Apparently, the bird flu has been detected in Turkey.
Which is sobering, but also deliciously full of word-based irony. I mean, if there's one place you'd expect there to be a bird flu, it would be a country named Turkey.
Up to 10,000 dead in New Orleans!!
Okay, Katrina">less than 2,000 throughout the coastal states.
Murder, rape, anarchy rampant in the Superdome!
Okay, mostly rumor. Six died.
New Orleans water is a soupy, toxic mix that will kill you if you look at it funny!
Okay, that may be a Katrina tad of an exaggeration.
I expect to see more of this downgrading in the coming weeks and months.
Don't get me wrong, Katrina was a disaster that wrought devastation along the Gulf Coast (it was a hurricane. . . HELLOOOO!), but I really have to wonder how much of a role the media played in making it sound like far more of a hell hole than it actually is turning out to be, and is hence responsible for a lot of the early hysteria.
So, I just took a gi-normous poop. It was one of those bowel creations that can actually fill one with pride. It was so massive, in fact, that I carefully dropped the toilet paper around the specimen so that, when I stood up and turned around, I could inspect my work in its entirety, unimpeded by any visual distractions like toilet paper. It was truly gargantuan. I felt almost guilty about flushing it. Seemed like such a waste.
But, that's not the point of this post.
When I finally acquiesced to the pressing release needs of my digestive tract, I already really had to go. So it was a little bit irritating when I arrived at the bathroom, only to find both stalls already occupied. The only other bathroom on this floor is on the other end of the building, which, if you know the IBM Rochester facility, you know it's a good distance to hoof it. But, I really had to go, so. . .
About halfway there, I started wondering if I was going to make it. I even had to adjust my walking style to ensure no fecal escapees would attempt to jump the rectal fence. And I really started to worry that, upon arriving at the alternative bathroom, the stalls would be occupied. THEN what would I do? I mean, things were getting pretty dire.
And it occurred to me, as I entertained thoughts of possibly having to crap in a urinal, that human beings are the only animals on earth that actually have this problem. I mean animals, by and large, basically shit when and where they want. If you've ever passed a group of cows in the countryside, you'll see about 1/10 of them either pissing a stream or releasing large, ploppy masses on the ground, totally at ease with their public excretions. Now THAT'S freedom.
Now, I'm not advocating some sort of excremental anarchy for the human race. Of course not. That would be gross. The current system, as it stands, is both wise in terms of sanitation and societal acceptance. Still, it seems a touch unfair that we humans have set such restrictions on ourselves. Just minutes ago, I was in considerable discomfort, simply because we humans have dictated that there's a time and a place for expelling bodily waste, and those places sometimes exist entirely too far apart, particularly when the need for release is greatest.
I guess it just would have been nice if, during our evolution and rise to civilization, we humans had experimented with other options for bodily waste disposal.
I mean, consider our nearest genetic cousins, the primates. They share about 98.5 percent of our genetic make-up, yet monkeys are free to do simply fantastic things with their excrement. Visit any monkey exhibit in a zoo and, in addition to fornication that would make Hugh Hefner blush, they also fling poo with near reckless abandon. What is it about that 1.5 percent genetic differential that makes us so particular about where we deposit our waste?
Back in 1994, during a visit to the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, my family and I were standing behind a large glass observation window overlooking the gorilla pen. Magnificent beasts, gorillas. Large and intimidating, with thoughtful-looking eyes. And a near-Freudian fascination with their own feces.
In just the 10 minutes of us standing there watching them, we saw gorillas pick deeply into their own anuses, roll little balls of poop in their hands and throw said balls at one another in what I could only surmise was a primitive form of balloon fight.
And then the gorilla handlers released the feared alpha-male, silver back gorilla into the pen, sending the lesser gorillas scattering and abandoning their poopy balloon war. The big silver back stood there proudly, alone in front of the admiring human throng behind the glass shield. He cut quite a fiercesome figure there in the gorilla pen. He was the master!
And to apparently prove his point, that proud, powerful silver back gorilla. . . cupped his right hand below his butthole, and proceeded to crap a very flourescent green soft serve into his awaiting mitt. Which he then placed, quite unhesitantly, into his own mouth.
There are some sounds that stick with you all your life and, let me tell you, the sound of over thirty Japanese onlookers groaning in disgust, with the audible retching of your brother mixed in for good measure, is one such sound.
For his part, the mighty silver back seemed quite pleased by the crowd reaction, and he continued to squish his own feces in his mouth for many more seconds, before I, too, turned away from the disgusting spectacle. To this day, I'm not sure whether that gorilla swallowed his poop or not, but I tend to suspect that he did.
Which, you know, GOOD FOR HIM! That gorilla was an innovator! A trailblazer for his kind! Several hundred genetic mutations from now, he and his ilk will inherit the earth, what with their larger brains and their ability to continually eat and recycle their own poop. Costly water treatment facilities will be an unheard of concept for gorilla sapiens, and all will have more than enough to eat. Hunger will be as alien to them as diapers and toilets.
And all because one brave silver back gorilla in a Tokyo zoo said "I'm going to try this," and ate his own green poop. Would that we humans had tried something like that during our own early development, we never would have had to worry about losing out to the gorilla sapiens 4 million years from now.
One of the numerous disadvantages of having a desk job--in addition to the lack of exercise and mind-numbing sensory deprivation of not having a window--is that you just get too caught up on current events.
You wouldn't think that's a bad thing, but it kind of is, because I find myself developing opinions on things that have practically no bearing whatsoever on my existence.
Why, for example, should I trouble myself and waste perfectly good neurons on anything remotely related to the daily goings-on of Britney Spears? Why would I care what Kanye West has to say about anything? So what if Katie Holmes is having Tom Cruise's child? And yet I find myself clicking on and reading such stories.
And then there's politics. If there's one thing that's become crystal clear to me over the past couple years, it's that politics have become almost a religion for a LOT of people. Mostly people who are online. And a LOT of those people take themselves entirely too seriously.
So it's been lately that I find myself at work, with about eight work-related programs running, from Word Pro, to Lotus Notes, to Adobe and several SameTime and MSN windows, and about three Internet Explorer windows open to varying pages ranging from popular nonsense like TomKat to MSNBC.com news, to political pages like Instapundit and Daily Kos and the infinite flame wars on Fark.com.
And, the thing I'm finding is, I'm not sure all this electronic information flow is all that good for me. I almost feel unhealthy at the end of any given work day. Granted, part of that is the sedentary lifestyle of the office workplace, even though I sneak a few sets of push-ups when I'm alone in my office.
It's just too much, quite frankly. And I find that it's not simply a matter of "not tuning in," because the temptation of having the world of information at my fingertips is just too great, and if I didn't have it I imagine work would be that much more unbearable.
Still, at the end of the day, I have about eight million things going through my head, none of which is all that useful. None of which give me the skills I need to remodel my basement, or re-grout the soap dish I accidently yanked out of the bathroom wall last week. In other words, despite all this information I'm privvy to, I don't think I'm becoming all that much better of a person. I'm just kind of sitting here, wasting away, absorbing gobs of online information that, when I boil it down, is basically just garbage to me, personally.
I sometimes find myself driving home after work, and I'll see construction crews working on the highway project through town, and I'll think "you know, that really doesn't look all that bad." At least they're outside. At least they're doing work that seems more tangible than most of the stuff I do. At least their thoughts are probably more focused on their own lives, rather than on Karl Rove's role in the Valerie Plame "scandal," or whether Jessica Simpson is back on the market.
Sometimes, I think my mind really starts screaming at me that I need some kind of change. A new job? A new hobby? Less Internet? I don't know. But, SOMETHING has to change. I don't know how to describe exactly how I feel. Overloaded? Broken?
Something along those lines.
So, I just received this e-mail from the main guy at the company I work for. Keep in mind, I work offsite from MSP Communications, down in IBM Rochester, so I'm not the culprit.
Will the individual reading New York magazine in the men's bathroom please return and clean up after yourself?
Thank you!
G
It's fall, or autumn or, as they call it in Hawaii, "sunny, with a chance of rain."
Yes, it's that time of the year, once again, when we Minnesotans must steel ourselves for the coming onslaught of winter. Before the first frozen flakes of snow descend and begin to blanket our fair state, we have to address an annual inconvenience that affects almost all of us.
I refer, of course, to leaves. Oh, sure, in April, we simply can't wait for those tentative tree buds to soak in the requisite amount of sun-given heat for them to burst forth in a green celebration of spring. We thirst for that moment of nascent greenery.
Come June, however, we've already become indifferent to the leaves we so yearned for just a scant couple months earlier. Yeah, they're green. Yeah, they're everywhere. Yeah, they're better than snow and ice. Booorring!
By August, leaves just seem like they'll always be there. Plus, it's swelteringly hot out, so we spend most of our time indoors, bathed in air conditioned splendor. We no longer go out and visit the leaves. We don't even call. This makes the leaves sad.
After one final grace month of September, the leaves, now deeply depressed by our lack of attention, and determined to wow us one last time, start to change color. Suddenly, we all remember the leaves again. We marvel at the majesty of their newfound hues. No longer simply green, they blaze forth in bright yellow, orange and red. And we also realize that the leaves are planning on leaving us, like they're going off to college down south somewhere.
And boy do they leave us. They plummet to the ground practically over night. It's like they all get together, plan a date and time, and on the prescribed date, they hold hands and just jump. And you walk out of your house the next morning, and you think "awwww, NUTS!"
I hate raking leaves. As household chores go, raking leaves ranks just above cleaning the litter box with my tongue, and just below cleaning the toilet with my tongue. Not that I actually do either of those things, but if I did, raking leaves would fall between those two distasteful imaginary chores.
Last year, on the weekend when I finally got around to raking my lawn, it was roughly 40 degrees out, and we had just experienced a fairly large rain. For those of you who don't know leaf math, wet leaves have about three times the mass of dry, crunchy leaves. Plus, I had to scoot along my rooftop, cleaning the gutters of over seven months of icky detritus, 70 percent of which consisted of new species of life, 100 percent of which felt suspiciously like phlegm.
When the last leaf was raked, I had 16 huge lawn garbage bags packed to their tops with leaves, and I STILL had to transport those bags to the dump. And, I'm here to tell you, 16 lawn garbage bags stuffed with we leaves looks NOTHING like the much-welcomed leaves of April and May.
Of course, come January, I'll be looking out the windows at the frozen earth, wishing for all the world that there are leaves on the trees. And, come April, the cycle will begin all over again.
We Minnesotans are kind of dumb that way.
