Virtual vehicles for the metaverse
How did I miss this one? I must have had my head buried in the snow.
Apparently the Queen will be knighting Bill Gates. He will be a knight. A knight! I can just imagine the ceremony… “Ride forth, O Geek Knight through the Gaping Holes of Windows Security and smite the vile e-mail worm!”
I have no intelligent comment on this at the moment because I’m still agog at the absurdity of this. Agog!
Link: The Seattle Times: Bill Gates to recieve honorary knighthood
Today I steered clear of McDonald’s, I eschewed Little Panda Chinese Take-out, and I… uh… didn’t go to Subway. I also misplaced my thesaurus. Where is that thing?
Lunchtime found me at the salad bar, and I loaded up the smallest container with vegetable matter. It’s usually busy in the market at noon, and today was no exception. A garrulous, bald-headed man was at the salad bar too, chatting with someone about the federal deficit. Then he turned suddenly and gesticulated at me with a styofoam cup full of chopped pickles.
“The pickles are good, eh?” he grinned, and I noticed that his red sweater was held shut with an oversize safety pin. “Dill pickles. No garlic!”
“Er… yep,” I remarked cleverly.
“This place is great! Lotsa healthy food here. Dill pickles’re great! Not like those other places… the other places… like greasy foods. Not like here. Other places like… with pizza… and… other places like, uh…”
He trailed off, deep in thought, and I filled in the silence, “Like McDonald’s?”
“Yeah, like McDonald’s,” he nodded vigorously. “That stuff’ll kill ya. Fulla grease. It’ll make ya sick. Yer payin’ to make yerself sick, huh? But this place is great! Lotsa healthy stuff here. Why’d ya want to pay to make yerself sick? ‘Cause greasy food like that’ll make ya sick. I never eat there. This place is great!”
He continued enthusiastically in this vein as he paid for his cup of pickle chunks. Twenty-five cents. After paying, he wandered off to strike up a friendly conversation at the wine shop. I paid for my salad and trudged back to my cubicle to continue working, and I wondered why I couldn’t be as enthusiastic about salad as that guy seemed to be.
Maybe I need more pickles in my life.
When Doctor Destructo said that he wanted to go ice fishing, I thought he was joking. When I realized that he was perfectly serious, I thought he was loony — the thermometer read minus forty.
But when there are fish to be caught, extreme temperatures are a mere inconvenience. Off we went to the frozen surface of the Red River, where we found his friend’s fishing shack
As my I shuffled around on the ice snapping photos, Doc augered three feet down to the water.
The shack has a small wood-burning stove which warmed the shack from minus 35 degrees to about 10 or 15 degrees, so it turned out to be quite comfortable. Given a good selection of snacks and beverages, it could be a regular party-in-a-box.
Then we sat. And waited. And ate beef jerky (thankfully, it wasn’t from the Country Fair deli).
Finally, all of our snacking paid off. I felt a tug on my line and fought for my life to reel in the monster. Suddenly, its great, gaping maw burst through the ice, with jagged teeth that snapped viciously at us. But Doc strayed too close, and it ripped his leg clean off at the hip. Now the monster had a taste for human blood, which drove it into a frenzy.
Well I decided that I wouldn’t stand for any more insolence from this fish, so I dove into the icy water and wrestled it into submission. Quickly, I performed the Vulcan nerve pinch and knocked the fish out cold. I pulled it back up through the hole in the ice into the warmth of the cabin, where the good doctor was already reattaching his leg with a little fishing line and a fishhook.
All in all, it was a good day of fishing. We felt bad about taking such a large beast from the river’s depths, however, so we decided to throw it back after taking a quick snapshot.
Yes, it was a good day of fishing.
This sign appears on the front of a deli in Winnipeg. They are no longer in business. Was it their motto, do you think?
