Eccentric Flower:199906/Random notes and rain

A few minutes ago, the sky ripped itself open and the rain fell in torrents. It couldn't have lasted more than fifteen minutes. We need more than that.

After that 97-degree day I wrote about a short time ago, we had a sixty-degree day. Then back up to the eighties. No rain throughout any of this, but the pollen count went from something like 600 to 60. The trees are as confused as we are.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I thought Louisiana weather was weird, but Boston takes the cake.

It's been a topsy-turvy sort of week. I had all those crises at work, which I finally resolved on Friday. Then I went out and got very intoxicated ... well, I'd intended to get drunk but not that drunk. I think it was because I was playing pool. I always drink faster when I'm playing pool. Of course I don't drive when I'm drinking - distances are close enough here that I can walk home if need be, but it was early enough that I was able to take the subway. I got home - it was around midnight - and got an unexpected phone call from a friend.

"Sorry to call this late, but have you seen X--?" (his significant other).

Uh-oh.

Apparently there had been a quarrel of some kind - I couldn't ask; how do you ask that tactfully? X-- had gone out in the car and not come back.

I'd have spent the rest of the night worrying about that, frankly, if I hadn't been so overimbibed that I fell asleep as soon as I hit the pillow. I bet I snored, too.

X-- turned up alive the next day, by the by, so don't worry.

I shouldn't read the newspapers. They just depress me. On Sunday there was an article about how we're running out of landfill space and no one really knows what will happen to the huge amount of garbage we generate. It's one of those things where you feel powerless - I mean, I recycle and try to avoid buying things with needless packaging and so on, but it's a little like trying to go after an elephant with a BB gun.

I wonder (and not for the first time) if trying to engineer better industries and better packaging and better farms and so forth is really the answer. Maybe we should be engineering better humans. Eugenics frightens me, but so does what we're leaving behind for our grandchildren.

An Ardent Reader wrote me about the "one scratch on a metal bar" entry. She found a couple of interesting problems, which only serve to illustrate how impractical the whole idea is. For example, how wide would the scratch itself be? That makes a big difference. Also, if you have a number ending in extra zeros - as my example did - those will be ignored when the number becomes a fraction ... but they need to be kept; we need them to decode the information. Oh, well.

(She also pointed out an error I had made ... speaking of missing zeros ... which I went back and corrected. If you noticed it, congratulations, you were paying attention. If you didn't, then don't worry about it.)