to me, though I can’t help suspecting a little cyber-twiddling.

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