All posts by Lucas

The eyes have (something)

I admit to having some trouble with my eyes. I can see okay, but check this out:

splotchy

A beautiful pair of baby blues, you’re thinking. No, that’s not the problem. Malformed eyelids? No, that’s not the problem either, and shut up, I’m sensitive about them.

For the last few days, the eye on my right/your left has been as red as Hollywood in the 1950s. Redder, in fact. It’s a bit like the results of an EKG were written directly onto my eye with a needle or something while I was asleep. Those of you who know me well will know that I am somewhat squeamish about eyes, and I have patiently been waiting for this redness to go away, lest a paranoid and hysterical public brand me as a mutant and put me into one of their special camps. However, admiring my handsome self in the mirror tonight, I realized that my red eye was one flaw that could no longer be ignored. Also, the redness has been so bright that it’s been difficult for me to sleep lately. So I rooted around in my medicine cabinet and found an old bottle of eyedrops that had been left behind by one guest or another many, many years ago, a bottle which I had kept for so many years just for an occasion such as this. So, still looking in the mirror, I unscrewed the cap, positioned the bottle over my eye, and squeezed… and a drop fell onto my chin. I realized then that I had my non-red eye squinted shut, which threw off my depth perception, but I couldn’t seem to get it right with both eyes open, either. Ultimately I decided to look up at the ceiling, hold the bottle a foot or so over my face and randomly squeeze out drops until one happened to land in my eye, and then another, time permitting. And so I was successful in this endeavor, yet I continue to wait for the desired results.

As I wait, I consider the possibility that Dennis Quaid is travelling around inside my body in a tiny ship, and the redness has occurred because he has shot a tiny video transmitter into the center of my eye so that he could see everything I see, which would in some part allow him to help build up my self-confidence in talking to women and dealing with dangerous situations. In return, I’ll do my best to get him back to the laboratory and out of my body before his oxygen supply runs out.

Splop!

There is a leak in the ceiling here in the office where I work. On the floor just behind my chair, and hence getting knocked around by my chair, is a little blue recycling bin which has been positioned beneath the leak so as to catch the water. There are several other such leaks here in our office. We are counting down the days until the entire ceiling collapses altogether.

In other news, this page does indeed look screwy in Netscape. It also looks screwy in Opera, although in a slightly different manner. I do not believe I will pursue fixes for these idiosyncrasies. It is a pointless endeavor. Changing one bit will just screw up a different bit. So I have sold my soul to Bill Gates. He is a fiery hell demon! And I hear he picks his nose and eats it!

And so I finally step into the nineties

I’ve worked out this webcam nonsense. It is taking little pictures of me every thirty seconds as I am sitting here writing this with a towel on my head, and before you go making any “towelhead” jokes, remember that I have just come out of the shower. I have nothing but respect for my Arab brothers and sisters. I have respect for all the people of the world. I am a respect slut. I’ll give it away to anybody. Why, just the other day, while I was walking to the Shop’N’Away to get a pack of Camels, I tripped over a shifty drug dealer who was taking a nap right there on the sidewalk. I apologized to him, gave him a hearty handshake, and asked him if he had any narcotics I could purchase. You see, even though he looked very skeevy, and not at all on the up-and-up, I respected him by offering to partake of a business transaction. Of course, it turns out that he was lying there dead, apparently from a stab wound to his nostrils, although you wouldn’t know it to look at him. At his funeral, to which I went in order to pay my respects, I spent a couple hours speaking to his mother about how, even in death, he seemed lively and vibrant and shifty; and when she pointed out that shifty isn’t a positive quality, I shared my logic that “shifty” was only a term that could be applied to someone who was very much alive. She gave me a hug, patted me on the head, and said, “You run along home now, son.” And so, to respect her wishes, I did.

I desperately need to start going to bed earlier.

Difficulties

To celebrate getting the new page up, I spent all day puking. Well, that’s not really true. I puked twice. Once at home and once at work. I stayed at work for the rest of my shift and even had a bag of Doritos afterward. I am not too smart.

Watching an SNL rerun from the mid-’80s on Comedy Central with Rosanna Arquette as host, I have come to the realization that Rosanna Arquette and Sarah Michelle Gellar are exactly the same person, only in different bodies.

I have also been drinking rum. Again, not too smart. I am tempting the nausea gods.

I played around a little bit with some webcam software. You may see different funny little pictures up in the webcam space before I figure out the best way to make all this work. Hopefully by the end of this week I’ll have sent out the big email to everyone I know saying “Hey, everybody, come look at my site! It has mostly the same stuff on it that it used to have, but it all looks different now! Ha ha ha!” But, you know, I have to be *really* ready first.

So, more rum then.

Hooray!

Looks like the file upload went off without too many hitches. Any links to the old URL should be redirected here automatically, if I have set everything up right. A couple of the archives sections play serious hell with the graphics, but I’m sure minor tweaking will take care of that. Haven’t looked at it in Netscape yet – I’m sure it will look shitty. Everything looks shitty in Netscape, except for shit – Netscape is that bad. The webcam, site map, and site FAQ features have not been implemented yet, there are some links in the “Drawing Is Fun” section that haven’t been activated yet, and the photo gallery in the “About Lucas” section is still being worked on. The only major thing I need to do now is go back through the archives and change the URL for every image so that the image appears instead of a little red X. But I will not do that now. No, I will not do that tonight, because I have to be at work in seven hours, and I have to sleep. No, I will not do it tonight. I can do it at work tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow. Sleep now. Not tonight. Tomorrow. Sleep.

Let’s rawk and rowl

Okay. The new page is just about ready to be put into place. There are just a few links that won’t be active yet, but pretty much everything is ready to go. In the next half hour or so, I will be putting the new files on the server, and taking the old files off. Which means you won’t be able to read this. But you will once the new files are back up, unless I fuck everything up. Wish me luck!

Forum no good reasonum

Behold!

The Lucubus Forum!

Hosted at Delphi, where memberships are free, and advertisments are at a minimal annoyance level. Go there, join up, and post stupid shit. Nothing could please me more.

Oh no! Don Ho!As I sat tonight drinking a refreshing lime rickey, I received the following email message from my friend Sandy:

today, october 2nd, is a very special day. it’s palindrome day. for the first time since august 31, 1380 — over six hundred freakin’ years — the eight-digit representation of the date will be a palindrome.

10/02/2001. By gum, he’s right. He goes on to say:

i’d love to see who can come up with the best palidrome using their own name. the best i could do is “sandy, my DNAs!”, which admittedly makes little sense. surely you can do better….

I can do better. Not much better. But slightly better. “Cased Lucas, a cul-de-sac.” That’s the best I could come up with. You know, like, investigating real estate or something. Granted, it doesn’t make as much sense as “Sit on a potato pan, Otis” or “Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas”, but I’ll take it.

Here’s some palindrome fun!

I’m older than twenty-five year-old dirt

Today is my birthday.

I am aging.

Do I have to get my prostate checked now? Should I start using Rogaine? Should I consider cosmetic surgery? Should I be thinking of settling down with a nice girl and having a few kids? Is it time for me to start watching CBS?

I have been worried about my teeth. I bought an electric toothbrush. I put the pea of toothpaste on it, ran a bit of water over it, as is my routine procedure, and turned the thing on. Of course, the vibrations sent the toothpaste flying everywhere. Of course. I bought a little contraption which purports to make flossing easier, and it may yet do that, but my teeth have a knack for causing floss to unravel. I switched for a time over to the tape, until it was pointed out to me that the “dental tape” I was using was in fact tape from an audio cassette – the cassette in question being the master recording of many famous songs, including the Beatles’ “Let It Be” and Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance”. I do not feel guilty.

Sometimes when I’m writing these I start with one or two sentences, then get to the end, and realize that somehow I had written a bunch of shit in the middle.

This is one of those times.

Will to live, and live well at that

I recently had the pleasure of learning (if you can believe this asshole) that despite being pre-empted by an address by Bush to both houses of Congress (“My fellow Amurrikins, this war against turrorism will be long and hard, and God help us I’m commander-in-chief of our milturry.”), the Columbian Broadcasting System’s wonderful summer series Big Brother 2 went ahead with its live finale, even though it was not being broadcast. And, in the final analysis, after the polls were closed and the votes were counted and the fix was in, the winner to emerge from the corporate-sponsored camera-laden cathode-ray hovel, clutching half a million dollars desperately to his breast, was none other than Will, the Funny, Evil Doctor.

I want to have his babies.I found this to be fantastic news. I easily count Big Brother 2 as my Favorite Program of the Summer Which I Watched Less Than Ten Percent of the Time It Was Actually On, and Will was easily the most entertaining contestant, despite his early alliance with two of the more cringe-inducing people on the show – Mike “Boogie”, the white rapper, and Shannon, the psycho hose-beast. Congratulations, Will, and here’s hoping you save up some of that money – Evil Doctors do a lot of pro bono work, after all, and you’ll need *something* to live on.

I’ll never trust the liberal media again

Well, if there were any.

Seriously, several days ago I posted about reports that CNN footage of Palestinians celebrating in the wake of the WTC disaster was *actually* footage of Palestinians dancing and cheering at some sort of sock hop back in 1991. I picked up this story from CounterPunch which I had believed to be a reputable left-wing nutter news source. Well, maybe it is. But some days later (and once again, the Lucubus is the very last site ever in the world to jump on this story), the fellow filing the article was challenged to provide evidence for his claim and it turns out, ahem, that he hadn’t actually watched the footage and had gotten the information from someone who hadn’t watched the footage recently EITHER.

From http://uk.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=11546:

Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 07:52:49 -0300
Subject: CNN

Dear all,

Last September 13, I’ve sent an email to this list in which I provided some information about the falsity of the images of Palestinian celebration for the terrorism in USA, information given to me by a teacher. I spent the last day looking for that teacher, and, unfortunately, when I found her, she DENIED having access to such images.

She said that she was sure she had seen the images back in 1991, but SHE CAN’T PROVE. She was not willing to provide further information, DENYING what she had said before to a full class of students.

I sincerely apologize for this uncertain information; unfortunately I can’t prove the information contained in my last post; IT’S ONLY A CONJECTURE, THAT THOSE IMAGES OF PALESTINIANS CELEBRATING IS FALSE. I bought the idea myself, and reproduced it for you because of the importance of it, in the case it was to be confirmed.

Whatever news I get I’ll pass to you.

Best regards

Márcio A. V. Carvalho
State University of Campinas – Brazil

As a result of this, I have made a decision: every time I decide to run a news tip, no matter what the subject, I will clarify it with the phrase “if you can believe this asshole”. CNN, Drudge, Mike Wallace, whoever: if it is purported to be hard news, I will say “if you can believe this asshole”. No offense to the actual reporter is intended, unless he or she is actually an asshole.

Example: If you can believe this asshole, Russia is providing a financial boost to the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

Thank you and good day.