phik

I’m running out of Best of Penny Arcades. We’re starting to scrape the bottom of a very well-constructed barrel which, it must be said, contains a spectrum of overall delicious offerings.

OK, sure, I kinda beefed it when it came to October. But I’m going to make up for it. No blood no foul, &c. October roundup!

• toshok moved to Boston.

  No kidding! We are very pleased to welcome him, just in time for winter, the best 9 months of the year! Bring a poncho and grab a snickers.

• metric came to town.

  It was an 18+ show, and the 18-20 crowd had big black Xs on their hands in magic marker so they could be easily identified as targets of this country’s absurd alcohol laws.

  I hadn’t listened to any of their new album yet, since it wasn’t technically on sale, but unlike Jacob I don’t know that I necessarily prefer it that way. The new album is, however, mind-bendingly good. iTunes informs me that I’ve listened to it 37 times since then.

  During the show, people kept requesting songs from the first album that they wouldn’t play. Towards the end, she asked if anyone wanted to come up on stage and ad-lib something to music, and of course someone took her up on it. This guy went up and bounced from one unrelated topic to another, mostly talking about how drunk he is — and he is pretty clearly sauced, despite the Xs — but nevertheless did a better job than I expected, or would have done myself in the face of paralyzing stage fear. After he did that for a few minutes, he waved the lead singer back over to whisper something into her ear.

  “I can’t believe, after all that, you just asked me to play I.O.U. Go home and listen to the CD.”

• jsb

  It was time for me to pick up my canpass — totally awesome, by the way; it makes me long for the return of the INSpass — so why not catch a show too?

  The next day I played Scrabble for the first time in many years, which made me remember when we tried to play Scrabble in Montreal. We couldn’t get ahold of an English-language version, of course, so we had to settle for French.

  “What’s the difference,” you ask? Letter and point distribution. More E, U, and S, fewer W and Y. And Y, W, and K are all worth 10 points! That was a weird game.

• Not much travel in October! I only flew four segments the whole month. Not so for November, by all appearances.

I spent today at Sandia National Laboratories, home of the Whopper. I learned that they have supercomputers named liberty, freedom, and democracy. I am not making this up.

Anyways, it went OK. Sandia has a lot of Lustre on the floor now, and it seems to be working pretty well.

Albuquerque, I may have mentioned before, is a bit of a pain to get to and from. It’s not all that well-connected in the air travel web, which means it’s practically impossible to fly in or out on the day of your meeting. This time, through careful planning, I will at least escape on the same day.

Last night, on my way in, we were stuck in Denver for a little while. I guess the incoming aircraft had a broken “flight control computer,” which these modern, lazy, over-fed airplane captains apparently can’t live without. Or maybe it’s big brother FAA again, trying to tell me how to live my life and fly my airplanes. I don’t know what the big deal is — they got the plane to Denver, didn’t they?

At any rate, this is another reason why I like traveling with a big legacy airline: we took one of their spare, eighty-million-dollar aircraft so that I could get to my destination at some approximation of on-time. Two thumbs up.

Tonight, not so lucky. Late aircraft arrival means late departure, means arriving in Denver just in time to see my Boston plane push back. Drat.

You know that your fatigue has crossed some sort of line when a perfect stranger walking by stops at your dinner table to tell you how tired you look. The bartender lady gave me a bit of a steely eye before pouring that third scotch.

This morning’s shower was an absolute fiasco. It becomes totally clear that you are exhausted beyond reason when you can no longer manage this simple and most repetitive of daily tasks.

My first clue was when I was having real trouble working up a lather. I wasn’t trying to wash my hair with conditioner, that’s an amateur mistake. No, I was trying to wash it with hand lotion.

Second, the faucet. I am not an ignorant man. I’m somewhat well-travelled, across what I think is an interesting cross-section of global cultures. I have never in my entire life, anywhere on your planet Earth encountered shower faucet knobs that turn clockwise to make more hot or cold water appear. They’re also pretty sensitive — don’t turn them sharply, no sir. That all being said, I’m also reasonably on top of my game, so I can probably remember this fact for more than 45 seconds.

No, wrong. Halfway through my shower things are getting a little warmer than they need to be, so I’ll just adjust it a tad, and jesus christ make the pain stop but the knob also fell off and now it won’t go back on and the searing water, she burns, so I have to jump through the shower curtain to save myself. This could have gone better. A large percentage of my skin is peeling now.

I guess I’m living pretty high on the hog these days, a little taller in the saddle than I was aware. I can’t decide if it’s a sign that the hotel is too expensive or too cheap, but in either case I am angry.

I wanted to read a new book that I ordered two days ago, so I had it shipped to my hotel. I do this all the time. So imagine my surprise when, this time, I find a receipt for a package handling fee of five dollars and forty-four cents on my desk.

What happened to courtesy? Did it just… disappear?