Well, I wrote this up around 6 AM this morning, but the SFTP socket or whatever was being screwy so it's just now getting posted. ENJOY.
Did I mention how greatly I dislike the Blogger redesign? Oh, I mean I'm sure it's not that bad, and I'll get used to it eventually, but right now I'm just missing my most recently updated blog links. Ah well, at least it'll keep the sidebar from sagging too much further...
Nice productive day over at Scary-Crayon with the completion of another article, though it probably won't go up until next week. But if you want to get ready for it, I suggest checking out A Random Lunch #0...because let's just say that Kain and Wild Boar Alien's adventures with cheesy grahams didn't end there...
Work on the Aeneid piece (design and HTMLwise, I mean; the thing's been written since 1999) is also coming along well and should be ready in time for posting on Thursday. Virgil is spinning so violently in his grave that he should shortly be arriving somewhere in the neighborhood of New Zealand. So if that's where you live, have your shotgun ready, 'cause Zombie Virgil's coming to dinner and he hungers for your soggy grey matter.
Speaking of things that will consume your brains and leave them to rot (I am the king of segues!), among the handful of job applications I've recently filled out was an online Blockbuster Video app that featured no less than THIRTY-SEVEN pages with a number of statements on them, each of which required you to respond by marking either "strongly disagree", "disagree", "agree", or "strongly agree" with respect to it. And these were some really stupid and/or difficult statements to assess, depending on how much thought you put into them. For example, the one that I remember most (and I'm sure I've told some of you, like Julie, this already) went as follows:
I find it maddening when the court lets guilty prisoners go free.
But see, here's the thing -- consider that if the court lets the guilty prisoner go free, either a) the prisoner ISN'T GUILTY, since according to the law one is innocent until proven guilty, and if the court is letting the prisoner go free we cannot assume a guilty verdict, or b) the prisoner was guilty and had been convicted, but is being released because he/she served his/her sentence. I picked disagree, to allow for the possibility that perhaps the prisoner really WAS guilty -- though for whatever reason wasn't convicted -- but even there I doubt I'd find it to be truly "maddening." Thirty-seven pages filled with statements like this, people.
Suffice it to say that I've been hesitant to fill out the online applications for Best Buy and Kinko's, since their apps follow the same format. Ugh.
Oh, and since I looked it up for Wendy and because I really recommend reading it, here's a link to the fulltext of Flannery O'Connor's classic short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find". This story was required reading for every fiction writing class I took at Yale, so you know it's good. Enjoy!
And that about does it for this post. I'm shocked that I managed to get through the whole thing without complaining about the heat. 'Cause it's really hot here. Sauna hot. I'm drowning in sweat and my clothes are soaked through. I miss the snow. 🙁