Time runs low but tasks are fewer anyway

The resume is still not complete, although almost all of my other tasks are. I've got Skype working on the laptop I'm bringing to Australia.

The single most important things I had done before a late lunch, and clearly these were vital, is read biographies and watch old episodes of Time Trumpet on YouTube. This is a BBC show from 2006 which claims to be a look back at 2005 through 2009 and slightly upward from the lens of 2031. They get the real new people and such to play along, which makes it a total win. The first link I saw was this one: Tesco versus Denmark. Tesco is a supermarket chain in the UK that has Wal~Mart-like powers. Watch for the deployment drop.

I've got the iPod reloaded for the trip. I went into Harvard Square and the Back Bay with my roomie this afternoon and found lots of things I once owned on cassette and hadn't heard in years. Big Black is excellent wake-up music, don't you agree? Was it a brilliant idea to buy these albums again on CD to simplify the MP3 ripping process? Maybe not.

This latest setup of my mobile music library may be my security blanket as I travel the tourist cosmos. The thought of 21 hours in the air each way, plenty of time in trains and cars, and otherwise needing something when the local accent gets on my nerves.

I can't pretend I don't get the occasional urge to throttle someone speaking a version of English I had never heard before. You smile on the outside but inside you're thinking "it's cute, it's still cute... okay, that word never had those syllables so cut it out. There shouldn't be a glottal stop in the word "fuckin'"! Speak Murkyn like Jesus did!" When I went to England I wanted to smack the lisp out of this woman from Devonshire. I mean, it's a lisp! Don't gimme that ethnocentric correctness argument: if you can afford to dress two children in nice clothes you can stop pretending I'm the crazy one for thinking you sound like Elmer Fudd.

Oh wait -- Barbara Walters. She's wealthy and while she has improved her diction it'll never sell if she lost all trace of the 1970s Baba Wawa. I think of that lisp as low-class but England doesn't. Come to think of it, that guy from the New York Dolls has one too.

It was very hard to accept that I sounded funny to people in the UK. Entire characters that I would usually use in conversation had no reference point: if you have no Bostonians, a south shore accent will still sound the same as Dallas the TV show. Then again their impersonations of us were miserable.

I think my point is: I have to accept that I'll sound funny for a fortnight. Yeah, there I go. If I observe and keep calm, I'll be fine. If I can come home with at least two new accents I'll be even better.

-not going to admit I was enjoying lolbots this morning, Ps/d

No limbs, bed for two? Call Fisty-Bear 5000!

My roomie insisted on terrifying me this evening. His cruelty can only be cured by paying forward. What you are about to see is a real link from a real company whose name is inches hakamadare's old email address:



No, I didn't fake this. This is a proposed extra application for a robot called, shyte you naught, BEAR. Why is this perverted robot called Bear? It's an acronym with an extra significance: his shiny white head has bumps on the top to make him look vaguely like a teddy bear.

Note the docile smile on the amputee's face. He looks like a cow person about to get an oxygen mask in a flight safety manual. Note there is no wheelchair for this amputee, but he still has one good arm to balance himself in the robot's cradling pods. What happens when he gets up? Does BEAR also gas him to death or does he use those arm pods to bash his skull during the night?

Would our amputee be so happy if the robot didn't have a teddy bear's head? If the ears were bigger and he had a cassette deck, would he be the life-sized Teddy Ruxpin all plushies dream about? What if he had really big ears, buttons on his pants and a doofus grin? Potential lawsuit. Never mind.

Anyone else notice the amputee is being placed on one side of a bed made for two but there is also a pillow setting for another person? This amputee doesn't have a loved one to put him in bed but he's got a swinger's bed. This leaves us with one other option for those arm pods and a well-lubricated robot already bending him into a good fisting position.

Kibo also proposed the caption "Bear needs spare parts". That hints the robot wants to tote this dude around. The robot is built to traverse horrid battlefield conditions. I suspect he'll go Marvin fast and only get the spare parts from our once overly eager Marine if they'll be bone jewelry.

Unrelated subject for discussion: I tried again after nearly a decade but I still don't like Monopuff's It's Fun to Steal. It's just kinda limp and grating. "Creepy" (the opening track) is okay and the third track is also tolerable. That damn song "Pretty Fly" makes me want to claw my ears or the discordant singers' larynges. It's coming out of the iPod tonight before I accidentally hear it again on shuffle.

-I'll bet you didn't know the plural for larynx before (except for dobrovolets and moominmolly), Ps/d