Superburger!!

One of my must-stops while in Jackson is a little joint called Stamp's Superburger. Big, fat, greasy burgers...with emphasis on big. I mean, that's why they're called Superburger, right? Right. The small Superburger (one patty) is loaded with 7 1/2 oz. of beef (or turkey, if you prefer) while the large Superburger is a whopping 11 1/2 oz. And that's as small as they come, mind you. Chili cheeseburgers with jalapenos. Deluxe burgers with sauteed mushrooms, grilled onions, jalapenos, chili, and cheese--a five course meal in itself. Homer would be proud.





Here is the large Double Superburger. I don't know how many ounces of all-beef patty is on it...I'm not sure I want to know. It was handed to me with grease already on the bag. A good sign.












Lord have mercy on my soul (and heart and arteries and digestive tract)! Patties stacked two inches tall and four inches wide...something like 25 cubic inches of beef.







Excuse me, the Superburger and I would like some alone time...

Been watching a little bit of End of the Century, a documentary on the Ramones. I haven't listened to them in a while (the only Ramones I have is on cassette, and, well, what is on my iPod or available on the turntable usually dictates what I'm listening to these days). Watching this reminds me of how much I like them. And of how friggin' great it was seeing them at Tipitina's in New Orleans my freshman year in college! There's nothing quite like getting spat upon and having beer poured on you by the fellow idiots in the balcony, slamming in the pit with tattooed skinheads, breakfast at Denny's, and getting back onto campus just in time for 11:00 chemistry class. Ahhh, those where the days...

Chocolate Oatmeal Stout

That's what I made on Saturday. The little yeasties are happy eating up the malty sugars right now, turning their feast into alcohol and CO2. It should be a nice winter drink. The cider is doing well--the touch of orange and spices (cinnamon and cloves) have balanced out nicely so that they are there but are not in danger of intruding upon the apple taste. The altbier is yummy, too; however, given its smooth character, it has been the drink of choice (until the cider balanced out) and is consequently in danger of extinction. I'll let that species die out for now, but will repopulate my beer fridge with another variety soon enough...

I'm flossing regularly these days. I haven't done that since grade school, when They tried to scare us by sending us home with those chalky red tablets that (supposedly) turned red all the plaque that we missed after brushing. And even then flossing didn't last very long. Fear eventually fades when faced with the tight quarters of a small mouth and fat hands.

Dang it. Got Jordan's new book today. And an old one (New Spring) that I haven't read.

My USB pen drive decides that it won't be read by either of my computers. The way I put it, the drive messed up, not me. This makes me feel better--laying the blame on something that can't fight back. But, as with most technological computer-related mishaps, it's the user rather than the usee that messed up. I pulled it out of the USB port before telling the computer it was okay to pull it out and before it was finished doing whatever it was in the middle of doing. As far as I was concerned, it was in the middle of being a royal pain in my side--not defragging properly, not transferring files quickly enough, etc. Anyhow, you aren't supposed to take it out of the port before it's okay to do so. Bad things could happen if you did. I've accidentally done it before, and nothing bad happened. But before it wasn't in the middle of something. Something bad happened this time.

There's nothing on it that doesn't have a fairly recent backup somewhere else. Reformatting it will erase what's on there, but I'd be able to use it again. It's how I transfer files among the three computers I am in frequent contact with: two at home and one in the office. The problem is that it won't agree to be reformatted. So, I can't even use it. The computer that has the documents pertaining to my classes on it (the Mac) isn't connected to the internet, so I can't send it that way to the computer at school. I could put the documents onto the secondary hard drive in the Mac and then plug it into the PC, but whereas Macs can read PC-formatted HDs, PCs won't read Mac-formatted HDs, and I already re-formatted the secondary HD. Sheesh. It's time for a beer.

If Technical Assistance for the pen drive can't help me reformat it (they were very helpful last night, but what they said to do didn't work this morning), I'll have to buy a new one. That's the price of impatience. Stupid, stupid impatience. Why can't I come to such realizations BEFORE I actually carry out such idiocy? Why can't I learn from my past mistakes?

When I think of inanity of impatience, especially as it relates to the silliness of wanting already fast enough technology to be even faster, I think of a Simpsons episode (of course) where Moe was turning the bar into a family restaurant. He orders a huge deep fryer from the army. When it arrives at the bar, Homer is there (of course) with Moe, who turns to Homer and says, "It will fry a buffalo in forty seconds." Homer whines: "Forty seconds? But I want it NOW!" Exactly.

If your bath towel stinks, and you're not even close to it, does that mean it's time to get a new one? I mean, um, hypothetically speaking.

Of course, this question has all sorts of nasty little philosophical buggers in it, some of which we've been discussing in one of my classes. What does it mean for something to stink when I'm not smelling it? Can something stink while not being smelled? We usually think that it would smell bad even if we weren't around to smell it. But how would we know that it was stinky? We couldn't unless we were smelling it. For something to be stinky is for it to be smelled (and determined as stinky). Does this mean that smelling it (as stinky) makes it stinky? Interesting.

We have before us (at least) two choices concerning a property of a thing, sense experience of that property, and the relationship between them.

1. The bath towel's property of being stinky causes the sense experience of smelling it (as stinky).
   
2. Smelling the bath towel (as stinky) causes the bath towel to have the property of being stinky.
   

Hmm. (1) seems to be the most common sensical. But (2) isn't quite worded correctly, because we weren't concerned with the sense perception causing the property of the towel but rather with the sense perception being the reason for attributing the property to the towel. Without the sense perception, we wouldn't know that the towel was stinky, but the towel could have the property of being stinky without someone's smelling it. Epistemologically speaking (that is, regarding one's knowledge of the bath towel's properties) the sense perception is prior to the property possessed by the bath towel; this is because we wouldn't know that it had the property until we smelled it. Metaphysically speaking (that is, regarding what the bath towel is in itself), the property is prior to the sense perception; this is because we wouldn't receive a sense perception unless it had that property. Although this epistemological-metaphysical distinction might make sense, does it make sense to say that a property which is perceived by the senses can exist when unperceived?

Can't you tell that I have papers that need grading? That this is procrastination, not heartfelt philosophical monologue? That I need to go outside my apartment for the first time today?

Cell phone update. So, I got my provider to drop the charges for the downloads that I didn't make. Good, right? Nope. I was told to just pay the part of the bill minus the download charges. Apparently, however, the refund hasn't gone through the system (or was denied or whatever else happened to the darn thing). So, I am being charged a $5.00 late fee for not paying my bill. So, now I have an extra $11.00 worth of charges to contend instead of the original $6.00.

See Bryan talk to the Customer Service representative. Listen to Bryan use bad words. Oh, my, look at how purple Bryan's face is! He is really, really mad, isn't he? See Bryan have a heart attack. Now Bryan's troubles are over. The End.

Depression Setting In

Twilight. Another season of fruitlessly applying for jobs has begun. Classes will suffer. Writing will suffer. (As if I've been doing a lot of the latter lately, anyway.)

Writing leads to getting published. Getting published leads to getting a job. Applying for jobs leads to not writing. Not writing leads to not getting published. Not getting published leads to not getting a job. So, applying for a job leads to not getting a job.

Well, I bought a new computer. A Mac. A used Mac. Been playing around a bit on it today. Once I get my old hard drives hooked up to it and get it online, I'll be able to form a better opinion of it. So far so good.

Between Fact and Fiction

The scene is a backyard deck. Six children between the ages of 2 and 5 are eating on the patio table. One child (Child #1), a 2 year old, stands alone in the backyard looking helpless and hopeless.

Child #1 (near tears): "Cup! Cup!"

Grown-up #1 (picks Child #1 up, begins walking toward the patio table): "Where's your cup?"

Child #1: "Cup. Cup." (points in some general direction)

Grown-up #1: "Where is the cup?"

Child #1: "Tree." (points in the same direction, where there are a number of small trees)

Grown-up #1 brings Child #1 to the table.

Grown-up #2 (to Grown-up #1): "Where is the cup?"

Grown-up #1: "He says it's in a tree." (the Grown-ups exchange snorts and engage in eye-rolling and head-shaking in apparent disbelief)

3 year old Child #2 is overheard saying something about a cup.

Grown-up #2 (to Child #2): "What did you do with his cup?"

Child #2: "I threw it up in a tree." (Grown-ups exchange glances of surprise, reconsidering their previous disbelief)

Grown-up #2: "In a tree?"

Child #2: "Uh-huh. With the dragons."

Just in case you ever wondered about the urinary excretion of odoriferous components of asparagus.