Look, I do write! I **do**!

Just because I don't have the time to type if I want to keep my scholarship doesn't mean I don't have plenty of ideas, my head like a bag of popcorn in the microwave oven of the multiverse: ideas going pop pop pop pop pop pop!

I don't really even have this time, but I'm stealing it, so I can type this poem up:

Say This In Lieu of a Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to this Thing
A pledge, allegiance doesn't bring
It doesn't matter anyway
Just something that you only say
To look good, something that you do
So teachers will not yell at you
So go on, don't let me interrupt
I'm 'sorry' if I was abrupt
And rude, since I spoke the Truth

A most treacherous thing, that is
That bites the hand, that fans the flames
Of defiance, which makes people thing
Compliance kind of sucks...
So why should we do it? We shouldn't?
Then screw it! The pens are in our hands
Have at it!

Truth makes for independent thoughts
Which leaves civilizations all distraught
The only way to have society
Is to live with absolute piety
With the doctrines of no new ideas
Individuality being the highest sin
That anyone can deal in
Averageness the highest virtue
(Don't stand out, the world might bite you)
That to heaven (or something) lets you go,

But you know? Heaven has always seemed
To me, only a pale smokescreen between
Something and something else,
Not somewhere in itself
But hey! How could I know
How could you know
How could anyone know?
We can't - what remains to discuss?

I pledge allegiance to this thing
But I don't, really, just pull the string
To see the truth or a different lie;
Someday even death may die.

Guess Who is visiting?

Oreo-zerg, oreo-zerg,
Does whatever a zerg/cookie hybrid does....
Oh my gods, now I can't
Get the image
Out of my head
Run away, it's oreo-zerg

Yeah. And, no, we haven't been watching the Simpsons Movie... of course we haven't... yeah... the hand wavey thing will erase all your memories...
No, we didn't make cookies... And we didn't eat cookies... Or prodigious amounts of Hershey's Kisses... or brownies... or hotdogs... Nooo... Of course not...
And there's no way that we were obsessively playing games of set, over and over and over...

ha, we pwn!

Two mastheads no more!!

I fixed it! Well, sorta! It'll still need work to be permanent, but, hey! It's no more double-vision! Yay!!

[Naren notes - WHO GAVE 369 CHOCOLATE?? Or sugar? Or - what?! She's hyper! Too many exclamation points - that is bad, it's even influencing me---
[Cosima informs Naren that it might be wise to shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up now.]

If you guess what is quoting a song and where the lyrics are from I'll make March's masthead in your honor. (I'd make January, but Jan.'s done and Feb.'s background's done and the foreground would be in the works if I had remembered my sketchybook.)

369'll rescue the page... later!

Yes, I am aware that there are two mastheads. That's what I get for trying to center it! And I've got a January masthead and a Feb. in the works, so I'll end up having to repeat the process, around and around! ANYway, the two mastheads - 369'll fix everything. Just not now. (369 is me when (poly? I wish. Discuss)mathy.) Because right now I am blogging from a computer that is not my own.
Have fun! I'll be back with your unreliable, non-hiatused, no-way-is-it-normal bite-sized insanity soon! And even, perhaps, with a decent template! (The Thisaway Blue is only because it went well with the masthead. Please do not be tempted to make jokes about regressions to sixthgraderhood! (As if anyone would, but it makes me feel better to pretend that there are readers, and readers who would joke ;S )) Be that as it may, gotta go - there is movie and this compu's keyboard is impossible. I like mine better!

removing programs... sort of?

there's this one program - typing instructor deluxe - that was on my machine that i never use (well, ok, i'd occasionally clock how fast i type - it's around seventy words per minute but with a lot of mistakes if i can't use backspace) and it was, holy holly, it was huge. and my machine was critically low on space, so i thought i'd delete some useless stuff. but its uninstall didn't work, possibly didn't even exist. (it's been on my cattop for, what, years? so it's been through a lot of machine crashes) so, i google 'uninstall programs manually' and i get this nice tutorial - you can find it here - problem is, it's all DOS and i don't really know any DOS - at all. ya, sad, isn't it?
but here's the possibly useful thing. i hold no illusions that this got the whole sock-darned thing out of my cattop, but at least it cleared 450 mb - i went to my computer> c drive> [...i think] cosima's documents> well some way or another i got to program files, and i went to its folder and deleted it. so that's a simple way of getting most of a program off of one's machine, i guess. hope it's useful to you and that the all-lowercase isn't too annoying - remember, it's only until january 7th!

more spiced ham

what happened? suddenly i'm getting quite a bit of spiced ham! three more lottery things (get it into your thick heads, people, i'm not in the uk!) and one that got past my filter and so i shall post it:

Greetings,

I am Major Andrew Biko, squadron leader with the ECOMOG (Economic
Community of Africa Monitoring Group) Army; I requests your co-operation in
this confidential transaction of cash money amounting to total sum of
Thirty-Two Million United States Dollars into your facility. before the
My squad and I secured this fund during the course of our duty in the
invading of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) guerilla rebel camp in
Angola, The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone and
Liberia where they trade Conflict Diamond for Amunition . Due to our
sensitive position and civil code of conduct, which does not allow us
to own or operate foreign bank accounts and many other Rigorously benchmark, we
seek your cooperation in this deal to externalize this fund.
We will provide you with the necessary logistics for this project if
you are interested in this deal, please reply to my personal mailbox:
andrew_biko01@yahoo.co.uk

Yours sincerely.
Major Andrew Biko

someone please spam his email address. he deserves it, for crimes against inboxes, grammar and proper capitalization*. and some of the phrases he used belong in an rpg!

oh, and name change notification thing - due to a joke, oreoboy is oreozerg when he's being a... *refrains from saying what "methe"_i called potato king*


*which usually i advocate but for the vacations i write in all lowercase, justine larbalstier-esque-ly.

_i pronounce it mee-thee. it's a translation, more or less, of the first two syllables of her name - the only ones i know how to spell.

Mysterious... Thingy... of... thing!

Well, so, yeah...
I had this mysterious Hanukkah present. Thing. That Dad was on the phone for most of Sunday and Monday trying to finagle. Well, he told me what it is...
I'M GETTING PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS SIX I'M GETTING PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS SIX OH YEAH!
(bit of background here - I have been running Photoshop Elements 2 for as long as I've had this computer, pretty much - longer than I've had Seh's trusty tablety sidekick of doom - and boy oh boy was I surprised when I found out there was 5 while reading the comments on Scott Westerfeld's blog while people waited for the Author to post so that they could, theoretically, win a copy of Extras - "I'm downloading a demo of Photoshop Elements 5 while I wait." "I'm having pizza." "Cool, pizza." "Yum." "I'm hungry." "I'm eating popcorn." "Popcorn and bloggery? Party down!" "Wait, Photoshop Elements 5? WOW! What's it like???" "Um, shiny?" - and shiny is good, right? Right?)

A most unaspicious date

Not that I had a bad day or anything, but I like doing what I refer to as "reducing" numbers, plus I'm a bit Midnighters-obsessed at the moment (Read Scott Westerfeld's books) after having read Touching Darkness (no I don't have the first one. Or Blue Noon) so I've been poking at every number I find - and twelves, twelves, are very very bad.

Look. 12 (day) + 12 (month)= 24 (bad). Now, 24 (=12+12) + 9 (2+0+0+7= 2+7= 9) = 33, and I don't know what I think about 33 - elevens aren't that good, but I stand by my beloved 3s - and - hey! 1+2+2+1= 6 again and... um. Again, don't know much about 6s.
And, for the heck of it (haven't done this yet) let's see...
t-w-e-v-l-e-d-e-c-e-m-b-e-r is 1-2-3-4-5-6 + 2, 4, 6, 8 so that's, ah, fourteen? Not as bad as the rest...
And d-e-c-e-m-b-e-r-t-w-e-l-f-t-h is 8, and, um, and, um (these are really my thought processes as I do this - I wuves math, but this is boring, even if it's numerology, because I can't skip steps because I'm typing them up!) 7, so that's - 15? Don't know anything about 15s.
Still, even if the letter counts result fairly neutral, twelves are icky--

Wait!
*counting occurs*
14+19= 33, again!
15+19=34.
Huh. I still don't like the twelves, though.

(19= number of letters in Two Thousand and Seven that I came up with. I may be wrong, I'm addled at the moment.)

FYI, if you read By Freaks, For Freaks - I have two book reports from English class and on Friday I'm going to write an essay thing on why (well, in some cases middling and higher) YA is preferable to - IMHO - all other age ranges in books. I'll post all three, theoretically, during the vacation, but also during the vacation I have to work on peoples's presents, They are leaving us several projects, and Maestra Olga Español expects me to illustrate my dictionary and work on my book project, too. For the presents, however, I will post the better results here and (hopefully) on DeviantArt. Also, I'm going to digitize some of my better done projects, since the plant one is universally turning brown.
Whee.

It tasted good.

"Why do you hate me so? I only burnt your cross... and everything else... and ... cannibalized Jesus..."
"You ate Jesus?"

OreoBoy is over here doing homework

And we all know that results in great quotes...

OreoBoy: (holding something up) What's this?
Me: (looks at the thing in his hand) That is a potato.
OreoBoy: Oh.

OreoBoy: Wait, dad has an accent but potato doesn't?
Me: Yeah.
OreoBoy: Oh, okay.
Me: Why, did you write that it was your dad pasted to that paper?
OreoBoy: (snerk) (sounding like a kindergardener) Daddy!

OreoBoy: Brocolies are like small bonai trees.

New song

Ok, I thought this song was pretty silly. Other people thought it was weird. No doubt Ipso will think it too negative. I'm still working on it. In theory it's a duet. And the mouse bit is only a placeholder, seeing as it has the correct number of sylables and the right cadence and rhymes.
Enjoy. (Working title's Doomsday; as soon as homework allows and as I can get Audacity I will post a recording, though vocals only unfortunately.) But here goes nothing:

Doomsday, it's
Doom's day, so
let him have his fun
Today-o,
Doomsday, it's
Doomsday, so
Let him have his fun/(Count slowly to one)
Today-o.

Tomorrow things
will proceed
much as they have before
as long as you
don't go outside
and don't look out the door

Stay away
From doors and windows,
Stay inside the house
Stay away
From the great unwashed
And would you kill that mouse?
For me-o,

Doomsday, it's
Doomsday, so
Let him have his fun
Today-o
Doomsday, it's
Doomsday, so
Let him have his fun / (stay hidden everyone)
Today-o

Did you know?

Well, my computer's running Windows XP so it might be different for people on different Windowses and it's definitely different for different OSs, but if you delete stuff permanently from the outset, instead of a page flying of it's own accord into a trash can, it's a page crumpling itself up, then turning into a little firework. Cute.
Why am I deleting stuff from the outset? Because I did a really stupid thing, I set a hard drive to back itself up, and said hard drive is now full. So I'm deleting all record of it backing itself up, only Windows wouldn't let me send it to Recycling, so I'm trying to delete it all but my dear Windows is being odd. And here I thought an eighty gig hard drive was the solution to all my problems; now, disillusioned, I wish for a terabyte and a USB hub.

Public Letter thing

It’s taken me a while to get the news through my very, oh-so-very thick skull, but I’m finally kind of believing that Kirsten Miller’s comment was real (Or someone who knows how to trick blogger… But I’m fairly sure I’m the only one that’s occurred to… it was a fairly good idea… oh well) and if so then I have a question for her, a correction, and a couple quadrillion thanks.
Number one – the question.
Your comment just said email me at kikistrike.com – one problem, no email address given. I was thinking of asking the Webmaster but this works too I guess.
Number two – a correction.
Well, maybe. I don’t live in Mexico City, at the airport of which there were beckoning bookstores but the nasty, nasty escort teachers wouldn’t let me visit, but in a little bookstore-forsaken town with a backwards school system that makes me wish every waking moment I am here I was homeschooled, or at least somewheres with a working computer lab and a foreign language teacher who actually knows her subject. I visited Mexico D.F. for a week. I liked it there, a lot.
Three – thanks.
Yes, please, I would love a copy of the Empress’s Tomb (insert gratuitous exclamation points here) and thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you…
I can’t thank you enough.


Okay, and for the rest of you – I figured out one of the tricks to this stupid computer. (I’m on the same one as last time – remember the time with the chairs?) The symbols on the keyboard, to the computer, are shifted to one side, on the shift-version of the number bar. So if I go from 1 to = on SHIFT I get: !”•$%&/()=?¿. In fact, the whole keyboard looks like this:

ª ! ” • $ % & / ( ) = ? ¿ backspace,
º 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ‘ ¡ backspace,
caps lock A S D F G H J K L Ñ ¨ enter
caps lock a s d f g h j k l ñ enter
shift Z X C V B N M ; : _ shift
shift z x c v b n m , . – shift
ctrl windows alt space alt windows I-don’t-know-what-but-it’s-damn-annoying ctrl.

That would be a diagram of your common Spanish-language keyboard – ONLY THE KEYBOARD ITSELF IS ENGLISH.
(English language keyboard on my laptop:
~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + backspace home
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - = backspace home
tab Q W E R T Y U I O P { } | PgUp
tab q w e r t y u i o p [ ] \ Pgup
caps A S D F G H J K L : " enter PgDn
lock a s d f g h j k l ; ' enter PgDn
shift Z X C V B N M < > ? Shift End
Shift z x c v b n m , . / shift end
ctrl fn windows alt space alt i-don't-know-what-it-is-but-it's-damn-annoying ins del
arrow keys
So you can see why I'd be having trouble even if it wasn't a Very Perplexed Desktop.)


Aaah!

SinCerely.

Hurricanes, Hurricanes, Hurricanes!

I've heard it's ran aground now but there's still quite a lot of wind and stuff. Glee. And Felix might cross over the skinny bit of Central America and give us grief. That would be pretty insulting; who wants a secondhand hurricane?
Well, as long as I'm talking 'bout weather, just warning you, I might go AWOL for a while. Jeez that's a lot of wind.
And while we're on weather Sunday we had an earthquake! Check Dad's blog for the details that I am too lazy to post at the minute. I'll give you my views and some info if I can dig it up... Later!

PS- You might wonder why I'm using this lousy Minima template (I mean, no offense to the Minima guy, but it is not bubbly. At all.). Well, it's homework and laziness and the fact that a template is a work of several days while since I have been forbidded from hibernation of the Cattop, my work is restricted to one day, then start from scratch. Neh.
I've been trying to at least get the parts of the layout I've got to do in blogger's imperfect, bogus WYSIWYG to work, but they won't. Baaaaah.
Just overheard: "C'mere, Estrella!"
(Estrella is my doggy)
"C'mere, girl! C'mon!"
*Estrella runs away*
"No, Estrella, come-!"
*Estrella's out in the rain*
And despite what it may look like, Estrella is not stupid. Far from it. She's pretty darn smart. She thought she was in trouble is all.

PPS- This wind is so strong, even the screen that actually fits in the window blew out. Although it had been dislodged once today already. Funny story behind that. I'll tell you later. It's kind of long.

The origins of remotely foodlike substances

The memorable phrase comes from an argument about whether you can eat something that isn't food or whether if you can eat it and it doesn't kill you, it's food (what doesn't kill me makes me stronger...). The argument ended, if memory serves, as such arguments often do: "Leave it at 'remotely foodlike substances'! I'm hungry! Will you go to the store?"
And therefore since them, mere "I'm hungry." "What do you want to eat?" "Uh.... foood!" convos won't cut it. This is now commonplace:

"I'm hungry."
"What do you want to eat?"
"Food."
"Don't think we have much of that."
"(and this is a chef's house!) Um... remotely foodlike substances then?"
"Here's paper..."