Some questions.

what brand do you smoke?

I smoke Drum tobacco. On the packet is written Halfzware Shag, amusingly. Drum is a traditional Dutch blend of a variety of tobaccos and, I daresay, a quality smoke, preferable to most other brands of loose tobacco and certainly more agreeable than tailor-made cigarettes.

In the final analysis, of course, they're all as fatal as each other.

monkey monkey monkey

Yami, is that you? Here's a weblog devoted to monkeys (and MetaFilter in-jokes).

1. A dry desert wind is like a continuous peck on the cheek from your great-aunt Esmeralda.
2. Like a clam, I form pearls around tiny grains of dust caught up in my tender membranes. But my pearls are made of boogers.
3. Romanticizing the heavy, humid, begrudgingly-dragging-themselves-along-with-continual-protest winds of my youth (the logical extension of no. 1) is a Very Bad Sign.

So I'm back, and I would tell you the stories of my week through the lens of bruises and scratches and bangs, but after a hasty move on Saturday I still have an apartment covered in boxes of crap and no food in the kitchen. Stories will just have to wait.

Guestbloggers, you're safe here until at least Wednesday evening, when the data analysis is due and my summer bumhood begins in earnest.

Internet refrigerator, microwave, washer

Remember, there's no such thing as an inappropriate use of technology, only an insufficient use of technology.

Though I've only played Dance Dance Revolution a few times, I really enjoyed it. It felt like I'd finally discovered what I'd been training for during all those years of step aerobics classes.

Now, a SoCal school is letting kids play in PE class. Lucky bastards.

(But, frankly, it wouldn't have helped me then. I was long out of high school before I learned rhythm and coordination.)

"An unemployed Italian man from Turin has been charged with fraud, harassment and damage to property after allegedly orchestrating at least 500 car crashes in a doomed effort to meet young women."

So I've been more or less patiently waiting for UPS to deliver a package that was scheduled to arrive yesterday. Tracking it on their site (yay the web) I saw it was out for delivery as originally scheduled but was bounced back to the hub noting "correct street #" needed. Checking that my email receipt from the retailer had the correct address, I called UPS.

The customer service rep verified that the address they had was correct, but on hearing the number was 2020, asked if it was on the corner. "No," I said. "Well, most of the time 2020 is on the corner," she said. "It's common knowledge," as if it were reasonable and justifiable for a delivery company to give up looking for an address if it didn't support so faulty a heuristic as that a number that's an even hundred must be on a street corner.

Note to customer service reps everywhere: when your company really did screw up, the right response is to say "sorry, we screwed up." and to make amends. The wrong response is to suggest that the customer is unreasonable to have possibly expected the company to not screw up.

Unidentified floating object washes up on South Carolina beach.

Sunday is cleaning day over here.

I take a very, shall we say, er, efficient attitude toward cleaning. If it doesn't look dirty, it doesn't need to be cleaned. If it looks slightly untidy but not downright messy, it doesn't need to be cleaned unless your parents are coming. If it is messy but not embarrassingly so, it doesn't need to be cleaned unless your friends are coming. When it becomes messy enough to be bothersome, that's when you clean. Sometimes this takes a month; sometimes it takes a few days, but in any case, you can live perfectly well in it until it is time to clean (because if you couldn't, then it would be bothersomely messy), and you will end up cleaning far less often.

I understand that not everyone is this casual, so while my room is kept less-than-pristine, the common areas are always presentable. Today my roommate finishes breakfast, looks around, and says, "God, we need to clean up in here." I look around and wonder what on earth she's talking about.

Apparently it is filthy in here. Mind you, we did a large-scale cleaning last week (as in spending the whole day doing it, cleaning the carpet and all). We have a few dishes in the sink, some keys and books on the coffee table, mail on the counter, a few flecks on the floor. This is to her disgusting beyond measure and she can't believe we've let it go for this long. I look on questioningly as she proceeds to dust the living room (dust? after a week?) and decide to tackle the dishes, that being the one thing I am sure is dirty. Somewhere in there the bathrooms get cleaned, the house dusted and vacuumed, the glass surfaces shined...

Aside from the stuff on the coffee table, it looks exactly the same as it did before. Am I going to say anything? Not a word...

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Spam Mimic: text to spam steganography.

...and it's starting right here.

Here's something else for the physics buffs: how does stuff manage to expand in transit from a dorm room to a bedroom?

My dorm room was about the same size as the bedroom I have in the apartment (maybe slightly larger, but the closet was smaller, so it evens out). My roommate had the majority of the furniture and stuff, and even so, both our sets of stuff fit comfortably. Now, while the bed is twice the size here, there is only one desk, one dresser, and one nightstand, and no loveseat or fishtank. My kitchen things are in the kitchen, my bathroom things in the bathroom (the things from my mother's house are mainly stuck in boxes in the closet). I'm reasonably sure none of it has sublimated, and yet my stuff fills the room and threatens to spill over.

I don't think my physics class ever covered this one.