By
kah
25 Jan 2001
swish
“Seven-hundred ninety-seven.”
swish
“Seven-hundred ninety-eight.”
swish
“Seven-hundred ninety-nine.”
…..
“Seven-hun- -
..wait a minute!”
seven-hundred ninety-nine
let the cat swish one more time –
it’s jet-black tail ‘cross my back
to make an even 800 track.
i starred into unblinking eyes:
filled with anger; love; surprise.
i knew then what it could see –
the inevidable stream of antiquity.
the cat and i sat back to back
as the cat’s long tail had swished away it’s track
seven-hundred ninety-nine,
oh, let the cat swish one more time.
o, cat! o, cat! o, kitt-y cat!
swish your tail across my back!
maddening eyes, smirking face –
with time there now shall be a race.
i felt that i was going mad,
but what the cat felt was only sad:
the loss of his friend with the iron shoe,
the loss of his brother in Timbuktu.
i wasn’t thinking clearly; straight -
all i had to do was wait!
wait for the impossible fate..
not six, or seven-hundred, but eight!
i longed to say the words out loud
and imagined my body within a shroud
eighty years later, buried with the cat
still waiting for the feeling of that swish across my back.
it seemed as if the cat was trying to decide
whether to let out the swish it was hiding from inside..
or to make me squirm with pain and agony
as it purred with pure pleasure and stupidity.
the cat’s long tail flickered and flicked,
it looped, it curled, it fluttered and thricked.
one could not hope for only one more;
one more swish to add to the score.
then the cat’s black tail came closer to my back – - -
o! the even eight-hundred track!
could it be… would it be?
could it? would it? could it be?!
the golden eyes i looked into,
and then i knew it would be true…
the cat’s tail swished one more time!
farewell, seven-hundred ninety-nine!
with an annoyed look the cat tucked up it’s feet.
o! delicious moment when flesh and cat fur meet!
i was free from the torure, the madness, the pain..
and what did i lose? (but what did i gain?)
“800, 800, 800 times!
Eight-hundred, eight-hundred, eight-hun – -”
ONE. EIGHT-HUNDRED AND ONE.
i screamed with anguish, for then i knew
that swish could not be erased untrue.
and then with a grin and a yawn so deep
the cat shut its eyes and went to sleep.
(written by me in 8th grade)
By
anders pearson
21 Jan 2001
the source code for /dev/random is finally up. it really hasn’t been cleaned up yet but i try to write fairly clean code to begin with so it isn’t that bad. at any rate, you can now see for yourselves exactly how markov works if my previous explanations didn’t make much sense. i still plan on making a nicer looking template pretty soon too.
By
jp
21 Jan 2001
NPR has had this running habit of waking me up with our new president, “Dubyah” Bush in the mornings. it’s thrown a seriously depressing shadow over an already depressing weekend of drizzle and exam cramming. but it’s lead to a few thoughts.
so now our proud (?) nation unites behind the man with the mouth where english goes to die. I don’t know which is worse — imagining the copious amounts of strenuous backtracking he’s going to take as far as social programs and civil freedoms are concerned, or KNOWING that it’s been headed by someone with the same literacy as what I pulled out of my navel pre-shower this morning. seeing the shining prodigal son of the old boy network ™ finally back at the helm is downright silly. soon we’ll all live the american dream of a prayer in every classroom, a gun in every hand, an oil rig in every backyard, and a war so cold it’ll make even new hampsire look warm (or maine, for those of you with a different point of reference).
seriously, I’ll take any and all bets anyone wants to place — we’re going to war with Iraq sometime in the next six months. count on it. and while it’s nice that our nepitism-endorsing dance-shy leader with a ferocius coke twitch is probably going to be all for national security and miliary revival rather than globalization and disarmament, c’mon now… is this REALLY a game we want to be playing with China? I didn’t think so. I think we ought to be sure we’re on their christmas list.
I think what bugs me the most is (anders, you’ll be able to relate) that all in all, he’s nothing but a worthless private school shit. his dad bought him a yale education where he did naught but establish a firm reputation as the campus washout, came home to start a few businesses with borrowed money which ALL tanked, and only got on his feet when dad gave him a job. and now he’s leader of the free world or something. sound familiar? Bates? Columbia? Dartmouth? the unworthy shall inherit? I think the meek are still in line.
so now we have our proud muppet in the public orifice, bless his soul by whatever god he talks about so much. and may his strings be pulled by only the kindest of the many that control our fearless peon.
but, amidst all this horror, at least we know that we’re going to see some of the best sketch comedy we’ve seen in decades during the next four years. talk about a uranium mine of material. hell, even saturday night live might get funny again.
By
anders pearson
20 Jan 2001
today, i went, with mimi and about 8 of her friends to Newark.
three of us took a train over and were meeting the rest at the train station there. we got there early and spent some time wandering around a bookstore reading trashy astrology books, connect the dot porn (don’t ask), and Oprah’s magazine (we learned how to “walk like a goddess”). for the most part, the train station was horrid. well, it wasn’t that bad except for the mind-numbing, soul-crushing muzak; but that was enough to ruin it.
when everyone finally got in, we walked down to a brazilian restaurant and stuffed ourselves on good food and sangria while a Xuxa episode played on tv. afterwards we went to a bakery for dessert, then descended upon the Newark Museum.
as soon as we got into the museum, one of the guards decided that we looked like we were up to no good and followed us around the whole place telling every other guard, in a whisper loud enough for us to hear, to keep an eye on us because we were some kind of vagrants or miscreants who were just there to cause trouble. naturally, we were a little offended. at first, the other guards who had been warned were also a little hostile to us but they got over it once Haydn started reading the Chinese calligraphy out loud in perfect chinese and was explaining to them the translation and the meanings of the poems. toward the end, we were in this replica victorian house and the evil head guard woman who hated us was there trying to shoo us out.
Haydn says “Wow! look at that ceiling!” pointing out the nicely decorated cieling about 20 feet over our heads.
the evil guard woman screams out like we were little kids on a field trip “Don’t TOUCH anything!!”
Haydn gives her a distateful look and says “I can’t touch the ceiling.”
you had to be there i guess.
all in all, Newark isn’t that bad a city. rather pleasant actually. just stay out of the train station and don’t touch anything in the museum.
By
anders pearson
19 Jan 2001
i’ve been using w3m for quite a while as a light, fast text-based web browser. it’s basically like lynx but with support for tables, frames, and SSL. i just now found out though, that there is a w3m.org with some pretty neat stuff. there is a demo that will let you see any random url through w3m as well as a short history of how w3m came to be that outlines the algorithm that it uses for laying out tables.
By
anders pearson
17 Jan 2001
i’m standing in line today at the Taco Bell on the first floor of my building waiting to get my recomended daily allowance of bean burrito goodness when i almost had to kill someone.
Taco Bell offers several different gradations of their “Border Sauce”: “mild”, “hot”, and “fire” (there might also be a “medium”; i don’t recall). of course, this being America and not Mexico, the first couple levels are merely variations on bland tomato paste and can’t really be considered particularly spicy or flavorful. only the “fire” seems to have any real taste whatsoever. naturally, the “fire” sauce is a little more popular than the others and so of the bins of sauce packets on the counter, the “fire” bin is almost always empty or near empty. it’s very sad.
anyway, i’m in line today and i see that the bin has a single “fire” packet left. then i notice that the guy in front of me has not one, or two, but about fifteen “fire” packets on his tray. as i’m watching, he reaches in and grabs the last one for good measure. i was absolutely speechless. he only got two tacos so unless he was planning on floating them in a pool of sauce, it was obvious that he was just hoarding them for the sake of hoarding them.
so i’m wondering if this guy really is as much of a complete and total asshole as i think he must be or did my parents just raise me with an underdeveloped sense of selfishness?
of course, as this is going on, i’m also listening to the kid behind me telling his friend about how over vacation he and another friend of his flew to some remote location in Colorado on his friend’s private lear jet for a week of skiing. i counted three times within a minute that he mentioned the fact that his friend actually owned his own lear jet.
By
anders pearson
08 Jan 2001
today i bought a fishing watch. i don’t fish. i don’t plan on fishing. why did i buy a fishing watch? because it was the only decent watch i could find that didn’t glow permanently.
for some reason, just about every digital watch that they are making now seems to be permanently illuminated with this annoying green light. they don’t actually have a light on, they just use some cleverness with reflective materials so that if there is any light in the room whatsoever, they look like they’re illuminated.
i think this is about the most irritating thing in the world. having something on my wrist that glows at me out of the corner of my eye all the time is bloody distracting. i have a hard time walking when i’ve recently polished my boots because the shine on the toes keeps catching my eye and i can’t look away. i’ve been known to walk into walls.
i don’t know, maybe i’m just weird. anyway, i now have a watch that doesn’t glow at me unless i press a button telling it to light up. it also shows the phase of the moon which, admittedly, is pretty damn cool. now i have to go find out what the longitude of new york is so i can punch that in and always know when the high and low tides are. never know when i’ll want to go swimming in the hudson.
By
Matt Micalizzi
07 Jan 2001
nothing’s sexier than a foxy woman smoking a cigarette.
By
anders pearson
06 Jan 2001
kamden has been assimilated whether he likes it or not.
By
anders pearson
05 Jan 2001
just thought i’d let everyone know that i’m still alive. i’m still up in maine on “vacation” and shall continue to be for about another week.
maine is very cold.
other than that, there isn’t a lot to do here. i’m on an iBook on my parents’ kitchen table (the only available phone jack in the house is in the kitchen and i only have a 2m cable) working over a very slow dialup connection (the misery). but i guess that’s better than nothing.
other than sleeping, eating beaucoup mac+cheese, and drinking beer the highlights of my vacation have included:
- getting contacts
- having peripheral vision is something i haven’t experienced in over a decade. very neat. you really forget how much of a handicap glasses really are until you get rid of them. unfortunately, it’s taking me a while to get used to them. i apparently have superhuman blink reflexes. when i first got them, it took the eye doctor about 45 minutes of poking me in the eye and swearing to get them in. it was taking me an hour or so to get them in or out by myself until tasha let me in on the secret to getting them out quickly: just stick your finger in your eye and jab it around until they come out; surprisingly effective. now i just have to master getting them in.
- new year’s eve
- yet another spectacular party at Jere’s. got to see lots of friends who i haven’t seen in way too long (kara, zeb, anthony, matti, heather, tasha, nigel, elliot, jesse, etc), got to finally actually meet kim in person after having known her online for the last 3 years. and of course, we managed to consume enough alcohol to mortally wound a small herd of elephants. driving for six hours through “whiteout conditions” in the worst blizzard we’ve seen in a while was just icing on the cake.
right now i can’t feel my feet (the kitchen doesn’t seem to be as well heated as the rest of the house) so i will write more later.