there's a new sheriff in town

"Hey, did you see that CXT truck made by International. Biggest pickup/SUV ever made! Dwarfs the Hummer. A beauty. Hey I always loved the Scout. International Scout II is my baby. Where can I buy one of those? Loved it. Company says it's NOT putting those back in production. Too bad." -fortune mag

"The bad news is that this truck is unlikely to have the square bolts that so many grew to love about the old 50's Internationals. That is, of course, if you measure love by the curse words thrown at them...It looks more like a rig than a truck. It carries six tons, tows twenty and is nine feet tall. Yes, it is all wheel drive. International has entered if not jumped ahead of the SUV highway arms race." -some mag i never heard of

I find this especially interesting given the news that many SUVs are actually illegal on residential streets in many California cities. The SUVs include Chevy Suburban and Tahoe, the Range Rover, the GMC Yukon, the Toyota Land Cruiser and Sequoia, the Lincoln Navigator, the Mercedes M Class, the Porsche Cayenne S, the Hummer and the Dodge Ram 1500 pickup (with optional Hemi), per http://slate.msn.com/id/2104755/.

On a different note, I'm leaving going East for a week. Mac will be in the good hands of my lab mate and her husband. I'm looking forward to taking time off work, although I feel perpetually behind. I've been looking at a book called Getting Things Done. I think my system for tracking things I need to do is pretty good; I'm just not good at doing the things. Maybe I need to be more brutal about not doing things I don't like to do. I usually have energy for things I'm excited about. I was thinking this morning about how both my parents seem to be people who have energy to get enormous things done. I feel like I generally have little energy.

tv makes you think

kj and i passed a poster for a tv show today while we were driving to the ice cream store. i mentioned that, like the name of the show, my grandparents' names were jack and bobby.

kj: the premise of the show is interesting - what are tomorrow's future leaders doing today.
me: i've been reading a little bit of the clinton biography. the stuff he did as a kid was amazing. he went to regular summer camps and special leadership ones that involved real world-type coalition building and such. if you met him when he was 14, you would have thought, this kid is going to do something.
kj: and if you met george bush at 14?
me: even if you met him now...
kj: you'd never guess he was the leader of the free world.

1 H3art Junk Ma!l

harriet got me started on this project, writing a poem using entire subject lines of spam mail. here are her rules:

the only rule is that each line must be an actual spam subject heading in its entirety. repetition of the whole subject is permitted. [...]punctuation may be added for clarity (or what passes for clarity).

i get very little of the kind of spam that generates serendipitously lovely word combinations, so mine is many times over more pedestrian than harriet's.

lol, u just have a little little bro shanty bargepole

sorry you didn't make it.
u still angry me?
holdout, jive somnolent.
read about this
imitating
moravia. intensify pessimal raman
from mr. eli mast.
congratulations.

hey
can you come check me out,
look at this
ecclesiastic dodecahedron?

see this
interesting
afterword?

who cares?

look at this.

who cares?

[all sic]. i'll also share two of my favorite junk mail subject lines ever. the first is "viagra, it's for more than just sex." ok, what's it for exactly? increasing one's blood pressure? i would imagine marketing something directly connected to sex is pretty much the apex of the advertising job. sex is what everything else gets compared to. you're already there folks! you've already got the best tie in! i think they're only using this construction mindlessly (see entry below about what a tiresome person i can be, i mean about the inaccurate use of the word 'literally').

the other of my favorites is "go on a blind date with over 100,000 singles!" i think i've raved about this one online before. what could be a worse curse than to go on 100,000 dates, even if they weren't simultaneous? if i went on a date every day, it would take me 273 years to go on that many dates. if i lived to be a hundred years old, i'd still have to go over 4 dates per day to make it to 100,000 dates. socializing twice a week is enough to put a strain for me.

i went to gary and isabel's for a birthday dinner for gary, with kj coming as a surprise. it was lovely. i got to meet kj's squeeze too. i'm still feeling well. yay! gary and isabel have done many nice things to their townhome, and i'm feeling encouraged to do the same. first i must do some painting! that's next on my list.

homeowner needs

although i want to buy some tools for my house, this excavator is not one of them. make sure you notice the size of the cars and people right next to the machine. the scale is enormous.

i've been a bit blue lately, lonely. i think some of it is delayed/repressed frustration with the homebuying process, how hard it was and how most people do it with someone else. i have been intensely cheap since this process started, refusing to buy something at a price that i would be willing to pay if the seller weren't making so much profit. i think it's because i feel like i got such a raw deal in the homeowner process. i'm happy with the price i paid for my place, and i think it's a great home and a great investment. still, i feel that in many small ways i was undermined and misled. as a result i am especially mistrustful.

roberta and holly have separately informed me that i'm cheap (in a very supportive way, so much so that i know they must be quite serious). i know that i was raised by wolves and sometimes don't know how to provide myself with the necessities of life. i've gotten better over time. in college, julia told me about someone who wouldn't buy herself menstrual products. this kind of help is appreciated. holly and roberta convinced me that it's ok to buy a new refrigerator, that it's ok to buy a lamp, and gave me lots of other advice. i know i'm still cheap by their lights. at the same time as i try not to live like a depression baby, i'm proud of being thrifty. i do wildly detailed and extensive research before buying any product. i don't have a drawer full of string though.

today ended up being a nice day in spite of starting off blue like the last few days have been. i had a nice lunch with people from the lab. i learned a practical skill in the lab. i invited some people to go away for some unspecified future weekend, and they were excited. i interviewed two good roommate candidates. kj's coming tomorrow and we're going to a great dinner party tomorrow night. right now, things feel not so bad.