Julie over at the Skinny Daily has an excellent post up about scars . So I thought I would chime in on the subject.

Just above my right eyebrow I have a scar. It is about an inch long and runs at a perfect 45-degree angle up toward the center of my forehead. When people ask, I tell them that I got it saving a busload of wolverines from a ravening horde of schoolchildren. Or that it was part of a rite of passage to get into one of the local churches. Anything to keep the masses amused. The truth is infinitely more mundane.

Toward the end of my college career I worked as a prep cook for the local (I kid you not) Polish-Mexican restaurant. A year of making bratwurst burritos had removed any novelty which could be found in the job and I was looking to get out.

One September morning I was chopping up the fixings for the days tacos with a knife which probably hadn’t been sharpened since Easter. Parts of the blade were as sharp as a razor; others as sharp as a stick of butter. I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing, so when a dull section of the knife slid across the surface of a head of lettuce and a sharp section bit halfway through my thumb, I didn’t notice until I felt air where I had never before felt air: on a bone.

Several thoughts went through my head, “fuck” being the most prominent, closely followed by “I hate my job” and “sauerkraut and refried beans are a terrible combination”.

Running the wound under cold water was astonishingly painful so I wrapped it in a wash-cloth and sat down in the employee break area. A few seconds later I opened my eyes and thought “I don’t remember tiling my bedroom”, then “I don’t remember hanging cook jackets over my bed”. Then I watched a spray of blood arc gracefully from somewhere above my field of vision and hit the wall. The full horror of the situation hit: “No, seriously. A sausage-taco salad?”, and “I have a degree?”, and “what happened?”

Later the guy who worked the dishwasher – who might have worked me over while I was passed out on the ground – said he saw me walk back to the break area, sit down, stand up, and do a face-plant into the floor. He said I “fainted”. I preferred to think of it as “temporary stress-induced unconsciousness”.

So our new manager (her first day!) drove me to the med center, where I was by far the most interesting thing to appear that morning. The doc put me on a bed and numbed my head (shaddap!) and sewed me up, While watching the needle disappear and reappear from my field of vision I had a brief hallucination that he was tying pigeon feathers to me and was going to go fly-fishing when he was finished.

So I got the rest of the day off. When I finally looked at myself, covered in blood and stiched and unexplained bruises all over my face, I felt inexplicably proud. I still had little feeling in my head (i said shaddap!), so it seemed a grand idea to hang things from the stitches. Necklasses. Earrings. Safety pins.

That evening, still decorated, I drove out to Grand Valley to visit those unfortunate friends who had not yet graduated. This was the beginning of the semester and they were participating in a “Student Life Night” where everyone tries to recruit everyone else into their [club|frat|cult]. One of the booths was empty so I grabbed an enrollment sheet and made a sign, and the “Head Piercing Club” was open for business. I got about a dozen signatures, mostly from stoned freshmen in tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirts (made in Thailand). Then The Man shut me down. Said university insurance didn’t cover stupidity.

The next morning I went in to work with a safety pin through the stitches. One of the waitresses thought I had put it in because one of the stitches fell out. Yup. Not kidding. Others thought it was disgusting, what with me mocking myself by making fun of an injury. Didn’t I have any feelings for me? Didn’t I know I was part of an oppressed minority? Why, I could get the ACLU to sue me for a hate crime! (I kid. Most of my co-workers couldn’t spell ACLU).

A few days later I had both my stitches and my job removed and began a long career at a bookstore. One of these days I will tell you THAT injury story, which is at least as funny as this one.

I have just heard that Andrea and Ryan, two of the most wonderful people on the planet, now have a son, born at 1am this morning, 8 pounds, 20 inches long, happy and healthy.

Congratulations Dre and Ryan!

So tell me: What makes you happy ?

Mike , whose mojo Knows No Bounds, had this information about the tire swing:

The tire swing is a Mark di Suvero creation from the late 70s. He’s a well-known and important artist in the American modern/contemporary art scene, and has recently contributed a second major work to the Grand Rapids community at the Frederik Meijer Gardens. Mark works out of NYC in a very cool studio near Long Island City in Queens, but keeps a home in California as well.

“Motu,” the title of the installation that you played upon, is of Latin origin. It’s derived from the city’s motto “Motu Viget”, which roughly translates to “Strength Through Activity.”

Yesterday Virginia took me to the home of one of the families for whom she is a nanny. While there she showed me a box-full of two-week old shih-tzu puppies, for which she acted as a sort of midwife, even saving one of the puppies from suffocating.

I looked up the shih-tzu in an old book I inherited, where it had the following information:

The shih-tzu – or “shitzoo”, in some parts of the Midwest (c.f. “kazoo”) – is a small dog, originally bred as a guard dog in China. Its agressive personality and fierce loyalty make it much harder to hate than most small dogs, and it has, in fact, been removed from the canonical List of Yappy Dogs (Smythe, 1886).

When attached via velcro to a broom-handle the shih-tzu makes an excellent dust-mop, and such is its personality that it views such behaviour as a sort of fun rough-house. They may also be used by hand to clean window sills and doorframes. Care must be taken when shaking the dust from the shih-tzu coat (Stewart, 1999), and we recommend that the dog actually be brushed instead.

Shih-tzu puppies – unlike the offspring of other small dogs – are born (Freud, 1886), rather than found secreted under rocks. From a quite young age they develop an instinctual hatred of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, and will often cry when in the presence of a computer on which it is deployed. This hatred manifests itself later in life when the adult shih-tzu, which is often employed in web design and development, will go out of its way to write Javascript which causes IE5 to crash.

The shih-tzu is impervious to all known vectors of physical harm, although employing this trait in military or commercial ventures has yet to succeed (as exemplified in the Carnivorous Bomb Shelter Disaster of March, 1959).

The adult shih-tzu is best sustained with a steady diet of socks and the ankle-bones of small children.

Who the hell writes this stuff?

In other news I just finished cooking up a huge pot of borscht, enough bright red soup to last me the week. In the process I burned my left thumb something fierce, and every few seconds I must stop typing in order to immerse it in icewater.

Got a call from a friend a little while ago. While his power was out yesterday someone broke into his apartment and stole his VCR and his fiance’s laptop. Material loss was minimal but she had years of documents on the computer. After work I will donate my unused VCR. Unused since I broke down and bought a DVD player.

Todays justification for pouring chlorine in the Browser Gene Pool is the simple fact that IE5 is the oldest major browser still in widespread use, and that is justification enough to start treating it like an obnoxious little yappy-dog.

Remember the scene from Good Omens where we learn the reason behind Crowley’s extraordinary collection of houseplants? Every now and then he would go through them and find the one which maybe was’t quite as green or bushy as the others. He would then carry the plant around while making comments like “You see this one? He just isn’t trying. He isn’t a Team Player.” And he would leave with the plant.

A few hours later he would return with the empty flower pot and leave it in the middle of the room, thus ensuring the healthiest, most vibrant (and terrified) collection of houseplants in London.

Ah, if only browsers were as intelligent as plants.

Today Virginia and I wandered around the campus of Aquinas College taking pictures of ice-laden trees. Beautiful stuff, if you are not a property owner.

About half an hour into our excursion a breeze picked up and the trees began a crystalline crick-crack , punctuated by branches falling in bursts of ice. I didn’t say anything but being under trees in that condition made me a little nervous.

Still: A beautiful day to be outside, and effectively broke up the melancholy of setting the clock ahead an hour.

Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 Can Take A Long Walk Off A Short Dock is the fact that Microsoft decided to use ActiveX to grant access to XML in its browsers, thereby effectively shutting Macintosh out of the running. The could have done something more universal (like Mozilla!), but instead chose the exclusionary/reactionary path. Actually, this applies to all versions of MS Internet Explorer, but Macintosh is only abused by IE up to version 5.x.

Die, internet explorer 5. Die, die, die. Go, and darken my monitor no more.

All of my plans for this evening were cancelled by a solid inch of ice coating every available outdoor surface. I still have power, but the streetlights went dark at around 10:00. The trees will be sweeping the sidewalks by morning.

So I did what any other red-blooded American would do when stuck inside on a bitter Friday evening in April: I looked at porn.

No. Scratch that. I did my taxes. There was a heart-stopping moment when I though I would owe something in the neighborhood of $2k, but a quick review of my math showed that I had used Cosine when I should have used Sine, and I will in fact be getting a little back.

So what to do with this minor windfall?

I could get a new digital camera – not that there is anything wrong with the current camera. I could bulk up my DVD collection, or my CD collection, of my bookshelves. I could get a good start on a liquor cabinet. Or the contents thereof, anyway. Maybe a good suit. I bought my current suit just after I graduated from college, eleven years ago. I haven’t worn it since 1995, and it was a little tight around the waist at the time. I could buy a new sword or two. Not very practical, buy quite high on the nifty scale. Furniture is out of the question, because I can’t fit much of anything through the doorway into my apartment. A bike might be fun, but I have no place to store it when I am not riding.

Option paralysis.

I added a little more content to Master Lee’s site, this in the kung fu and tai chi forms pages. A little here, a little there.

Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 can Eat Shit And Die is that it comes in such a wide variety of distinct flavors: IE5 on the PC, IE5 on the Mac, and IE5.5 on the PC. Three entirely different beasts, one major browser release. So not only is the rendering engine crap, but just try coding a workaround with it’s half-and-half support of the standards. Makes we want to break things.

And so to bed.