Cerebrate Good Times

It always seems to me that people get mad over the stupidest things, and then I go and get mad over something that other people would find bizarre. So it seems that anger, like laughter, is relative. What are the really idiosyncratic things you get angry about? For some reason I get mad if I get a spot on my tie or dress shirt, but I wouldn’t really care about a scratch on the car.

You know those questionnaire things that used to be sent around by email but are now typically posted on blogs? They ask your favorite breakfast cereal is, what you are currently reading, and other similarly detailed questions. Well, I was wondering what those would look like if species on different planets were viewing each other's blogs. Here are some samples of what I think it would be like. How many eyes are you using to read this? How many planets orbit your star? How many senses do you have? Do you prefer type I or type II supernovae? Is your physiology carbon-based, silicon-based, or another element? How many planets has your species colonized? Did you like the way the Harry Potter series ended?

All of you who have blogs out there (using Blogger, anyway), I'm issuing a plea. Please, please , please follow these directions to eliminate a tragic annoyance. First, go to your Dashboard and select the Settings tab. Then select the Comments menu. Then select No in the item referring to word verification. And life will be a lot easier for those of us who want to comment on your blog. The word verification is a big, fat waste of time unless you get a dozen spambot comments every day. I mean, let's face it. Most of us have something like two regular readers, and all this feature does is make me think "Hmm, what a great post. I'd like to leave a nice comment, except that I hate the word verification! No comment for you!"

I have a hunch that we all consider ourselves pretty normal in most ways. But I also have a feeling that we all eat at least one thing that others would find totally bizarre. Here are a couple culinary confessions of my own: Cheese and jam sandwiches (it has to be cheddar and grape jelly, though) Lockhart Surprise—cubed, fried spam (yes, I said spam ) in a creamy soup (there was a specific kind we could get in Korea that you can’t find here, but cream of chicken is pretty close) served over rice Fess up. What weird things do you eat?

I like to think of myself as a decent cook (among other self-appointed titles), but I do make the occasional blunder in the kitchen. The other day I put some tomato soup on the stove and got to work making some grilled cheese sandwiches. Well, I was out of counter space, so I put the lid for the margarine container on the stove. After a moment I noticed that it was quickly melting. I had turned the wrong burner on, and the tomato soup was sitting there doing nothing. So I quickly tried to take the remains of the lid off of the stove, turned off the burner, and turned on the correct one. As I was trying to remove the molten plastic from the one burner, the tomato soup started scalding, because in my haste I had turned it on too high. It was truly something you’d see in an exceptionally boring television show (i.e., a show with no sex or violence).

Do you ever have rerun dreams? I used to have the same dreams pretty often as a kid. Maybe I didn’t have enough experiences for my brain to come up with that many creative things. Anyway, last night I had a partial re-run of a dream, and then in my dream I was telling other people about the re-run dream I had just had. It was truly strange, but kind of fun.

It's not unusual to get mail for someone who used to live in your place. But there is a Justin Dixon who is apparently out there giving our address as a current address, even though it's been 7 or 8 years since he's lived there. We try returning the mail, writing "He doesn't live here, stupid! Stop sending us his crap!" on the envelopes, but the insurance companies and bill collectors seem to think it's just a ruse and keep mailing his things to us. Needless to say, if I ever meet this joker I'll have to do something awful to him while I'm still temporarily insane.