One week is less than 'weeks'

Spring is Here! Which reminds me of Tom Lehrer's comedy song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", whose title unfortunately gives away the joke, and I wonder why Lehrer let that get by him. Perhaps the title was imposed on him by his producers, who are notorious for messing up artistic visions in misguided attempts to pander to the popular will. That is, not Lehrer's producers in particular, but producers in general. For all I know Lehrer's producers are or were gems in human form and the title is merely an ironic joke that's too subtle for my poor brain to grasp. My guess would be that that's not the case but I've been wrong before. More than once, even. Like Fred Saberhagen's time-traveling hero, Pilgrim, I can remember three times in the past century that I've been wrong. (Pilgrim is quite a character.) But he doesn't really have much to do with Spring, or with Tom Lehrer, as far as I know, although, again, it could be that the whole story Saberhagen tells is a coded message, understandable to those in the know, explicating Lehrer's song and it's relation to the season, and how it all traces back to trained aardvarks from Ancient Atlantis.
But probably not.

I hate bloggers who don't blog for weeks at a time.

It's really inconsiderate! Here I am, all eager to see what new amusement they're going to provide me for free, and they haven't done anything! Therottabealaw! Although, we have a lot of laws already, come to think of it, and I hear somebody in New York wants to ban restaurants from cooking with salt, which doesn't sound very practical to me, although I would certainly appreciate the option of at least one truly low-sodium dish on a restaurant menu. But that's a case where I'd say there didn't ottabealaw and so far there isn't, so I guess it's all to the good, except for seekers of low-sodium meals, who are mostly forced to cook their own meals, but that's cheaper and healthier anyway, so what's the big deal? (Funny/gruesome typo: I first wrote: 'mostly forced to cook themselves', which evokes some rather disturbing images, no?) It reminds one of the fabled auto-cannibals of Lemuria, the car-eating cars that are said to have evolved 500 million years ago on that lost continent from a colony of defective self-reproducing robots left here as junk by visiting aliens from outer space. The eventual extermination of the auto-cannibals was indirectly triggered by the time-travelling antics of the well known Young Man (well, little-known, really), in a brief episode regrettably left out of Wells's account in The Time Machine. How Wells came to know of it at all is an amusing story which may one day come to light if we're all lucky.

It's still morning in Honolulu

...but it's tomorrow in Tokyo.

I don't think it's yesterday anywhere, although as of 1 AM this morning it was yesterday in Honolulu, if I am not mistaken. Which reminds me of the 'how to prove Santa Claus exists' theory, dramatized by Raymond Smullyan approximately as follows:

Logician 1: Santa Claus exists, if I am not mistaken.
Logician 2: Well of course he exists if you are not mistaken.
Logician 1: So you agree I am correct.
Logician 2: Yes of course, I just said so.
Logician 1: Or in other words, I am not mistaken.
Logician 2: Yes. Um, wait...
Logician 1: And we agreed that if I am not mistaken then Santa exists.
Logician 2: Just a minute...
Logician 1: Therefore, Santa exists!

Invalid

Invalid reminds me of Dorothy L. Sayers's (whose name I keep confusing with Dorothy Salisbury Davis for some reason) mystery Strong Poison in which an invalid, and imbecile, old lady named Cremorna Garden (which one character in the book mis-remembers as Hyde Park, go figure) leaves all her money to one nephew but not the other, which fact (not revealed till near the end of the book, if I recall correctly) had started the sequence of events leading to the murder. Strong Poison also features my favorite Sayers character, Miss Katharine Alexandra (or possibly Alexandra Katherine, Sayers doesn't seem to know for sure herself) Climpson, an elderly spinster who (in this book) masquerades as an amateur spiritualist medium, thereby persuading "Cremorna Garden's" nurse to send her (i.e. Garden's (English needs more pronouns)) will to her (Garden's) lawyer. The reader gets a good look at how spiritualist fakers do 'cold readings' when Miss Climpson takes a quick look around the nurse's sitting room while she (the nurse, that is (English needs more kinds of pronouns)) is outside making tea. Miss Climpson looks at furniture, old photographs, quickly glances through letters, and does all kinds of shocking intrusions into the nurse's privacy that you would never expect an elderly spinster to perpetrate, all in aid of tricking the nurse into believing that Miss Climpson has psychically discovered personal information about the nurse.

It's great fun.

I don't know what kind of a point I had here, but another thing English needs is a better way of handling parenthetical remarks, or else maybe I need to not use so many.

It's technically still morning!

Today's random word is 'automatic' (courtesy of this site.)

Automatic MacHinery (1742-1919), one of the Virginia MacHinery's, was an inventory of automatic machinery which he modestly named after himself. His mother's family, the Pluperfects, originated in New Hampshire from a colony of mutant mold spores whose DNA was blended with human DNA by radiation from a fallen meteorite. This unusual ancestry no doubt accounts for MacHinery's long life, although he himself claimed it came from his father's side, on which he was allegedly descended from Ancient Atlanteans. The family tradition of vegetarian aardvark breeding adds some verisimilitude to the claim, although the tradition can be traced back with certitude to no earlier than the early fifteenth century. MacHinery's first invention was inspired by this tradition: a peanut shelling machine which made it much easier to feed the aardvarks. In his old age, MacHinery was heard to remark that it was a wonder the Atlanteans hadn't invented such a machine themselves, and if they had, the continent might well have survived to this day. Based on this comment, some researchers have speculated that the peanut-shelling machine must have been suppressed by enemies of the Atlanteans such as the Muvians, who bought up all the patents before the machines could go on the market. Others, however, have argued that even if MacHinery was descended from Atlantis, he had no better idea of what sank the continent that Plato did, and stories of patent-suppression were no more than propaganda by anti-Muvian partisans. The truth may never be known.

Why I didn't blog this morning

...because I had some very important loafing to do. Those Futurama re-runs won't watch themselves, now, will they? Besides, the keyboard was covered with all these little pieces of black plastic with white letter on them; it was entirely too confusing. Which reminds of one of my pet peeves: the weird habit of electronic appliance manufactures of marking the controls in black-on-black. Who can read such controls? I suppose I should be grateful my keyboard isn't marked like that. Frankly, I suspect the Bavarian Illuminati; it's part of their subtle plot to destabilize the world to make it easier for their takeover. But I'm ready for them! I have a white-paint pen to mark the black controls with! That'll fix them. Fortune favors the prepared and I'm prepared for black-on-black controls. But I digress, as Tom Lehrer would say. Since the Illuminati have been interefering with my blogging I'll just have to do twice as much for the next few days to make up for it.

...starting tomorrow. TheThis afternoon I have to watch Robin Hood.

How I got this way

I was searching the Web for entertaining items for sale cheap (xkcd's idea of a script to buy random stuff is cute but I bet you'd just get boring things most of the time) when I came across the juiciest, raciest, funniest, most outrageous gadget I ever saw, which I'll name as soon as I can think what it should be. Alma Werfel's autobiography, perhaps, or a ridiculous automatic gadget that throws naughty items up in the air to land at the feet of unsuspecting passers-by. Anyway, whatever it was, I decided at once that "it must be mine", to quote John Kovalic's Dork Tower comic, which shows that it must actually have been a gamer's item: the D&D Book of Naughtiness, that must be it (and there actually is a book like that, although I forget its actual name.) And I just almost mispelled its: Why is the possessive of it not spelled it's? Frankly, I firmly believe that English could get along just fine without apostrophe's. In fact, it'd be noticeably improved. Join the Coalition to Stamp Out the Apostrophe! It's bad enough in its (ha! check out those its's!) place--the apostrophe, that is--but when it's misused, as it frequently is, either by those who know no better or those who experience an unfortunate lapse of mental acuity, it can drive one nearly to distraction. Evidence is left as an exercise for the Google-fu of the reader. So in summary, naughty apostrophes have destroyed the racy automatic gadgets that throw Alma Werfel's non-existent (as far as I know) autobiography at innocent bystanders. What else could explain it?

Update: check it out, I spelled the plural of apostrophe as apostrophe's, instead of apostrophes! Once again proving that it's impossible to write a post about bad spelling without making a spelling error.