Eccentric Flower:200912/In Pursuit Of

Presented without identifying marks for various reasons, but let me say sincerely, you folks are sometimes just the niftiest people ever.

When you have an 'I Hate My Job' day, try this:

On your way home from work, stop at your pharmacy and go to the thermometer section and purchase a rectal thermometer made by Johnson & Johnson

Be very sure you get this brand. When you get home, lock your doors, draw the curtains and disconnect the phone so you will not be disturbed.

Change into very comfortable clothing and sit in your favorite chair. Open the package and remove the thermometer. Now, carefully place it on a table or a surface so that it will not become chipped or broken.

Now the fun part begins. Take out the literature from the box and read it carefully. You will notice that in small print there is a statement:

"Every Rectal Thermometer made by Johnson & Johnson is personally tested and then sanitized."

Now, close your eyes and repeat out loud five times, "I am so glad I do not work in the thermometer quality control department of Johnson & Johnson."

Here's one reason why you keep stepping in the wrong places with so many people online: because rampant exceptionalism does not please anybody. If I went around saying, "All monogamous people are boring and stupid and they only do it because they can't think outside the social conventions," and then all my monogamous friends bridled, and I said, "Oh, you know I didn't mean *you*; you should know that by now," would you expect them to say, "Oh, well then. Okay. When she goes around making sweeping generalizations about people like me, and then comes back later and is annoyed that I listened to what she was saying, that's fine as long as she just means every other monogamous person on the planet and not *me*"? If someone was going on about black people ("Of course I don't mean *you*, Mike, just all those other black people, like your parents and your siblings and your friends and...") or lesbians ("Why do you keep getting offended when I talk about lesbians, Shelly? You know I don't think *you're* like that, just all those other lesbians") or any other group of that sort, the belated "but I don't mean you" would not help very much.

Gustav’s Guide to Hurricane Survival
Lessons Learned During and After the Storm

• No matter how many times you flick the switch, lights don't work without electricity.
• Vienna sausages only appear on the food pyramid during hurricane season.
• Lovebugs do not disappear in 92mph wind gusts.
• Disasters can cancel one LSU football game but there will be even bigger casualties if we cancel two.
• Cats are even more irritating without power.
• Baton Rouge without traffic lights resembles Mexico City, Rome, Los Angeles and New York City all rolled into a single snarl.
• A 7 lb bag of ice will chill 6-12 oz beers to a drinkable temperature in 11 minutes, and still keep a 14 lb. turkey frozen for 8 more hours.
• There are/were a lot of really big trees around here!
• Just because you're 18 doesn't mean you can stay out as late as you want. Mayor Holden meant business when he said curfew.
• Most popular text message after September 1: do u hve pwr
• Twenty-seven of your neighbors are fed from a different transformer than you, and they are quick to point that out!
• Crickets and cicadas can increase their volume to overcome the sound of 14 generators.
• Dirty clothes in an unsupervised hamper multiply at an exponential rate.
• Coffee, spaghetti, biscuits, and frozen pizzas can be made on a grill.
• He who has the biggest generator wins.
• Tree service companies are under-appreciated, except after hurricanes.
• There are a lot more stars in the sky than most people thought.
• If you owned a store that sold only ice, chain saws, gas and generators, you would be rich.
• With only a small amount of guilt South Louisiana can collectively pray a second hurricane to landfall in another state or country.

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Maybe a less overcomplified example would involve buckets and names. In many programming languages, variables are buckets: When you assign them to each other, the bucket gets filled, maybe by making a copy of contents of another bucket (PHP works like that).

So:
a = 10; // the a bucket contains 10.
b = a; // Make a copy of whatever is in the 'a' bucket and fill it into the 'b' bucket.

In Python, you're actually using names that point to stuff. This is similar to how names work in the real world: We have names for people which are normally not changed and immutable and we have names for groups which refer to a structure which can change.

When the Beatles returned to England in 1962, they were already a quartet (Stuart Sutcliffe, the fifth Beatle, had decided to stay with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr in Hamburg). Their line-up was like this:

lead_guitar = "George Harrison"
rhythm_guitar = "John Lennon"
bass = "Paul McCartney"
drums = "Pete Best"

Together, they were The Beatles:

beatles = {"lead_guitar": lead_guitar, "rhythm_guitar": rhythm_guitar, "bass": bass, "drums": drums}
> print beatles
{'rhythm_guitar': 'John Lennon', 'lead_guitar': 'George Harrison', 'bass': 'Paul McCartney', 'drums': 'Pete Best'}

Shortly after that, Brian Epstein became the band's manager:

the_band_managed_by_brian_epstein = beatles

Now, shortly before they recorded their first album, Pete Best was replaced with Ringo Starr (for various reasons no one seems to be able to remember today). In a quartet like the Beatles, there can only be one drummer, thus:

drums = "Ringo Starr"
beatles["drums"] = drums

But they were still The Beatles!

> print beatles
{'rhythm_guitar': 'John Lennon', 'lead_guitar': 'George Harrison', 'bass': 'Paul McCartney', 'drums': 'Ringo Starr'}

And surely enough, they were still managed by Brian Epstein, although their internal data structure was updated, but it still pointed to the same object:

> print the_band_managed_by_brian_epstein
{'rhythm_guitar': 'John Lennon', 'lead_guitar': 'George Harrison', 'bass': 'Paul McCartney', 'drums': 'Ringo Starr'}

Um. Not sure if this helps, especially with the earworm potential ... but this morning I realized that REO Speedwagon were actually crazed lunatic stalkers threatening some poor person.

And I'm going to keep on loving you
Because it's the only thing I want to do ...

Um ... You could do the dishes? Or go to work? I know! You could get some groceries.

The whole song is horribly threatening if read right. You can just imagine some poor girl cowering in the kitchen while the crazed lunatic rants about how he knows all about those men who snuck in while he was taking a shower this morning.

Porn/breasts: I feel that's not an answer; it's more like a restatement of the problem.

Sure, but the stated topic was that straight male porn was *fascinated* by breasts, not that it has a problem with them. As someone with a mild, run-of-the-mill fascination with breasts, I feel safe in saying that if straight porn had such a fascination, there would be quite a bit more time and variety devoted to things that please them. As You Know, Bob, the problem is that straight porn (and I assume we're talking photo/video, not text) relies on blatant visual cues to convey a message - more symbolic than immersive - and as such doesn't know what to do with anything you might call foreplay. Kissing gets tossed by the wayside, but since naked breasts still have taboo attached to them, they get bigger. Make the billboard larger! This, I submit, is an example of a discontinuity between market forces' fascinations and those of human beings.

Eh, that's what I've got for this morning.

Am combing through LSU-era files and have a few odds and ends to send you. May scan some other bizarre things. You would not believe some of the stuff I found. What the hell do I do with a printout of the Purity Test from 1988, on long green-and-white striped dot-matrix printer paper? What the hell do I do with a copy of the sex-tips-for-girls book allegedly written by David Duke?

Short role-playing game system based on Commedia dell'Arte: http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/the-penguin-harlequinade

The Charlie Stross stuff I recommend to you are The Atrocity Archives and, especially, The Jennifer Morgue. They're a great mix of smart-ass, first-person private eye / Lovecraft horror / computer geekery. The reason I thought of you is because The Jennifer Morgue rings some interesting changes on the James Bond mythos.

http://www.metafilter.com/85868/Eleanor-Cameron-vs-Roald-Dahl

This is fascinating, and the whole comment thread underneath is basically awesome as well, so don't skip it just because it's the internet!

Thought of you while reading this ... the impact that social media websites are having on sports (in particular college football, from this article)

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/stewart_mandel/11/12/twitter-youtube/index.html?eref=sihp

Sending you this link because it looks like something you might write yourself, wanting to share some obscure bit of Disney animation/illustration history. Instead it was written by Austin actor/filmmaker/miscellaneous artistic type Wiley Wiggins, for a blog that is mostly about t-shirt and poster sales. Go figure.

http://blog.mondotees.com/2009/11/19/the-universe-according-to-scrooge-mcduck/