Weird

The game’s afoot

Posted on by Patrick

I’m not going to say too much about it yet — I’m still in the open­ing moments — but it seems that some pret­ty seri­ous lib­er­ties have been tak­en with the copy­right on a poem I had pub­lished way back in 1997. I found out about it by acci­dent, from a rel­a­tive in Chi­na, and ini­tial­ly assumed that it was part of the intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty pira­cy that Chi­na is, fair­ly or unfair­ly, known for.

Nope. Turns out the copy­right infringe­ment hap­pened in my own province. In the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem, no less.

So now I’m look­ing deep­er, and try­ing to fig­ure out what my next set of steps should be.

#

As for tonight, I’m writ­ing, and then I’ll be run­ning, and prob­a­bly writ­ing a bit more lat­er. I need to find out about late 17th cen­tu­ry embalm­ing prac­tices — did they use cam­phor, for instance? — and funer­al rites. Any suggestions?

Interesting, to say the least

Posted on by Patrick

I got a new watch from my wife for my birth­day last month. It’s a great watch, and I like it rather a lot.

My new watch

Today on my lunch break, for no oth­er rea­son than “because I’m a nerd”, I punched my watch’s ser­i­al num­ber into Google, expect­ing to find — I don’t know, maybe its incept date*. Noth­ing much, anyways.

Instead, I found a US Mar­shal for­fei­ture auc­tion list­ing that includ­ed my watch.

My watch's lot

That’s it in the bot­tom mid­dle of the lot.

The things you learn.

[update] Appar­ent­ly, the auc­tion com­pa­ny in ques­tion “sells all the jewelry[etc.] seized and for­feit­ed nation­al­ly for the U.S. Mar­shals Ser­vice.” So… do I have a drug deal­er’s watch? Was it seized in a tax fortei­ture? The rather shal­low mys­tery deep­ens a very lit­tle bit.

[2nd update] As it turns out, there’s no mys­tery here. What I took to be a unique ser­i­al num­ber was appar­ent­ly in fact a glob­al prod­uct num­ber. So it was­n’t my watch in the prop­er­ty auc­tion; just a watch just like mine.
____

* See, there’s that nerd thing creep­ing in again.

A blast from the past

Posted on by Patrick

…in more ways than one.

When I was in Uni­ver­si­ty, there was a girl I knew that had a book called 10,000 Dreams Inter­pret­ed*. She point­ed one out to me, and it became my favourite dream ever:

To see a horse in human flesh, descend­ing on a ham­mock through the air, and as it nears your house is meta­mor­phosed into a man, and he approach­es your door and throws some­thing at you which seems to be rub­ber but turns into great bees, denotes mis­car­riage of hopes and use­less endeav­ors to regain lost valu­ables. To see ani­mals in human flesh, sig­ni­fies great advance­ment to the dream­er, and new friends will be made by mod­est wear­ing of well-earned hon­ors. If the human flesh appears dis­eased or freck­led, the mis­car­riage of well-laid plans is denoted.

– source

Lit­tle did I know — until today — that that book was first pub­lished in 1901, and that dream’s been haunt­ing peo­ples’ minds ever since then.

____

* Or some­thing to that effect. Come on, this was 15+ years ago. Some­times I have a hard time remem­ber­ing where I put the cord­less phone ten min­utes ago.**

** Until it rings.

Wait, what?

Posted on by Patrick


“Grand Design” Spi­ral Galaxy M81
From TopTechWriter.US’s Flickr photostream.

Via a cow-ork­er: Our world* may be a giant holo­gram.

“…[Y]ou can think of the uni­verse as a sphere whose out­er sur­face is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each con­tain­ing one bit of information.”

Well, maybe you can. I can’t. Not yet, anyways.

____

* If by “world” we mean “Uni­verse”.

On and off my meds

Posted on by Patrick

Days I’ve been hic­cup­ing: 9.

I had my wis­dom teeth removed on May 10th; since then I’ve had on-and-off bouts of hic­cup­ing last­ing, oh, three or four hours at a stretch. It’s real­ly quite dis­tress­ing. Okay, it’s !@#$ing irri­tat­ing. You wormed it out of me.

I’ve been to two doc­tors about it. The first one sug­gest­ed a low dosage of Hal­dol, which is an anti-psy­chot­ic (real­ly). That did­n’t seem to make a whit of dif­fer­ence, though, and so the next one pre­scribed some­thing else, a mus­cle relax­ant used to treat mul­ti­ple scel­ro­sis patients. He also pre­scribed a tiger-striped antibi­ot­ic for what appears to be an infec­tion that’s got my right cheek puffed out almost com­i­cal­ly. (Well, oth­ers might find it com­i­cal. Since it’s also ten­der, I’m a lit­tle less amused by it.)

So here’s hop­ing that the new drug stops my hic­cup­ing. It’s had some effect already; right now I’m hic­cup­ing, but for an hour or so while I played Lego Star Wars ear­li­er today, I was fine.

“I’m there right now”

Posted on by Patrick

Warn­ing: Freaky spooky con­tent ahead. Don’t click unless you like the hee­bie-jee­bies (or the jib­blies, if you’re a Strong Bad fan).

Today, on YouTube, I dis­cov­ered two of the eeri­est moments com­mit­ted to cel­lu­loid, and they’re both from David Lynch films.

Chrono­log­i­cal­ly first, here’s a snip from Lost High­way:

I have the sound­track to this film. The song that brack­ets the clip is titled “Some­thing Wicked This Way Comes”, IIRC.

Aaaaaaaaaaand after that bit of spook­i­ness, this one should seem down­right nor­mal. From Mul­hol­land Dr.:

The singer is named Rebekah Del Rio, and there’s quite the sto­ry behind that song and its appear­ance in Mul­hol­land Dr.

These two clips have some­thing in com­mon: When I saw the respec­tive films that they come from, each one was the one piece that stuck with me the most. Both had that spooky qual­i­ty that just embed­ded them in my mind.