A Valid Opportunity
Actual card I had prepared to give out last Saturday in case anyone asked me why I’d shaved off the beard the previous Monday. Shaving was a mistake, despite the fact that I know my Van Dyke makes me look like the Evil Duke of Norfolk and slightly less approachable than I’d like to be when starting a new job. That said, I still have a pouchy, jowly face that won’t be interesting until I’m as old as Phillip Baker Hall. Until then, I’ll continue to rely on a sharply trimmed beard to provide my face with the illusion of an undercarriage.
In other news, despite repeated listenings to Vienna Teng’s “Daughter” from Waking Hour, I did not engage in any summer flings or romances. I have, however, fallen in love with the Righteous Babe label’s technique of releasing entire albums via streaming QuickTime. Not impossible to rip, but just annoying enough to prevent any but the most dedicated of freeloaders. In this manner I have been listening to Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Ani DiFranco’s new release, Reprieve. The latter is a fun return to form, with an equivalent number of instruments and studio work as something like Little Plastic Castle, but with a greater idea of how to use them to good effect, instead of the effect of “Hey, look! Instruments!” I especially enjoyed the opening bass lick, the structure of which echoes “You Had Time“, and subsequently got me to put up with some rhythmic inconsistencies later.
Pennies to Heaven
In the year 2001, I was given an enormous jar of pickles by a friend who thought that it was be an amusing gift. It was, particularly because I hate pickles. I brought the jar to a department meeting and they were cleared out in moments by ravenous faculty members, and I took the jar home. I’m not entirely sure what possessed me to do this, except that it had been a gift and while I abhorred the contents I still wanted to enjoy the spirit of the gift in a tangible manner.
The jar became, by dint of random chance, the jar into which I dumped my excess pennies. There’s a new attempt to get rid of the penny, as previously documented on The West Wing, and I occasionally find myself agreeing with the prospect. And these times, by total lack of coincidence, tend to fall on occasions when I have seventeen cents in copper weighing down my change purse, and no other money on my person. We don’t even have a ¢ key on the standard western keyboard anymore, f’r cryin’ out loud! So, I would keep four cents for the purposes of exact change, and the rest would get habitually chucked in the pickle jar. Five years later, I still hadn’t filled more than about two inches of the jar, so perhaps the problem wasn’t as rampant as I thought, but when wandering around my apartment trying to find stuff to discard for my upcoming move, well… a giant glass jar of change seemed to meet the basic requirements.
Luckily, my local supermarchet has what’s known as a Coinstar machine. Truly, a brilliant invention. One takes one’s giant pickle jar of pennies to the supermarket, and dumps them in a scoop. The machine counts the pennies and either turns them into actual, useful money (while removing a percentage for the service), or — and this is the really cool bit — turns the pennies into gift certificates to useful megaconglomerates like the iTunes music store or Amazon.com.
Back in the day I rowed crew, and every day on our way to practice we would stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts to buy a 20-pack of chocolate munchkins for $1.99 (which should give you an idea of how long ago this was). After a concentrated four seasons of this, we had enough pennies left over from the change from $1.99 to buy a 20-pack of munchkins: one hundred and ninety-nine pennies. It was an event, and we were proud. I figured I’d have a similar amount saved up today, enough to buy one of the two remaining episodes of The Office that I hadn’t seen. Imagine my surprise when the machine clinked and clanked up a count of 978 pennies.
Wow. That was a really good gift, even with a slight briny cent, sorry, “scent” (no pun intended, really) lingering over my pentennial accumulation of spare change. I’m now totally excited to go to one of the five Coinstar machines within easy distance of my new apartment and pour in a whole new bucket of petty cash. Too bad it’s going to take a few years to accumulate an equivalent experience.
Light Raillery
I have totally fallen in love with the word “persiflage” today. I read an article about how the romantic male lead and one of the main writers of NBC’s The Office had gone to grade school together and tripped over the word. I’d never encountered it before, and it so perfectly summed up the way I feel about my own verbal contributions to the wider world, that I decided to make it my new identity. I’ve been tired of “m3lbatoast” for a while. In college, being on the fringes of a bunch of self-proclaimed n3rds and 31337, I enjoyed the alphanumeric thing. But it’s hard to write out. And it’s hard to say simply. “Is that a numeral one or a letter ell after the three? What does that say? Emm-three-ell-ba-toast?” I have grown tired of it.
Unfortunately, adopting “persiflage” as a new web-identity isn’t that simple. Despite my inexperience with the word, it is a standard enough vocabulary word, which means that someone thinks it’s marketable. Specifically BuyDomains.com, which seems to think that the persiflage.com address is worth a cool seven thousand dollars as a personal site. Now I can’t wonder what their dedicated evaluateers would have quoted as a price if I’d said that I wanted the site for a business page or for a film tie-in. Persiflage.net has been similarly sat upon by BuyDomains. I assume that .net top-level domains are less desirable and might cost a grand or so less, but even that is eye-rubbingly ridiculous. It’s a nice scam if you can get someone to swallow it.
I have come up with a suitable username that will link to the persiflage brand and concept, and have been wandering all over creation solidifying my stake. It’s a fake word, so it hasn’t been that difficult, and now my potential new web-identity has it’s seat saved over at Blogspot, Gmail, WordPress, AIM, Flickr, and Yahoo!. But while it makes for a good username, it’s not really URL material, outside of the free hosting that someplace like WordPress provides.
The difficulty arises when one tries to avoid paying BuyDomains or GoDaddy. What do I go with? persiflage.biz? persiflage.co.uk? I am so through the whole three-for-e thing, and besides I’m not really seeing the aesthetic appeal of p3rsiflage.com. “m3lbatoast” has a visual aspect to it that is pleasing, and the reversed substitute digit makes itself almost immediately self-apparent. “p3rsiflage” and “persiflag3” fail to create a similar intuitive grace, or indeed to embody any visual aesthetic.
I have my eye on a couple of work-arounds that have a certain charm — but they will not be mentioned here so as to prevent any vicious cybersquatting. However, suggestions are welcomed as I scrutinize my bank account and ponder redesigns, server hosts, functionality, and longevity.
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