My bookshelves would break Lance Armstrong's spirit...

I'm having a hard time getting things together to my satisfaction in the last few days. I took a dry run on the bus this morning to make sure I could get to work. I could. I put my butt-ugly couch (the one I planned to put in front of my front window to give robbers the impression that I have nothing worth stealing) in a dress, but it is now only marginally prettier. I watched the Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory, which I last saw in the theater, but it was not as good as I remembered it.

You know how when you have two relatively minor problems that coincide, they add up like waves? Well, I'm surfing on top of a big mother. You know, when we had new shelves cut at Home Depot, I was sure they were going to fit because I actually brought an example of the type of shelf we needed. So of course it was about 1/4 inch too short. I was annoyed and after a nice little stomp around my room I found some screws and decided to rest the shelves on those. I'm a regular fricking McGuyver. Then Animala went to get the mail, only to find that my social security card had not arrived. I was depending on it for tomorrow. You know, so I could start working.

So I decided to put together my big expensive bookshelf. What a piece of crapola! You know, I can't even describe to you what's wrong with it, it was clearly meant to be assembled in at least 6 dimensions. This is what happens when you allow M.C. Escher to design furniture. Fuck.

Let me try explaining. Imagine if you will 3 ladders. Join them on hinges like a Japanese screen so they can stand together. Across the rungs of the ladder, you set 5 boards, the shelves. The shelves are guided into place by dowels, and they all fit, so you would expect it to be impossible for the ladders to come unhinged. But apparently not, and so when they become unhinged, so do I. They are like the sofa permanently wedged in Dirk Gently's stairwell, smugly defying the laws of possiblity. It's the hinge design that makes me think that Escher let his 4-year old son, Timmy Escher, help. They aren't secured. You just slide the male and female components together and let the ladders sit there. They are not secured, so the goddamned thing just pops apart if the floor is not even. I wonder if some welding would not be in order to keep the thing together and solid? I'm serious.

When I come to power, I would have the guy who designed this piece of furniture gutted and have his skin draped across his hideous invention, but I wouldn't want to let him off that easy.

Now I'm having a drink, because, damn it, it's been a heckuva week and I want to take the edge off. I'm not at all buzzed, which is fine. I'm just not uptight. I'm drinking E.M. Schnuck whiskey, the generic brand for the major store in St. Louis, which was given to me as a jokey present by a pal back home.

Animala just blurted out that she can't believe we live in the south. Hell, I applied to schools in Alaska as well as Atlanta. (University of Alaska, Eskimo's Asshole campus, I believe it was.) I could have been anywhere. I'm just happy to be a day's drive away from my family, should there be any need to go.

I did make a point of going to a Borders today, oh, bliss of bliss. I picked up 4 things. A copy of Skeptical Inquirer. A Popular Mechanics with the Mythbusters in it. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I have encountered in numerous books, so it seems that natural to pick it up. I also got Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, by Chris Mooney. It had been tempting me naughtily for a few weeks now.

Here was something fun. On my drive down from St. Louis, I listened to a couple hours worth of lectures from an astronomer at Ohio State about the solar system. For some reason, I seem to have downloaded the lectures about the colder bodies in the solar system, (my favorite bit was his discussion of Saturn's rings--he gave really good explanation of how they came to have the shape they do. If I can find the link to the series of lectures, it's a semester's worth of talks. The only thing I lamented was when he referred to something that he put on the overhead, a graph that showed the relative densities of objects, by which you could presumably deduce the composition of the sucker. I wanted to see those, and not being able to see the slides he was tossing up was heartbreaking. But the college lecture podcast has great potential, methinks. It would be great for a history class! It would suck monkey gonads for a creative writing class!

Oh, great history of the space race: A Man on the Moon, by...Andrew Chaiken (almost didn't come up with it). Sweeping and engaging. I encourage you to read it for a quiz on Monday.

HJ