Will Hines Dot Net

1) I’ve been pushing the boundaries of sleeplessness pretty far lately.
I might treat myself to a cup of coffee because of that.
This is how it starts! A single cup of coffee now, then tomorrow morning I wake up bleary-eyed and shaking, seeing a baby crawling on the ceiling.

2) Yesterday, Kevin and I had approximately this conversation:
“Kevin, I’ve had this phrase running through my head, and I can’t remember what it’s from. It’s ‘I was wrong.’”
“That’s from Austin Powers.”
“Oh yeah.”
“It’s funny you ask because I’m trying to remember this quote from Woody Woodpecker and I can’t…”
” ‘If Woody had gone straight to the police, this never would have happened.’”
“That’s it.”

And Brian is the one who normally is in charge of memory!

3) Pirate Batman

Words/phrases I’d like to use more often:

charlatan
torn ventricle
slag
torrential
mealy-mouthed
enormous pancake
the follies
Who’s head is this?
incisor
incisors
remarkable beans
deputize
snow peas
Would you mind getting off my border collie? I have to use it.
denim
global thermonuclear denim
nice denim
could i have some denim?
your head is icy
Jessica Tandy
Butter cubes
Your next president of the United States
some more vanilla, please

I am enjoying the Kasper Hauser podcast greatly. When I saw the titles, I worried it would be kinda played out and lame (Captain Kirk? Really? Wacky items on restaurant menu? Lawyer commericials? Hitler jokes?) But they’re all smart and funny with deliberate, bizarre vocabulary. Then I was like: “Who am *I* to worry about something being played out? What am I, the Minister of What Is Hip”? Then I laughed at their lawyer commercial. Then I desperately wanted to BE Kasper Hauser. So badly! Make it happen, world! Almost half of their episodes are the probably-easy-to-produce “Wedding Announcements” but they’re all funny, so why not? WHY NOT? I LOVE IT.

Maybe everyone already knows about Kasper Hauser.

Maybe they’re played out and considered hack, like Airplane! That can’t be, right?

Beasts! is a new Fantagraphics book featuring a bunch of comics artists and other illustrators drawing a mythological creature of their choice. I don’t know my favorite yet, but I enjoy how Johnny Ryan autographed his page at a signing this weekend in Seattle (not to me — I just read about this).

This isn’t even in the top 100 most offensive things Johnny Ryan has done, by the way. As I’ve posted before, he’s a genius at being offensive. I love it!

Someone talk me out of this thought: Assuming that time travel is someday invented, and knowing that I’ve never met any relatives from the future, I can assume that none of my descendants find me an interesting enough ancestor to come visit. Discuss.

This will likely be a horrible and convoluted stand-up joke very soon! Oh, man, y’all better buckle up for that!

I’ve been tagged by Eliza to list five things you don’t know about me.

• I played the French Horn for 14 years.
• When I was in elementary school, I rallied my class and eventually other classes to try and write out a googol’s worth of zeroes [edited to add: this is known as a googolplex, thank you Dan Goldstein], because I wanted to get an idea of how big that number really was. For years, I had boxes of paper filled with handwritten zeroes in my family’s basement. We never even got close to being done.
• I once played paintball with Harrison Ford. My group was there for a bachelor party, and Ford and his family (son and brother, I believe, though I’m guessing) were there coincidentally. He was gracious but also very into the game. It’s surreal to be standing in the woods and see Harrison Ford bounding out of the brush in full camouflage to grab your team’s flag.
• I was admitted to MIT as a chemical engineer. I never wanted to go, but I’m proud enough of it that I like to bring it up anyway.
• One day in 1998 I walked all of Broadway in Manhattan, from north to south.

I tag Kevin and Dyna.

The universe had an interesting way of telling me I’ve been eating like a fat pig. A few days ago at lunch, I bought a huge chocolate chip cookie at the deli downstairs from my office building. I love huge chocolate chip cookies. But I do feel a generous twinge of self-consciousness when I buy one at a corporate deli. It’s like buying a cup of yogurt and then following it up with an enormous candy cane.

Anyway, this doddering elderly woman in line behind me tapped my cookie and bleated “My six month old grandson loves cookies, but he’d take a whole week to eat that!” And then she looked at me for a response. My gut instinct (pun!) was that she was rudely pointing out to me and to everyone within earshot that my cookie purchase was unreasonable. Shame-faced, I glared back at her and said, with an unreasonably clipped tone of bile: “Well, it’s good that I’m the one who’s buying it, then.” Then I took my huge cookie and left.

In hindsight, I see she may have just been making small talk. I do need to eat better.

Thank you, Dyna for the super-new headers! This blog is now randomly displayed in one of eight versions. Please, you bastards, collect them all!

“Same Old Drag” by Apples in Stereo. That page leads to a blog, which leads to a download page — it’s well worth it.

Recommended by my friends here at The DL, and they are correct.

This morning, a repairman from Verizon diagnosed what was wrong with my phone line, free of charge. It was a happy ending to my brief dystopian struggle with the mammoth phone beast Verizon. My dial tone went out about 3 months ago, but I’m so flummoxed by Physical Problems that I ignored it (my DSL worked, and I have a cell phone) and kept paying my phone bill anyway. Getting Screwed is often the path of least resistance.

When I finally decided to investigate, I found that Verizon, like so many companies, tries really hard to prevent you from talking to a human being. Instead, I filed a repair request on their website, got a call from a machine confirming my appointment and had no way to ask in advance some questions which MIGHT have let me fix things myself.

Actually, their web site offered instructions on testing the dial tone at your “NID” which is a box located outside most houses/apartment buildings. My building’s NID is located just above human height in the backyard of my landlady. So Monday night, I was standing on tiptoe on a wobbly concerte block, with a flashlight in one hand and a flathead screwdriver and telephone in the other, trying to see if I could get a dial tone there. My landlady was peering from her back door, nervously saying “I’ve never heard of what you’re doing.” After successfully disconnecting and then reconnecting phone service to my entire building, I gave up and ambled back inside where I swore at my broken phone jack for about 20 seconds. Each step of the “repair request” process asked “Did you test your NID” to which I would angrily click “Yes.”

But when a human being walked into my apartment, he diagnosed the problem in about 45 seconds.

If I save a bit of money, I’m just gonna cancel the whole thing and get a cable modem anyway.

Unrelated: I really like this comic strip. This particular one. I don’t read it normally:
http://www.asofterworld.com/