Rockin' Ebola; Split-end Blues; et al.

Finally, musicians are playing actual instruments again. Synthesizers are all fine and good, and I personally love the theremin, but there's a line that should never have been crossed: electronic drum kits. Logistically, it's almost infinitely more complicated to design and manufacture a hunk of electronics that simulates simple percussion than it is to build a drum. That's just inefficient. Besides, isn't there something fundamentally satisfying about banging away on some big ol' drums with little wooden sticks? And it's not as though the synthetic drums sound particularly impressive. If you're going to waste biomechanical energy beating on stuff, you may as well take the trouble to do it right...

You know the only thing that would be more imminently enjoyable than watching cobbled-together robots beating the bloody hell out of each other? Watching cobbled-together robots beating the bloody hell out of my Roomate. I'm generally a pacifist, but this guy's a real ass.

I was in a local store today, and I chanced to wander into the section devoted to hair care products. Apparently, it is not only possible to curl my straight, fine hair, but to condition the pores in my scalp, maximize the moisture balance in my assorted follicles, and even--I know, I couldn't believe it either--finally put an end to the abysmal terrors of protein deficiency. I didn't know I had a protein deficiency, but it must indeed be severe if its ill effects have spilled over to my coiffure. You know what I like in a shampoo? I know this must sound like a radical, even dangerous idea, but I like a shampoo with the ability to clean my hair. If I wanted herbs and nutrients in my hair, I'd put a steak on my head and roll about on the lawn.

If I see one more puppet cavorting about my television screen issuing geysers of simulated excreta, I fully intend to...
Come to think of it, what in Hell can be done about this? I welcome any suggestions.

Note to Self: If Pres. George W. can frolic around waging war on nebulous intellectual concepts such as the ones governing Terrorism (punctuation his, not mine), then I declare an immediate commencement of hostilities against midlife angst, daytime TV talk shows, and that weird crud that forms on the tops of toothpaste tubes. Oh, and the color yellow. I never did like yellow.

The Masked Logician is lazy and very, very surly. Comments, cash, and secrets of immortality welcomed.

I used to have this nightmare, see...

...where I'd be alone inside this desiccated hulk of an early-eighteenth-century farmhouse on the property where my grandparents lived when I was young. Once there I could always expect to be visited by some supernormal malevolency the like of which would bring a tear to the eye and a quiver to the bladder of Robert Englund himself. On more than one occasion, I can recall, in the infinite wisdom of the dreaming unconscious, fervently hoping that some leprous abomination would skitter the most revolting of its many appendages from the darkness under the bed and lay hold of my ankles and draw me down into the unflinching embrace of eternity as I slept so that I might be reprieved from my own imagination. Not to say, mind you, that anything I saw and/or suffered in the course of these somnolent sojourns was any more or less than the meat and bread of the day's Hollywood gore machinery. It simply seemed as though my pre-adolescent sensibilities were unequal to the task of coping with anything even tenuously connected with this humble, moldering former residence. Always, in the sober, Joe Friday light of morning the despicable things I recalled--fortunately few--would utterly fail to shrivel to shrieking fantasy death as did my other nocturnal frights. No indeed, even still some of the latent imagery from those dim childhood nightmares, burned into the phosphor screen of an overactive imagination, come back to me on nights darkest and most still. All of which amounts, as they say, to precisely dick, I suppose. And in further supposition, the fact that, lacking any prompting or discussion of the subject from myself, my pseudonymous beloved, upon spending some few minutes in the environs of this particular dream-specter's real-life counterpart, came down with what can only be called a righteous case of the heebie-jeebies must also be discounted as meaningless--indeed totally insubstantial--coincidence.
On a similar note, don't you hate it when you dribble gelatinous melted cheese onto a clean shirt? And even if the shirt is not, according to the strictest empirical definition, precisely clean, as such, at such time as the cheese makes contact with the fabric, well, that's still pretty lousy, right? Unlike less viscous substances, a cheese spill cannot be absorbed by a napkin or blotted away with a towel. Moreover, even if the bulk of the cheese is removed promptly, there always remains behind a troublesome residue of unwholesome dairy substance that attracts not only the attention of those individuals lucky enough not to be so endowed, but ever dust particle within approximately three parsecs of your current location, creating, after a time, a stiff, Bakelite-like layer of gunk on your poor abused garment that, once dried, will not be removed by anything less than a religious rite.

Alright, I realize that the two topics are not in any way related. But then, if you wanted coherence and relevance, you wouldn't be here.

I'm Deraming of a White Tax Season

Ok, so I was wrong...
It snowed today. Quite a lot; and will in all likelihood continue to do so well into the afternoon tomorrow. To anyone who happens to be reading in whose face I laughed yesterday at the notion of frozen precipitation--not that I expect there are any of you--I would hereby like to express my deep and sincere desire that you sod off immediately. I mean seriously, the meteorologists get the forecast right once every two weeks and they feel generally good about themselves, so surely I, a relatively climatologically uninformed civilian can be excused of being on this one isolated occasion somewhat less than precognitive.
That being established, I come back to the point on which I entered. I awoke at approximately 0800 this morning and new instantly that something was amiss. Some intangible something nibbled inquisitively at the back of my mind like a small mouse on a bag of non-soy-based imitation cheese-flavored snack food product. Then it hit me. My alarm clock, that is. At some point during the night, I must have dislodged it from its resting place on the corner of my combination desk/worktable. The impact of cheap Taiwanese plastic on scalp was surprisingly loud in the tomb-like early morning stillness. I knew immediately the source of the nagging disquiet in my mind. It is NEVER quiet here, morning or otherwise. The best I can normally hope for is a sort of subdued cacophony. This inexplicable silence could only mean that some terrible, unthinkable catastrophe--something on a par with a major glacial impact at least--must be upon us, I thought. Being ever the impulsive one, I elected on the spur of the moment to turn over and go back to sleep. Unfortunately, now that I had been awake for some moments, it was no longer just my mind that was being nagged at. I stumbled blearily to the bathroom and made my daily obeisance to the porcelain god. A few moments of functional consciousness served to convince me that I was, for the time being, at least, not going to be able to go back to sleep. So I decided to go and investigate the overwhelming dearth of intolerable noise with which I found myself presented. I stuck my head out the front door to reconnoiter, and...
I should note at this point that, after having lived in this particular location for as long as I have, I was fully prepared to behold anything up to and including minor human sacrifice (campus life is indeed an interesting one). What I was not at all ready to cope with was snow. The reader must remember, before he scoffs at my naivete, that, in the region of the Southeastern U.S. in which I live generates a decent snowfall only slightly less frequently than it generates conjoined sets of tap-dancing transvestite leprechauns.
I suppose I don't need to tell you that the excitement of witnessing the first legitimate snow of a long winter was more than enough to convince me to return at once to bed, whereupon I slept until nearly midday (it had been a long night).
So it was that I came to exchange the rigors of academia for the only slightly more potentially life-threatening rigors of an early-afternoon snowball fight.
All, I thought, must assuredly be well on such a fine, crisp, snowy winter's morn. The giddy laughter, the ominous whisk-smunch of compacted snow colliding with ice-cold skin, the dismayed shriek of those who apparently occasionally forget that ice crystals provide little in the way of friction...
Add to that the simple joys of bonding with friends, a somewhat less than quiet late afternoon spirited away in the solitude of my room with my very significant other (ahem), and the--much appreciated--occasional attractive young coed braving winter's maelstrom in an extremely insubstantial bathing suit and I have myself a recipe for a fine day, right?
Snowballs to the head suck, most of my friends are bastards who are not at all above aiming snowballs at my head, said significant other couldn?t stay nearly long enough, and, pleasing as they are to watch, those uninhibited--or simply masochistic--young ladies are only just that: something pleasing to watch (and being that it was actually snowing, said eye-candy was understandably very fleeting indeed).
So now, as my wonderful snowbound Saturnalia comes to a graceful close, I find myself cold, wet, and still relatively...er...frustrated. I've spent the latter half of the evening flipping between The History Channel and the Democratic Debate on the television and trying to work some feeling back into my fingertips.
This is depressing; I used to love snow days...

UPDATE:
Apparently I can look forward to yet another weather-related sabbatical today, too.

One of Those Years...

You know the ones I'm talking about. First, everything seems to go wrong. So you change everything around, and for a few nanoseconds—much like the temporary vacuum in the immediate vicinity of an erupting volcano—you’re skippin’ down the cobblestones, just lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy, as the wise prophets once said. Then the universe looks you square in the eye and demands to know just why in Hell you aren’t miserable. So then that detestable Roman Status Quo leaps to his death from a thirty-story ledge and you’re left with nothing but a confounded look on your face and a pocket full of What the Hell do I do now?
Ok, so it was nothing as dramatic as all that. The truth is, as I’m sure most of you realize, in real life, few things ever are. On TV, maybe, where everyone demonstrates the adaptive capacity of a toothbrush, but not down here on the concrete-and-Velcro plane where you and I wrestle for the scraps of happiness at civilization’s heel.
My, aren’t we deep this evening? I don’t like the association that goes with that term…Deep… I’m deep, you’re deep, she’s deep. You know what else is deep? A hole. And do you, my friends, know what’s at the bottom of a hole? Well, that depends on how deep it is, I guess. But if it’s deep enough, it might just be eternity down there, and we, as humans, understandably have an aversion to eternity, as well as Olestra and anything involving Rosie O’Donnell.
Speaking of whom, I’m reminded of one of the things I intended to rant about this evening. Do any of you out there have an opinion on homosexual marriage? You do? Good. Keep it. That’s right, you heard me. Take your opinion and fold it up really, really small and tuck it safely down in the bottom of your left back pocket and do the world an enormous favor by sitting on it. Huh? What’s this? The Masked Logician stifling freedom of expression? Damned right. And you know why? Because this is—or damned well should be—a non-issue. I’m sick, physically ill to the point of projectile regurgitation of my fatty, thrice-processed American snack food substances, of one group of people bitching about the right of another group to take advantage of some social perk that they, the members of the first group, take as a gift straight from the callused hand of God. No, no that’s not fair. Bitching is not the appropriate term. But I’m not sure I know of a word that would encompass the depth and breadth of socio-emotional fuckery inherent in the rabid Right’s insistence that allowing a cheap copy-bond municipal courthouse printout of a marriage license to be signed by a homosexual couple would bring about the collapse of everything we hold dear, from the global economy to the very sun itself. Can anyone out there give me just one good—logical—reason why any one person should give a sweetly hemorrhaging fuck about who—or what, for that matter—another such person chooses to marry? No, I didn’t think so. That being the case, it becomes, as I said, a non-issue.
What the Hell brought that on? Well, for those of you fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with American politics never fear. If our beloved Caricature Executive has his way, you will be soon enough. But in the mean time, it seems the good ol’ Texan is trying his level best to add a convenient little amendment to the U.S. Constitution making it fundamentally unlawful for same-sex marriages to occur, and never mind the irony of installing into the constitution an amendment that is itself unconstitutional. Dubya can’t even spell unconstitutional. But then, Dubya can’t spell lots of words…
So then they say John Kerry to the rescue. But if it’s in oratorical superiority they intend to best the incumbent, hell, I’ve got navel lint that’ll do the job.
But enough politics. Surely, if there is anything good and pure within the depth of that force which I am constantly told lies at the heart of all existence, then there must, must be something else of at least passing relevance at large in the world. Frankly, I don’t know how professional political pundits refrain from inserting their genitalia into electrical outlets after a few days of that asininity.
But then, what else is really going on in the world right now?
Mel Gibson has made a movie about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ only to find himself—tee hee hee—crucified for his trouble. It’s a good thing irony isn’t toxic. Unfortunately, neither is stupidity…
On a much more immediately pressing personal note, I really, really abhor my newest roommate, who has obviously been visited upon me as retribution for all the unpleasant things I said about/wished upon/did to his predecessor.
And I suppose that I should note that the Mars Rover seems to be performing adequately, which is a marked improvement over past models. The Rover conducted tentative drilling on El Capitan yesterday, which sounds approximately as exciting as a re-broadcast cricket match to the MTV-viewing public, but apparently has the fine folks at NASA masturbating for sheer joy. I say good on them.

I only hope they don’t uncover any weapons of mass destruction…