The strange little mouth-like orifice on my toe has more or less healed.
The toe of shame.
In addition, while I was handling an assortment of nails, brads, and tacks tonight, I dropped several of them on my feet. Instead of piercing the skin, which is what one might have expected them to do, they all were caught harmlessly in the crannies between my toes. Truly, this is a great day for toes.
I apologize if you have heard this already.
This evening, during my regular regimen of alternately milling about my apartment aimlessly and sitting on my duff watching television, I noticed that the bottom of my right big toe was a little sore. Not sore enough to really qualify as discomfort – more an annoyance than anything. I pulled my foot up to investigate, and, after brushing away the dust and crumbs and cat hair that coated the bottom of my bare foot, I discovered that the source of the irritation was a small slit, about a quarter of an inch long by my measurement, right through the meaty part of the toe, just above the joint. A slit. I examined it a bit more closely, and while it was certainly no more than a millimeter wide, I discovered after prying it open slightly that it was at least three millimeters deep. But there was no blood, no pus, no discharge of any kind coming out of it; it almost looked like it was supposed to be there. It was a bit like a tiny smile.
I applied the usual disinfectant ointments and bandaged it, and have walked around like a goon for the rest of the evening, trying to keep that toe from hitting the ground when I walk. While I was taking my nightly shower I thought I might want to give it a good cleaning, and so I gave my toe a good scrubbing with my tasteful pastel green bath sponge. However, a small portion of the sponge, clearly weary from its participations in other such scrubbings, clung around my foot as I pulled it back, and consequently I lost my balance, fell over backwards into the tub, and bruised my bottom. The shower gods had a good laugh over that one. The sponge gods were not pleased, nor were the bottom gods. The toe gods were busy trying to figure out whether the sore was some sort of tapeworm cave, and did not take note of the incident.
Unrelated and gratuitous attempt to get a song stuck in the reader’s head:
Who’s tripping down the streets of the city?
Smilin’ at everybody she sees?
Who’s reachin’ out to capture a moment?
Everyone knows it’s Windy.
Aside from the fact you didn’t start it? Does this fire have something to do with the cultural events you’re shouting out to that tinny little tune with no context whatsoever? What exactly is the viewpoint being expressed here? “Garsh, a lotta stuff sure happens, donnit!?!?” Yes, Billy Joel. Yes it does. Since the world’s been turnin’. So the message is “Don’t blame the boomers”? Hm. I mean, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. throws a lot of cultural stuff out there, but the message there is clear: Michael Stipe feels fine. He’s just totally fine with the whole thing. Leonard Bernstein he’s fine with. He’s fine with Lenny Bruce not being afraid. Monty got a raw deal, and everyone’s exhuming McCarthy, but he’s just fine with Birthday Party Cheesecake Jellybean Boom. For crying out loud, he’s even losing his religion. What do you have to offer, Billy? Write more songs about Christie Brinkley. No, I don’t care that you’re not married to her anymore. Listen, boy, I’m sure that you think you’ve got it all under control. You don’t want somebody telling you the way to stay in someone’s soul. But she’s a trusting girl, she’s put her trust in you – and a girl like that won’t tell you what you should do. Anyway, Catholic girls start much too late.
Holy shit. I just realized this large baggie of M&Ms I’ve been eating has not contained M&Ms at all, but rather a wide selection of recreational pills. YOU’LL BE HEARING FROM MY LAWYER, PIANO MAN!!!
Salvation
I apologize for not having posted in quite some time. I have been busy developing my screenplay. It is shaping up to be the Citizen Kane of bikini movies. I can see the little statuette over my fireplace already. Although perhaps I am seeing it over someone else’s fireplace, which occurs to me because I do not have a fireplace. Damned unreliable psychic flashes.
Go visit these sites:
www.emotioneric.com
www.dancingpaul.com
www.neofuturists.org
www.warrenellis.com
www.ninthart.com
yabs.comicbookresources.com
zot.comicbookresources.com
www.proaxis.com/~half/BeanWeb
www.igia.com/epil-stop
groups.google.com/lucas
www.clambake.org
www.politicalcompass.org
court.it-services.nwu.edu/idealog
www.mightybigtv.com
www.duniho.com/fergus/enneagram/test
Or don’t, if you’re a loser.
Is the Hey moving to a Monthly or Bi-Weekly format? Because I haven’t gotten a new one in some time.
You should know by now that many of your readers rely on the Hey for relief from their drab workaday lives. This being undisputably the case, I hereby call, on behalf of all Heyites, for a revitalization of the Daily Hey as a true Daily, or Weekly if Daily is too ambitious — academic institutions being the frantic, fast-paced places of constant change and innovation that we all know them to be, I as much as any — so that the average, hard-working, Hey-reading global citizen can once again enjoy the diversion from reality, however temporary, fleeting, shallow and narcotic-like, that a cursory glance at each new Hey affords.
One idea, if “Weekly Hey” seems too cumbersome or rhyme-deficient a name, is to forgo The Hey as a title altogether, and rebrand oneself as the “Weekly Cheek”, or, slantwise, the “Weekly Check”, or even, in a clever workaround, the “7th-Day Hey”. Alternately, in a tribute to Norman Rockwell’s alma mater, one could call it the “Saturday Hey”, and “post” the new edition each Saturday evening at 10:15 sharp. That would be a cunning “cure”.
Puns and pop music references aside, good friend, let us put behind us these dark days of infrequent and spotty publication, and gaze ahead to a future of limitless Heys, commenting on all manner of interesting social and cultural phenomena, offering a pristine window into the maturing, self-doubting soul of Generation X, eulogizing popular humorists, skewering the inept, upraising the meek, and soldiering on through remarkably slow download times and browser compatibility difficulties to deliver, through it all, like a rock, like a tower, like an island in a sea of dispiriting, worldweary ennui, a few minutes each day (or week) of blessed diversion to its deserving, patient, voiceless readership.
Thanks.
I.F.C. Hammond-LeKaak
Douglas Adams, R.I.P.
Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books, of which I am a fan, passed away from a heart attack yesterday at the age of 49 – that’s the official story, anyway. Rumors have been circulating online which reveal that Adams’ untimely departure was actually the result of a slight warp in the fabric of spacetime which had the unfortunate effect of erasing him from existence.
Now, I’ve read the arguments against the existence of warps in the fabric of spacetime. But I have seen such warps with my own two eyes. On the train this morning, a large, chubby, bald man with a beard and dark sunglasses entered the car behind me and sat down across from me. The headphones this man was wearing did nothing to dampen the Kenny-G-type soprano-saxophone-based easy-listening music he was listening to at a very high volume. In addition to this he was swaying his large head back and forth, not just bopping along in time to the music, but engaging in some sort of complicated cranial choreography, almost ritualistic in its complexity. Suddenly light began to bend along the contours of his body, and space itself began to distort. I had to look away lest I lose my sanity; in fact, I think that I have lost a portion from that mere second. The light around the man continued to bulge and pinch and bubble, and as the train pulled into my station, the man swirled out of sight.
So rest in peace, Douglas Adams, and wherever you may be, I hope that this other guy’s headphones are more effective on the other side.
May is the month in which a young gentleman’s thoughts turn to those of fancy. Love floats on the breeze like a cheap perfume. I have spent the last few weeks searching, in vain, for a date to the prom. Perhaps it is not in the cards, but as I have already booked a limo and hotel room, I am loath to waste them, so now I am combing the Yellow Pages for the city’s finest whores. Unfortunately, many of them already have dates to the prom themselves. I may be relegated to punch bowl duty.
This morning I discovered that a pair of wings had sprouted out of my back. They were small, maybe a wingspan of just a couple feet. Still, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could fly to work. I leaped out the window of my second-story apartment and landed on the pavement with a resounding thud. As I stood up I realized that I had forgotten to cut holes in the back of my shirt for the wings to poke through. I went back upstairs to change shirts, as the shirt I had on, as well as having no wing-holes, was also covered in blood from my fall (I had apparently landed in a puddle of blood). I put on a new shirt, cut some holes in the back for the wings to poke through, and leapt out my window again. Once again I dropped like a rock. I lay on the ground and wonder what I could have possibly done wrong that time. I realized that I needed to build up speed to get the proper lift. I ran down my street at top speed, and as I felt the wind catching my wings, a car appeared in my path. Aha! I thought. Perfect timing! I’ll just take off right before the car hits me. I jumped into the air and came crashing down through the windshield. I dangled over the dashboard, looking at the driver, who had been bombarded with shards of glass somehow, and thought, well, maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.
I just thought I’d squeeze in one last post for April.
Hi.
The more astute amongst you may have observed that I have trimmed some of the fat off the Lucubus. First on the chopping block was ShanDo! – An Avantgarde New Media Art Piece Disguised as a Shannen Doherty Fan Site. I had grown quite tired of various international personalities e-mailing me and asking me to send nude photos of myself, presumably although not necessarily under the impression that I was Shannen herself. Also holding my interest no longer are e-mail messages from assorted Charmed fans both foreign and domestic, who do not seem to get the joke that I neither love Shannen nor hate her, but am entirely indifferent, and thus are inclined to call me a dickhead or a retard or possibly a retarded dickhead. Don’t get me wrong, I love being insulted, but I’d rather the insult be well-informed, you know? Anyway, the page is still up in its original location, but I’ve removed all the links to it. It will ultimately be available for viewing in a site archive I’m building, although that probably won’t stop it from going into the search engines, dammit. At any rate, all messages sent to [address deleted] or [address deleted] will, from here on in, go straight to the trash.
Also removed from mass linkage is the homepage of The Complacents The Real Life Band. The Complacents The Real Life Band have not played a show for about two years now. The most recent news update congratulates Jeremy on his marriage, and he’s not even the most recent Complacent The Real Life Band Member to get married. That would be Mike. (Congratulations, Mike! Even though it happened six months ago and I’ve congratulated you in person since!) So, out-of-date combined with probably-defunct results in internet litter, and thus shall be swept into the rubbish bin of the not-linked-from-the-main-page site archives. Taking its place in the link is the homepage of The Complacents The Fictional Cartoon And/Or Radio Show Band, or complacents.com for short, which has a halfway decent prayer of being updated in the next few years.
The final, most minor deletion was that of the “Something Else” section, ironically named as “Nothing Else At All” was ever put there. At various times I thought I could make it a photo gallery of my toenail clippings, or of my customized Lego action figures, or possibly instructions on how to perform a nosefart. But “Something Else” fell by the wayside, and few will mourn the passing of the Most Pointless Single HTML Document On The Internet. Or at least in my zip code.
Anyway, the end result is a smooth, efficient site. And also I have tweak the bottom menu frame so it looks right again.
The Lucubus. Bringing you webby fun and internet good times since, oh, 1996 or so.
I have changed my mind about the Confederate flag .
I used to think that the continued display of the Confederate flag was entirely inappropriate, given the fact that the Confederacy lost the Civil War, after all, fighting for an indefensible cause.
Then I thought, wait a minute. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction, in which some progress towards racial equality was actually achieved. After a couple decades, Reconstruction began to lose its potency, and the racist Democrats came back into power. It was around this time that the most active variant of the KKK appeared and started catching tigers by the toe and hanging them by their necks. In Texas, “sundown towns” started popping up. These had billboards at the city limits reading “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you here!” It’s no longer so extreme, of course, but racism – the nasty, active kind as well as the ignorant passive side – persists and thrives. There are “United Daughters of the Confederacy” monuments in states that were not in the Confederacy, and, indeed, in states that were not states at that time. It kinda seems like the South rose again, doesn’t it? And now, they’re patriots!
So, why shouldn’t Mississippi celebrate its racist heritage? Sure, racism is a festering hemmorhoid on the anus of society, but who says our state flags have to be prescriptive? It’s a true part of their history. And maybe they’ll look at that flag and it’ll make them think about racism – what it is, what it means, how it makes them feel.
I mean, look what it did for the Duke boys. No truer heroes ever joyrode through Hazzard County.
I am drunk.
So it snowed today. It SNOWED today!?!? It’s the middle of fucking APRIL!!!! Goddamned Chicago. I’m going to move to Hawaii. Also my gay marriage will be recognized there.
So no one ever leaves any comments, not that anyone visits the site or that I say anything worth commenting on, but maybe I’ll get rid of them since they’re so damn UNPOPULAR.
I still can’t believe George W. Bush is president. STOP THE WORLD, I WANNA GET OFF! I’M GETTING DIZZY AND STUFF!
I will delete all of this later.
Complacents.com is live, if that means anything to any of you.
I’ve spent the last several days with the “Electric Company” theme in my head. I have the Noggin network on digital cable, and they show “The Electric Company” on a regular basis. I credit my overall successful education to the hours clocked watching it and “Sesame Street”, which also appears on Noggin, back in the first four years of my life. Why, that’s why my generation is better off than today’s teenagers… why, those baggy-pants-wearin’ gun-totin’ baby-havin’ to-N*Sync-listenin’ whippersnappers woulda been eaten alive back in my day. Because back then, we didn’t have any food. Food had not been discovered, and so we ate each other, for warmth, as neither heat nor hunger had been defined either. Sure, things were tough back then. But we weren’t grumbly, sullen punks. Of course, we are now. Being grumbly and sullen are what your twenties are all about. What, then, are your teenage years about? Being hormonal and underappreciative, that’s what! Being unwilling to see any sort of larger picture, that’s what! Perpetuating the career lifespans of various undertalented yet highly commercial pop stars, that’s what! I mean, that’s what my generation did when we were that age!
I am going to go drink some milk.
a 150 proof
BACKGROUND.
I was on Usenet a couple of weeks ago, and some idiot was trying to defend use of the phrase “a 150 years”. He claimed that “a 150″ was how to say “a hundred and fifty” as opposed to “one hundred and fifty”, which he claimed sounded “stilted and pompous”. When people told him he was wrong, he launched into a diatribe about how this is English, not French, and there is no governmental agency determining the rules of the language, and thus the rules of the language were to be determined by popular usage. When informed that he was the only one defending this phrase, and thus that it was not popular at all, he said that he wrote “150” on a card, asking random people to pronounce it. He said most of them said “a hundred and fifty” and so that made him right. When told he was missing the point, and that “a 150″ would mean “a a hundred and fifty”, he would accuse people of being “language fascists”. He refused to listen to what anyone had to say because they “gave no reasons to support” their arguments. So I wrote this formal proof.
PROOF.
Prove: “a 150 years” is a silly phrase.
Given:
1. The numeral 300 is pronounced “three hundred”.
2. The numeral 200 is pronounced “two hundred”.
3. Numbers can be used as nouns AND adjectives.
4. Adjectives modify nouns.
5. Nouns can be modified by multiple adjectives.
6. Nouns cannot modify nouns.
Assumed:
1. The indefinite article “a”, being singular, is roughly equivalent to the adjectival number “one”. Thus, “a year” equals “one year” equals “1 year”.
2. The adjectival phrase “hundred” minus the “one” or “a”, as in “hundred fifty” or “hundred and fifty” or “hundred-dollar bill”, implies a singular hundred, or 100, unless other numerical modifiers are added, as in “two hundred”.
3. The phrase “one hundred and fifty” is equivalent to “one hundred fifty” is equivalent to “150”.
4. In the phrase “150 years”, “years” is the noun, and “150” serves as the adjective that modifies that noun.
5. The phrase “a one year”, when “year” is the object noun, contains a redundancy. (When there is a hyphen, as in “a one-year trip”, “one-year” becomes an adjectival phrase.)
6. Redundancies are silly.
Point #1
a. The numeral 100 is pronounced “one hundred”. (G1, G2)
b. It can also be pronounced as “a hundred”. (A1)
Point #2
a. “[one hundred fifty] years” is equivalent to “[150] years”. (A3)
b. “[one hundred and fifty] years” is equivalent to “[150] years”. (A3)
c. “[a hundred and fifty] years” is equivalent to “[150] years”. (A1, A3, P1b)
d. “[hundred and fifty] years” is equivalent to “[150] years”. (A2, A3)
Conclusion #1
[150], [one hundred fifty], [one hundred and fifty], [a hundred and fifty], and [hundred and fifty] are all variations on the same numerical “word”. In the case of “[150] years”, the numerical “word” serves as an adjective. (P2a-P2d, G3, G4, A4)
Point #3
a. “a [one hundred fifty] years” contains a redundancy. (A3, A5, C1)
b. “a [a hundred and fifty] years” contains a redundancy. (A5, P1b, C1)
c. “a [hundred and fifty] years” contains no obvious redundancy. However, as we showed in Conclusion #1, [hundred and fifty] equals [one hundred fifty]. Therefore, the phrase contains a redundancy. (A2, A5, C1)
d. “a [150] years” contains a redundancy. (A3, A5, C1)
Conclusion #2
The phrase “a 150 years” is silly indeed. (P3d, A6).
POSTSCRIPT.
The poster acknowledged that I did back up my reasoning, but then he went back to the “one hundred and fifty sound stilted and pompous” argument, which means he continued to miss the point. The guy was almost certainly a troll, although seeing as the thread went on for weeks (to which this proof was my only contribution), it may not have been a troll, as trolls have much shorter attention spans than that. People on crack also have short attention spans, so that can’t be it either.
And yes, I am a loser for (1) writing out a formal proof on something so inane (2) using usenet lingo (3) using usenet and (4) enumerating the reasons that I am a loser.
I just watched the first episode of “Boot Camp”. It was GREAT!
SIR YES SIR!!!
That is all.