contact has been made

I had forgotten that you can’t write m-o-n-t-y p-y-t-h-o-n in this blog. Something (is it Word Press?) won’t let you publish anything that says the Mty Pthn word, you get this error:

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /fuckoff/wp-admin/post.php on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Which throws me off. This happened once before; it makes me curious as to how one can get around it.

After I ate some del Monty (yeah I know it’s spelled wrong) canned pineapple, I was attacked by a python.

MontyPython.

MONTY PYTHON

monty python

Monty python

Ok, it will reject your post only if M_P is 2 words that are both capitalized. Nice!

the store where I used to work in Government Center is moving to a new place. It will now occupy a huge spot in Faneuil Hall, right smack in the middle of all the tourists and such. Now when you are browsing for a coffee mug with your name on it featuring a picture of a lobster, you can also pop into Newbury Comics for all of your grow-a-penises, Tool t-shirts, $500 limited edition Spiderman statuettes and Boney M CDs. Anyway, the current location is having a giant sale to sell off their inventory before moving, so I bought me a webcam. A DALEK-SHAPED webcam, no less.

Wow, I haven’t had a webcam since the mid-90s when they were giving them away with every single thing you subscribed to. I think I got one for signing up for Earthlink way back when everyone had dial-up.

Here’s the first picture I ever took with it (ca. 1998?):

Here’s one I took today with the new dalek-enabled one:

Notice anything unusual? How about the fact that I am wearing the same dress? Damn I’ve had that thing a long time! It wasn’t even remotely new in 1998.

So anyway, i can now have a Dalek-related strip show that you can stream live… or not. Maybe I’ll have my Dalek action figures put on a strip show. Wouldn’t that be… amusing to only me?

Just when I thought there was no reason to live, Krustee brought this product to my attention:

I have long tried to thrust my opinion on the world, which is that everything tastes better with bacon. These fine souls agree with me! In fact, their motto is “everything should taste like bacon.” OF COURSE IT SHOULD!!!

So, I went in search of this mythical powder. According to their website, it is available in Stop n Shops across Massachusetts. Thus I rode my bike to the SnS in Ahlington. Alas, the store was closed for remodeling. Still on a quest, I went to the one in Allston, but to no avail. I couldn’t find anything resembling a baconizing agent, and the one native English speaker I could find to help me there just gave me a weird look and mumbled “spices” trying in vain to disguise her “DUH!” voice before walking away. So today I drove out almost to Assembly Square in search of Bacon Salt and lo and behold, there it was! They had 2 different flavors, so I chose the regular one.

What did I have around the house to test it on? First I tried it straight out of the bottle. It tastes like bacon bits… so far so good…

Next I sprinkled it on my leftover Macaroni and Cheese. It has a slight sweet taste, which clashes with the oddly sweet after taste of the Market Basket brand Mac & Cheese, but it did improve it. Bacon can only improve everything!

Next I dosed some Tater Tots with the wondrous magical bacon dust. They were transformed into puffy bacon nuggets!

My favorite way to eat tater tots is with sour cream, with garlic salt mixed into it (I know it sounds gross, but it’s actually pretty awesome). Instead of garlic salt, I added bacon salt and lo and behold! A creamy bacony wonder sauce!

1. Bacoroni and Cheese
2. Bacor tots
3. I can’t come up with a punny name for this (sour cream with Bacon Salt)

I think I am a convert.

My next projects: bacon poutine and bacon scrambled eggs…

Saki says that there are a few things that bacon can’t improve… like cake. It’s my goal to make delicious Cakon– bacon-flavored cake. The sky’s the limit!

In other news…

Sunday I actually went to the BEACH. Yes, Patty and I went to um… a beach on the south coast of MA whose name eludes me. Horseheads beach? no, Horseheads is in NY. Something with a horse. Anyway, it was awesome– big waves, nice sunny day… I got sunburned in the white farmer-tan patch where my wrist brace normally lives and all over my neck and back. Those Asian genes haven’t kicked in yet this year. Damn you, lack of melanin!

I still hate my job. I spent 10 hours today working and didn’t even get to one of the accounts I’m supposed to. I feel like I’m working for Mom now– it doesn’t matter what I do WELL since I’m guilty until proven innocent. I could personally nurture every single plant to lush green beautifulness and it wouldn’t matter because I’d only get graded for the one small piece of dried up leaf on the ground I’d forgotten to pick up. How do I know? Because when my overseer saw 2 plants that were healthy and nice-looking, she kept saying “well these are new, aren’t they? They must have just gotten installed.” No matter how many times I tried to convince her that those plants had been there since I started, she didn’t believe me. Anything good I do obviously has nothing to do with me, and is a fluke. I have been relegated to the Suck category. Oh well, it was bound to happen. Every job I have I manage to get put on the Incompetent List sooner or later. It doesn’t matter how hard I try; it is inevitable.

Basically, I’m sick of being a blue collar wage slave.

What else can I do?

Why can’t I be interested in anything PRACTICAL? How come everything that gets me excited career wise is either impossible (being an onomastics expert), improbable (i.e., being a movie set designer. How does one even go about doing this?) or involves time travel (i.e., a WWII-era jazz singer). Why can’t I find an intense desire to, like, be an auto mechanic or even a stock broker? I wish I could be hypnotized into thinking that being a secretary (i.e., white collar wage slave) is fascinating work, because that’s pretty much all I’m qualified to do. Any hypnotists in the audience? Anyone? I’ll make you bacon-flavored cake!

I hate my job. really, it sucks. I get no respect from anyone whatsoever– it’s just another shitty blue-collar wage-slave job! OK, I’m just sore because today I had what I hate most in life: the review. Not only did I have to go do my shittiest account that I’ve had the least amount of time and hate the most, but I had to have my supervisor with me every single step of the way to criticize every thing I did. It looked like ass from day one, and I have spent hours and hours on it, but it’s 7 floors of plants, and I’m bound to miss things and spend less time on some and more time on others.

We went to another account, this one is a good one, only I wasn’t able to get to it last week because they closed on Thursday for the 4th of July weekend. Of course, that one was all dried out.

Basically, I hate reviews, because it gives me the opportunity to discover how much I suck in ways I didn’t even know existed. The obvious answer is: stop sucking, right? Well, I’m doing everything I thought I could; it’s just that there are hundreds of different ways a person can suck and I’m not even aware of most of them!

Plus, the way I was trained is diametrically opposed to the way the supervisor does things. The girl who trained me lets plants dry out to almost dust before watering them whereas the supervisor considers plants “dry” when I consider them “soaking wet.” However, it doesn’t matter since it’s the supervisor’s criteria that matters. This job has been wearing thin for a while now, but I really dread it every morning when I get up. Fuck work. When will I invent something and make a zillion dollars? I’ll have to think of something good to invent.

Why did I give up drugs and dancing? I don’t even drink much anymore! I could definitely use some mindless escapism these days. When’s the next rave? the cool think about Boston is that nobody ever evolves past what they get into when they are young. Thus, I am usually one of the younger people at these raves!

more song chart memes

So far I’ve got 2 thumbs-downs and one thumbs-up (but that doesn’t count because it was me that voted!)– I spent way too much time analyzing this stupid song for it to be funny. I actually remember parsing it 20 years ago to figure out exactly what the point is. It probably should have been more like a pie chart like:

But now I’m analyzing the analysis, which is kind of dumb. Whatever!

I still have a ton of stuff left in medford, because I’m lame. I’ve been cleaning it out because Jo & Stacy want to sell the house and wow. I’ve found some really random weird stuff. I have about 100 billion notebooks that I’ve scribbled in– I have the first 5 pages to at least 47 different novels. This is not hyperbole– (ok, the 100 billion part is, but not the 47). Some of them might actually have been funny and/or entertaining, while others… uh… we’ll just say that I started an essay about being adopted and the nature of belonging, unfortunately non-tentatively titled “Blood Ties Lie Bleeding.”

When I am a zillionaire, I think I will hold a contest and award money or chickens or water or Space Credits or whatever is the Currency Of The Future to the person who comes up with the best rest of the novel based on 5 hastily scribbled pages I wrote when I was 14. Take your pick, I have a ton of them!

I also have at least 30 books of Irish folk music. I have songs in Irish, English and a few in Scottish; songs written by Irish immigrants in other countries, books of jigs & reels, books about the relevance and history of Irish music… I even have a dictionary of musical terms in Irish and English. This is all fascinating to me, and awesome to have on hand for reference, but… I live in a tiny apartment now and have absolutely no room for all of this stuff. So… do I keep it all, stacked in boxes cluttering up my living space? Or… or…

do I not care right now because I’m too psyched to be seeing !!! (Chk chk chk) tonight?!?!?

I think the latter.

Oh, and because no entry would be complete without bitching about my life… I thought my health insurance would kick in after 60 days of this job, but it turns out that I have to FILL OUT FORMS after 60 days, and my insurance won’t kick in until August. OY VEY! There goes another $249! ::sigh::

So, I thought i would have health insurance by now… it turns out that I have to turn in some form after 60 days. Did I know about this? No. I may or may not have filled it out already.

However, my current prescription runs out in T-minus one day and counting. So… do I try to stretch out the prescription in hopes that I’ll get insurance speedily and deal with some withdrawal and shit until next week? Or do I break down and cough up another $249 for another month’s worth of drugs?

I’ll probably just cough up the kizzash; fuck my vacation account again. It will take me so long to save up the last $249 I took out for drugs that it’s hardly even worth it to have anything at this point. Knowing my life, the insurance won’t happen for another 800 years, based on the number of bureaucratic complications everything on earth manages to throw in my way when it comes to health care and reality.

On the plus side of being abandoned– Saki said I could have free reign of his CDs since he has them all burned onto his iPod and doesn’t want to store them all! I scored a ton of awesome shit!!! I now have a ton of CDs that I used to play all the time at work when I worked at the record store because we had promos, but never bothered to buy: Blackalicious. Dan the Automator, Gnarls Barkley, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and… THE POWERSTATION, bitchez!!! Hellz yeah I’m not sweating when the heat is on! I have this on vinyl, but there’s something to be said for having it on CD so you can blast it in the car at any time.

Also: Bell Biv Devoe, Digital Underground, Gorillaz, and the only Beck CD I don’t own (The Information) are now in my collection. I haven’t even finished going through his collection (he has zillions)– that was just the cursory glance!

Something smells really good as I’m driving along the highway. Maybe someone is cooking out on the grill (at 11:30 p.m. on a Wednesday)… it sure smells juicy (for 10 miles)… Oh, it’s just my dinner leftovers that have exploded all over the back seat. That’s an idea– have dinner-flavored air fresheners! Make every day a BBQ during your commute!

It poured today; I’m talking torrential downpour. I know, because it started pouring the second I stepped out of the T stop at DTX and continued unabated until 3 blocks later when I reached 220 Franklin St. I accidentally took a wrong turn when I got out of the T and had to go a block out of my way. Do you think the rain would have stopped earlier had I not had to make a course adjustment?

Because of the rain, my wrist brace got all soggy so I spent the rest of the day with my arm smelling like someone had shoved a wet sponge into a sweaty gym sock. Basically, that was what my arm was, so the analogy almost isn’t an analogy at all.

At my job sites, people are getting used to the sight of me. They come up to me and ask plant questions all the time. Yesterday I spent 15 minutes discussing powdered fox urine in broken English. Apparently fox urine wards away skunks, and a lady asked me if I knew where to get it. I had half-a-mind to be like, “I got da hook up. Meet me in the parking garage, floor 4 in 10 minutes. Bring the briefcase…” but I didn’t. I go easy on non-native English speakers! Today I spent 20 minutes discussing the finer points of orchid care with a Chinese woman (the finer points are: don’t ever water them, give them direct sunlight or pay attention to them. They’re kind of like gremlins).

Saki and I went to see Hancock today– it was surprisingly pretty good. I was expecting it to be heartwarming; at least that’s what the previews hinted at. Instead, there was a PLOT TWIST I’m not going to tell you about. Needless to say, it ended up being a completely different movie from the one I thought I was seeing, which was a nice change.

Mmm. Now my arm smells like Palmolive.

Well, I’m not approved for the state-funded emergency health insurance. I’m older than 19, and I’m not pregnant nor do I have breast cancer. They’re allowing me to appeal the decision, but I can only check one of the 5 boxes that list the exceptions and changing jobs and not qualifying for health insurance for 60 days isn’t one of them. I’ll bet you anything that come tax time, I’ll have to pay the tax penalty for not having insurance for these two months. Just wait! I totally will have to fork over like $200 or whatever to Uncle Sam, because the way to get poor people to not clog up the city’s emergency rooms is to fine the semi-poor for not having insurance! That makes sense, right? Well, I’m happy that I can ensure that some giant multi-national insurance conglomerate stays on top. The CEO really needs that golf vacation!

Let’s see… the last time I went to the emergency room years ago, the fee ended up being like $600 (but insurance paid for all but $35 of it). That was about 5 years ago, so I’m sure the ER rates have gone up since then. Plus, I had to have a real doctor plus one normal nurse and a super high-ranking nurse all there to pull shit out of my ears, so that will probably cost a whole lot more.

Hmm, stressing out about money? Moi?

Now that my hearing is back, my conjunctivitis is getting worse. Luckily it’s only in one eye, but I can’t really see out of it at all. I should get an eye patch, because it’s annoying to have to see everything with one normal eye and one completely blurred eye. AHRRR, MATEYS!

Shit. I KNEW I should never have gone to the hospital. I’m a wimp. I didn’t think I could wait the 3 weeks until the insurance kicked in. Next time, i’ll know better. Where’s my time machine? Can I go back and undo my hospital visit? Even if it means that I could only hear 25% of Jamie Lidell last week?

Let’s see. I need something to not whine about…
I like the new Ladytron CD a whole lot. It’s really good! I’d go see them in concert in a couple of weeks (with Datarock opening), but I’ll probably officially owe several unborn children to the Cambridge Hospital by then.

Wait, I said I wasn’t going to whine.

I will think up 10 awesome things in my life right now. This means awesome things that ARE, not things that are awesome because of their absence (i.e., it’s awesome that my arms aren’t amputated).

Here goes:

1. the new Ladytron CD is awesome (of course I probably shouldn’t have bought it because now after I pay rent I’ll have exactly $1.33 in the bank) WAIT! THAT WAS WHINING!!! Now I’m going to have to think up 11 things…
2. I have an ancestor named Patience Bacon. I just think that’s a cool name.
3. my wrist feels slightly better
4. uh… Netflix should be sending me disc 3 of MI-5 on Friday, and though I don’t like Adam as much as Tom, he’s growing on me.
5. I just made $46 in freelance jobs in the past week, and one of them was totally a breeze.
6. Tomorrow’s high temperature is predicted to be a balmy 26 degrees [79 Fahrenheit]! Where are my mittens?
7. Since the BPM of most house music falls nicely into the range of bagpipe marches, I have an idea for how to combine the two and maybe have it not suck. Snap your fingers: around the world, around the wor-rld. around the world, around the wor-rld… keep snapping. Now hum “Scotland the Brave.” See? Same tempo! Really! Now, to find a decent hack so my software doesn’t keep expiring… ARHH MATEY! I be a software pirate!
8. I managed to resurrect a large number of dying pothos at one account at work, as well as kill most of the bugs at another one.
9. the withdrawal symptoms from going off the one drug are getting less and less, so I don’t feel like punching things as much.
10. I watched 28 Days Later yesterday and I had forgotten how awesome it was.
    ‘Man walks into a bar with a giraffe. They both get pissed, the giraffe falls over. The man goes to leave and the barman says ‘Oi, you can’t just leave that lyin’ there.’ Man says, ‘Naw it’s not a lion, it’s a giraffe.’

11. After nearly 7 years of searching, I finally found a 9/11 joke!

    Q: What did the hotdog vendor outside the two towers say when the planes hit?

    A: Hey, who ordered the two jumbos?

    (I know it doesn’t have the wit of the Space Shuttle jokes nor the sophistication of Ethiopian jokes, but at least one exists!)

12. uh… uh… I can’t go to bed until I think of one more awesome thing in my life… and it can’t be something abstract like the Stills are coming out with a new CD someday and possibly Daft Punk might tour again and make it with 500 miles of Boston… OK. Something good. OK GOT IT: Lard Ass has managed to keep his bodily fluids contained to his stomach and the litter box. I.e., he hasn’t barfed or peed on anything in a while. That’s a good thing.

    SWEET. I can go to sleep now.

Now that it’s been a couple weeks that I’ve had 100% of my hearing back, it’s time for something new: I’m getting conjunctivitis! It never fails; I always get it when it’s the hottest, or when I’m on vacation. I always get it when I go to Ireland; there’s something about that country that just inspires bacteria and/or viruses to attack my eyeballs (or rather, the tissue covering them). I got it in the middle of the desert in Kenya, and at an Irish music festival in D.C. (see? The Ireland thing again). Now, since the heat index is well above 38 (see me gettin’ funky with the centigrade? That’s 100 to you philistines!) my eyes are at it again. Oh well. Binocular vision is for pussies anyway.

My car wouldn’t start the other day, but I knew it would. Do you know how you just know things sometimes? I was in the parking lot of Market Basket and I turned the key and… the battery went on, but the ignition did nothing. BUT, I knew it would start for the following reasons:

1. It wasn’t snowing
2. There wasn’t anyone with me that I didn’t know very well
3. I wasn’t wearing a dress
4. There were no live animals or perishable goods in the car
5. I wasn’t late for anything
6. I had my cell phone with me

And lo and behold, my car started!

I should have my own psycho psychic hotline!

The heat is also amusing because it causes my cats, who normally sleep curled into tight little balls like armadillos, to sleep all stretched out on their backs with their legs up in the air.

Or they just drape themselves over things:

STOP THE PRESS!!
I just found someone in my Family tree who was FRENCH!!! HOLY CRAP! I’m being sarcastic here, because it seems that everyone on my dad’s dad’s side of the family as well as my mom’s mom were all of Scottish or English descent (nobody really bothered to keep track of the tree on Grandfather’s or Nana’s branches–the Hungarian and Irish ones). Nobody mixed it up with any other race like EVER except for this one French dude. Whoa, you go people in the 1600s–you go with that funky multi-culturalism! Yeah, being Jewish or Irish wouldn’t get you into the D.A.R., I guess so who really cares, right?