Trivial Pursuits

We are not a-Mused.

It's not writer's block, it's a sympathy strike.

gamely posted by Martin Marks at 10:26 in the evening // one comment by:

• Tanya

(As opposed to lintels.)

I just discovered that for the past two years my company has been paying for a hell of shiny web host, despite the fact that until I just now fixed it, our web site claimed we sold lentils. PHP 5.2.5, baby! That's not even been out two months! Poor hobbes is still stuck in the fours! And yet we still have a corporate web site with all the keywords in two-point font the same color as the background at the bottom of the page to fool freaking AltaVista.

clandestinely posted by Martin Marks at 10:44 in the evening // two comments by:

• Moss
• Martin

Sentence of the Day:

stentoriously posted by Martin Marks at 9:34 in the evening // one comment by:

• Neil

Eh, I would have had a headache anyway.

Okay, so we were down at Max's of Broadway, a bar in Fell's Point, and after ringing in several time zones worth of New Years with the appropriate number of Heavy Seas (the Winter Storm is really quite a pleasant little beverage), we were on our way back to the car. Suddenly, out of nowhere, this young gentleman was really pissed at me. (He was also, to mix my dialects a bit, really pissed in general.) The only theory that the rest of us were able to come up with after the fact was Kerry's—she thought she might have brushed up against him and he thought it was me, possibly coming on to him or something, which is plausible enough given the way drunk logic works. Anyway, he punched me. One shot to the left cheekbone. It didn't really hurt, and in fact it was a little while after that before I realized what had just happened—I just felt a lot of pressure in my face, saw some stars, all that exciting stuff.

After that, my concern was defusing the situation and getting my friends out of there. Me and my friends outnumbered the guy who hit me and his friend by about two to one, and the guys I was with were both willing and entirely able to pummel them both into the sidewalk, but I didn't want them to, for various reasons I didn't do a very good job of explaining. Fortunately, our designated driver Alex (who's about three times my size) was on the same page as me, and the combination of sheer physical presence and sobriety that he brought to the table was enough to prevent what had seemed inevitable. I shook hands with the guy who hit me (his name was Matt), he and my friend Yoni looked for my glasses (apparently they weren't enough to stop him punching me after all), Yoni found them under a car about eight feet away from where I had been standing, and I thought we were okay. One of my friends, Mende, did manage to get in a small altercation with Matt's friend (Dave—apparently the secret to remembering people's names is mild head trauma) which I didn't really see but which ended up with Mende in the gutter, having evidently busted his head on the way down. It bled a fair bit, as head wounds are prone to do, but it was a small cut and didn't require stitches or anything.

Anyway, after that we got everybody out. I felt bad that I had let a friend get hurt defending me, and even though I know I did the right thing trying to defuse the situation, I still felt very old and prudent.

The eye is fine; a bit of a bruise on the cheekbone, a couple small cuts from my glasses. No shiner. Mildly uncomfortable, but not painful. It was a good experience, honestly, or would have been if Mende hadn't gotten hurt too. I've always secretly wondered what it's like to get punched—I think a lot of people do, otherwise Chuck Palahniuk would be a lot poorer.

balefully posted by Martin Marks at 2:37 in the afternoon // three comments by:

• the old feller
• Liz
• sarah

Well, that's all my resolutions dealt with.

So far in 2008 I've been smooched and punched in the eye.

unintentionally posted by Martin Marks at 4:25 at night // five comments by:

• the old feller
• Julia
• anne
• Tanya
• Amelia

Google will come to your house and do your laundry for you.

Google now has a free 411 service. Dang.

abjectly posted by Martin Marks at 12:46 in the afternoon // two comments by:

• Moss
• Martin

So glad I'm not working today.

Apparently I really did catch up on my sleep yesterday, because after being out until like 1:30 last night, I found myself unable to sleep past seven. Crazy.

parenthetically posted by Martin Marks at 7:59 in the morning // comment? by:

240 and counting!

I had an accomplishmenty-fresh day! Woo!

begrudgingly posted by Martin Marks at 10:44 in the evening // comment? by:

Now I have a too-much-sleep headache.

Oh, sleep. How I've missed you.

I am very glad that Sasha has figured out that I don't appreciate being woken at four in the morning. I was not looking forward to having to throttle her. Actually, she seems to have developed a rather uncanny Santa-sense thing—the instant I wake up, she knows immediately and comes running. I honestly think she might be the sweetest-natured representative of any animal species I have yet encountered. When the aliens come demanding to know why Earth should be spared from their fury, we should really just introduce them to Sasha.

hesitantly posted by Martin Marks at 1:31 in the afternoon // comment? by:

"Anyway, this cake is great."

The Year in Online Video, by our beloved Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg. A thousand bonus points if you manage to watch all twelve videos in their entirety without crying. (I managed it, though by minute four of "Chocolate Rain" I was pretty close to breaking.)

hesitantly posted by Martin Marks at 3:12 in the afternoon // four comments by:

• anne
• Martin
• anne
• Martin

And yet I can't help feeling like I should have more books than this.

Bookshelf 1: English-language fiction (Adams-Vonnegut)
Bookshelf 2: English-language fiction (Vonnegut-Yehoshua), foreign-language fiction, memoirs, poetry, general non-fiction, linguistics
Built-in shelves: General reference, linguistics reference, Spanish, Russian, other languages, photography reference, art/photography, comics, religion/folklore, philosophy

Actually, I have a lot more shelf space than I realized, thanks to my thirty-six linear feet of built-in bookshelves. That's a very good thing, because those shelves are the closest I have to a pantry. (My apartment, I've noticed, has plenty of storage space in theory, but the distribution isn't exactly optimal.)

Are there any good authors whose last names start with "E"?

methodically posted by Martin Marks at 7:57 in the evening // ten comments by:

• patrick
• Martin
• Liz
• Julia
• Martin
• Liz
• Julia
• Martin
• patrick
• Nate

Where in the hell am I going to put Persepolis?

I hate trying to categorize things. It always seems so arbitrary.

ambivalently posted by Martin Marks at 6:03 in the evening // six comments by:

• Moss
• Martin
• Moss
• Martin
• Liz
• patrick

"But I'm not done vomiting!"

So I tried to make today a Decadence Friday, but as it turns out, my idea of shameless and unabashed hedonism is apparently sleeping in until 6:45. Also, I somehow managed to volunteer to come in to work tomorrow. I suck at Decadence Friday.

needlessly posted by Martin Marks at 4:23 in the afternoon // one comment by:

• Martin