After reading about that photogenic wanker Bilzerian, I thought about what I could do to become an instagram star. I should take a storm of selfies of my exciting life.
Here’s my Monday:
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Start my morning with a dental appointment.
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Finish grading 50 cell biology exams. That’ll take me into early afternoon.
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Spend the rest of the day finishing up my science talk for my Beijing trip. There goes the rest of the day.
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Go to bed, too tired to play high-stakes poker.
That’s it. That’s the whole day. Maybe if I used a machine gun as a paperweight and had a team of topless supermodels standing around…nah, too distracting and my office isn’t that big.
My glamorous day has both a dentist and doctor appointment. Around the appointments, the care, feeding, and exercising of the Redhead.
My day so far:
● Wake up. This is generally a bad thing, and puts a poor complexion on the rest of the day. Today, however, the mildly deranged penguin did not turn the bed — with me in it — upside down, and then jump up-and-down on it shouting “wakey, wakey, time to hunt MUSHROOMS!” That’s probably a positive moment, but does not bode well for the rest of the week.
● A jackhammer starts jackhammering. And keeps on going, almost until lunch. Joined by bellowing boat horns, an exceptionally loud moped, and church bells…
● Eventually get out of bed, and decide it’s too late to bother with breakfast. Besides, the dirty dishes (not many) are crawling across the kitchen floor. Will deal with that later.
● Check various Internet sites. Yawn.
● Succeeding in not falling down the stairs to front door, and go to get a dead-tree newspaper & then some coffee. (This time, I do remember to put some clothes on before leaving.) Oh a whim, also buy the dead-tree Newsweek for later reading. Notice the sky looks cloudy, and recall I haven’t closed the skylights.
● Coffee. Darker, rainer-looking clouds. Go to lunch. Wonderful “curry” starter (reminds me I haven’t tried the new Indian restaurant yet), so-so albeit competent main course, nothing special for dessert. Big delay before the coffee.
● Naturally, it rains — hard — during lunch. Skylights in the liar are open, oh well… And then again during the coffee-wait. Yeah, yeah, I get the hint. Return to lair just in time for the third burst of heavy rain. Before I can close the skylights…
● Sit down at Pharyngula to moan. Amazingly, no water dripping on my head from upstairs where the skylights were open. And no rain whilst I’ve been tpyosing this, so is poopyhead also an anti-rain faerie?
Machine guns won’t help, topless distractions might, and it’s just started raining again. Skylights closed this time, BRAWWWHAAAHAA!
Somebody starts incomprehensibly shouting outside, probably the faerie of open skylights…
What, no zebrafish?
I got up to whining dogs and my wife already gone, and had to deal with pee, puke, and a torn-up couch cushion, when what I wanted was a warm hug and a jelly doughnut. I’m back in bed and the dogs are barking.
Well, I stole a supercar, steered it off a cliff towards a natural gas storage tank, taking to my jet-powered wingsuit just in time to avoid the explosion, then parachuted down to a soft landing in a field of sunflowers to reload all of my weapons.
Then I saved my game and went to work.
Currently starting week three of taking care of one of my sister’s cats while she is out-of-state setting up for new job with her better behaved – and even bigger, fluffier – cat. Proper name is Lola, but I’ve been calling her ‘Fluffenstein’s Monster’ (~19 lbs, but mostly hair). Much like the chump, she is a loud, obnoxious, gluttonous, ‘dominant’ dumbass with unbelievable hair. You can set out a trail of kibble bits or treats and she will follow it anywhere. Unlike the chump, unbelievable as it may look, it is actually her own naturally growing hair and her paws are still bigger than his.
Will be spending a large chunk of today in the bathroom: strip and polish the floor, fix the sub-floor where it delaminated due to water dripping down the side of the tub over many years of kids getting out of the shower, and finish patching+priming the walls.
I must have pleased the rain faeries. Now it’s coming down so hard the street outside is flooded, and the local poisson sauvages are holding a protest (well, it is France!)…
He is named after a parasitic disease? (yes, I know it is spelled Bilharzia, but if Trump can use truthiness, so can I)
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Cheer up, PZ, you may get a call from the future:
“Spider Paleontology” http://xkcd.com/1747/
birgerjohansson@8, Re XKCD spider’s web: There is one known specimen of a c.140myo spider web, complete with with spider & prey, tapped in amber: Fossil of ancient spider attack only one of its type ever discovered (Aug-2012). The use of the word “fossil” is, I presume, a misunderstanding on the part of either the PR flack or myself.
me@9, Oops, I meant c.100, not 140, myo — confusion due to conflicting ages in other reports of the (same?) specimen.
Caine Day:
Tea.
Reads.
Posts stuff to Affinity.
More tea.
Muffin.
Time to clean.
Post office.
Time to work.
Much more tea.
I’m going to take a bath.
My day is ypically a whole lotta nuthin.
Occasional watch over 2yo granson to brighten day
occasional reading and posting random comments here and there.
Today I decided to post a longish essay to the hated social medium: FaceBook. That piece I also dropped here in the poli madness thread @110 (of the current chapter of that multi-chapter thread)
back to reading chair
I get it. Bilzerian is a horrible person and Rogan gave him a platform. Awful. I agree. But seriously, why this post? You do seriously sound jealous. ‘… doth protest too much, methinks’.
re @14:
me thinks you’re using the wrong thread for #14.
Why ascribe jealousy for motivation behind mocking a story that well deserves to be mocked.
‘me thinks thou dost protetht too much’ …
nomadiq:
:Snort: Seriously? I can’t speak for PZ, but from my perspective, there’s a level of frustration as to why someone who is seemingly a very worthless person, who does nothing but spread bigotry, misogyny, and other damage, gets a major following for no good reason. People think he’s just *great*. Personally, I don’t grok that. And in the end, of course, it’s not people like that who keep things going, who make a difference in keeping various societies and cultures together and stable. It’s people like PZ, and me, and the others in this thread, and those all over the planet, who, in comparison, have very dull sounding days indeed.
I read this post as more an expression of exasperation with people, and a small smack to all those who just go “those dudes are fab!” without ever once exercising their brain. I’m pretty sure PZ has no desire for naked beard strokers, or massive rooms full of guns. Well, I’m not sure about the beard strokers,* but Mary might have something to say there.
*For the hard of thinking, joking!
I bet PZ is also jealous of Trump.
This morning:
Come home from work, thinking that “My, but the moon is awfully bright tonight”.
Wait for 90 minutes, reading my ebook. Run out to pharmacy, “ahhh, druuuuuugggggsss!” (calcium channel blocker and proton pump inhibitor, pharmacy didn’t feel like filling my diabetic wife’s alcohol pads (which I learned of at length when I got back home).
Lay down, drift off, jump as the house shakes (there’s an industrial yard a few hundred meters away and I think they were hammering something into the ground with a battleship).
Thoroughly irritated, log in, fix my zoneminder database, as an upgrade wreaked havoc with playback on the one recording camera playback.
Read e-mail.
Listen to my wife saw lumber (she doesn’t snore, she said so and I learned the error of my ways by recording her once and playing it back).
Listen to the *@&!^ telephone ring incessantly (maybe I’ll forget to pay the damned bill and I’ll get some peace).
Look over at the empty alcohol prep box, grumble over CVS.
Think about the many times I’ve improvised paperweights (never use a field knife to hold the map down, hilarity and a useless map occurs when the wind picks up), recall how many people came in to bother me when a loaded handgun was holding my papers down – maybe a machine gun would’ve been better, alas, that was propping the window open.
Topless supermodels, no time for that kind of drama.
Well, back to the remaining 68 e-mails I’ve received since 07:00…
…Gets distracted recalling wife mentioning that she’ll be out back later to get some sun, per doctor’s orders (vitamin D deficiency). Distracted, as I’m pretty sure doctor doesn’t realize what she doesn’t wear when she’s getting sun…
Back to e-mails.
Checks the built-in camera on his new laptop. It’s off, but decides to do the tape-over-the-lens trick as a precaution, and to avoid making photon surprise.
The busses got cancelled so no work today!!! Woooo!!?!?! unfortunately stuff costs money.
blf:
Smart move, you don’t need to invite the ratters in.
@nomadiq
I honestly can’t imagine anybody over the age of 16 being jealous of Bilzerian unless his life, his mind, his imagination, and his heart were as empty as an empty trash can.
Well, except maybe for the money. Most of us would love to have more of that.
Jealous…of Bilzarian? Heh. The only thing of his I might envy is all of his money. And if I did have his kind of money, I wouldn’t be spending it on ridiculous cars and even more ridiculous guns and random women. But hey, if I did have a $100 million, here’s where it would go:
• Pay off my mortgage and sock away enough of it to cover a comfortable retirement for me and my wife.
• Set up trust funds for each of my kids so they’d have a little something from the interest to be comfortable. Not “buy a Ferrari every year” comfortable, but “never worry about house payments” comfortable.
• UMM would finally have a confocal microscope, and a complete single-cell manipulation rig! I’d leave the place a chunk of cash in my will, too.
• Invest in another interest-generating account that would maintain FtB ad-free, and provide for a stipend for all of our writers.
• Pour everything else into secular/progressive charities. Everything. Hmm. Maybe another endowment where the FtB team gets to pick a charity every year.
I know, that’s not very ambitious. A little bit of selfishness, of course, but you know, I’m not even that envious of his wealth.
PZ – you’ve worked so hard and traveled so much to make meets with one convention or another over the years at far removed locations in big and not so big cities…
Take your beloved to a first class orchestra scheduled to perform a worthwhile romantic era symphony, suite or tone poem followed by good eats at a refined restaurant nearby within range of the accommodations you can arrange. (A man of your traveling experience ought to be able to satisfy it within Chicago)
It’s nothing…a 2 or 3 day excursion. But the music will move powerfully on the emotion for a long, long, long while, and most positively.
PZ:
Ohhhhhhhhh, that would be so grand! And there’s one difference between people who try to make a difference, and people like whatshisface. I get all excited at the idea of donating money, not hoarding it. Although there would be some hoarding, to be sure, just to make sure those I love were okay. But the rest? Giveaway time.
My glamorous day involved waking up and immediately hunting around my room to see if the cat pooped somewhere strange. The kitty I nymed myself after likely has the stomach cancer (ultrasound confirming tomorrow) and her guts are owwy so she’s pooping odd places. Then I went to work and spent 4 1/2 hours minutely examining 25 ringworm + cats under a black light, logging the locations of every lesion, pulling new DTM samples, soaking the cats in lyme sulfur, and then going through the older DTM plates and looking at them under the microscope to confirm the presence of their various types of ringworm. Then I had lunch. Then I did more ringworm related stuff (I HATE mondays) and have ended my day doing 7 dog exams… 6 of them male, and those 6 done after the in-heat female sat in my lap. I was quite popular with those lads. And one of them broke my scale by jumping on it repeatedly because it made a noise and that was FUN OMG.
So…. mostly fungus for my day. Fungus is glamarous, right?
… I did discover a yeast contaminant on one of the plates. I’d never seen yeast before as a colony rather than as part of a skin or ear infection. It was like a firm, orange colored dome. I was giddy when I looked at it under the microscope and saw what it was. Yes, I’m that strange.
Hmph, when it comes to glamour, nothing beats my life. Today, for example, I scrubbed the toilet bowl, washed the dishes, planted out some rhubarb seedlings, did a load of laundry (washed, hung out to dry AND brought in) and dropped off my job-search results at the office of my JobActive provider. Oh, and I have photos up on Instagram (of the garden, after planting out the rhubarb plants – I’m Megpie71 on Instagram, if anyone’s curious).
I have also, by way of excitement, prepared a red beef curry casserole for dinner (cooking at present) and connected up a garden hose to the front garden tap.
This week’s fun commitments include having an electrician show up to re-wire the meter box tomorrow (after having the rental we’re living in re-wired before we moved in) and having to submit a report of my earned income and my partners to Centrelink (the Australian social security people). Oh, and I have to change the sheets on my bed.
Yup, for glamour, excitement, and really wild stuff, nothing beats the life of an unemployed suburban housewife on the dole.
Meg Thornton, I feel for you.
I too went through the Job Network Provider’s rigmarole, back in the day.
They profit, the unemployed are punished. Deliberately. Gotta suffer for that dole!
(Gotta go to endless bullshit courses on motivation and attitude, gotta keep rewriting the fucking CV, gotta supposedly accept the fucking bullshit jobs they offer you)
Privatising what used to be the CES was one of the worst decisions ever made (privatising utilities was the other one, and the Libs keep working on privatising Medicare, but they’re not there yet) by Oz governments.
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Yeah, I know this is a digression, but it still exercises me.