My mom writes:
“We had a guy come into the hospital today, who had a fractured penis. I asked the doctor how something like that would happen. “Was he just being vigorous or did he have someone “enthusiastic” or gymnastic?”
“The doctor said it is usually (to put it delicately) caused by putting somewhere he shouldn’t be putting it. Also, a lot of people into S&M get penile fractures. Don’t ask me how; maybe somebody is bending it in weird positions.
“So don’t be putting it in a bottle or a harness or twisting it around backwards or anything cause with the blood vessels. It is hard to get it to work again.
“Sometimes the penile implants bend in weird ways and break them. You should see those things: they are big old pieces of soft hose with an end that looks like a cake decorator tip, and hard plastic side hoses that fit somewhere, AND a bulb like the nose sniffers for babies. When it’s time to use it you have to poke on your stomach to blow it up.
“I can’t figure out the optimum time to start pumping up the goober… I mean putting on a condom is intrusive… how would you go about poking on the bulb in your groin to crank up the works?
“Can you picture the whole scenario? “Just a second, honeybunch, while I inflate”?
“Could you just roll over and do it clandestinely? How do you let the air out? Is it like a float? Or if you go too fast do you do like a balloon and fly around the room?
“How romantic.”
Microsoft Outlook tries to be too smart for its own good. Its willingness to execute scripts and display attachments that only-heaven-knows-who may’ve sent is the reason the world heard of the MELISSA and ILOVEYOU email worms.
If you or someone you know is forced to use this steenking pile of excuse for software, by corporate policy or otherwise, you might direct them to two ways I found to give Outlook a well-deserved lobotomy: a registry hack from Microsoft to force Outlook to display email as plain text, and a different solution from Slipstick Systems that uses Outlook’s Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) implementation for good rather than evil.
Tara took a great photo of a street sign in Seattle.
When I was a wild young rebel [long hair and listened to KMFDM, grr!], we used to “correct” street signs, using black electrical tape.
“WATCH FOR LICE ON BRIDGE”
Check out the new “unofficial” beta release of Adium, complete with a Brushed Metal theme.
After tabbed message windows, the next best thing about Adium is that it supports overriding background colors and fonts. Since I prefer a nasty green-on-black terminal-style message window, people using official AIM clients tend to squeal in pain when I message them.
For those of you shopping for a new home: if you are considering purchasing a “Home Buyer’s Warranty” on the appliances in your new home, stop now.
Home Buyer’s Warranties are a scam.
The contracts come with so many fine-print loopholes, 2-10 will almost never have to pay a dime when it comes to fixing anything. In my case, the deductible cost about the same as repair visit would normally cost. The repairman took one look at my oven and suggested I replace it, due to the inner lining being rusted out. 2-10 refused to pay replacement costs, because they don’t cover damage “due to rust, within the first 30 days of closing.”
Save your money and put it in a “rainy day” savings account, rather than falling into the Home Buyer’s Warranty Scam.
Another wisdom tooth is gone from my head. I’m very disturbed to be losing chunks of my skull, but it had to go, as it had grown in slightly crooked and was stressing my other teeth. The whole procedure took about ten minutes, and afterwards I felt a lot better than I did a few weeks back, when the tooth started bothering me.
If you’re in the Atlanta area and are looking for a good dentist, Dr. Ken Berger is very good.
And we’re finally, mostly, moved in.
Rather than spending eight hours and risking permanent back injury, Laura and I hired movers. They got the job done in about two hours, and were well worth the expense.
The house is still filled with boxes and neither of us knows where things are, but I’m sure we’ll work that out soon.
This morning we woke up to 50F temperatures, colder inside the house than outside. After much obscenity, I realized that yes, I really was lighting the pilot light correctly, and no, the pilot light simply wasn’t going to stay lit. A call to a repairman confirmed that the ‘thermocoupler’ had failed. A few hours and $80 later, we had heat again.
The DSL has been spotty all week. The tech suggested I plug into the NID to eliminate a house wiring problem. Unfortunately, there was no NID. The telephone wires ran straight from the pole, down through a vent, into the basement. Daniel came over this afternoon, and we discovered that the Red Russian Army had secretly visited the US in 1944, just to install the telephone wiring in the crawlspace of my house. They used the finest technology Mother Russia could create in 1944.
In Soviet Russia, the telephones … nevermind.
Daniel and I ran a new segment of phone cable from the NIU [the fancy term for an ugly black hunk of Bakelite bolted onto the subfloor] to a new phone jack just for the DSL modem. I’ll check with Speakeasy tomorrow to see if this helped out any.
Next up, repairing [or hopefully, mercifully] replacing the Stove That Time And Degreaser Forgot. The people who owned this house before me seemed to be nice folks. It just seems they’ve never heard of cleaning under the cook surface. Yes, the orangey chunk is a bit of cheese left over from someone’s pizza, circa 1976.
