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Recent News... Just for Pope Gregory... |
2002-01-16 - 2:12 p.m. Dangerous squirrel Ethical questions. I lost a battle with the paper shredder. My secretary had a bunch of documents to be shredded and for reasons having to do with my red hair and violent tendencies, I just love using the shredder. Simple pleasures. Except it got jammed. Sigh. So I had to take it apart and pull the jammed paper out - which caused a huge shower of shredded paper all over the floor. Sigh. Clear the jam, sweep up the huge mess.... I apologized to my secretary and told her I'd go get the janitor for serious cleanup. She smiled and said she'd take care of it. And then she thanked me profusely for cleaning up the mess. I stared at her. She says I'm one of the few who clear jams, change paper, tell her when we need supplies, etc... Most people just walk away leaving non functional office machinery without telling her. Okay, this is sad. As Gen would say "My QOC is SO far away ..." and even I have the manners to clean up my own mess. I know this sort of thing was covered in kindergarden and I work with a bunch of friggin' rocket scientists. The small courtesies are important, people. Think outside yourself. We knew my free wheeling goofing off at work couldn't last forever. I've been tagged onto a new Solar-Earth Connection mission - a constellation of spacecraft studying the Ionosphere/Thermosphere and how it's electric and magnetic fields are coupled to the magnetosphere. I've spent most of the day reading flux and field equations. I'm essentially consulting on this one - helping the scientist translate their science goals into 'how-to-buy-a-spacecraft' requirement shopping list. It'll be a relatively simple satellite, we should be able to buy from commercial vendors rather than custom build a spacecraft. Which means more $ for science, less on the spacecraft infrastructure - a good thing. It's something to keep me occupied until my next full-time assignment. Babylon 5: Legend of the Ranger premieres this Saturday in Sci-Fi. Thought I'd bring that up since I haven't rhapsodized about B5 in a couple weeks. And they're bringing back Andrea Katsulus - as the Narn statesman G'Kar. He can put chills down my spine. It was a slow TV night, but I was determined to continue doing nothing in particular, so I popped in my tape of "Buffy: The Musical" and worked on embroidery designs. (Okay, I've faced the fact I compulsively multi-task.) If y'all didn't see this, you missed a great show. It ridicules musicals, while being a great musical itself. A demon arrives who makes everyone burst into song and dance at the slightest provocation, as Buffy discovers when she looks outside on a sunny morning and sees a phalanx of ordinary citizens prancing and high-kicking in perfect formation, swirling their just-retrieved dry-cleaning about them like bullfighters' capes. ("They got the mustard out!" a chubby, gleeful baritone sings by way of explanation.) And then, the seemingly happy group of Scoobies discover all their hidden feelings as the spell forces them to sing out their hidden feelings. It's clever. It's funny. It's good. And the music doesn't suck. I hope they put the music score out on CD, but in the short term, I found MP3 downloads and, with consulting help from Kev (cause I was too damn lazy to search for an MP3 freeware player myself, thanks, Kev!) my officemate is now being subjected to Spike singing "Rest in Peace" [All music and lyrics written by Buffy creator Joss Whedon] The entire show is worthy, but especially great is Anya's solo about bunnies being behind the evil-singing plot. (She is terrified of bunnies.) "Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes And she has a point? What do they need good eyesight for? And if bunnies are scary, think about the conspiracy potential amongst the squirrel community. They're can scurry anywhere and no one pays any attention to them. They can scrounge supplies completely innocently (look how much havoc Gen, Mel and I can wreak while looking innocent). And all that storing and chi-chi-ching - maybe they're organizing. Maybe Bubbles is their supreme commander. She does speak the best squirrel� Hmmm. And there was that squirrel behind the toilet incident in Mel's college apartment. They are not as harmless as they look. � � � 
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