Category Archives: Weird

ghost story part two

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From the Archive.

So there I am again, staying with James, only this time I brought my friend Katy. Because she is “new” she gets the upstairs room, which I forget to mention to her is haunted. But it is. But she doesn’t notice. Odd.

But maybe not, because there I am, staying in the basement, right near the Indiana Jones tomb which I see has a nice new wooden frame around it now, all polished in an unhealthily obsessed way. I mean, if you had an unexplained little half-tunnel in your basement that looked like a home for a coffin, would you fix it up nice? Anyway, I have to pass through the room with the tomb every time I go upstairs, which is a trial in the dark, let me tell you.

But if the ghost does not bother Katy it sure bothers me. It doesn’t poke, it bangs. Kathunk, kathunk, ping, ping, ping, BANG. **BANG**. Ping, ping, ping. Kathunk…you get the idea. It was a long night, especially when I went upstairs to get a drink and it banged and pinged its way up the stairs ahead of me. I told it it was dead and it should be quiet and go back to sleep or whatever it is that dead people who are not haunting do.

James’s partner Tony says it’s just the heater, but that fails to explain how the heater can preceed me invisibly up stairs, or how it can stand in the hall, all invisible and everything, waving and doing for all I know jumping jacks to get us to notice it. I notice it. I glare at it. It does an invisible Tasmanian Devil routine every time I pass it to go to the bathroom, but all I ever say is “You’re dead. Get over it.”

You know, I think it’s very much like a little dog that wants to play. Give it a little attention and it’s a happy puppy. I bet it lives for my visits…on second thought there’s got to be a better way to put that.

Ghost Story Part One

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From the Archive

So this is the story:

There I am up in Vernon, staying with my friend James. His house is haunted. I told him that last time I stayed up there, told him that not only did his new house have ghosts, but they were very pushy ghosts, poking at me every time I got up to go to the bathroom.

And he just looked at me like I had just crawled out of the gin bottle, which I had but that was not related!

If I’d been sober I’d never have told him at all.

James goes to sleep early, but I stay up till all hours and thusly encountered the poky ghosts. They poked me all the way from the living room (which I think aught to be reserved for the living; I mean, just look at the word but you can’t get these dead people to listen to reason, you can’t even get them to stop poking you and pay attention. You sure can’t get them to agree to split up the house, even though it’s just so obvious that the basement room with the unexplained Indiana Jones tunnel just big enough for a coffin has to be ghost territory and the living room, I mean **hello?** the living room, should be for the animate to lie on the couch and watch Space Channel in peace with no spiritual visitors, no, not even if the Omen is on again) through the French doors, all the way down the hall and into the guest room, where they continued to poke at me from time to time as I lay in the bed, until finally, finally I was forced to address the issue directly.

Now normally there is nothing I avoid so much as addressing an issue directly. Now normally there is nothing I avoid even more so much as confrontation with a disincorporated intelligence; it’s faintly embarassing, as my own fleshiness points up the issue of their ectoplasmicism. We are both made uncomfortable. So this is something I generally avoid. I am not, however, normally poked at so agressively. Sure, one or two quick tentacle-feels, maybe even a tentative arrow prick, but nothing like what I was undergoing now. I **had** to take action.

“You’re dead. Leave me alone.”

And did it do me any good at all? Hell no! Got not a moment’s peace from that time on; poke-a-rama it was, with me all the time going, “hey, stop that, you’re dead! Leave me alone! Oh, fine, ignore me, but you’re still Dead! And I’m Not! Ow!” You know, it wasn’t my finest hour.

OGMD: sometimes a meme can easily be seen

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Horse-O-Phonic 8-track saddlebag system

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Horse-O-PhonicHey, is that Ann Coulter?

Nope, but it’s from the same era.

According to this post on the Bridlepath, this fellow and his horse, both equipped with long. luxuriant manes, are big fans of Seventies music. On their treks through the Italian countryside, they could not be without their precious tunes.

But there was a problem. Really, isn’t there always some kind of problem with Lynyrd Skynyrd on horse treks in Italy? Well exactly.

You see, Francesco‘s system only played 8-track tapes, the kind that were discontinued in the early 80’s. But Francesco‘s horse was unequipped, even with an iPod. Francesco, however, was not easily put off, as you can imagine by the fact that you are still reading this, and eventually our devoted Yes fanatic managed to jury-rig the most monstrous stereophonic monstrosity ever to hang off the flanks of a sturdy European warmblood.

Hi, I’ve taken a photo of the horsephonic mounted, note that there’s no saddle as I’ve sold it to a friend 4 years ago, so the components are not very well positioned and the breeching behind the haunches is a bit too low, however, I’ve turned the thing on and played one program while I was posing. The antenna is actually non functional in this photo, and I’ve used it only two times when I used the FM tuner cartridge (that now is disassembled in a tin can due to a tuning cord breakage) However, here you can see what the horsephonic looked when I walked through small towns and countryside with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Boston, Christie and other similar cool tapes playing loud.   

Operation Global Media Domination: the avatar and blogworth situation

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TIASee my lovely new avatar? WordPress has just added a feature that allows you to upload an avatar which appears in “Latest Posts” and also on the forum when you post a question or response.

I know you’ve seen it before: it’s my icon for Operation Global Media Domination, my relentless pursuit of fame across the blogosphere. If you’re American, you may have seen it even earlier than that, when it was the logo for the US government Office of Total Information Awareness. Nice, eh, and not at all Orwellian. Wasn’t he an immigrant? Don’t worry, at some point someone grew a set of brains and deep-sixed the Office and its logo, at least publicly.

I should really co-opt their motto, too, “Scienta est potentia,” Latin for “Knowledge is power.”

In any case, now that I have a logo and a motto (49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees attitude! fits me so well!) I should be all set to conquer planets, beginning with Pluto, for lo, it will love me because I called it a planet and will fall willingly, at least after a couple of good, strong girly drinks.

I’ve already started playing one blogworth counter against another. Surfing Latests Posts today, I came across a post called “How Much is Your Blog Worth,” which, given recent events, was bound to attract a laserlike focus from moi. It’s from Gauravonomics, and introduces a much more sophisticated blogworth calculator than the aforementioned Pingoat‘s.

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, Dane Carlson of Business Opportunities has created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays a blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

Which is hella inflated, but enough about that. It says this blog is worth $30,000+, so do I give a rat’s ass that the numbers are puffy? Hell to the no! I’m not a buyer.

Wonder how soon someone will factor in blogger book deals. I say give MediaBistro four months, Huffpo maybe four weeks. Too much fun for those underemployed, think-tanking economists to play with. They will be powerless to resist!