What a crushing disappointment. Number of the Beast, eh? The only truly beastly activity that raincoaster saw was the heinous Ann Coulter YouTube video, which I will spare you because you've been such a good little raincoaster reader lately. Naturally Ann's launching a book today, but it begs the question of how many of her fans can read anyway? That's why YouTube is gonna be so important…and the audiobook, just as soon as they can track down Anita Bryant for the recording.

the 6/6/06 quickie fact roundup: it was a stunningly perfect day, the kind of day where you pull socks out of the drawer (or, in raincoaster's case, off the pile ontop of the Dairyland case of old Conde Nast magazines) and immediately let them drop back to rest in place, perhaps till September. The kind of day where a butterfly on your hand isn't so much an icky insect crawling on you as an airborne blossom alighting. The kind of day where it seems some merry elf has run ahead of you all the way home, planting blooming rose bushes every thirty feet for your sniffing pleasure. The kind of day where even the Chihuahuas are pleasant. Instead of bait.

Was up on time without use of an alarmclock. Okay, it was because I didn't bother going to bed last night, but still. It counts. Of course, I was still, as always, 15 minutes late for my course, but let's go to the transcript from somewhat later in the day for an impact-assesment report: Tamara, trolling in to the computer room about 45 minutes late:

"Hi everybody," she says to all three of us. "What are we doing?"

Samona, the computer tech who has been surfing and checking email:

"Fucking the dog."

Me, who has been checking Gawker and already posted two entries in the Shebeen Club Blog:

"That's about right."

After said dog-fucking for an hour or so, we go downstairs, are handed photocopied menus from the Chinese restaurant up the street, and are instructed to choose lunch dishes. We do so and then Carla decides to facilitate the process. As with all government-sponsored facilitation, this causes it to take many, many times as long as it would otherwise.

She divides the chalkboard up into sections corresponding to each section in the 2-page menus, and proceeds to canvass us individually in order on whether or not our individual selection lies in each particular section. That nobody has chosen or would choose anything in the Sea Cucumber subsection does not cause a corresponding neglect on Carla's part, nor does she allow us to divert our attention from each section in its turn. Oh no, that would be too easy. Carla would be an invaluable team member on an archeological dig, holding up each grain of sand, examining it, and carefully tagging it, "Not a pot shard" before placing it in the "Not-Shard" pile and moving methodically onward.

It takes an hour and a half to order lunch.

Then we spend twenty minutes on doing cover letters; at this point I've been up for 20 hours and had two pots of coffee, a pot of tea, a diet Red Bull, and no solid food since yesterday at three in the morning, so it suits my brain just fine when the class degenerates into "my anecdote about the mortifying racism of my relatives is funnier than yours."

Then we go home.

I slept through the two things I was going to do tonight, but that's okay. At least I don't have to wax my legs to stay in bed and catch up on sleep.

Verdict: not in the least fiendish. And it didn't even rain on my laundry.