It’s been a very long time since I’ve been posting here regularly, for several reasons. One is that I’ve been even more preoccupied than usual for a year or so; my being in a usually-long-distance relationship has generally meant that my communication efforts are channelled elsewhere than blogging. On top of that, what posting I’ve been doing has generally been elsewhere in a more private space, where I can feel freer when it comes to, say, complaining about my job and aspects thereof.

However, given that this space is still here, I feel a vague onus to do something useful (or at least, hopefully, interesting) with it. By happy coincidence, I’ve been thinking recently about taking a couple of my hobbies a little more seriously of late. These two great tastes taste great together in the following way: I’m going to start using this space as my notebook for hobby-related activities.

What does hobby-related mean? It means that I’m probably not going to spend a lot of time talking about my research or my teaching, since those fall very firmly within the category of my real job. I’m also not going to talk much about truly personal things, since as mentioned above I have an elsewhere for those. That leaves, well, everything else. Music. Food and drink, with particular emphasis on baking bread. Theatre, sometimes. If I’m particularly affected (or enraged) by a book, movie, or TV show then that might show up here as well.

As an experiment, I’ve also chosen to turn comments on here, on the off-chance that there’s anyone who hasn’t deleted this blog from their RSS feed already. If you’re reading this, then great! Feel free to let me know.

Anyhow, I’m here again, though who knows if anyone’s still got this bookmarked or whatever. Let’s see how long I can keep going this time.

Random note #1: Google Chrome exists for the Mac. A cursory examination reveals no obvious way to open a whole batch of bookmarks in tabs, which sad to say is a deal-breaker for me. I’ll stick with Safari and Firefox for now, thanks.

Random note #2: I’m really good at procrastinating on grading, it seems.

Random note #3: In roughly thirty-six hours I’m planning to be vacating my current temporary premises, packing up my room, random kitchen devices, and my office into my car and spending a couple of days(ish) driving. I am so not ready for this, and can’t wait to see how I pull it off. I suspect that tomorrow’s going to be very, very busy.

However! They seem to have a new corporate policy to make buying things as annoying as possible. I bring the DVDs up to the cash, and get asked in quick succession:

• Do I have a membership in their club? (No.)
• Would I like one? It costs $10/month and gives you a 10% discount here and at various other unspecified places. (No.)
• Damage insurance on the DVDs? (Um, no. Especially since they’ll be leaving the country shortly.)
• …any magazines that I’d like to subscribe to? (NO.)

I don’t know if I’m justified in resenting all of this, but it does seem weird that I spent more time refusing offers of upsells and side deals than I did actually entering the store, finding what I wanted, and waiting in line at the cash.

Really, this is part of a broader effort on my part to shift around some habits. I’m going to be on sabbatical this coming year, which will give me the perfect opportunity to shake up a couple of things that want shaking. Maybe I’ll even develop a work ethic; who knows?

So consider this report:

A pilot alerted airport police when he saw a bike with a sticker that read “this bike is a pipe bomb” parked near the passenger ramps of Terminal C at Memphis International Airport, according to the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority.

This provoked airport security to clear out large portions of the terminal; it was later discovered that the bike was not in fact a pipe bomb. The explanation, apparently, is that “This bike is a pipe bomb” is the name of a band in Florida.

So my question, or possibly concern, is whether this is what one learns in airport security training: that explosives will typically be labelled with helpful signs reading “bomb”, “TNT”, etc. Even accepting the notion that an object can be simultaneously a bicycle and a pipe bomb — an assumption not without epistemological difficulties, I suspect — does it really seem likely that such a hybrid object would be clearly proclaiming this fact? Particularly if it is, in fact, being used in a subversive fashion to destroy portions of an airport?

I mean, really, which of the following seems more suspicious?

1. A bike with a sticker that reads “This bike is a pipe bomb”.
2. A bike with a sticker that reads “This bike is not a pipe bomb”.
3. A bike with a sticker that reads “Cthulhu ’08: why vote for the lesser evil?”

Maybe it’s just policy that any mention of the word “bomb” (or any other term on the No-Fly Words List) requires further investigation. But this seems like too much tempest in too small a teapot.

…and that’s about it. More later.

Of course, it’s always been my conceit that this me — the writing voice that I use, the one that you’re reading — isn’t the me of the outside world. As such, perhaps this isn’t an absurdly wrong result so much as a reflection of how I construct this particular version of myself.

Here’s what I’m getting at.

What do families of four and five and more pay for cell phone service every month? What do college students pay for their cell service every month and why do their parents put up with it?

And how come we don’t find this ridiculous?

And so, a momentary reassessment: why do I have a cell phone?

Originally, I got a mobile phone because of my car. My first car was not, shall we say, very good. And after spending a night stranded by the side of the interstate ten miles outside of the Atlanta Bypass, courtesy of a failed alternator, having a mobile phone seemed like a fine precaution to take. And once I got it, there wasn’t any particular need for me to have a land-line; when I moved to a new place a couple of months later, my old phone number didn’t go with me.

But then I moved to the Midwest, and went back to a two-phone solution. At that point, the rationale was that I travel around enough to make a cellphone practical, but I’d conceived by then a certain dislike of the sound quality on most if not all such phones. (It’s better now, but even now there are some people whose voices I just can’t make out on my mobile; it’s worse if they’re on their cellphone at the time.) So I had a land-line for the purposes of having actual conversations, and a mobile for making plans on the fly.

My original Midwestern cellphone fell apart (pretty much literally) after a year of owning it… or more than a year, since it was out of warranty, but less than two because I didn’t qualify for a free upgrade. Which brings me to my current arrangement: landline plus Canadian cellphone. Useful in that people in both Canada and the States can call me domestically (less useful for my peeps in Germany, Ghana, etc. but one can’t have everything); I’ve considered giving up the home phone but between internet service and the necessity of a local number of give local businesses it just doesn’t seem worth it.

So yes, I’m paying a fair amount for my phone services. I can afford it at the moment, and I enjoy the convenience.

Oh, internet. You bring me so many good things.

In unrelated news, typing without using one’s left ring finger is difficult.