Green eggs and spam

I just took a break from cleaning out my fridge (since I'm going to be gone for a few weeks and I can't rely on my roommate to monitor the sanitary situation in the kitchen) to sign on and check my e-mail and futz around online for a little bit. Now, I have an e-mail address just about everywhere you can imagine (aol, gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.) so checking email can be somewhat time-consuming. Especially since finding the few important messages buried amongst the bajillion junk messages requires some effort. Basically, I kept signing up for different accounts because the previous one was getting hard to manage as the spammers found me.

I'm sure you're all as good as I am at spotting and deleting the announcements about penile enlargement systems, career advancement advice, mortgage rate reductions, requests for account information, hot teen school girl lesbian action, Nigerian investors, and septic system chemical ads, without even opening them anymore. But occasionally a particularly cleverly disguised one gets through, and every once in a while I'll open one on purpose just to satisfy my curiosity given the sender or the subject line. And there's that underlying fear that I might delete a legitimate attempt to contact me from some long-lost person whose e-mail address I might not recognize.

And so this evening, sitting in my inbox was a single such ambiguous message from a potentially valid e-mail address with the subject: "I'm so glad I found you!" Of course I opened it and of course it was spam. I was greeted by a picture of a bare-breasted blonde holding a hand-written note saying "I love Zach". Demographics aside, holy freakin' crap are they getting good at targeting junk mail in very specific ways. It makes me wonder if this woman sat there snapping photos all day long with notes for Bill and John and Yuri and Amichi and Julio...

The best part though? The website it's promoting is called "Coochiejar"

Killing me softly

I didn't intend for this space to devolve into a bitch-fest, but that's my current state of mind, so a bitch-fest you shall have. It will be short-lived, thanks to my well-balanced brain chemistry.

I don't know if this is the case with any of you fine people, but the short work weeks actually seem longer than the normal ones. Thanks to the dead Presidents, I didn't have to come into the office on Monday*. But I suppose trying to combine 5 days' worth of work into only 4 makes those days drag into interminability. Combine that with an elevated stress level for all the projects coming down the pipeline, and pile on preparing to be out of the office for 2 1/2 weeks starting Monday**, and you can imagine what a doozy this week has been. The fact that it's 8pm on Friday and I'm still at the office instead of getting my drink on (or just going to bed sounds kind of nice too), is pretty indicative of the sort of week I've had.

Naturally this brings up many issues of the sort that I should really be delving into under my "Work in Progress" heading here. For example, what am I doing continuing to devote so much time and energy to something my heart's just not in? But in true Zach style, I'm going to put off that ginormous Can-O-Worms for a future discussion***.

For now, I have more media to deliver and documentation to write. If not sooner, I'll write again, and probably a lot, once I've arrived in the heart of Appalachia. Later y'all.

* Which doesn't mean I didn't have to work on Monday. No no. I've had to either remotely connect to work or physically be in the office every night between 9 and 11 pm for the last 2 weeks to deliver daily media updates direct from NBC in Torrino to our own programs. I'm usually still up at 11pm anyway, but something about doing work at that hour for 14 straight days has really wiped me out.

** I found out this week that a hypothetical business trip was now fully, uh, thetical, and I'm flying out on the 27th for a 14-17 day stint in western North and South Carolina. Yee, I say, yee-haaw.

*** Aaaaaand I just answered my own question, methinks.

Melt With You

I don't want to be an alarmist here, but this whole global warming thing is getting out of hand. It seems that every week some new study is released detailing another frightening statistic or doomsday scenario. Today, for example, it was announced that Greenland's glaciers are dumping twice as much ice into the ocean as 5 years ago - meaning existing estimates of future sea level rise are all too low. The ice may be 2 miles thick, but 36 cubic miles of it is pouring into the Atlantic a year, compared with just 12 cubic miles 10 years ago.

Now, I recognize that the planet is a dynamic system and has undergone periodic shifts in temperatures and climates in the past. So this hardly represents the end of the world (except perhaps as we know it). Change is nothing new; life will go on and organisms will adapt. There's recent evidence (taken, coincidentally, from the very Greenland ice sheet which is now melting) that some of the past shifts happened far faster than anyone suspected: 100s of years instead of millennia. I'll even admit that there's a small twisted part of me that's fascinated by it all and curious to see how things will turn out. I mean, we could see some of the most dramatic climatological shifts of human history - the sort that helped shape human evolution in the first place. Isn't that kinda neat? And we might bear witness to the sort of mass extinction we can otherwise only infer from the fossil record.

What freaks me the hell out about all this, however, is the likelihood that this is all happening as a fairly direct result of human activity; that the train has already left the station and has enough momentum to continue even if we began applying the brakes now; and that it'll happen so rapidly as to cause chaos of both the social as well as environmental sort - shifting crop zones, extensive droughts, flooded cities, migrating populations, emergent diseases. Plus, there's the tragedy of losing what we know and love; it's depressing that someday soon we could have walruses and caribou only in zoos, beetles could destroy the evergreen forests of the Rockies, the Alps could be ice-free, and the coral reefs of the Caribbean and Pacific could be sterile and lifeless.

I'll really miss the polar bears.

Surprise

You know, several people have told me their iPods are psychic and, when set to shuffle, tend to play just the right song at just the right time.

So this morning, as I was waiting for my coffee and bagel at the little place across the street from my apartment, reading some blurb about something in my Economist, what do you suppose comes through my headphones?

In a coffee shop in a city
which is every coffee shop in every city
on a day which is every day,
I picked up a magazine
which is every magazine
and read a story then forgot it right away.

They say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
and the little plastic castle
is a surprise every time
it's hard to say if they are happy
but they don't seem much to mind.

I'm telling you, Ani Difranco was singing to me. And dude, I've got to get out of this rut.

Single Awareness Day (SAD) part II

I'm not generally one to mope and fret about having been single for every Valentine's Day ever, but I'll admit that everyone else's giddy glee grates on my nerves. It's not that I feel sorry for myself for being single but I certainly don't need my nose rubbed in it like it's a stain on the carpet. And there really is only so much of this pink and frilly heart-shaped doily chocolate-covered smoochy rose-petalled hand-holding pepto-bismol laced gag fest that a boy can take. But I'm not bitter. Oh no, not me.

Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt

Cake and glory could have been ours. I'm kicking myself. I should have known the answer without having to run half-way across town.

"If you're not spaced out, you'll find Vena Rd and Al will be close by. Across the steet there's a flowery business whose name matches a famous and just-concluded festival for artists whose medium is 1.4 inches wide and full of holes. Find a lucky number that's up. Look inside and you'll see a fast monarch who likes to take a spin. What are the two words above the man with the newspaper?"

Venard Alley is right next to the Sundance Floral Shop a block away from my apartment. Across the street is my laundromat with a big 7-up sign in the window and filled with Speed Queen Dryers. Every time I do my laundry I stare at the murals on the wall of the guy reading his newspaper beneath the Caffe Trieste sign. Aargh!

We did not win. But, as always, we had a terrific time running around the city interpretting cryptic clues and hunting for hidden treasures. No dodging dragons or ducking beneath tubas or crossing the parade route this year though - we got trapped in the crushing crowds instead. Next year, I'm taking charge of the map.

Dog-tired

I don't have the energy to type much this evening, but wanted to get a post in just to help stave off the slow decline and inevitable death of my blog. I returned last night from a week visiting the fam in balmy Denver. Which was great, as always (I miss them, I do), but not exactly relaxing. What with the wonderful weekend snowboarding at Copper Mountain in the crazy snow, the flurry of my 4 and 6-yr old nephews who operate on energy levels I'm just not used to in my usual sedate existence, their new adorable ankle-biting puppy, and lugging all my snowboard equipment home from the airport on public transportation, I'll admit there was a part of me that sighed a little sigh of relief upon walking in the door to my apartment.
Sadly that teeny sigh faded when I realized it was well after midnight and I had to be at work this morning...

Single Awareness Day

There's a lighted sign above "The Hungry I" adult shop that I walk past on my way to work every day, and it currently says, "Valentine's Day is coming. Will you be?" Despite my annoyance at the reminder, I had to laugh.