Acetio | Blogma

There was an electrical outlet (everyone but my father called it a "plug") near the floor, near the bathroom.
The plastic cover had cracked long ago and when my sister accidentally kicked it while running down the hall, the cover fell off in pieces. Later, at dinner, my father announced, "The Face Plate is broken." I looked at my dinner plate, wondering what he could possibly be talking about. My sister looked at me, accusingly, and I kept my mouth shut.

After dinner my father muttered to himself while he covered the hole in the drywall with bits of masking tape. Without looking up he said, "This is for the time being."

The pancakes were stacked three-high and were tender enough that I needed no knife.
I sipped from my mug and carved an inch of breakfast from the stack, then speared the bite of pancake and made figure-8 patterns in the syrup.
The inside of my cheeks were still wet with coffee when I put the fork in my mouth and allowed everything to sit for a moment.
I breathed slowly and deeply through my nose in order to smell the sweet cake and maple with a smoky hint of coffee.
I chewed slowly and continued to take deep breaths through my nose.
I closed my eyes.
I swallowed almost as slowly as I could, hastened only by the thought that I was making room for the next bite.

The thought occured to me that there was a maximum of joy one could feel at any moment and I was currently at that maximum - no more neurons could fire, no more chemicals could be released.
Then I wondered whether I was worthy of this bliss; should a man be permitted to feel such complete joy at 8:00 am?

I expressed this to my wife. She said, "I'm glad you liked the pancakes, but you should know the day will only get worse from here."

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations Of Jasper Morello [CZ subs] from Ludik on Vimeo.

From Variety:

"Elton John's Rocket Pictures hopes to make the first Jane Austen adaptation to which men will drag their girlfriends."

From the New York Times:

"The movie “Pride and Predator,” directed by Will Clark and written by Mr. Clark with Andrew Kemble and John Pape, will juxtapose brooding aristocrats with a brutal alien that lands in 1800s-era Britain, attacking residents and leaving them with neither sense nor sensibility."

Hemlock from Tyson Ibele on Vimeo.

I'm not the young man I used to be and I recently decided to undergo the event known-as a "check-up" - the event that used to be, in my life, relegated to cars and old people.
My fear was that it involved some "extreme" version of the thing where the doctor pushes up on the soft tissue between the scrotum (plural, "scrota") and the anus (plural, "ani") and asks me to "turn my head and cough".
From what I understood, as someone who avoids health care professionals in the same way that I avoid venomous snakes (I don't really think about avoiding them, but if trapped in the same room with one, I leave the room and close the door), there is a little finger condom that the doctor puts on (his finger) and proceeds to insert it into the patient's (my) anus and wiggle it around - something to do with the prostate.

A friend of mine who is a little older than me said that his doctor is a woman, and the prostate exam is not so bad. Another friend, who is a doctor (female), said that women doctors don't give prostate exams. So one of them is not being completely truthful.

I've never had to pick a doctor. My only experiences with doctors in medical situations have been in the E.R. when I was not altogether altogether, or as a child at the pediatrician's, when I was hyper-alert. So most of my memories of doctors are from when I was quite young, back when people in their 50s seemed positively ancient.
This is probably why I selected Old Doc McGuire as my doctor. He was very old, or at least he looked old: lots of wrinkles, shuffling walk, long pauses between my questions and his answers, etc. He reminded me of the pediatrician I saw when I was a kid.

Now, Old Doc McGuire used to be a vet - a veterinarian, a doctor of animals - before he decided to get his M.D.
When in vetrinary college, veterinarians have to select which of three specialties they wish to specialize in: Pets (cats and dogs), Farm Animals (cows and horses), or "Exotics" (snakes and birds). McGuire chose Farm Animals because, at the time, there was a need for people to do that kind of thing.
There was a British show called "All Creatures Great and Small" that was shown here on PBS that portrayed the life of James Herriot, a veterinarian in post-war England. I thought of that show when I went to see Old Doc McGuire.

I waited in the waiting room (naturally) and looked for a magazine that might interest me for a while (did you know that they've changed the illustration style of "Goofus and Gallant" in Highlights Magazine?), but didn't. I'm not in the habit of carrying my New Yorker with me, nor having an iPod (like everyone else) on hand at all times.
So I waited in the old-fashioned way: made sounds with my mouth while looking around, hoping maybe to have a conversation. And I didn't have to wait too long.
Another guy put down his copy of "Better Homes and Gardens" (I just read it for the articles) and began the same foot-tapping that I was engaged in and he saw me and gave the head-nod: "Hey."

"How's it going?" I said.

"Not much reading here, eh?"

"Nope. You been here before?"

"Eh?"

"You been to see McGuire before?"

"Oh, yeah. Once or twice. He's funny."

"..." I didn't know how to take that. "How do you mean?"

"Oh, you know. Old Doc McGuire's never forgotten his days pulling dead calves out of the backsides of sick cows. Sometimes I think he forgets that he's a people doctor now."

I smiled a little but didn't know what to say. The conversation continued a little after that, but to tell the truth, the other guy was kind of annoying and I was relieved when he was called in.

I had to wait a bit longer and then finally, annoying guy came out, gave me the thumbs-up and flirted with the receptionist.

I finally got called in to Old Doc McGuires inner sanctum and undressed at his command. I stood shivering and nearly-naked for a few minutes before he arrived.

After the joyless pleasantries we proceeded, and my thoughts turned to the lives of prostitutes. They are also paid to have forced intimacy with strangers. Do they have the same thoughts as doctors seeing patients?

Eventually the time came and McGuire put on the rubber glove and reached under my scrotum. He told me to "Turn your head and clomp your hoof."

I jerked my head around to his - ready to laugh at his joke, but with a tightened brow.

He wasn't laughing. Not at all.

Conversations with My Mailman III

It was a warm afternoon; the rain was ending and the Sun was coming out.

My mailman was under an awning with one bare foot on the pavement and his shoe on the mailbag. He was wringing out his sock.

I slowed when I got near him. "Step in a puddle?" I asked.

"Yeah." He said without looking up.

After a moment he noticed I was still there and he looked up, then smiled. "Oh, Hey. I thought you was someone else. Yeah, these puddles'll get ya. I was talking with a buddy of mine over there across the street and I stepped in the gutter when I was talking. He's a new dad and trying to figure out what to do with himself."

"A lot of responsibility." I offered.

"You telling me. His woman keeps telling him, 'You aint no man. You just a boy!' It's cause he doesn't do anything with himself, just watches the game and plays his Nintendo. He says to me, 'What makes a man a man?' which I don't want to hear cause he's older than me, but I tell him 'my old man was a man'. I tell ya, my dad taught me how to sew and how to cook, and you know, that don't make him no sissy. When he was in his boat and the sail gets ripped or the net gets wound up, he's got to sew it up again. Or when he's off in the woods, he's got to fix his own meal. He can't wait around for room service and wait for somebody else take care of his problem."

"So he was independent."

"Damn right! He didn't need nobody. All these young guys now, maybe they don't got their mommas cooking for them, but they just eat at McDonald's or whatever, and what's the difference? They can't take care of themselves and they're just little boys."

He began to put his sock back on.

"But you know, it's more than that. Being a man means having honor. More than anything else it's honor and respecting yourself."

"And how do you get that?" I asked.

"Well, we was arguing about that when I stepped in the puddle over there. My buddy said he figured it was giving money to his woman to pay for the kid, but I said he was thinking too small. Honor aint just doing what you're supposed to do anyway. That's called being adequate. Just doing what people need you to do is being adequate. Plenty of guys pay for their kids but don't have no honor."

"I guess it's going above and beyond what's expected of you." I suggested.

"Yeah, that's good, but even boys do that. A kid is real good at sports, does better than anyone expects, he's 'exceeding expectations' but he's still a kid."

"So what is it?" I was getting impatient for the revelation.

"It's doing what you're supposed to do, regardless of people's expectations, regardless of whether they even know you're doing it. Honor is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching."

I couldn't think of an argument or improvement to his theory and I told him so. He put on his shoe and we said goodbye.

matchstick kidbooks: children's literature, emphasizing books that promote child development

This is a list I began compiling years ago, when I knew several families with children ranging in age from 2 through mid-adolescence.

It's essentially all the books that won at least one award.

The categories correspond to a range of children's ages.
For younger ages, the higher number is the average age of child who would enjoy reading the book, while the lower number is the age of the child who would enjoy listening to the book being read.

I came across this unattributed story: A tale of Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science:

"Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."

Bitey Castle is the portfolio of an Aussie named Adam Phillips, and contains some of the highest-quality flash animations I've seen (particularly the backgrounds), the most recent of which serve to expand the world of the forest planet of Brackenwood and it's fantastic inhabitants.

Check out:
- Animation for the Brackenwood series
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