September 2007 minutiae

• I was poking around on Youtube and I found REM's television debut: Letterman, 1983. Michael Stipe looked like a fair maiden in a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

• cnn.com: Losing pants better than losing life. Wearing pants worse.

• I was very saddened to learn that Alex the African Grey parrot had died. A few days later I checked out his entry on Wikipedia and found the following note on the list of edits:
       (Category:African Americans is for people.)

• oregonlive.com: Craig won't say if he'll return to Washington, D.C. Depends on whether he can get a flight that connects through Minneapolis.

• I received an email from the San Mateo Public Library. It said "Pre-Overdue Notice." I guess this is the same sort of logic that leads anorexic girls to consider themselves "pre-overweight."

• Dry-farmed early girl tomatoes = completely awesome. The growers water the plants once and then never again for the entire summer. In Northern California, there's enough water deep in the soil that the plants don't die. Instead, they produce tomatoes with only a tiny fraction of the watery goop most tomatoes contain. You cut them open and it's just solid, gleaming, deep red tomato goodness. Winner.

• ...And apparently they are one of the few things I can still eat. Now that I can afford health insurance, I figured I should see a doctor to run through some of the minor but annoying health issues that have been cropping up since around the time I turned thirty. Verdict: he said he was impressed by the amount of cholesterol I had somehow managed to squeeze into a vegetarian diet but that I would have to get the lipids under control posthaste. Prescription: no dairy products until a blood retest in 2008. But this should be welcome news, he added, because nearly all of the diverse array of symptoms I had listed pointed to lactose intolerance. So after years of mumbling "yeah I might become a vegan someday maybe I dunno" it appears the moment has arrived. DO NOT WANT

• abcnews.go.com quotes police investigator Kim Scanlan: "We try to do the occasional outing to make arrangements to go golfing or do something fun so we can kind of break the tension after a long session of viewing a lot of children porn." Man, I hate to think about what Golf Channel producers do.

Return to the Calendar page!