Getting Some Bad Ass

Frank Castle...

...finds demon-killing guns so hot, he'll even hit on a dude.

The Ghost of Henson

Okay, so, you know, I'm sitting here watching Sesame Street (ahh fuck you it's what's on the noise-box at 7:30am) and there's this bit with some characters I'm too decrepit to know --specifically, a trio of Muppet faeries.

I wasn't paying attention to much of it, but apparently the sequence involved one of the faerie boys being temporarily made a prince. At the end, he's a bit disappointed not to be the prince anymore, but the teacher faerie offers him the assurance that he'll always be the faerie formerly known as Prince.

Am...am I reading this joke wrong? Did they just totally call Prince a fairy on Sesame Street?

Beauty Thy Name is Miser

Matt sent this link to me, possibly in revenge for something: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGhT_ylXN8s&NR=1 (video, sfw)

It's...it's just awesome. I mean in the sense of "terrible". I mean, it's just so, so awful...and yet, it was necessary that this should exist. I've already watched it like five times. It's just so charming, in the sense of having the fascination of some dark power at work.

Maybe it's those hairdos, recreating the heads of the original puppets with curious accuracy. Maybe it's the Misers' assistants, emphatically not recreating the original. Or maybe it's just that damn trombone hook. I mean, that sure is catchy.

In any case, this is totally my Christmas-spirit tap for the week.

A Little-Advertised Advantage of Digital TV

The static, man. Digital broadcasts still get interference, but not the same grainy fuzzy hissing effects that TV signals used to get. Instead, you get these trippy pixellation effects, sometimes animating along with the image in bizarre ways -- as though characters on the screen had suddenly turned into smooth-flowing blocky robots. A screwed-up signal on digital just plain looks cooler than old-fashioned static.

Plus, when the sound is affected it usually cuts in and out cleanly, without that, well, staticky sound, so you can pretend that the moments of silence are covering tirades of vicious profanity.

Laughed So Hard I Fell Off

This is in response to a very old post* at Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin (guess what I've been reading lately?), but I couldn't resist -- for no other reason that I can't believe none of Sterling's respondents had done this one.



* from almost THREE WHOLE YEARS AGO whoa did they even have internets then?

He Thinks Dynamic Tension Must Be Hard Work

...with your penis.

...WITH YOUR PENIS!

Oh, what, did you think I was just being randomly vulgar?

No, really...

THE POWER IS IN YOUR PENIS

(images found at Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin. Used without permission from anyone.)

Okay, Here's the Pitch...

...you know, just in case producers are randomly trolling obscure blogs in hopes of finding unsolicited concepts.

Further Evidence toward a Theory of Rita Pavone

Mentioning My Name is Potato in the immediately previous post led me toward the related Rita Pavone videos, which reveal that the enthusiastic energy she poured into her ode toward potatoes seems to be a general trademark of her performance style; in this video she gets equally excited about Tuscan tomato soup (apologies ahead of time, incidentally, for getting this tune into your head, where it will not leave) -- so excited that she appears to have joined some sort of paramilitary outfit, or at least donned one, to celebrate it.

This ebullience, and the willingness to expend it in honor of foodstuffs, combined with the elfin frame and frankly rather captivatingly large eyes, all lead to the conclusion that she may be some sort of commercial mascot sprite in search of a product.

Wha - what...?

...no really, what the hell?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk2wViKSh_M

Don't think you've got the idea after just a few seconds, either. It gets even stranger.

Is this...kinky? Is it comedy? Is there any rational explanation at all, or is it actually Japanese?

The video's provenance is as baffling as its content; this comment on reddit seems to be the most detailed information available anywhere*, and the only thing it makes clear is that this is an intentionally bizarre mash-up.

It's been a while since I was literally struck speechless by anything online -- though My Name is Potato came close (it's not so much the song itself, as the passion Rita Pavone pours into serenading a cartoon tuber) -- so for that, a salute, I guess. The most perplexing thing about Ultimate Muscle Roller Legend, perhaps, is that it's just so damn plausible as a clip from some Japanese or possibly Korean video game (for instance, is URML really any more bizarre than the very existent Boon-Ga Boon-Ga?); all in all, it's probably for the best that we don't get to see a boss battle here.

---

* "anywhere" = "on the first page of results from a single Google search"

Next on the List is 'A Touch of Zen'

Looking at an archive of movie reviews, I noticed these three titles in succession:

A DAY AT THE RACES

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

A STUDY IN TERROR

And I can't help but think that a Marx Brothers film called A Study in Terror would probably have been awesome.

-----

P.S. (several days later): Same goes for a Queen album.

Small Cold-Blooded Creatures Express Interest in Your Insurance Premiums

By what path 'online auto insurance sales' became such a prominent genre of TV advertisement I'm not sure, but there's some kind of shared wavelength effect going on -- something like the force that makes 'someone wants to steal the cereal' the almost universal children's cereal ad -- that drives the four or five competitors in this niche field toward very similar campaigns and marketing approaches.

Dear lovely one,

This turned up in the message box of my account at the Cracked.com, which provenance makes me wonder whether it's really a genuine scam, or someone faking a scam, which would presumably in some way be different. Follow the link for spam!

Welcome to Wherever You Are

Humor me for a moment and envision something: in darkened surroundings, a woman looks downward to something in her hands, something which emits a soft blue radiance, illuminating her features dramatically from below.

Not an entirely unfamiliar image, is it? You've probably seen some variation of the concept on any number of fantasy paperback covers and movie posters -- it's got to be at least as common as 'guy holding sword over head'.

Tonight I sat in the lowering evening on the porch behind a local coffee shop, and looked up at one point to see exactly this scene: soft blue radiance, dramatic underlighting, expression of slightly amused concentration. Of course, the woman I was sitting with wasn't doing anything really magical -- just using her phone to communicate with a friend across a great distance. Nothing to think twice about.

Walking home, rather toward the bus stop toward home, I passed a well-lit soccer field and saw a bunch of Mexicans playing cricket, a game I don't think I've ever previously ever actually witnessed in person.

Then I found a dime.

I went to a restaurant near home, had some beer, and managed to spend no more than five dollars more than I really should have. I got a dessert for free.

Tonight I turned thirty-six. I don't know how long my current job will last and I'm not entirely sure what's going to become of my current apartment lease. Things, in general, seem to happen almost entirely at random. But tonight has been really good.

Well, I'm Speechless

This is clearly the purpose of film.

Our Top Story Tonight: YAY

Some good, very good, nigh unto miraculously good news: I got a graphic design job! Thanks in large part to my friend Matt, to whom I now owe a big huge lobster, I've been offered a paid internship working on design and web stuff for PetsMD.com.

So for the vast multitudes who've been hanging on this ever so intriguing saga, that means I'm not going to have to leave Austin, or even leave my current apartment. This for me is happy.

For anyone who's interested in The Devil's Virtue, expect to see some positive changes there in the near future -- I need to train myself up to speed on CSS and PHP like immediately, and I might as well practice on my own site, which needs yet another makeover anyway.

So in short: got job, job good, TDV soon more good. Oh, and that thing from before where I had intended to write a Lost article at least weekly is probably out the window, at least for the next few weeks (although heck, it's not like I still have five freakin months before the last season airs).

Hail Jabootu!

Swimming around aimlessly online recently (far too listlessly and without direction to justify calling it 'surfing'), I ran across this collection of Bad Movie reviews, a topic understandably close to my heart -- these folks poke at movies even more deeply and at greater length than I do, as well as a much lower profanity percentage, so if you like that sort of thing, I recommend skidding over there. From that site I was further directed to And You Call Yourself A Scientist, which (just in my taste) is even more entertaining, hooking me in by finally articulating some of the things I loathe about the character of Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park.

So, How's the Site?

Alll righty, things have been getting weird around here. I need to vacate this current apartment very soon; my roommate has plans in motion to head for New York and I have no visible means of support remaining. Whether I'll even be able to stay in Austin depends very heavily on the miracle factor of finding a better than minimum wage job around here, on which the odds are dropping with each passing day of the empty gmail box.

In an effort to impress some potential employers to whom I've sent resumes, I spent most of the last couple weeks sharpening up The Devil's Virtue, which had a fair amount of opening-day blues: after the first draft got posted it became apparent that some of the image links were broken, and the file-structure was fatally flawed as well, so I took the opportunity to streamline it a bit -- tightening the graphics and arranging it so that each page used the same table with only slight modifications, and making the file-structure somewhat more logical.

Of course, immediately after posting the 'corrected' draft I finally started researching CSS and realized that there's a truckload more that can be done to improve the site. Converting the whole thing from tables and big huge clunky HTML assembled by Kompozer over to a smoother CSS setup and tighter code composed by hand ought to cut loading times, make updating and adding pages easier, and make me look a good clip more professional to potential employers.

But I'm afraid that upgrade is going to have to wait until after I move -- to wherever the hell I'm going to end up -- and even then may be considerably delayed by concerns of more basic survival. For the moment, The Devil's Virtue is on a 'good enough for now' status, but I am cooking up the CSS update when I can find the moments. Right now, though, my prime concern is getting this apartment cleaned up and cleaned out, and packing my stuff for a move which might have to happen very quickly in the next couple of weeks. I'm already down to very little more than the things I most want to keep, and if I can't salvage anything else from this situation, at the very least I really don't want to end up losing all my possessions this time.

In the process of packing I've finally gone through my file cabinet and boxes of unsorted notes, and sorted out a fat accordion file of everything pertaining to the projects which already have slots on the Projects section at TDV, so I've got lots of material to add to that section -- once I have time to convert it all over from handwritten notes, and find a scanner for the miscellaneous sketches. Again, though, it may be quite some time before any of that arrives online. In the meantime I hope folks enjoy what's already available on the site, and for that matter, I hope anyone shows up to enjoy it in the first place.

Lost in the Interim

Note from future me: A dated relic of an article, containing a big spoiler warning for Lost, a series which later turned out to spoil itself.  But I did like it a lot while it was running and the watery ending doesn't change that the ride along the way was fun.

Daring Don't

No idea why I woke up thinking about the Daredevil movie this morning, but there you go. I've got a tall stack of smartass remarks I've been hauling out when the movie comes up in conversation, so I might as well give the old horse a fresh flogging and see if I can't make a full twenty-five-point Reaction out of it. Though hardly a current film, it's at least somewhat relevant given that the "Director's Cut" DVD has just been released -- which is somewhat odd since the original is six years old; what has the director been doing in all that time?

Oh, right: Elektra and Ghost Rider. Yeah, I guess that would keep a guy pretty busy.

And then this came out of my head

To the tune of this

Dear Microsoft...

...when an application freezes, I use CTRL-ALT-DEL to open the Task Manager. I do this precisely because the application has frozen, and is not responding. If it were responding, I would use its close button to close it. Because it is not responding, I did not do this. Instead, I opened the Task Manager and pressed the button clearly labeled "End Task".

I KNOW THAT THE GODDAMN THING IS NOT RESPONDING JUST END THE FUCKING TASK DON'T GIVE ME A SECOND FUCKING WINDOW TO TELL ME THAT THE PROGRAM IS NOT RESPONDING I KNOW THAT

The Wild Card

Today's random idea for a DC character: the Joker.

Back to Ragging on Commercials

Okay, I just can't believe that there are two separate ad campaigns for two separate fast-food chains forcing me to say it, but please, please, CEASE REFERRING TO MY "KISSER". I do not call my mouth a "kisser", particularly when the activity being referred to is eating, not kissing; my friends do not call it a "kisser"; my parent's generation does not call it a "kisser", NOBODY HAS CALLED IT A FUCKING "KISSER" SINCE THE HONEYMOONERS WENT OFF THE AIR.

More specifically, I simply do not ever want to hear your growly middle-aged-to-elderly-sounding male announcer purring juicily about anyone's "kisser", especially not when he's also slobbering out syllables describing the mouth as "a round hole" or...hhhh...talking about "loading the tubes" to "fire a tasty torpedo" toward it -- why do I even have to tell you people this? You're selling sandwiches, not blowjobs; moreover, even if you were selling blowjobs, it should be very basic marketing wisdom that the customer base involved will (for the most part) not only wish to keep "gravelly-voiced older man and/or Denis Leary impersonator" out of the mental imagery, but will want also to be positioned as the party in this transaction whose mouth is not full.

Woo!

It's ready to go! There are some pages launching without content, but they've at least got menus and headers on 'em, and the really important parts -- Galleries and Articles -- are all prepared. The new Devil's Virtue should be up and running online within the next 48 hours! Squee!

The site is currently visible at http://www.sanguinus.org/devilsvirtue/Home%20-%20TDV.html until the address www.devilsvirtue.com is redirected to it. Hope you like it!

This Just In

All right, it's 7 AM and I haven't got all the Galleries ready to go yet. 8 out of 14 ain't too bad, though, and now that I've got the process down smoothly the remainder should be relatively easy. But the sun is coming up and I'm fried. Will continue tomorrow, or technically, later today.

Update Update

Note from future me:  this post and several around it relate to the previous version of TDV before I moved it all over to Blogger, in a tradeoff of fine detail control for convenience.

Spoiler: Snape is Tyler Durden

Got an unexpected invitation to a midnight showing of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", at the Alamo, naturally (are there any other theaters worth speaking of?). Just returned from that, so this is a quick initial-reaction dump, hopefully soon to be revised into an actual review. Caution, contains some spoilers for a wildly popular story published four years ago.

Because I want you to hate me, okay?

Fig. 1. Marilyn Monroe in a Slinky Dress

Short Reviews of New TV Shows

More to come as I watch them...

* Mental: It's House in a mental hospital! Only instead of an asshole, House is Patch Adams! Every bit as appealing as it sounds.

* The Goode Family: Remember that hippy-dippy teacher from Beavis and Butt-Head? This is a show about that guy's home life, for an hour. Not quite as good as it sounds.

* Don't Forget the Lyrics!: Sort of a karaoke game, dragged out to an hour-long show with Millionaire-style artificial suspense. We'll skip the obvious question of whether Wayne Brady will, at some point in the show, be required to apply pressure to the throat of a woman he considers personally unpleasant. Somewhat better than it sounds.

* The Unusuals: That guy who played Michael on Lost is in a cop show. That's all. Much duller than it sounds.

*Glee: In the actual commercial, actually put together by the actual station to actually promote this actual show, one of the characters says "Glee makes me want to claw my own face off." I have no intention of viewing this.

* I Survived a Japanese Game Show / Ma Ji De: I'm afraid to examine this show for subtext because I might find something, and it can't be good; similarly, I intend to deliberately avoid learning the translation of "Ma Ji De" for as long as possible. It's entertaining as pure spectacle, though. Of the episode I saw, the highlight in my eyes was the fact that, in a show with a good deal of untranslated incidental chatter in Japanese, they felt a need to translate "Ay dios mio".

GET OFF MY TUBES!

An overdose of the Internets for you.

Because plain old text is boring, that's why.

Another Foot Down

Whee!  And in just one day, after spending the morning writing up that long "design document" post.  Compared to my usual speeds that's pretty good!

Revamp Update & Checklist

On the surface this may appear to be an effort to keep breathless fans up to the minute on the progress of The Devil's Virtue.  Secretly, though, this is just a note to myself, posted in public with the vague hope that it will provide pressure to finish this project in a timely manner.

Joyful Noise

Andrew Wheeler over at The Post-Game Show delivers a terrifically snappy and pointed rejoinder to a recent geographically perplexing act of legislature.  Take that, the state of California!

More Wordstuff

Compliment, with an i, is the word you want when you mean positive commentary, flattery or praise: He complimented her hat, they received many compliments on the show.  In actual usage, the word sometimes takes the metaphorical meaning of improving or reflecting well on (the gold fringe tastefully compliments the red velvet), but strictly it refers to words specifically, actual spoken or written praise, and some readers may still hold this standard strongly enough to make such usage seem jarring or humorous.

Complement, with an e, means something that completes something else, makes a set with it, fills in a missing place or reinforces:  socks and shoes are natural complements to each other, as are hammer and nails, washer and dryer, or even beans and rice.  Very often, complement implies an option, something that could be left out but which enhances or transforms the experience if included; the orange sauce perfectly complements the duck, Mr. Thompson found massive drug use a perfect complement to the Vegas experience.

There are some cases in which either word might be appropriate; a dress could conceivably both compliment and complement someone's figure.  In this instance, though, you'd be better off with a less ambiguous word such as flatter or enhance.

What never works is the belt complimented the shoes, unless you mean the belt can speak, or has gold-foil lettering on it spelling "Hey, check out the hot shoes!"

Ziggy Goes a Little Too Far Sometimes

I mean, bad enough the guy goes around without pants...

(view the original cartoon)

Picking out Drapes

Continuing the big push to renovate the Devil's Virtue, working on the graphics now. Here's a preview of the new look -- be warned these are big huge images.

What's Going On?

Which is surely what everyone is clamoring to know.  The new wallpaper here is part of a big revamp project for my website (The Devil's Virtue), which is currently laboring under some pretty terrible graphics that I dunno, I guess I thought were a good idea at the time.  The new look will be much more attractive and interesting, as well as being hosted on a friend's server instead of being a fill-in-the-blanks Google page.

Once the new look is done, there's a ton of content waiting in the wings, needing to be polished and posted.  So the next month or so ought to be a pretty big one over at The Devil's Virtue.

Oh, and my head is fine.  Just got a little scar now, and a bunch of business piled up that didn't get taken care of while I was languishing on Vicodin.

This is Becoming a Habit

Hey, you want to render a bomb harmless?  You want to DEFUSE it.  DE-, remove, render ineffective; FUSE, the trigger mechanism.  D E F U S E.

To DIFFUSE something, on the other hand, is to cause it to become scattered, less dense, widely separated, even to the exent of disappearing into its surrounding medium; as for example, ink diffusing into water, or morning fog diffused in a breeze.

The easiest way to diffuse a bomb would be not to bother defusing it.

Remember Kids...

I say this from my perspective as the greatest wizard of my generation, of course.

Okay, I picked up Promethea vol. 3 by Alan Moore, and this is my review: This series has the highest quality-to-pretentiousness ratio I've ever seen, but good GRIEF that's a pretty high total volume of pretention.  I'm calling it about (Illuminatus!) x 2.5 on the pretentiometer.

"Behold, cretins, I will teach you magic in a comic book!"

Just barely justified by the fact that he does do a pretty good job with the Intro to Magic 101.

Moore actually feels more like he's making fun of his audience than Crowley did. That's some sort of literary achievement by itself.

Here's a line: "It makes you wonder if we have emotions, or if emotions have us."

Brilliant, but SO snotty.

I don't know why I'm writing an essay on this, but I'll blame it on Vicodin.

The Bil Keane Memorial Collection

of Moribund Figures of Speech Used Today Only by Advertisers and Humorists with Small Imaginations

Our collection's specimens have been carefully gathered from television, newspaper ads and small theme restaurant menus, polished and restored by our resident linguistic cleaning experts to remove tarnish and superfluous "quotation marks".

GAHHHH

A SUIT a SUIT is clothing you WEAR A SUIT no matter how fancy it is, a suite-with-an-e A SUITE IS A SET OF ROOMS, A SEQUENCE OF MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS or possibly even A SET OF RELATED SOFTWARE but it is NOT SOMETHING YOU WEAR.

Maybe this entry is a bit more outraged than is really justified but I dealt myself a pretty serious head injury last night and now I am in pain all along my spine AND I have indigestion and WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE DO YOU NOT HAVE BACKSPACE KEYS

I'm not THAT old

The April 29th, 2009 "Weekly Haul" entry at Every Day Is Like Wednesday gets a special award for the first correct use of to pore over that I've seen on the internet in years.

To pore, as a verb -- almost always used in the form "to pore over" -- means to examine or read carefully.  It's a phrase most often used for books or other printed matter.  One goes to the library and pores over ancient tomes, or sits at home poring over the newspaper.

To pour means to apply something liquid or possibly powder, something that flows at any rate, onto or into something.  It typically implies that the the substance being poured is in a container and being applied at a controlled and deliberate rate, as opposed to spilling or splashing, but it also carries the implication that a large amount is being used, as in the colloquial "the director really pours on the angst".

To pour over a book will probably ruin it.

Twit

I got a Twitter account like all the cool kids, so, another format to type things for nobody to read, yay.

More Blunt Honesty from Whataburger

Another direct quote from their own advertisement:

"When you're eating a Whataburger, you've got to brace yourself somehow."

I suppose a fresh bottle of whiskey might help.

[edit:  No, tequila.]

Surprisingly Honest for an Advertisement

Actual narration of a recent Whataburger ad, completely un-Photoshopped:

"Can you get a burger at 3:00 in the morning?"

"No.  But you can get a Whataburger."

Really?   Did they honestly pay someone to say this about their product on television?

Damn it, Internet

Palpable means able to be squeezed, or detectable by touch, such as a palpable cyst; or figuratively, easily perceived though intangible, and typically unpleasant, such as an atmosphere of palpable terror.

Palatable means acceptable -- generally, no better than acceptable -- to the taste, or to the sensibilities, as in a palatable entertainment for fans.

For fuck's sake.

Observation of Two Cockroaches

I believe I may have mentioned the roaches in our apartment.  A few days ago I happened to see a couple of them doing something I really hadn't expected.

They were bathroom roaches, and when I spotted them they were high up at the juncture of wall and ceiling.  I'd gone in there to take a shower, but I could hear that one of the neighbors was already running one, threatening a hot water shortage, so I was going to wait a few minutes and hope they didn't take too long.  But I wasn't the only one who could hear the noise.

The two roaches were a large female, about half an inch long -- I could tell the sex because she was hauling around a distended ootheca -- and a smaller bug, about a quarter of her length.  What caught my attention was the way they were huddled together: the small one was right up close to the larger one, face to face, and the larger one's antennae twitched and flicked around the smaller one, while the small one's antennae continually tapped and brushed the larger one's antennae and face.

When the shower from next door stopped running, the large female's antennae relaxed, making slower sweepes around the little one.  I stood on the toilet to get a better look, and the antennae snapped to frantic attention again, relaxing only slightly when I stood down.

When I started my own shower, the noise spurred the roaches to further action.  Very slowly and carefully, the large one began backing up, continually stroking the air around the little one and keeping it within her antenna radius, and the little one followed until they had backed up to a little pit in the ceiling stucco.  The large one then prodded the little one into the small hole, until it was almost entirely hidden inside, and then stood over the hole, still whipping her antennae around virogously.  They remained like that until I left.  When I looked back in a short while later, they were both gone.

It's difficult to interpret this behavior without falling into overly anthropomorphic language, but at the very least it's a more complex interaction than I expected from roaches, and finding a pit to hide the smaller bug in is more goal-oriented processing than I would have credited previously.  And of course, for all I know, as soon as I left she could have eaten the little one.

I set out a sort of roach trap, a pickle jar with some aromatic food for bait and a bunch of crumpled paper for hiding places, in the hope that if I provided a preferable place for the pregnant female to brood, I could trap and release her outside the apartment and away from people houses.  It didn't work, though.  She's clearly too clever for me.

As Flies to Wanton Boys

We have a cockroach problem in the apartment.  There's a colony of them actually living inside the microwave and another smaller group roaming the bathroom -- the bathroom ones must have a nest somewhere but I haven't found it.

This is of course pretty much our fault.  To begin with we're a couple of slobs -- I can be very neat and tidy when I get around to it, but I get around to it on a pretty slow cycle, usually kicked off when there are literally no dishes left outside of the sink pile.  There's more to it than that, though, I think.

When I was in kindergarten, I was sitting on a step near the school building during recess, watching a spider at work on its web.  Some other kid came up, saw what I was doing, and squashed the spider.  I don't remember the kid's face and I don't think I even knew his name then, but I remember the way the spider's glossy round abdomen was cracked open, how the stuff inside it was yellow and red and smeared out like a singularly horrendous booger, how its graceful little legs were all splayed and bent.

A teacher found me crying, and I felt even worse that it took so long to make her understand that I wasn't crying because a spider scared me, but because it died.  In retrospect I think the reason I was so upset was that I felt it was my fault.  If I hadn't drawn attention to the spider just by being curious about it, it could have gone on with its spider business unharmed.  I don't think I realized that at the time; what I do remember is having a vivid image of the spider, large and translucent, drifting away into the sky.  I don't know what kind of concept of mortality I might have had at that age, but I guess I had a pretty clear idea what a ghost was.

Around the same time -- it must have been within about the same year, because I was at the same school -- there was a field trip to a local zoo.  I don't remember much about the place except that they had a vending machine that made little wax animals right in front of your eyes, which I found even more intriguing than most of the animals -- I do recall that it was a pretty dingy and urban little zoo.

What I do remember very clearly is that at one point I was trailing a bit behind the rest of the group, but I wasn't the last in the rear.  That was another little boy, who made a strange noise behind me; I turned around, and in his hand was a horrible mess: a mass of yellow and clear ooze, with a twitching mass of red slime in its center, slime with eyes and tiny clawed feet.

Somewhere he had found a bird's egg, and broken it.  I vaguely recall that a teacher spotted us before either of us could say anything; I barely had time to register the dull stunned look on his face before the adults descended.  I imagine that whoever that kid was, he probably remembers more clearly than I do how the teachers reacted.  I just remember the dying half-made bird.

Somewhere within two or three years of the same period -- I really don't remember the order on this; it may have been before I even started school, but I'm just not sure -- we had a little black dog named Holly, who got old.  Her eyes got cloudy and weak, and her legs stiffened with arthritis.  In the end she had to be put to sleep.

I don't remember very much detail beyond that.  What I do remember is that the decision to put her down came immediately after she had snapped at, or possibly bit, either myself or my sister (I must have been at least four, then, if my sister was around and already walking).  At the time I just wasn't aware of all the signs that the dog was old and sick.  The impression I got, and which remained with me for many years, was that the dog had been taken away because she'd done one bad thing.

Many years later, when I was around 21 or 22, my girlfriend had a pet rat who was very bright and loyal.   We'd let the rat out while we lounged around, and she liked to just sit and clean her self on my girlfriend's shoulder, or pin me down by falling asleep with her head stuck perilously through one of my belt loops.  We dyed her green and told people she was a rare African green rat, and when she was in an active mood, she would eagerly come back to your hand to be flung three feet onto the mattress over and over again.

Of course the rat, too, got old.  She developed a lung infection and began to cough all night, and more often than not her muzzle was rimmed with blood.  One night she lost all her strength and could barely move, whimpering with every strained and hitching breath.  We called the vet, who had helped the rat already live as long as she had, but he regretted having only one piece of advice to offer that night.

So I took a damp cloth, and we both stroked the rat's heaving sides while I smothered her.

About a year and a half ago, I found a dead bat on the sidewalk in front of a sorority house on my way to work.  I was distracted and troubled throughout the day, and when my shift ended, I took with me a small empty box, and a bundle of paper towels.

The bat was still there, and in the winter cold, no insects had gotten to it yet.  Its body was about two inches long with a soft ginger pelt.  Its wings were neatly folded in close; on first spotting it I thought it might have been a hamster or a mouse.  Its eyes were closed.

I took a thick layer of paper towels -- however sentimental I might wax, I'm not going to actually touch a dead bat -- and bundled the cold little body into the box.  I fastened it shut with a silver elastic band, wrote a short inscription on the box, and buried it behind my apartment building.

I couldn't stand the idea of just leaving the soft, peaceful little corpse where it was, to become an object of squealing disgust when the girls from the sorority came out; and I couldn't stand either to treat it like a piece of trash, swept into the gutter with the fallen leaves and cigarette butts.  I buried it more in respect for its vacated body than for any notion of a flying rodent's soul.

So we have a roach problem in our apartment, and I'm not doing anything about it because I just don't like killing animals, even insects.  The roaches are just living; they aren't doing me any harm, and despite widespread impressions, cockroaches have never been implicated as carriers of disease -- they are in fact very fastidious in cleaning their limbs and typically home to fewer germs than a human finger.  And they just don't freak me out, personally, in small numbers; I don't find a roach any more hideous than a grasshopper or a pillbug or a honeybee, and less bothersome than a wasp or an unexpected spider.

If it weren't for other people, I wouldn't have much trouble with the roaches at all.  But we'll have to do something about them if we're ever going to have guests over, especially guests of the very friendly persuasion, and I doubt the apartment managers or our immediate neighbors would be terribly happy to find out about all our extra lodgers.

But of course, the roaches repay our tolerance by thriving, and I know that if we don't let the apartment's insect guy spray them out, they'll keep on breeding past my limit -- I don't mind seeing one or two wandering around, but dozens of them lose my sympathies pretty quickly.  But I still dither and wait, in melancholy Danish fashion, never quite getting around to the relatively simple action of sealing all the food and calling in the bug bombers.

It's not a high-flown moral principle or a philosophical position, it's just a gut reaction.  I don't like killing things just because they're alive in my presence.

Another General Rule of the Internet

A site with a homepage all about how awesome the site is offers nothing useful for free.