Fascinating New Thing

I was helping someone clean out old stuff yesterday. I found this card under the bed.


I have it on my keyboard. I love it! I think it's from some game, because the back says Hasbro, Inc., but I don't want to know what game.



It makes me smile. It makes no sense. Like some type of odd apology card.

You couldn't give a card with that written on it, in this day, but wouldn't it be interesting to print up cards with unusual sentences on them and leave them places? A bit like anonymous mail art.

"I never loved you, but I always wished I had."

"Once, I had a bunny. I named him bunny."

Random thoughts. They would have to have a common flip-side. I guess that would identify the author. You could even have a name or URL on the back. Oh no, now some advertiser will do it, and we'll all find these really bizarre cards and it will turn out to be a promotion for beer, or online insurance. Please, don't. Artists, writers, and creative types with no real reason except mischief, okay?

I also put up a bit of flashing. If you've never had the pleasure of working with flashing, it's like a rolled razor blade. It will cut you, deeply, if you are not completely focused. I was wearing my leather work-gloves - they must be stiff, hard to bend leather - and I took one off, because I was having trouble using the tin snips with it on. Quick as a wink, the flashing flipped around and cut my finger. It wasn't too bad. It spurted blood like crazy, but wasn't big enough for a stitch.
Imagine working with a live rattlesnake. Every second, you must pay attention. You must respect and fear the snake. It will strike at any opportunity. This is flashing.
But, flashing is shiny. Oooooo.... shiny!

Peruvian Aspargus

::Update at end::

Who doesn't love asparagus? Who would dare say it's evil?

Um... that would be me.

I had some weird symptoms after eating asparagus. The palms of my hands and the soles of my feet started itching and burning. I didn't get hives. I didn't get a rash. It was the second time in my life I had these 'itches' happen. The first time and this time, I had just eaten asparagus.

I've always loved asparagus, so I didn't like the connect - at all. I decided to look it up, see if anything could be done. What I found was not helpful.
Seems, it's very, very rare to have an allergic reaction to cooked asparagus. That really cut into my search results. I decided to look up just 'asparagus'. Turns out, off-season and most of in-season asparagus is now coming from Peru. This is new. Like my allergic reaction.
I'm hoping, I'm only allergic to asparagus from Peru. I tried a search for 'Peruvian asparagus' and allergy, but the results were only relevant to contact dermatitis. Again, I hit that brick wall of rare reaction to cooked asparagus.

Maybe, it's something in the soil in Peru? Maybe, arsenic or copper? Those seem to have the same allergic itch reaction. Our local grocery stores do NOT say the source of their asparagus. I thought all foods had to have the origin on them, but nope - nadda.
Since I couldn't find anything about this online, I wanted to post about this stupid, tiny inconvenience. If anyone else is having a problem with Peruvian asparagus, maybe they will at least find this.

I'm going to see if I can find some locally grown asparagus. Do my own experiment. If that doesn't give me a reaction, I can grow my own. I hear it's simple and grows like grass. Yummy, yummy grass.


::Update::
It's copper. I believe there are elevated levels of copper in asparagus from Peru. Not only is copper one of Peru's biggest exports, it is commonly used in agriculture.

Every symptom those who are finding they are suddenly allergic to asparagus have are all symptoms of too much copper.

B6 can help chelate some of that copper away, but until the U.S. government starts looking into this and forcing Peru to meet dietary standards for copper, some Americans will not be able to eat asparagus without making SURE it is NOT from Peru.

Did My Brain Write This?

This popped in my head yesterday and kept repeating. I don't know if I read it somewhere, or my crazy brain wrote it:

I am a fairly reasoned man,
Few things I will not do,
There are some things
I do not like,
And one of them is you

I don't see it in a search for a few of the phrases. Crazy brain.

New Amsterdam

My Mom: I don't get what that show is about.

Me: It's about a guy who died 400 years ago, and an Indian lady put a spell on him. He can never die, until he finds his true love.

My Mom: He's been looking for his true love for 400 years?

Me: Yes.

My Mom: He's pickier than you are.

The Gathering of the Pod People

I don't really participate in social networking. I've always thought having a website with a valid email address was social enough for me. I don't have a MySpace page. I get grief about it all the time. One of my friends is so in love with MySpace, she refuses to acknowledge any stalker story is true, or that most user's pages could put you in a coma from the colour/image clashes. I call them MySores. She defends the service like it's her abusive husband. ::sigh::
I cannot bring myself to get a page on MySpace. I can't.

Lately, however, I've been working on a project that may require a social networking application as its base. I had to join somewhere, to have a look around. I decided to try Gather.com. A few minutes, and I do mean a few minutes, after I signed up, I got my first 'connection' request. Over the next few days, I got more. They weren't from anyone I knew. They were random people asking me to add them to my friends connections.

I wrote my MySpace friend and asked her what the deal was. Why would these strangers want me to list them as a friend? She said, she didn't know anything about Gather. I asked her why people do that on MySpace. She didn't reply.

I've been on Gather for about a month now. The people are strange. If you're on Gather, you either 1. Think I'm crazy to say that, or 2. Know exactly what I mean. If you aren't on Gather, I'll try to explain it as best I can.

Have you ever seen the movie, The Steppford Wives?
That's the best place I know to start. Everyone - everyone - is super, happy, friendly. Everything that anyone writes, uploads, thinks, is ...nice.

"Nice image!"

"Nice essay!"

"Nice icon!"

If you do a Google site search for the word 'nice' on Gather you'll get over half a million hits for the word 'nice' - that's not counting how many times it appears on each page. It can appear 10-20 times on the same page. Everyone telling someone how 'nice' their new post is. No one on Gather can do wrong. Images, almost always have a 10 rating.
It may be, Gather's unspoken motto is 'If you don't have anything nice to say, keep your mouth shut,' or it could be that Gather is a cult. I was welcomed and friended within minutes. I was told how nice my avatar is. I was told how nice my writing is. My avatar was nothing special. I wrote something off the top of my head, just to see how their posting application worked.

I am loved there. I am nice and everything I do is nice. Yesterday, I commented on how nice someone else's writing was... I tried to think of another word, but only the word 'nice' came to mind. It was frightening.

(is it just me, or does it seem like I'm ending almost every sentence with a preposition?)

One explanation for the niceness, could be a points system Gather has in place. I don't understand it. I have points. I think I can trade them for discounts, but I haven't looked into it. If people are given points for friends and writing, that could explain the friendliness. If they get points for every time they comment on something... well, eventually you run out of adjectives. Maybe, it's simpler for them to stick with 'nice', than try a thesaurus?

Yesterday, I received 17 notices from Gather users - comments, mostly. Seventeen notices on a site I've been on for a little over a month and know only one person. Someone I asked to join, because the Steppfords were creeping me out. Join us. Join us. ::shudder::