Asparagus pee, Gooblek & Other Neat stuff

Did you ever see those episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation where Broccoli, I mean, Lieutenant Reginald Barclay, is addicted to the holodeck, preferring to spend time there to his real life aboard the Enterprise?

Well I think I’m having the same problem with the Internet. I also feel like that other episode (Nth Degree) where a benevolent patriarchal superbeing gives him super-intelligence so he can wire himself into the computer through the holodeck and bring the Enterprise round to his ‘hood at the center of the universe for a quick look-see. My mind is going a mile-a-minute, picking up clues and making connections, and fighting the urge to follow those curiosity threads out through Google is beginning to sap my superpowers.

Luckily, I just found out via e-mail this morning that I’ll be a rich, skinny, well-hung winner with no debt, a new house, a free car, 50 lbs. of lobster, killer steak-knives, and a hoard of cheap DVDs before you know it!

So I’m listening to the radio on the way in to work, and the guy says, ‘I’d sure like to buy my sweetheart a diamond for Valentines Day, but I don’t have any cash, and my credit isn’t any good,’ and the announcer says, ‘That’s OK – come on down to The Diamond Center, where no one gets refused.’ But I’m thinking, well, gosh, if you don’t have any money and your credit stinks, then maybe you shouldn’t be buying diamonds!

Of course, that’s basically the same thing Greenspan told congress yesterday too.

There are three kinds of people,
those who can count,
and those who can’t.
–Anonymous

I’ve been getting really into personality types lately – you may have noticed that the sidebar refers to Type 7 and INFP. The 7 is supposed to be my enneagram, which is turning out to be an interesting way to classify personalities. There’s a good test at Similar Minds. INFP is my type on the Keirsey temperament sorter, which is related to the Myers-Briggs personality tests. Here’s a butt-ugly, but useful looking website: Keirsey.com.

Anyway, I’m really excited because we are supposed to be getting a bathtub installed this week by the same crew that remodeled our kitchen. We bought an old house where the previous owner had remodeled the bathroom, and I’m sure she ripped out a good solid old tub to create our way-too-elaborate custom-tile shower stall.

It occurs to me that there are bath people and shower people, just like there are cat people and dog people. It also occurs to me that the pairs that go together are probably cat/bath, dog/shower, but maybe that’s just overgeneralizing from my own thoroughly established cat/bath personality preference. Regardless, by the end of next week, I should be sitting in a bathtub reading a book, happy as a cat with a bowl of raw shrimp.

By the way, I knew I was getting to be an old fart a few years ago when I actually got excited about buying a recliner.

Don’t forget – Survivor 6 “The Amazon” starts this week! CBS

Yesterday I had lunch at Jack in the Box, and I was struck by something that I witnessed. An older gentleman was giving the clerk a really hard time because he didn’t get his senior discount on three iced teas, and bitched that he’d been in the day before and they’d only given him the discount on one of the three. The reason I found it laughable was that when they gave him his 50 cents, he walked out and got into one of those $55K Mercedes with the windshield wipers on the headlights. I guess maybe that’s how you get to drive one.

On a lighter note, our daughter had a pair of caterpillars in a peanut butter jar that we collected together a couple of weeks ago, and one of them has turned into a butterfly! We released it yesterday morning into a beautiful sunny day, but we’re worried that the chrysalis opened early because it was so warm in the house, so we left the jar outside with the other guy still hanging from the lid.

Ah, where to start, where to start?

I have christened this blog Asparagus Pee, Gooblek & Other Neat Stuff because I love neat stuff. I once dreamed of editing a major magazine publication called Neat Stuff that would be a general purpose magazine of the best articles about everything. I’m intrigued by things like asparagus pee – you eat a little bite of asparagus, and within minutes your pee smells funny all day – how odd is that?

Gooblek is something I just discovered my wife playing with with my 3 1/2 year-old daughter yesterday. It’s nothing but a stiff suspension of cornstarch in water, but it’s the neatest stuff you ever saw: you can slap it or break it or roll it around like a ball, but if you leave it stand for a second, it ‘melts’ into a shiny wet puddle. If you drop a ball of it, it damn near, but not quite, bounces.