LOOK INTO THE MANHOLE, WHICH WAS MY ONLY ENTERTAINMENT, AND SEEK THE WALRUS OF BLACK-AND-WHITE AND BED WITH HIM.
    STROKE HIS TUSK FOR LUCK, GOOD OR BAD.
   DO NOT SEEK TO CLICK UPON THE VIRTUES, AS THEY WILL BE VISITED UPON YOU IN DUE TIME.

    Time seems to accelerate for me. I have four theories on why, and no interest in verifying any of them.

1. Each day is proportionally smaller relative to your entire life span than the day before.
   1. When you are young, perhaps only several thousand days old, each day is a sizeable percentage of your entire lifespan. When you are older, say tens of thousands of days old, each day is nearly insignificant compared to the number of days that have gone before.
2. As you get older, your brain ‘hardens’ so that new experiences skip across the surface like a stone on water and rarely sink in. When you were younger, each experience sank to the bottom immediately, making the total amount of experiences seem more frequent per day and therefore slowing the apparent passage of time.
3. Milestones become increasingly infrequent as you age, making it more difficult to note the passage of time.
   1. When you are very young, you pass from grade to grade in school, grow larger, develop secondary sexual traits, and experience many ‘firsts’. These serve to accentuate the passage of time and make them noteworthy and memorable compared to later adulthood, when change comes less often. I, for one, have had the same job, domestic partner, and basic physical shape since I was in my late twenties. Consequently, all of the time that has passed since then seems equidistant from the present to me.
4. The rate of change in our modern culture has itself slowed compared to previous decades.
   1. This one is the most fascinating to me, and I’ll talk more about this one in detail next time.

    So to what do you attribute your changing perceptions of the passage of time? Is there anything you can or have done to slow it down? Do you want it to slow down, or are you happy with your impending mortality?

    OK, enough about Odo. Next is the New Year, or maybe sooner. I’ve a bit of a bad cold right now *sniff!* and want to have a lie-down. Unfortunately for me, this is traditionally one of the busiest weeks of the year at IDSI. There’s always at least one client having major work done to their systems between Christmas and New Years, either for bizarro budgetary reasons¹ or because no one is there to notice the network is in pieces².
    So its off to install some servers. If you are in the Detroit area, watch out for the yellow Ford Focus hatch-back. The driver is doped up on vitamins B and C, decongestant, loratadine (claritin), ibuprofen and chicken broth. Mmm….liquified poultry essence…

1 – You must spend your money this year to get more money next year in corporate America. And that’s why we’re losing the war.
2 – One year we had a network in Pisces, which made their servers imaginative, sensitive, compassionate and kind but, unfortunately, also made them weak-willed and easily led. Ad-ware and viruses decimated the whole lot, which we were forced to replace with a bunch of Gemini equipment. Dual-processors all around, bitch!

Odo taught himself to pee on the toilette. This was very cool until the stupid little twit began peeing in his water dish. But it was only after he began peeing in the chrome burner cups of our old electric stove that we decided to end his exotic eliminations.     As near as I can tell, he figured that if it was round and he saw that other siamese cat’s face in it, it was a target.     It took us a while to figure out about those burner cups, too; the warm skunky smell led us to incorrectly diagnose no less than three batches of baking chicken as being spoiled.
Odo was always happy to get his nails clipped. Clipping Kyra’s nails, on the other hand, requires two people, with at least one of them wearing a heavy winter coat.
He loved boxes. I drew wheels and a hood on a cardboard box, bent over and pushed him around the house full-speed, yelling VRRROOOOMMM!!! It was also amusing to shove him butt-first into a 12-pack box and then dump him out. He’d spend five or ten minutes trying to figure out how to get back in there….

    All around me fall my friends and family, stricken by a flu we barely understand through the smudged lenses of our American science education. As far as we know, we’ve upset the gods again. Goddam dark-lord Shasta, I swear we didn’t ignore you in favor of your Bacchian brother Fanta¹! Why make my throat sore? Don’t you like my singing?
    Which reminds me. I hate Christmahanukkwanzadan. I an fully aware that I sound every but the Achmedezar Scrooge, but holiday pressure and personal history combine to fill my holidays with hate.
    When I was a child of just 13 years, on the third day of Christmahanukkwanzadan, when we recite the third principle of blackness, light the third candle on baby Jesus’ birthday cake and eagerly wait for sundown and the blessed introduction of cranberry sauce to our upper GI tract, my father put on the Santamoccasins and padded out into the leafy snow to roast the family almonds on the old DeSoto engine block. He never came back, although we later found the almonds.
    As an adult I simply find the whole thing a hassle. Every extranuclear family member thinks that they are due my nuclear family’s specific and undivided attention on their chosen day of Christmahanukkwanzadan, and I’m already annoyed by all the money I’m spending and the food I’m not eating. As I stand on the front porch of my brother-in-law’s home, stomach rumbling, the soft foam antlers drooping in front of my eyes while their not-so-soft headband digs into my temples, I curse Mohamed for telling Jesus about his damn weight loss plan.
    I just want to go to sleep.
1 – Yes, I used one god as an adjective for another god. In my defense the second god is known mainly for his carbonated mead.

    Upon logging in this evening I was ambushed by Blogger. It forced me to move SafeTinspector main blog to the new blogger system, and… what can I say? The editor still erases nbsp’s between the html and wysiwyg modes, so I still seethe. Seethe at its filthy, filthy shortcomings.
    Unlike teething, seething is not only my default state, but will never result in ruptured gums, or raptured gums for that matter. If my gums get sent straight to heaven, leaving the rest of me to toil away in global warfare, then I guess my hypothetical angelic commander will have to deal with my reluctance to bite our tenacious foes in holy combat.
    I.. want.. more.. teeth.. f*@ker.
    My brother came to call once upon a Sunday and together we lofted the microwave no less than 18 minutes; a microwave which had lived troll-like near the cat litter in the basement for a year. The cabinet above its final destination also had a shortcoming which took the form of an elongated form ill-suited to the task of fitting saucepans beneath the form of the aforementioned microwave oven.
    I can’t see myself owning a stove solely dedicated to pancake production, and THIS is why the microwave had lived, troll-like, next to the kitty litter in the basement.
    But with his meticulous, methodical, engineering brain he reduced me to an indentured porter and feverishly modified my kitchen. This all happened this past Sunday, the once upon that I onced mentioned. And the kitty litter sleeps alone, tonight.
    Christmahanukkwanzadan is almost here! Christmahanukkwanzadan is the amalgamated holiday which celebrates the time when our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’s birthday candles seemed preternaturally fuel-efficient, unpleasantly illuminating his divinely flabby body for hours on end. This prompted him to wallow in self-disgust until a lengthy telegram exchange with his pen-pal, Mohamed, who had found great success through fasting, drove Jesus to refrain from eating anything from sun-up to sun-down for a whole month. Afterwards, the starving and delirious Son of God poured libations and hosted a feast in which he spoke at length of the seven principals of blackness, though some witnesses to the event spoke to the fact that Jesus was not actually of African origin, but was instead Jewish.
    Whatever, I got some egg-nog, and any day I can mix raw eggs with booze under the auspices of a state sanctioned holiday is a good day indeed.

Click to Enlarge
    Not sure what Samantha was going for here, but I’m pretty sure the Barbie had it coming. Oh, here’s a picture of Riley:

Click to Enlarge
    Not sure what Riley was going for here, but I’m pretty sure the diaper had it coming. Oh, here’s a picture of me:

Click to… not actually enlarge.
    Not sure what I was going for here, but those shorts are approximately 9 years old and, contrary to this convincing photographic evidence, I do have feet. They are powerful beyond your ability to comprehend, and even now you wonder what they taste like. Oh, here’s a text message selling you on some earlier blog posts:

Scroll down! There was a really cool Arthbard post about lava pits and floating platforms, plus some really nice inspirational orations. You owe it to yourself.

Listen to these. They are–no crap!–samples from a CD intended to be purchased by employers looking for ways to convey appreciation and positive feedback to employees. Dilbertonian? Yes. Creepy? Yes. Hilarious? I certainly think so.

Great Job!

It’s Your Turn!

Success is Yours!
    Want more? You can actually buy a CD of this shit at The Good Cheer Company website. Frankly, I prefer my insincere acknowledgments to be more personalized than this. On the other hand, can there be a more dystopic act of affirmation than a bored man’s voice piped in over canned applause telling me how great I am? Perhaps, but only if it were accompanied by the tender ministrations of a set of scrotum electrodes firmly attached to my testicles, pumping 20 Amps of pure American alternating current into my genitals. How would your boss even give you this? Through voice mail?
    Scroll down and read Arthbard’s latest post! Now! Shut up! No, Eat a Sausage!

You know what this room needs?
A lava pit, that’s what.

    I’ve been playing Nintendo’s latest Legend of Zelda game, lately. And, while my online presence has been pretty nearly nonexistent of late, at least the land of Hyrule is safe and sound. I’m sure everyone can appreciate my efforts in this regards, as a safe, stable and democratized Hyrule is in everyone’s interest. Cut-and-run isn’t in my vocabulary, which makes its presence at the beginning of this sentence mysterious and magical.
    Anyway, I’ve had video games on my mind the past couple of weeks and therefore my first post to break my blogger hiatus is about… video games. My apologies to non-gamers; but you have to read it anyway. Its a rule.

    In the universe of The Legend of Zelda there exists a race of mountain-dwelling, rock-eating creatures called, “Gorons.” In the latest game they inhabit a dungeon in need of a good spelunking. Technically, they don’t call it a dungeon or temple as per the usual Zelda parlance. These are actually the Goron mines, where Gorons… I don’t know… mine shit.
    In grand Asian tradition you must first best them in a contest of strength before gaining access to their fabled mines. This tradition carries through to all walks of life in the far East, which makes admittance into emergency rooms along the Pacific rim far more challenging and, frequently, much more tragic than in our Western counterparts. The Gorons are big, and much stronger than a trauma center orderly, so of course there’s a trick to defeating them; you must get advice from someone who once beat a Goron.
    It turns out that the big secret is to wear a pair of big, damn, heavy, iron boots. Because, see, the heavy boots keep the Gorons from tossing your ass out of the ring during their little wrestling matches. The human in question is fairly embarrassed by his little podiatric secret and begs the player not to spill the proverbial beans.
    So, I head on up the mountain to meet me some Gorons. I strap on my iron boots–right in front of them, I might add. They don’t seem to notice. Nor do they seem suspicious about the giant metal blocks on my feet or the fact that a puny, little elfin boy is able to overpower an eight-foot-tall mountain monster. This all fits perfectly within acceptable tolerances for suspension of disbelief; at least, it does if you’re the sort of person who spends their days playing The Legend of Zelda.
    But… what struck me, personally, was that the Goron mines following my boot-assisted rasslin’ victory were largely navigable only by using those same iron boots in conjunction with a bunch of giant magnets. Together they allowed me to walk around on walls and ceilings like Lionel Richie. Which is great fun from a gameplay standpoint, but I mean… logically? Come on! The whole mine level is entirely impassable without the use of the repeatedly aforementioned set of freaky iron boots–which the Gorons don’t even know I have! So how the hell is it that this race of mountain folk came to completely base the design of their mining system around the existence of an item they presumably don’t even know exists!? Sheer madness!
    But this kind of thing is pretty much par for the course in the video game world, where an important item, rather than being locked away in a safe with the key cleverly concealed in the villain’s wallet, is typically protected by an elaborate series of pulleys and levers comprising an intricate logic puzzle whereby one transports a certain amount of water from a bucket on one side of the room to a bucket on the other side of the room in the most elaborate way possible.
    All of which sent me back to my days of playing Super Mario Brothers in my youth. Back then I always tried to think up reasonable explanations for the layouts of King Koopa’s castles, through which Mario wends his way by jumping over lava pits, dodging giant bullets, and hopping along series of floating platforms. Honestly, this is actually the kind of stuff I thought about when I was a kid¹.
    Okay, and still kind of do, obviously …
    Certainly, an evil villain such as His Royal Majesty King Koopa would want to keep meddling plumbers from foiling his rotten plans, but … Koopa does have to live in that castle, after all. All those deadly traps must get pretty tough to live with.
    Really, just imagine it. When I, Arthbard, get up at night to use the restroom I have to carefully feel my way through the dark to get there. Throw spinning blades into that equation, not to mention giant spiky blocks that rise and fall at regular intervals and, one way or another, you’re generally going to be left with a mess that someone’s got to clean up–and Koopa may no longer be in a position to help out at that point.
    Just imagine the mind-set King Koopa must have. Always sitting around obsessing over the possibility of a mustachioed Italian putting an end to his nefarious plans yet again. I mean, I’m all for home security and all, but it takes a particularly paranoid state of mind to mandate the installation of lava pits in your living room.
    Hmmm… I suspect Axl Rose may be considering the possibility. I don’t know. He just strikes me as the sort to sit in a corner, arms wrapped around knees, rocking back and forth and mumbling to himself that Slash is plotting to sneak in one day and steal away his precious music royalties.
    I’m convinced that there exists some company in the video game universe that sells, installs and maintains these elaborate security precautions. When you call them up, they probably send over someone to give you an estimate and say things like,
    ”You see over here where you’ve got your door? Yeah, well a hero could just walk right through there. What you really need there is a flaming pendulum. That’s gonna run ya’ about 3,000 rupees. And, right here? We can put an obscure logic puzzle in for you… Oh, and this big, open area over here? That’s not gonna do. For that we usually put in a ceiling that comes down on a timer to crush anybody standing under it. We’ve actually got a special on crush ceilings this week. Two-for-one deal. Get one in the kitchen, we’ll do the bathroom for free.”
    All these security precautions and video game villains still can’t ever seem to foil do-gooding protagonists.
    … Maybe Koopa should have just gone with an ADT system, instead.

1 – Which goes a long way toward explaining things. -Ed.

    Odo only lived in Heather’s bedroom for a few months, as in October of 1995 my penis convinced me to purchase a small house. Actually, my penis wanted me to get an apartment, but with great effort I made the stupid little thing accept that a home would be a better investment. And so I found myself at the age of twenty-three with sixty-five thousand dollars of debt. But my penis was happy. Smug little bastard.
    Odo was happy, too. Soon after we moved in, I adopted a female kitten about the same age as him named Kyra and the two became fast friends. This is the only picture I have from that time; both cats are about five or six months old.

Odo’s attention span was about twenty seconds. At this point I had not yet begun using my second floor due to its cramped, peaked ceiling and lack of central air. I would punish the cats by sending them upstairs.     ”Odo! GIT up-stairs! NOW!”     Odo would slink upstairs muttering; clearly upset. Within twenty seconds he’d come sauntering back down, ears and tail perked up happily. Kyra would remain up there for about a minute or two and then sneak down with ears and tail as close to the ground as possible. Such a sensitive lass.

Next: I guess this is where the toms in this house spray.

Odo the Kitten and Heather. Click to zoom in.
    At the age of 19, almost four years after telling me that she wouldn’t date me because I was too old for her, Heather came for me. It was an indirect pursuit at best, a third-hand request* for an escort to see the movie “Apollo 13.” I was, at the time, involved in a strained relationship with a much older woman**.
    Having always carried a torch for Heather, I quickly ended the aforementioned relationship and began my life with her. We were probably in love before we even finished that second first date. A few months later, as fall set in, we were accompanying Steve Valente on a futile mission to find a stud for his Siamese named Toomi.
    Steve was a massive Italian man who’d moved to Detroit from New York in order to work for EDS but, after a single round of layoffs, ended up working with me at IDSI. A lonely man, his Stallone-esque accent and brooding appearance caused the skittish Detroit girls to shy away from him and he found none of his New York courting methods worked here. Completely incompatible. He eventually threw in the towel and moved back to Rochester where he is now a happy husband and father of at least three children***.
    Several years before meeting that fate, however, Heather chauffered him to a breeder he’d located in a seedy area of Detroit. He wished to provide his regal lady cat Toomi with a kitten or two to keep her company. I accompanied him for moral support, and together we all entered the aging brick bungalow where I met Odo.
    The family that ran the small cattery out of their house were a bit grubby on the whole. What could only be the back seat of a Ford Aerostar stood as the front porch bench and a fly buzzed torpidly out into the cold air as we stepped past the torn screen door and into the warm. Happy faced and besmudged children bounced roly-poly through the house chasing and being chased by small herds of cats. The children’s father sat with his back to us, partially reclined in a partially shredded Laz-E-Boy silently watching a television which radiated local news from its rickety corner TV-stand. Throughout our entire visit the only movement he exhibited involved cats scampering across him. I tentatively retain the assumption that he was, in fact, still alive.
    The lady of the house was breeding Siamese cats to pay her way through school, a refreshing change from the pole dancing customary amongst most Detroit coeds. A quick inventory of her incisors (she had one) and a survey of her handsome face showed that traditional career avenues involving stiletto heels and overpriced cocktails were, sadly, closed to her. The cats, however, seemed very nice on the whole.
    Steve, a big softy who doted on his beloved Toomi, didn’t feel good about leaving her there to be bred. But he noted that the cats seemed healthier than the humans dwelling in that house, and in particular there was one kitten which caught my eye. They children were calling him “coyboy,” but I’m still not sure why.
    Steve saw that I really liked the little pot-bellied critter.
    ”That was a really good kitten,” he told me as we climbed back into the car, “You should get him.”
    I agreed with him in principal, but I was still living at home and my step-father wanted no cats. Forbade them, as a matter of fact. Something about bursitis. In any case, it was Heather who purchased my kitten and volunteered to house him in her room until such time as I had a place of my own.
    The picture you see above was taken a few weeks after that. I named him Odo. His arm isn’t really freakishly long, that was just a lucky shot. See, cats are held together by a loose arrangement of sub-dermal rubber bands, allowing them to assume all sorts of bizarre kitty topological arrangements.
    At this time his voice was too large for his body. His little butt would pop out like a turkey timer every time he went, “WOW!”

* – By way of her brother, a high-school classmate of mine.
** – A divorcee who lived in San Fransisco. But that’s a story for another day
*** – I’ve lost touch with him some four years ago. He may have spawned again, as I have.