(no subject)

There is an interesting case listed on my Page-a-Day calendar.

Judith Richardson Haimes sued the Temple University Hospital claiming to have had psychic abilities until a CAT scan at the Philadelphia hospital "destroyed her powers."  She said that the hospital's negligence left her unable to ply her trade as a clairvoyant.  Amazingly enough, the jury awarded her nearly $1m, but (fortunately) the judge disagreed and threw out the verdict.

I have to side with the judge on this one.  If she'd been a true psychic she'd have seen it coming in the first place.

Speaking of supernatural powers of observation...  I wish I'd paid closer attention to this shirt when I put it on this morning.  I just discovered that one the more critical buttons is hanging by a thread.  I'm hoping that it can hang on until I get home from work tonight.  I've become fairly adept at sewing on buttons lately.  I'm tempted to buy a little sewing kit for the office so that I can make spot repairs when I discover things like this at work.  I used to keep a sewing kit in my office briefcase, but I forgot that it was in there and took a recent business flight to Calgary...



The scissors that I had in my sewing kit were smaller, blunter, and less offencive than the ones in the picture above but apparently they were too dangerous for the return flight.  I guess they were afraid that I might wield them in an aggressive manner and threaten to trim somebody's nose hairs if they weren't confiscated.  I suppose I might have if I was clinically insane, but at the price that they charge for watered-down drinks on flights these days, it's not likely that I was going to get drunk and start air raging.

They let me keep my long, sharp, metal pen though.

If the terrorists managed to do only one thing, it was to turn our society even more stupid.

I want to be like that "Ding! Fries are done!" guy when I grow up

I had trouble sleeping last night.  Between the cats, indigestion, the last vestiges of this throat/chest cold and too much tea late in the evening, I obviously had a variety of factors working against me.  I didn't have that much trouble getting to sleep initially, but I was awakened at about 1 this morning by the "SLURP SLURP SLURP" sound of the kitten sucking on her own teat.  I kicked her off the bed, but she simply curled up on the floor nearby and kept sucking and purring loudly.  I tried to block it out for as long as I could, but I finally gave up, reached down and forcibly detached her from the nipple.  It turned into a game for the next half-minute or so; she would reattach herself to the nipple, and I'd grab her head and pull her free again.  I eventually won the battle of wills, and she darted out to the other room where she began playing and thumping about noisily.  We'll call it a Pyrrhic victory.

Seeing as I'd already been forced to move, I fetched a couple of Tums from the bedside table to still the indigestion and tried to find my way back to sleep.  I very nearly succeeded, and might have pulled it off if I had not heard a pathetic, protracted "mewwww..." from somewhere near the foot of the bed.  It wasn't very loud, but it was enough to bring me back from the brink of slumber.  For a moment I wasn't sure if I'd really heard it, or if it had been one of those random, phantom sounds that I will sometimes here when I am dozing off, but suddenly there it was again.  "Mewwww..."  It was pretty faint, but it was definitely a cat, and there was no doubt that it was coming from near the foot of our bed.  My first thought was that the kitten had pulled her stitches while playing in the other room.  "Mewwww..."  Then I heard a thump in the other room and realized that it wasn't the kitten at all.

It was Belladonna - the middle cat.  She was curled up at the foot of the bed.  Was she sick?  Was she hurt? wait a minute...

"Mewwww..."
"Mewwww..."
"Mewwww..."

She wasn't sick or hurt; she was snoring (or perhaps talking in her sleep).  Just to be sure, I sat up and teased her ears.  She jumped, and then immediately started purring.  Crisis averted.

I didn't get back to sleep until almost 3 though.

(no subject)

Today's "Ask Plonq" segment is brought to you courtesy of a co-worker who has been using computers for the better part of 30 years.

Dear Plonq,

Can you help me out here?  Every time I start a new line, Outlook insists on capitalizing the first word.

Dear Outlook User,

You need to disable auto-correct in your program settings.... wait a minute, are you hitting a carriage return in the middle of your sentences?

Yes, because I don't want my sentences to go all the way to the edge of the screen.

You do realize that if the person at the other end of this correspondence is running at a resolution lower than you are, the auto-wrap is going to butcher this message.

... What is this "auto-wrap" of which you speak?

facepalm
headdesk
hairpullout
bleah