Freelance Genius

Just cruising down Mount Pleasant, yelling out a song in Spanish.  I think it was a love song because I heard "corazon" and all the latinas were giggling at him.  This video goes out to you, amigo.

On Wednesday, May 29, 2013, the Washington Post called the Liberty Reserve "one of the biggest laundering operations in history."  Liberty Reserve stands accused with laundering six billion dollars.  For certain definitions of big, this statement could be considered accurate.  In the real world, this is like called a house sparrow one of the biggest birds in history.  HSBC was accused with laundering an estimated two hundred fifty billion dollars for Iran, as well as failing to properly monitor another six hundred seventy billion dollars of wire transfers and almost another ten billion in purchased US Dollars.

Let's put those amounts in numbers:
Liberty Reserve: 6,000,000,000
HSBC:              930,000,000,000

Hey, that's a lot of zeros.  Let's strip these down and ask an eight year old which is bigger.
Genius Nephew, which of these two numbers are bigger: 6 or 930?
* Not pictured, my nephew laughing at me, calling me silly, and pointing at 930.

Seven people have been arrested in the Liberty Reserve case.  Not one person has been arrested relating to the HSBC laundering case.  Let's go back to my Financial Investigator, my eight year old nephew:
Genius Nephew, which of these two numbers are bigger: 7 or 0?
* Not pictured, my nephew laughing at me, calling me silly, and pointing at 7.

The lesson is quite clear.  If you're going to launder funds, go big or go to the big house.  Laundering money is fine as long as the amounts involved are staggering, and you use the profits to expand your business into credit cards and other types of loans.

You might think that I am an anarchist advocating that the government shouldn't bother prosecuting cases like this in the new age of the internet, the greatest social experiment yet, but I'm not.  I am a progressive with some mild anarchist tendencies, usually only expressed while inebriated, advocating the radical idea that governments apply their laws to everyone, not just the conveniently prosecuted.

I'm also disappointed with the Post for the lazy reporting.  Calling Liberty Reserve "one of the biggest" when HSBC was two* orders of magnitude larger is ludicrous.  $6 billion is chump change compared to $980 billion.  Even the Republicans wouldn't argue too much over six billion in a budget debate, but nine-hundred eighty billion gives anyone pause.  To put that in recent news perspective, that is more than 2,940 massive Powerball jackpots.  Imagine if three people won 300+ million dollar jackpots every day for the next two and a half years.  Just ludicrous.

* Thanks, Pinko

Some moments you feel utterly wrecked and confused, while other moments you feel nothing.  Some moments you're so angry you can't speak because you will unleash a fury on an innocent, while other moments you feel only slight loss.  Most moments you just wonder what the fuck to do now.

This is not the toast I gave, but the toast I wrote before I was convinced that this toast was better absorbed through the eyeballs than the auditory nerve.  The actual toast I gave will follow on a later date.  Following that, I may give a lecture on how to give toasts, depending on how these two posts are received.*

"There's been a lot of talk about the definition of marriage lately. *Pause for laughter*  People have argued this til the boring end, and yet I do not stand here to speak about the definition of marriage.  I wonder about the meaning of marriage.  What does it mean for two people to stand in front of their friends and family and declare that they will be married.  What does it mean in this world, in this time, for two people to be married?

We hear no end of suffering, we see no end to bloodshed, we see no peace among the disparate groups of humans on this planet.  Misery seeps through our lives, infecting every aspect.  Cynicism rots our core until we can no longer raise a hand in aid of another.  What does it matter that two people wish to join their lives, to entwine their fates, in the face of such utter hopelessness, despair, and cynicism?  What can we do as witnesses, but bear the silent burden?

Bear with me, folks, this does lead to a point. * Pause for nervous laughter.*

When two people stand up to be married, they are defying the naysayers, the broken ones, and the fearmongers.  Two people who love each other enough to stand in front of those they value most in the world to say "I love you, and will hold your heart above all else in this world" are expressing defiance.  Defiance in the face of despair, hope in the face of suffering, and romance in the depths of cynicism.

Marriage is the ultimate rebellion.  Marriage is punk rock.  Marriage is a middle finger held up to an uncaring universe.  Marriage is a defiance of the unending wave of terror that floods our lives from all directions.  Marriage is a beacon of warmth, love, hope, and romance in a threatening world, and we witnesses will always be ready to remind you of this day.  This day when you stood in front of all the people who matter to you and said, "I love you, and take thee to be my partner in all things."

* Received has always looked like a misspelled word to me.

Last Saturday, I was walking into my local Metro station when I was asked for spare change by an allegedly homeless person.  The exchange damn near broke my spirit because it happened like this:

"Hey, man, spare some cha-oh, sorry, bro."

I was wearing some green, heavy-duty carpenter's pants that I use as hiking pants.  They are durable, but have wide enough legs that the thick denim isn't stifling, even in a DC summer.  These pants are pretty faded, worn around the hem, and have some permanent grass stains at the knees.  I was also wearing a green, long sleeve shirt that I always think makes me look like a revolutionary.  Apparently, I looked so pathetic that even a homeless man didn't want any change I might have had.

Thanks, Universe.  I needed this.  Everything is now cobagulating.

I try to remind myself that my life could be so much worse, but this doesn't feel helpful.  Everything can always be worse.  There can always be some other, larger, more hideous monster around the corner.  As much as I sympathize with the plights of so many people in the world, reminding myself that other people live in utter terror for their lives doesn't make me want to thank the Good Lord Pasta for my life.  I am torn between feeling guilt for being lucky enough to be born who I was born, and for trying to assuage that guilt by remembering that I didn't have any choice in the matter, so far as I know.

At least I can go to sleep, reminding myself that life isn't fair, there is no plan.  This comforts me more than any other platitude.

Confessional Mondays or whatever used to be one of those go-to joke posts or go-to emotional posts that people would use for inspiration in the days before Facebook consumed all everything.  To remind myself to attempt to live up to my own ideals, here is a hopefully funny, but probably lamely egotistical posts.*

I often confuse Cracker Barrel with Crate and Barrel.

I thoroughly enjoy and support high school robotics competitions, but worry about the use of drone technology by any entity.

I don't read as much as I'd like, but I am playing video games much less than earlier times in my life.

I can barely keep up with the pace of the New Yorker's print schedule, mostly because I spend so much time in my garden during the day.

I have not applied to jobs because I was worried I would be offered those jobs.

I find mowing my lawn tedious, but will spend hours weeding around my roses, hyacinths, irises, and lilies.

I am willing to shoot a deer, but almost cried when I ran over a hiding rabbit with my lawnmower. 

I refuse to look in medical textbooks, unless I am forced to perform surgery after the whateveralypse.

I have many books on my shelves that I haven't read because I want my guests to think I have read them.  This desire has greatly lessened since Lady Chemisty joined my life.

I like to think advertising doesn't work on me.

I have yet to finish writing a single story.

* 90% of this sentence is redundant.

So here's the thing about these amazingly awesome breakfast cupcakes: I was inspired by a picture I saw on Imgur.  I didn't bookmark it, so I can't link to it.  Imgur uses a shit-ton of my monthly allotment of internet, so I am not able to go searching through piles of pictures.  If you have a problem with this, go blog about it.  The only reason I am prefacing this recipe with this information is to explain why I am not naming these biscuits anything fancier than Bacon and Egg Biscuits.  Had I invented them, I might call them Grandmother's Revenge, or perhaps The Uncanny Canadian's Secret Desire.

Let's get down to biscuitness:
Ingredients:
Coffee - Preferably hot and fresh, like my women.  Ha.
Bisquik - Yeah, this is straight up unpaid product placement, but I don't care so you should shut your dirty mouth.
Milk - Thanks for the check, cows.
Garlic - I put this in just about everything now. Deal with it.
Bacon - Whatever kind you like.  I used some Costco thick-cut, hickory smoked.
Eggs - The kind that comes out of a chicken.  If you have access to ostrich eggs, you may need less of those.
Spices - You can forgo these if you are Scandinavian or live in the Midwest and claim a specific ethnic heritage but can not actually speak the language of your ancestors.


Make some coffee.  Start your oven preheating your oven to 450, if you're using a convection oven this should end up at 425.  Drink some coffee.  Slap that slab of bacon on your cutting board, take a look at your cupcake pan, and cut some strips of bacon into thirds.  I chose thirds because I didn't think I had enough bacon to provide a full lining around the edge of each cupcake divot.  If you have a full bacon lining, that might be more grease than you would like, but you can always eat a few more salads next week, maybe go for another jog next month.  Put your bacon sections in the cups, and drink some more coffee.  Remember to wash your hands.

Make some biscuits from the back of the Bisquik box, 2 3/4 cups of mix and 2/3 cup of milk.  Think about the total package for a minute while drinking some coffee.  Refill your cup while you remember everything about these biscuits, the bacon you're using, and every egg that you have ever consumed.  Drink some coffee, and then grab some garlic.  Smush your cloves with the flat of the blade, just like Anthony Bourdain or The Half-Blood Prince would, then dice the cloves.  Throw the garlic into the bowl with the mixed biscuit dough, drink some coffee, and then knead the garlic into the dough.  Tear the dough, knead it, and really mix that garlic into the proto-biscuits.

Wash your hands, drink some coffee, and then contemplate the nature of cupcakes and biscuits.  Even if you are using a non-stick pan, I would recommend smearing the bacon around the cupcake divots to grease the divots, just in case.  Tear a bit of dough, about a one to two inch thick ball, and squash that into the bottom of each divot.  You want to fill the divots no more than half-full. 

Now, you are ready for the egg phase of this masterpiece.  Drink some coffee, and then grab an egg.  Take a spoon, or maybe a knife, and whack the narrower part of the egg.  You want to crack the egg, but not shatter it.  Pour the egg into the cupcake divots, over the dough.  The bacon will fill the role of the paper lining people sometimes use with cupcakes.  When you've finished topping all the divots with eggs, wash your hands, and drink some coffee.  Maybe remind yourself that you won't stay up until 3 am cruising Imgur again.  If you want to cut down on the number of eggs used, you may not own a flock of chickens.  As I was saying, if you want to cut down on the eggs, you could try mixing the eggs before pouring them over the divots.  I would estimate that you could probably get away with only 2/3 the eggs, as compared to the eventual biscuits.  For today's recipe, I could have probably used eight eggs for twelve biscuits.

Grind some fresh pepper over the eggs, drink some coffee, and then put the whole pan in the oven for about 12-13 minutes.  I set the timer for 8 minutes, since the Bisquik box said 8-10 minutes for pure biscuits, but I ended up leaving them in for another 5 minutes.  The eggs developed large bubbles, and I poked these after 8 minutes because I knew that the thin egg in the bubble could get burned or crusty.

Anyway, once the eggs look done enough, take the pan out of the oven, wake up your sweet babboo, drink some coffee, consume the biscuits, and marvel at my genius.

Variants: You could add cheese to the dough, or sprinkle some on top of the egg.  You can use other spices, like some provincial herbs on the eggs, or chopped fresh rosemary from your garden in the dough.  Chives would also work, but I would put those in the dough or between the dough and eggs.

This recent Scenes from a Multiverse reminded me of Action Philosophers.  I should reread my collections, and maybe my philosophy texts.

Throwing a housewarming party, or a wedding, is not that hard at the core of it.  You invite friends and family, maybe some neighbors, maybe your real estate agent, and then a few people who you don't expect to show up.  You organize some snacks and a selection of drinks, coordinate some musical entertainment, and the party handles itself as long as people actually show up.  Typically, there is some gift-giving, unless you are in the habit of throwing these sorts of parties less than once a year.  The typical gift is some sort of useful home tool or accent.  You know the crap of which I write, candles, towels, big spoons, breadmakers, wall hangings, etc.

These gifts are all supposed to help you make the place a home.  Your friends have given you these things to ease your transition from one space to another, and in the case of a wedding, from one lifestyle to another.  There you were, with those things that were yours, and here you are, with these things that are the happy couple's.  You don't need to worry about how you will grate your cheese from now on, but you will worry about who will shower first.  You can focus on the two of you, now that you have an automatic coffee maker.  You can throw away that towel that other women or men have used, but you can not throw out those memories.  You have the time to talk while the slow-cooker makes dinner for the next few nights.  You have an unsafe number of scented candles gathering dust on your bookshelf, but now you need to buy a new bookshelf because that one doesn't quite fit the style you're aiming for in this room.  You buy furniture with a style, formerly second to purpose.

Somewhere in all this, the relationship will fall into place.  These gifts will aide you in merging two lives into one.  All fear for the future will be eased matching flatware and silver.  All doubts will disappear as the home becomes a comfortable place.  All desire will dissipate under the relentless wheel of routine.

And I spiced it with cinnamon and nutmeg!

In ages past, I hated Christmas.  The Shopping Season emphasized everything about my culture that I absolutely despised, with the added feelings on intense disappointment in my family when they didn't give me what I requested.*  I remember a December when I received exactly nothing on my list, and I thought my family was a bunch of jerks who thought they knew better than me.  I was thirteen or something, so just about anyone other than my brother did know better than me, but that didn't stop my from being an angry little snotrag about it.

I abandoned this feeling of disappointment a few years later for a whole new feeling of disappointment in humanity as expressed in American media.  This feeling was only intensified by being unable to buy anything for the people I wanted to give stuff.  I was in boarding school and then college, and any money I made during the summer didn't last longer than my short-sighted budget.  The only gift that I bought that I still remember and feel somewhat good about was a special mug I bought for my dad when I was a sophomore.**

I wanted to be happier during this time, because I like my family, for the most part.  I like visiting them, and we have fun together, despite my brother's attempts to ruin everything with plans.  I found it hard to be cheerful when I was bombarded with scenes of utter assholery in malls and on television.  Basically, I was angry because Christmas was a constant reminder of how I wasn't a kid anymore.  I couldn't just sit in a pile of wrapping paper and experience sheer joy anymore.  The world was sitting on my head, just crapping all  over any fun I might have had.

Something changed in 2008.  No, not something, someone.  I was trying to win back a woman I had wronged, and I had this idea, inspired by Gene Hackman in Heist, that if I wanted to be a better version of me, maybe I could just fake it.  I'm a pretty good liar on a bad day, so I thought maybe I would change the way I lie to myself.  Maybe if I pretend to be a better person, I'll eventually be that better person, and I won't have to keep pretending.  I'm not 100% there yet, but I'm not pretending anymore.

Part of this whole thing was that I realized that I was over Christmas.  If other people want to run around and be assholes to each other in malls and parking lots, so be it.  I'm just gonna make cookies, not send them to my friends, and eat the hell out of them.***  I'll invite my friends over for rum drinks, cookies, pie, and the Star Wars Holiday Special.  I'll try to find one or two small, meaningful, little gifts for my people.  Or maybe I'll make something to give.

The short of this is that I can also enjoy holiday music again.  This is much easier when i am not out in the world, but even when I am in the world, I just tune it out.  I just play Mahna Mahna on constant loop in the jukebox of my subconscious, and I move through the world.  I could have written a much shorter version of this post by just typing, OMG HOLIDAY MUSIC MASH-UPS HERE!!!1111!!1!!

*  There's a paradox somewhere in there that a kid might miss for a few years.
**  Much like a certain lamp, I'm pretty sure my mother introduced this mug to Mr. Baseballbat, and Mr. Backyard.
***  One of these years, I'm gonna mail some cookies to some friends, and those friends will be so frigging impressed.  Some jokes aren't worth it.

One of the high schools I attended required incoming freshpersons to write a paper titled "Who am I?"  These papers were fairly big deals for the kids, and a source of much stress.  Every year, there were rumors of kids trying to photocopy their student I.D. cards and turn them as a clever meta-essay, but none of these rumors were ever confirmed by me.*

These papers were then read by the student at the end of their four years at the school.  I guess the goal was a forced existential examination, but given the vast gulf between the person I was in my senior year of high school and the person I was in the fall of my first year of college, I can't imagine that this would have been particularly fruitful for the students. 

Since I started attending this school with my sophomore year, I did not write one of these papers.  I have plenty of written paragraphs that can only really be described as journal entries from the last fourteen years, a great many of which are thoroughly public as blog posts.  Leafing through them traces a character arc that I doubt is unique among the lives of American consumers aged 18-35.  Looking back at my various journals, paper or digital, is a great way to remind myself that while I may be unemployed, at least I am not as much of a chundernozzle as I used to be. 

Who am I?:  I make two u-turns and hold up traffic on a one lane road to move a turtle off that road.

* I never cared enough to even begin the process of asking my advisor about the grading process for these papers.

"In his new book, “The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Things And Why He’s Convinced That Ignorance Is Bliss,” Sayet strays from the humorous to explore why what he calls “Modern Liberals” support the policies they do."

"Explain the title, 'The KiderGarden of Eden.'"

So I was flipping some news on Yahoo, I think, and I saw a link to this Daily Caller piece.  The Daily Caller is usually good for a laugh because of frequent copy editing errors.  Every time I see one, I laugh at The Great Orange One's attempt to start a conservative version of the Huffington Post.  Maybe if you could frame your worldview in some way that wasn't a conservative version of someone else's work, you might succeed someday, Tuckbag.  Maybe if right wing cobags had some imagination, they might criticize Obama about something real instead of "He's so well respected and I don't like that! Waaaaaah!"

The article claims that Evan Thomas of Newsweek said that Obama is a god, but there is no link to back this up.  In fact, the only links in the article are from those Ad Choices auto-links.  This is just lazy, lazy reporting.  There is no attempt to fabricate even the smallest shred of journalistic integrity. 

The whole article fails to mention that Saturday Night Live has been making fun of Obama nearly every week, but I suppose they are too cool for SNL.  I think SNL has gotten much better lately. A search for Obama parody returns a wealth of hits, but I will admit that I have not investigated the political opinions of the people involved with those hits.  They could all be conservative, but I think can safely that this isn't the case because Key and Peele are on the first page of hits.

I took a screenshot to preserve these failures for posteriority.  That is not a typo, that is term that means we will all be wiping our butts with rags like the Daily Caller after the Whateveralypse.

This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my desire for pets of unusual cuddle-less-ness, but if someone were to buy me a robotic companion, I would want a tarantulabot friend.  We would hang out all day.

My daily task calendar just reminded me that I am a couple years late on Tarantula Tuesday posts. 

Every time I drive both of my parents anywhere, I make a mistake.  In 1998, I took over driving so they could both nap in the backseat, and was stopped for speeding as soon as my parents fell asleep.  79 in a 65 in rural New York.  Were we driving on I-90 toward Chicago, I would be in the right lane and most of the other cars would be passing me.

In September, we were on our way to my niece's birthday party and stopped to buy a cake.  The parking lot was the first floor of the grocery store, and it had almost pristine, white support columns.  I made some poor estimations of distance and crunched the passenger side mirror housing.  The mirror itself popped right out of the housing, and was fairly well obliterated.  The housing was basically fine.  I thought about gluing a cheap plexiglass mirror onto the cracked mirror, and then popping that mess back in until we could get a real mirror.  I was overruled.

Our annual inspection is due tomorrow, so of course I spent most of the day driving out to a salvage yard that had a compatible mirror.  It was a nice day, so I got to enjoy some scenery on the old state roads up to the yard.  Two hours and $70 later, I was on my home.

I took a quick look online for instructions, remembering the only previous time I have tried home auto repair and that mess.  I found some helpful pictures at VWVortex, and then proceeded desconstructing my car's door.
The door is a little scratched up around the handle, and most of the stupidstupidstupidirritatingstupid tabs that are supposed to "just pop right off" are broken, but the speakers work, the window rolls up and down, and the mirror moved with the joystick.  Or it did, until the joystick snapped off while I was carefully adjusting the mirror.

Frakking cobag joystick.

Updated on Friday, November 1, 2012: Technically, the score could be said to be 3 to 2 in VW's favor, since the keyfob battery died about this time last year.  I was able to replace this about a month ago.

In adding insult to injury news: to pass the annual inspection, the car needs new tires, rear brake pads, some flim flams on the woozle wazzle, the right-hand samoflange has sheared from the dimensional moorings, the alluvial calibrators need new dampeners, the inertial compensators have decompensated, and seven of the valves were found to be on backwards.

Let's call it 4 to 2 for VW, but the game is not yet over.

I thoroughly enjoyed Fallout: New Vegas, and regularly enjoyed Fallout 3.  This article explains just one aspect of why I think New Vegas was the far superior of the two.  I hold on to my hope, as does the tediously metaphorical man dangling from a tediously metaphorical cliff by a tediously metaphysical root, that Bethesda Softworks learned from Obsidian's success while working on the much rumored Fallout 4.

Maybe someday I will finish that article I am working on about how to make a great Fallout Online.

Hurricane Sandy is apparently aimed straight at New Jersey, obviously proving without a doubt that God is angry with Republicans, but Lady Chemistry and I are snug as bugs in a rug, who shouldn't be all that snug because rugs get stepped on.  So we are snugger than the aforementioned bugs.

I cleaned up the yard yesterday to minimize any missiles, taking the yard chairs to the barn, dragged the logs from the broken birdhouse and broken clothesline to the brush pile, and put our grills in the garage.  As long as the barn or garage isn't obliterated, we should be fine.  Well, there is the giant pile of house trash leftover from our neighbor's move, but hopefully that won't be launch in our direction.  And there are the dead branches in the maple tree that might hit a window if they fall, but we've got renter's insurance, and I warned our landlords about them twice in the last two months.  I can't do anything about the new leak in the roof by the kitchen chimney, but our landlord decided he wanted to wait until the first of November to have someone take a look at that.  That was a week ago that I warned him, and I hadn't heard of the hurricane either.

We've got plenty of wood cut for heating the house anyway, so if we lose power for days, we can still cook.  Our power was up and down last night, but seem fine today.  Right now, we're getting torrential rain with strong breezes, but by tonight things could be different.  We are in the peidmont, so I think we are far enough inland, and south, that we won't see much worse. 

Should this turn storm return Virginia to a libertarian post-apocalyptic paradise, I have an 80-pound hunting bow, and I know how to use it.

The Koch brothers have pulled a Sweetums.  This is a bullshit scare tactic.  All they are trying to do is convince a few thousand of their employees to avoid voting for Obama, or voting at all.  The implications in actions like this should enrage everyone in America, regardless of political affiliation, because this is a direct threat against out freedoms, and the democratic process. 

I was listening to NPR this morning while driving Lady Chemistry to work, in part because I like NPR most of the time, but also because our options are Jee-ZUHUS, country music, gawd, a cackling hyena's morning show, Jee-ZUHUS, what passes for hip-hop these days, Jee-ZUHUS, Jee-ZUHUS, and more Jee-ZUHUS.  Since we have no working radio at home, and can't stream radio without burning through our ridiculous cellular internet too fast, I can only listen to NPR in the car.  While I enjoy this, it tends to put Lady Chemistry to sleep.  This effect is not always beneficial.

Aside from the political reporting, the items which interested me were all in Space!, or Space! related.*  As we all know, everything is better in space, or better once related to Space!.  The space shuttle Endeavour is moving to the California Science Center, and will be cruising around posing for photographs, like the other shuttles have. The shuttle will be driven through the museum's neighboring urban areas at one mile per hour because the shuttle is both enormously big, and enormously fragile.  Or so the shuttle claims, I think this is just another shameless attention grab.  This trip will provide flickr and Instagram users ample opportunity to take all sorts of semi-artsy pictures of Endeavour passing Starbucks and McDonald's symbolizing two visions of American success, and probably also the opportunity to take all sorts of semi-artsy pictures of Endeavour passing empty stores and other available real estate symbolizing the end of the shuttle program and the twilight of America's economic hegemony.  Internets, hear my call!  People with photoshop skills, your assignments are in the mail.  Instagram users, start filtering your bad photos now!  flickr users, start doing whatever it is you do with those camera-thingies that don't make phone calls or send texts.  Get on this.

The other bit about space was slightly more musical, and just enough to make me smile.  NASA apparently shot some probes into near space to do some science, including recording the sounds made when charged particles impact our home's magnetic field.  If you can't listen to it where you are,*** imagine the sound of a spring evening in the boonies.  The peepers are chirping, a few crickets are peeping, and the raccoons haven't yet found your trash.

This bit reminded me of a previous thing I found on the internet, a live stream of sound derived from the information recorded by radio telescopes.  I haven't found the original website with the stream, which I listened to in 2008 or '09 on my brother's computer, and my craptacular internet won't let me stream this site either.  The music that results from the interpretation of radiation into audio is atmospheric.****  I have seen a lot of bands that come close to sounding like they are a planet, spinning in infinity and deflecting particles with a magnetic field, but nothing quite comes close.  Maybe a Phillip Glass score, if you were physically able to make through one.

* This post could also have been titled "The Less Ragey Post of the Two I Wrote in My Head While Driving, Because Politics."

** In a related note, every single time I tried to type shuttle in this post, I first typed shittle, including the one in this sentence.  I guess I remain unadjusted to this keyboard, or have fallen out of my habit of typing, or have some unconscious dislike of the shuttle program.  I just did it again, how odd.

*** I know no one reads this anymore, but I like to pretend, so play along.  You might even be wondering who is the intended audience of this note, if I don't believe I have any readers anymore.  In answer, I say-WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE! and then run away.

**** This is a bad pun for so many reasons.