Mental Floss Friday Questionnaire

April 30, 2010 by Miriam · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Found on the Internet, My Life, Sarcasm 

I apologize for the leave of absence (again). Grad school has been eating my brain, but the end is nigh! This is my very last semester of graduate school (until I finish the CPA exam), and I’m really freaking excited to not have to write another term paper ever again!! (Unless I want to. And actually, I like research papers.)

In lieu of an actual post, here are my answers to mental_floss’s friday questionnaire.

1. I can’t remember ever walking out of a movie theater before the closing credits. Maybe I’ve blocked those bad movies out of my mind. Maybe I’m just cheap. What movies have you marched out of?

I went to see The Saint with my uncle and my two younger cousins when I was a kid. We walked out after the first 15-20 minutes because it was so awful. Maybe we just have bad taste, or maybe it really was a terrible movie.

2. My dog’s name is Bailey. Growing up, our dog was Jake and our cat was Rosie. What I’m trying to tell you is I’m not a very adventurous pet-namer. (Though I should add that Rosie was a dude, information we didn’t have during the naming process.) Have you ever had a pet with an interesting name, or a good story behind the moniker?

Weird pet names must run in my family. My mom and her sisters have all had really interesting names for their pets. Growing up, my mom had a pomeranian named Jobby (pronounced joe-bee), and her oldest sister had a cat named Nappy, who went to sleep one day and never woke up. (IRONY!) My mom’s other older sister is notorious for weird pet names–she had a dog named Bookstore when I was a kid, and now she has a dog named Rock Sand (pronounced the same as roxanne).

Right now, I own a cat named Tetsuo, who narrowly averted being called Totoro, since he has Totoro-esque markings on his belly. We named him Tetsuo as a kitten, after the character in Akira, and he ended up growing to be a monstrously-huge cat. He never evolved into proto-goo-baby, though he did suffer from eye problems recently and is now completely blind.

3. You might have read about one of the questions Miami Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland asked wide receiver Dez Bryant in an interview before the NFL Draft. It was something to the effect of, “Hey, was your mom a prostitute?” It’s hard to argue that any answer to that question would help determine how Bryant would fit in the Wildcat offense, and Ireland has since apologized. We’ve discussed bizarre interviews before, so I’ll ask a different question—what’s the most inappropriate question you’ve ever been asked in a work setting? But if you missed the earlier discussion, feel free to weigh in about your best (worst) interview story.

My HPB interview involved a running series of quotes from The Simpsons. It was kind of like being hazed to see if I would fit in to the store, but luckily I grew up with the show so I’m pretty well versed in Simpson lore. As a bonus, I threw in some Futurama quotes. The most awkward, and probably inappropriate, questions I was asked during an interview were my questions for the shift leader position at that same store. I was asked how I “should have responded” to situations that I had been involved in. It was like a mock performance evaluation (which I failed, by the way, because my answers were rather namby-pamby), and a test to see if I was in line with management. I chose poorly, apparently, because I didn’t get the position. I did get a position more suited to my abilities, though, and they made me Master of the Evil Back-Room Warehouse Dungeon Store Inventory Merchandiser.

4. Our own Ethan Trex runs a great site called Straight Cash Homey, the world’s only website devoted to random sports jerseys. I had my share of obscure player jerseys and t-shirts growing up: Yankee sluggers Kevin Maas, Jack Clark and Mike Pagliarulo come to mind. Did any of you own anything worse?

Nay. I never really collected sports memorabilia, except for that brief time in elementary school/junior high that I was into baseball cards because I’d seen The Sandlot eleventy-billion times (LOL FOR-EV-ER).

Mobile updating

March 26, 2010 by Miriam · Leave a Comment
Filed under: General 
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Now that I have a phone with sufficient. Capabilities, I can update from a mobile device. Let’s see if I actually manage to find time to update in my last weeks of grad school.

Alas!

March 13, 2010 by Miriam · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Bizzarro World, My Life, Sarcasm 
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I SCARCE believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass ;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make it more.

But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence,
But mix’d of all stuffs, vexing soul, or sense,
And of the sun his active vigour borrow,
Love’s not so pure, and abstract as they use
To say, which have no mistress but their Muse ;
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.

And yet no greater, but more eminent,
Love by the spring is grown ;
As in the firmament
Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,
Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From love’s awakened root do bud out now.

If, as in water stirr’d more circles be
Produced by one, love such additions take,
Those like so many spheres but one heaven make,
For they are all concentric unto thee ;
And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate this spring’s increase.

— Love’s Growth

I am a genius of considerable evil and ability….

January 15, 2010 by Miriam · 2 Comments
Filed under: My Life 

I needed a nicer desk, because the one I had was nice but looked pretty horrific. It was a problem that not even fresh drawer knobs could fix. Unfortunately, I don’t start my new job for another two weeks (it’s part-time work to tide me over until I graduate in May and hopefully score a real job at a CPA firm) and funds have been tight since I cleared out my savings on my cat’s medical care. So rather than go out and buy a new desk and ship this one back to Goodwill, I’ve spent the past two weeks refinishing my desk. It’s a project I’d wanted to undertake since I got the desk about 5 or 6 years ago, but I haven’t had the time until recently.

My desk is a solid wood antique that I got from my neighbor before she defected to her home state of Michigan. It was a truly beautiful desk that someone had ruined with paint–and not just any paint, but several dozen layers of white exterior gloss paint, with a few layers of primer underneath. Imagine my surprise (or not) when I started stripping the paint off and found that it had been layered so thick I could measure it with a ruler. It took approximately 3.5 days of stripping and scraping and scrubbing with denatured alcohol and steel wool, plus several days of sanding, then waiting for the freeze to pass, then several more days of staining, before I’d finally finished turning it into something that looks like a real wood desk. To put that in perspective, it normally takes me a day or less to strip old varnish or paint off of a piece of furniture this size.

When I finally stripped all of the old paint off, I discovered that not only was the desk solid wood with solid wood bottoms and held together with old-fashioned tongue-in-groove or dove-tail joints and wood glue, I discovered that the drawer fronts had a solid wood veneer. Then I discovered that evidently the previous owners (before my neighbor) had decided they didn’t like the original drawer pulls, so they filled in the old holes (poorly) and drilled new ones. The drawer fronts are a little over an inch thick, though, so two of the drawers also had a larger inset routed out to accommodate the short drawer knob screws. I had to fill those insets with wood filler with the screw in place to refit the holes for the proper screw (#8-32 1-1/4″ cabinet knob screw).

I used Citrustrip, which is an all-natural citrus-based stripper, and it was very effective at removing the old layers of paint without ruining the wood. However, with all the paint, it did take several passes–trying regular BIX chemical ultra-enviro-killing paint stripper was pretty disappointing, and smelly, and it was pretty well ineffective at removing half an inch of old shitty paint. When I finally got the paint removed, I used water-based Minwax stain, and to achieve the dark mahogany color I layered Rosewood and American Walnut (using separate layers, and not by mixing the stains), and I had to use more stain to get an even color on the desk–first layer Rosewood, two layers American Walnut, then a layer of Rosewood and a final layer of American Walnut. The paint had soaked into the wood grain in some parts, and I was unable to sufficiently strip, scrape, or sand it off, so there are a few noticeable lighter areas on the back and side of the desk, but they’re on parts that aren’t readily visible. Rather than using polyurethane or some other heavy clear top-coat, I opted to use Tung Oil, which is a natural varnish. I’ve used it in other refinishing projects, and it gives a much nicer, more subtle finish to the wood. And, to top it off, I finished off the project with some new drawer knobs, which I’m going to burnish (later) with a gold/brass color to make them stand out against the desk.

Overall, I’m pleased with the results, and I’m glad I finally refinished my desk. In future projects, I don’t think I’ll use water-based stain because it’s too heavy for my tastes–it’s got a paint-like consistency and is more opaque than traditional wood stains. Because I had to add so many layers to blend the colors and mask the areas with paint remnants, the color came out much heavier, though it didn’t obscure the wood grain. It’s just not as subtle as I’d have liked it to be. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos through the paint stripping process, though I did remember to take photos after I’d finished sanding. I was more concerned with trying to strip the paint off without going into a rage (seriously, who covers wood furniture in exterior house paint? why do people insist on ruining perfectly good furniture with ugly paint jobs?) I also couldn’t find a decent shot of my desk beforehand, but I did find a photo of my desk piled with school shit last year.

Anyway, here’s the complete photo set on flickr. Below are the before and after shots.

HIDEOUS BEFORE PHOTO OF DOOM:
DSC00177

AWESOME AFTER PHOTO OF AWESOMENESS:
DSC02369

Also, as an update to my previous post about my cat’s eye problems, I managed to get a photo of him trying to find some wildlife to eat after the freeze. Naturally, he was not amused at my intrusion (though I’m pleased that he’s doing much better). Now, though, he only goes out when I’m around to make sure he doesn’t get hurt. He does okay by himself, but he’s old and he’s only got one eye and poor depth perception–which hasn’t stopped him from fiercely attacking any living thing he finds in our back yard. I love my angry pirate cat.
DSC02357
(The freeze chased off all the wildlife, so he was greatly aggrieved that there were no small mammals for him to eat terrify “play with”.)

Shifting Gears

January 2, 2010 by Miriam · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Found on the Internet, My Life, Politics & Media 

Well, it’s a new year, and Rebel Yell is shifting gears. Evil Dwight managed to convince me to go to work for my old arch-nemesis (just kidding) The Houston Chronicle, and I’m now blogging on politics as a moderate, independent–just where you’d hope an accountant would be, right? From here on out, all of my well-thought, carefully crafted political posts will go to Political Accountability, my new Chron blog.

With my last semester of grad school coming up, and my job search getting more attention, I’m going to finally–finally–start reworking my website, and hopefully start posting more in Rebel Yell. I say that every year, but this year it’s more important, and it’s actually going to get done.

Franken-kitty

December 28, 2009 by Miriam · Leave a Comment
Filed under: My Life 
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DSC02238

This is Tetsuo. I’ve had this cat for nearly 13 years–he was a surprise find in a local (now closed) pet shop, a mellow, laid-back kitten who grew into a 19 lb. miniature jungle cat. He’s a pretty special cat, and we’ve been through a lot together since we first brought him home, a few weeks after my brother came home from the hospital after his accident. On Christmas Day, Tetsuo lost his eye to an infection.

In mid-October, I noticed that his left eye was cloudy and leaking a large amount of greenish-tinted clear discharge. I rinsed it with eye wash, but since it was the middle of a hectic semester I left it for a few days while I finished up mid-terms. Finally, I took him to the vet about three days after I first noticed it, only to find out that he had a corneal puncture that had ulcerated. To save his eye, we went through an aggressive conjunctival flap treatment.

The conjunctival flap is a process by which the cat’s third eyelid is pulled down and sutured into place. Since a cat’s cornea is essentially a clear film that is cleaned and supported by the cat’s tears, and it has no real blood vessel structure to it, any corneal woulds can quickly become infected without any means of healing in the way skin heals. If the puncture is caught quickly enough, a round of antibiotics can be given to prevent infection and ulceration. If it’s not caught quickly, the conjunctival flap procedure can be performed. The procedure brings the flap of flesh down over the puncture, which allows blood flow to reach the cornea and promote healing. It’s a very aggressive (and expensive–close to $1200 dollars for the surgeries and medications) treatment, and usually it works. Unfortunately for Tetsuo, it didn’t, but that wasn’t something we’d find out until this past week.

Just about two weeks ago, after about six weeks of having the flap in place, the vet peeled back the flap to expose the eye and allow the flesh to recede from the cornea. At first, Tetsuo’s eye looked to be healing, and it was progressing pretty well–there was a crescent of eye starting to peek out above the fleshy part, and he was obviously getting light through. However, a few days later his appetite started decreasing, and by Dec. 24 he had stopped eating altogether. I checked his eye to find that he had a large crust over flesh, and when I flushed the eye it began to ooze. By the end of the day it had turned to a blood-flecked ooze, and by Christmas morning he was lethargic and the eye had crusted over again. I took him to the emergency vet and after cleaning the eye they found that the ulcer that had previously been covered by the flap had ruptured again and become infected, which caused the interior of the eye to ooze out. Unfortunately, Tetsuo had to lose the eye, and after a final emergency surgery, he started to get better.

All told, I’ve spent close to $3000–pretty much my entire savings–on my cat. It’s a small price to pay to keep my best friend healthy, and some people may have opted to put an old cat down. But Tetsuo has been my friend for nearly 13 years now, and he’s an otherwise healthy cat with several years ahead of him. He carried me through some tough emotional times, and he’s been a faithful companion, so this was a worthy expense. I’m dreadfully broke now, but for me this is something far more priceless than any other luxury on which I might have spent my money.

Living with Perpetually Unfinished Business

December 23, 2009 by Miriam · 1 Comment
Filed under: Bizzarro World, My Life 

My brother suffered an extensive anoxic brain injury in 1997. I’ve been struggling to come up with an adequate description of what it’s like to live with him. In short, it’s a bit like living with someone who is perpetually vacillating between the ages of 10 and 13, with occasional brief flashes of lucidity in which it is realized that said individual is actually 25 and suffering from the lingering effects of brain damage. For my brother, I’m sure it’s like perpetually living in Bizarro World. For us, it’s like a brief personal Hell, punctuated by moments of hilarity–like the time my dad took him to a local sheesha bar, where my brother entertained a group of college kids who thought he was just some weird stoner kid. Everyone got a laugh, but moments like that aren’t frequent, and my brother’s mannerisms usually make even the most banal situations (like shopping for groceries) awkward.

Today, on the way home, we passed by our neighbor’s Christmas yard display. It’s an inflatable nativity créche, complete with Jesus, Mary, Joseph, some animals, and even a little roof overhang with a star to complete the scene. It’s all very cute and cartoony, but evidently the designers wanted it to have some element of realism, because Mary and Joseph have loose head-coverings that fly about in the wind, and occasionally they get tangled in the rest of the decorations. I pass by this every day, and for the past week Mary’s head scarf has been blown over her face, giving the scene a bizarre Christmas with the Taliban look about it. I admit I’m rather obsessive about neatness and organization–my own books were organized according to category, then alphabetized by author’s last name with compilations coming before the general set. (I hadn’t the time to organize them by Dewey Decimal, otherwise they would have been organized as such). My CDs are likewise categorized and alphabetized, and even the clothes in my closet are organized according to item (pants, skirts, jackets, sweaters, tops…), sleeve style (short, long, half, quarter, et al), and color. I like being organized, and when things are out of place it bothers me. Driving by that créche every day and seeing that scarf covering Mary’s face bugs me, but not enough that I would be bothered to stop and fix it. My brother said nothing, so I assumed he hadn’t noticed and didn’t care.

Now, my brother has his own obsessions, largely brought on by his brain injury, and it’s not always apparent what will trigger an obsessive event. Sometimes, he gets into my car and obsessively wipes down the dash, picks up any miniscule pieces of trash, and demands that I pull over so he can clean my car. (Even though it’s like self-inflicted torture, I’ve started keeping a little trash in my car–just crumpled paper, mostly, and an out-of-place umbrella–because yes it IS still fun to tease my younger brother.) Other times, he’ll obsessively scrub at just one spot on his arm trying to clean off some sort of unseen spot of dirt. Today, I managed to largely escape the cleaning drama when I took him to run errands with me. When we got home, though, as soon as I pulled into the garage he jumped out of the car and announced that he had to go down the street. Before I could stop him, he was already walking down the end of the driveway and heading down to the end of the street. I asked him where he was going, but he just kept saying, “I need to go down to the end of the street.” Numerous attempts to get him to come back failed, so I grabbed my purse and followed him.

Normally, a situation like this ends in disaster–he gets upset, has a tantrum, and it takes both of my parents (and occasionally the police, and once a team of EMTs) to get him calmed down enough to come back inside. We’re constantly trying to find the right balance of medications to prevent this, but it’s not always possible. So naturally, I’m really nervous when I see him walking off, and I get my mobile phone out just in case I need to call my mom or the police (dad is in Houston today with our foreign exchange student). But this time, since my brother is obviously not having any kind of outburst, I decide to follow him and see what he wants to do. We walk down the street and I ask him, “Do you want to go back so I can put on my Chucks? We’ll take a walk around the neighborhood.” I’m thinking maybe he just feels cooped up and wants to get out for a bit. He says no, though, and says he just needs to get to the end of the street. I ask him why and he tells me, “I don’t know. I just need to go to the end of the street.”

We get to the end of the street and he heads straight for the créche and I start getting nervous. Sometimes, he gets it into his head that he wants to do something juvenile, so I ask him what he wants to do thinking he might try to fart on the baby Jesus figure. (While I’m generally not opposed to laughing when he grabs the boobs of the mannequins at department stores, I do draw the line at sacrilege.) Instead, he heads straight for the Mary figure, whose head scarf has blown over her face, and pulls the scarf aside to look at what’s underneath. Now I know why he’d headed over here, and it’s the same thing that had been bothering me. The difference between my brother and a normal person, though, (and I use the term “normal” loosely) is that he lost most of his inhibitors from the frontal lobe damage. “Inhibitors” are basically those synaptic responses that develop in the brain in response to social training: it’s what tells us how to act in different social situations. I drive by my neighbor’s nativity créche every day, but I don’t get out of my car and rearrange Mary’s head scarf every time it’s blown in her face by the wind. Normal people probably wouldn’t even notice it; an obsessive personality might notice but not do anything; my brother notices that something is out of place and because he lacks those inhibitors, his automatic response is to fix whatever he sees as being out of place.

My brother didn’t fix the scarf. Whatever is missing in his brain often prevents him from finishing tasks, so he’s perpetually caught in a situation wherein he walks to his room, opens a drawer, and then forgets why he was upstairs in the first place. Or, to use a reference from popular culture, he’s similar to the underpants gnomes from South Park:

Step 1. Steal underpants.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!

The difference with my brother is that he often remembers Step 1 or Step 2, but remembering Step 3 is always nearly impossible. Today, all he knew was that there was something out of place at the end of the street, but he wasn’t sure what it was or what he should do once he got there. He shrugged and walked away from the créche, looking as though he couldn’t quite remember why he was outside, so I walked up and fixed Mary’s head scarf and headed home with my brother.

The brain is a funny thing. It’s been hard living with my brother for the last twelve years (it’ll be thirteen in April), and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some resentment and anger over lost opportunities (I was forced to choose UH over UT because I was needed at home, even though UT is a mere two hour drive from us). But lately, I’ve noticed that the more time passes, the more flashes of lucidity I see in him, and the easier it is to understand–briefly–what’s going on in his mind. Today I had one of those revelations when we went to the créche. It’s not always this easy to deal with him, but at least it makes it easier to understand what he’s going through.

Alan Stanford doesn’t like prison.

December 23, 2009 by Miriam · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Accounting, Business, News, Sarcasm, Texas 
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I spend all this time talking about politics, but my favorite subject is accounting fraud and financial scandals. So it was with great glee (okay, more like Schadenfraude) that I saw that Alan Stanford is, like, totally bummed you guys. He got caught committing fraud and now he’s really upset that he might spend the next few years in Club Fed, cooling his heels, while his investment victims try to put their lives back together during an intense recession.

Stanford is suffering from “the physical and mental strains of imprisonment,” and his lawyers say there’s not enough time for them to review court documents in time to prepare for his trial.

Perhaps Stanford should model himself after Bernie Madoff: “…Bernie is not very remorseful. He told me, ‘I made them millions of dollars. I’m doing 150 years. F— my victims.’ ”

Buck up, Stanford! If you’re going to commit fraud, you may as well be proud of it. F— those loser investors; they should be in prison with you for being so gullible, right? Right! So stop cryin’, cowboy, and start showing those jerkwad liberals and their regulating cronies who wears the trumped up laurels in this business!

Pope Pius XII–”Hitler’s Pope”–is on the fast-track to sainthood.

December 22, 2009 by Miriam · Leave a Comment
Filed under: News, Religion 
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Hitler-Youth Pope has put Hitler’s Pope on the fast track to sainthood, including him with the late Pope John Paul II and several other holy men and women declared “Venerable” in a recent decree.

This is a pretty big deal for two reasons. The first is an obvious one: Pope Pius XII is known as “Hitler’s Pope” for his failure to do more to help Jews during the Holocaust. His tenure as pope has been criticized by historians and other groups based on his actions–or lack thereof–during World War II. However, that criticism is problematic because documents related to Pius XII’s papacy are still sealed by the Vatican, and the Vatican has refused to release them. Without those documents, there’s no way of knowing the reasoning behind his actions–was he secretly supporting Hitler, or was he secretly supporting Jews with underground measures? No one knows, and no one will know until the Vatican opens up those documents to historical review.

Second, Pope Benedict was part of the Hitler Youth during World War II, and putting Pius XII on the track to sainthood seems to make a definitive statement about his politics. Naturally, this has not made the world’s Jewish population particularly comfortable, and there has been backlash from Israelis about the decision.

At this point, there’s no way this is going to look good on the Vatican unless they postpone any further actions of sanctification. Without the historical context for Pius XII’s decisions, Benedict’s decision like the sanctification of a Nazi sympathizer by a former Nazi sympathizer. Keeping the documentation sealed will only serve to bolster that view amongst the public, and amongst Jewish populations especially. This could seriously affect Jewish-Catholic relations, and further harm a church that has already been dealt a serious blow by priest sex-abuse scandals in recent years.

This amused me greatly.

December 18, 2009 by Miriam · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Bizzarro World, Books, Found on the Internet 
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From io9:

Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

…

Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don’t need to hear more about my own racial experience. I’d like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we’ve seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I’m doomed to see the same old story again and again.

[Emphasis mine.]

This is pretty much every sci-fi book I’ve ever read (or at least the vast majority of them). It’s also the majority of fantasy novels–just put “elves” or “druids/forest magic-users” in place of “people of color (aliens),” and “wizards” or “city/urban magic-users” in place of “white people (humans).” (This is the problem I had with The Obsidian Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory.) It’s a sneaky way of feeling bad about what Europeans did to native cultures, while still maintaining that Europeans are the most relatable characters and the most reliable leaders of world culture. White people assimilate into a culture, become “natives” without losing their inherent whiteness, and then manage to ingratiate themselves as leaders who rescue the native society from the horrors of savagery–because only a white person is qualified to be an effective leader, and society can’t move forward without the influence of white people (I’m looking at you, S.M. Stirling, and your Change Series).

In other words, it seems like just another means (albeit a very sneaky one) of reinforcing the fact that white people are naturally superior.

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