As of Tuesday afternoon, I am officially part of the twenty-first century. Hooray for me! On an unrelated note, my entire life has been a series of apparently discontinuous experiences of finding out that you get what you pay for.

Item 1: The shuffle nonfunction. It starts at the first song and shuffles five songs forwards each time, producing world’s most predictable random song arrangement. I tried to circumvent it by starting shuffle while on a different song, but it just moves forward to the next multiple of five. If anyone out there can fix this, I’ll pay you in sexual favours.

Item 2: Hot hot heat. Hard drives get warm; that’s why computer towers come with fans. My MP3 player gets HOT - to the point where I could probably be picked up at a bar by someone saying, “Is that a burning coal in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?” Incidentally, here’s where we get to find out whether lab coats are really flame-retardant or not.

Item 3: English As A Fifth Language. An actual quote from the instruction manual, which is at any rate printed on hot-pink paper and is unreadable to begin with: “Keying the menu is like key the trackball.” What trackball? What menu? This was on the very first page, so I assumed it was important and I’ve tried to keep it in mind.

But the main thing is that I paid just over a hundred dollars for 1.5 G of space and now I can get my groove on to Right Said Fred in the tissue culture room. That’s what’s important, in the end.

(Yes, the very first album I put on it was ‘The Top 100 Queer Anthems.’ Shut up.)

What? No more Mike’s Two Cents? After I went through all the trouble of coming up with the tag phrase? :-O

At least go read and comment on his latest post, which is rather good and touches on several discussions I’ve had recently. His sounds less like the incomprehensible ravings of a manmad, and more thought-provoking.

When I found out this morning that Saul Bellow had died, I thought my heart would break into weeny little pieces. Over the years he’s become a surrogate father, whose advice - wise without being sly, knowing without being smug - always spotlit the darkest hours in my life. When I moved to Saskatoon, I read ‘Henderson the Rain King,’ ‘The Victim,’ ‘Dangling Man,’ and ‘Ravelstein,’ on the basis that if you were in a new city and alone for the first time in your life, those would be the logical texts to get you through it intact. And I made it through intact. Thanks, Mr. Bellow. Seriously.

The Trees
Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.