\t\t\t\tpreparing for the apocalypse, the revelation, the vaticination of the
\nrapture.<\/p>\n
just felt like saying that.<\/p>\n
new sunglasses today. $500 and about an hour after entering the
\nLenscrafters on 5th Avenue i finally ordered what appears to be a set of
\nsunglasses, the frames of which fold up into a small pile.<\/p>\n
the folding frames remind me of one of the ways i made my mother laugh. i
\ncould always make her laugh like she’d be sick, and i have stories of her
\nfits of laughter (in response to my clownish behaviour) which still make
\nme laugh hard. in fact i laughed myself to sleep a few weeks ago whilst
\nremembering another incident, but for now i’ll focus on the foldable
\nglasses and the story of which they reminded me.<\/p>\n
i was 17 or 18, driving around Tampa on a street which ran parallel to a
\ntraintrack. i needed to turn left, which meant crossing the traintrack,
\nbut as i prepared to make the left turn i saw a train coming. bells rang
\nand some red lights blinked, a pair of barricades might have been
\nlowered. all in all it was a common enough site. i prepared to wait for
\nthe train to pass when i noticed that a “NO LEFT TURN” sign had slowly
\nunfolded, appearing as if from nowhere next to the traffic light.<\/p>\n
i am finding it hard at this moment to describe the humorousness of the
\nsituation, but as i described it to my mother she just steadily and
\ngenuinely got lost in an episode of laughter, laughing at the corniness of
\nthe little sign unfolding as if by magic, and appearing as if from the
\nair.<\/p>\n
a week or o later she volunteered that she, too, saw the funny little
\nsign, and that she, like i, just sat there in the car laughing while
\nwaiting for the train to pass. her laughter was with mine. we didn’t know,
\nnow do i know now, how common these little foldout signs are, but we had
\nnever seen one before, and this one seemed clever and cute, if a bit hokey
\nand small-town.<\/p>\n
another incident which made my mother laugh so hard hard i thought she’d
\nget sick (this story is also hard to tell without a visual demonstration
\nof what i did, but i’ll try anyway) involved me taking out the trash. one
\nnight, after dark, i carried an extra bag of garbage out to the curb, to
\nstuff it into the already nearly-full garbage can. my mother stood in the
\ngarage as i did this, waiting for me to return so she could close the
\ngarage door and lock the house.<\/p>\n
i tried to stuff the garbage bag into the can but it wouldn’t fit. the bag
\nwas full of, well, garbage, but it was also filled with an abnormal amount
\nof air. my mother noticed this and told me to “punch a hole in the bag, to
\nlet the air out. use the scissors.” i withdrew a pair of scissors from my
\npocket and wielded it like a murderer with a knife. i raised the scissors
\nover my head and plunged them into the garbage bag, repeatedly stabbing
\nthe trash like a homicidal maniac, all in the interest of following
\nmother’s orders and letting the air out of the bag so it would fit into
\nthe can.<\/p>\n
i stabbed the garbage bag several times like this, then looked up, toward
\nthe garage, to see my mother convulsing with laughter. her head kicked
\nback, she clasped her hands, she could hardly stand and so she retreated
\nback to the house, where i ran in, laughing, to find her sitting on the
\ncouch laughing. “i told you to poke a hole in the bag, i didn’t say to
\nmurder it!”<\/p>\n
god, the laughter was like a crazed flock of seagulls. i laughed, but it
\nwas mother’s laugh that crackled with the sated anxieties of the moment.
\nin the weeks to come when i would take out the trash she would ask me to
\ndo so, “just don’t murder it this time.”<\/p>\n
yes yes, i could make her laugh, and as i sat at the Lenscrafters today
\nwaiting for them to take my money i remembered all that, stream of
\nconsciousness-like, from the foldable sunglass frames i bought.<\/p>\n
i was a bit chagrinned to be buying these sunglasses this week. some
\nmonths ago i threw some drunken dollars at a kickstarter project which is
\ndeveloping eyeglass frame with built-in video cameras. i am doing this
\nonly for fun, and because i need a pair of sunglasses, but i guess i
\nshould have read the project plan closelier because i failed to notice
\nthat the frames (containing the cameras) are not to be delivered until
\nnovember or december. i was happy to pony up $150 for what seemed like an
\ninteresting product developed by a qualified team, and the frames
\nthemselves seem like a reasonably fair value… but i may not be able to
\nuse them for some months after i get them. oh well. so today i bought
\nregular sunglasses with other frames that contain no hidden cameras.
\ngoddamit.<\/p>\n
i was lugging a heavy box full of old magazines, the full year of 1924,
\na year which once represented a vacuum in my collection but which now
\nabounds with multiple copies of every single issue. i consider some of
\nthese copies “sacs”, which has nothing to do with testicles but everything
\nto do with “sacrifices”, meaning that when i have enough copies of a
\nsingle issue i can afford to destructively scan one of them, tearing the
\ncontent pages out and saving only the front and back covers and the music
\npages for later use, discarding the scanned pages. as long as i ahve at
\nleast one solid copy i can do the scans this way, and i prefer to do it
\nthis way because it is much much easier and the quality is generally much
\nmuch better than doing it via the various scanner platen jujitsu methods
\nwhich aspire (usually futilely, depending on the vintage) to keep the
\nmagazine copies fully intact.<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
i have been cracking at the poetry this week, sicne getting this netbook.
\ni had a sour episode last night, with a few new lines in mind i turned on
\nthe netbook and typed with the wind, trying to sieze those moments of
\narticulation from the clutches of oblivion. i have been using a freeware
\ntext editor that boasts of being barebones, no-nonsense, a simple piece of
\nsoftware that lets you write and gets out of the way. this, of course, i
\nanother take-a-dump on Microsoft, though i would throw Open Office into
\nthe mix of bloatware word processing products as well.<\/p>\n
at any rate, i don’t know what i did to offend the righteous freeware app
\nthat claims to let you write and get out of the way, but i lost a huge
\nchunk of text to that piece of shit freeware, with nothing more than a
\nperfunctory suggestion to “contact the developer” so they can improve
\ntheir product. fuck that. i gave up on being a beta guinea pig back in the
\nEudora days, when that fabled piece of e-mail software greatness entered
\na beta phase with something like 12 decimal points after its new version
\nnumber, and at some point Eudora ate months and months worth of my email,
\nirrecoverably deleted, sorry. i wrote to the team, but the best they could
\noffer was that beta software is beta software. you read the NDA, right?
\nsorry.<\/p>\n
ever since then i’ve just held a consistent “fuck you” attitude toward
\nbuggy, piece of shit software.<\/p>\n
oh, i read today about an interesting problem lurking on the Interweaves.
\nspeaking of buggy POS software released for public use with inadequate or
\nincoherent quality control, i was not surprised to see that osCommerce has
\nbeen found to have security holes wider than the entrance to the Holland
\nTunnel. these security plagues allow botnets and digital mobsters to set
\nup malware distribution points on the most unassuming web sites. look it
\nup, if you care. i read it on USA Today, i think.<\/p>\n
it reminded me of Matt’s Scripts, those seemingly innocent CGI scripts
\nwhich allowed web site owners to have cookies, message boards, guestbooks,
\nand other glamorous technologies henceforth reserved for the
\npathfinder.coms and wireds of the day.<\/p>\n
today it appears that most of these scripts have not been updated since
\nthe 20th century, and one can only assume that they are not prepared for
\nmodern times.<\/p>\n
i remembered Matt’s Scripts in the context of osCommerce and it’s botnet
\nvulnerabilities because of an article I read somewhere in passing about
\nhow the seemingly well-meaning Matt could eventually find himself on the
\nhook for knowingly distributing POS software that fails to meet even the
\nmost generously liberal modicum of modern security standards.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
preparing for the apocalypse, the revelation, the vaticination of the rapture. just felt like saying that. new sunglasses today. $500 and about an hour after entering the Lenscrafters on 5th Avenue i finally ordered what appears to be a set of sunglasses, the frames of which fold up into a small pile. the folding frames […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-tf","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}