Pirate Personality Profile:

You are The Cap'n!

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some slit the throats of any man that stands between them and the mantle of power. You never met a man you couldn't eviscerate. Not that mindless violence is the only avenue open to you - but why take an avenue when you have complete freeway access? You are the definitive Man of Action. You are James Bond in a blousy shirt and drawstring-fly pants. Your swash was buckled long ago and you have never been so sure of anything in your life as in your ability to bend everyone to your will. You will call anyone out and cut off their head if they show any sign of taking you on or backing down. You cannot be saddled with tedious underlings, but if one of your lieutenants shows an overly developed sense of ambition he may find more suitable accommodations in Davy Jones' locker. That is, of course, IF you notice him. You tend to be self absorbed - a weakness that may keep you from seeing enemies where they are and imagining them where they are not.

What's Yer Inner Pirate?
brought to you by The Official Talk Like A Pirate Web Site. Arrrrr!

Arrr:

I hope everyone is preparing for International Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19. I know I am; it's the highlight of my summer. For those of you not as skilled as Susan or Ed at talking like a pirate, try this handy translator out to learn exciting pirate phrases.

Yayy!:

Yesterday at this time I was pretty sad. I had just spoken to a woman at the State Department and she had told me that not only was I not cleared yet, but that interns often didn't hear until the end of September or the first of October. This morning, I even wrote a long post bitching about this and how I might end up living in a box on the Midway if my clearance didn't go through and I didn't find out until too late to go to school. Then I would have had no job, no home, no money, and I was starting to think about how one could weather-proof cardboard. But then our computers at work crashed (again. This time the internet went rather than the drive, but that's another story) so I lost the post and didn't have internet access for the rest of the day.

I got home from work to the following email.

"Hello:

If you are receiving this email, you have received a security clearance! The next step is to arrange your start date for the Fall 2003 session. The following dates are available:

September 8, 15, 22, 29
October 6, 20, 27

Please respond to this email with the date you wish to begin your internship. Thank you.

***NOTE: If you are assigned here in Washington, you will receive another email three weeks prior to your start date with reporting instructions for orientation.

***If you are assigned overseas, you are not required to attend the orientation session. However, do provide us with your start date after you coordinate this date with the bureau coordinator for your respective bureau.

This message is unclassified based on definitions provided in E.O. 12958"

Yayy! So time to actually make plans for the fall. Will, Spain?

Near-death experience:

Wow. I was driving back to work after lunch today. I drive about a mile of the way down a narrow two lane road with no shoulder and a double yellow line down the middle. A guy going the other direction (who I'll call Jeep) was stopped to make a left turn onto a side street (there's no light or anything) and since this road is pretty busy there were six or seven cars lined up behind him. I'm driving merrily along and go on past him.

One of the cars near the end of the line (who I'm going to call the Grand Damned Fool becuase he was driving a Pontiac Grand Am and for reasons that will become obvious) decided he didn't want to wait. He pulls out across the double yellow line into on-coming traffic from a dead stop. This road has a speed limit of 35 and most people go about 40 or so. How he was planning to get past the 4 or 5 other cars waiting behind Jeep without getting killed blows my mind.

Anyway, he didn't pull all the way out because when he got the nose of the car into my lane of traffic, he saw me. I blow my horn, but he has to reverse to get the car back into the space he'd been in and he's kind of stuck. Luckily for both of us, there was a right turn lane there and I (and the two people behind me, all of whom would have hit the Grand Damned Fool) pulled in there and got around the guy.

The dumbest part about it all: of course if someone is stopped trying to make a left turn, there's traffic coming in the other direction. Why the hell else would Jeep have stopped, for his health?

TypePad?:

So I'm kind of sick of Blogger deciding to randomly crash on me and I'm too lazy to deal with Movable Type. I've heard fairly good things about TypePad regarding stability and ease of use. Has anyone tried it yet? If so, leave a comment or email me and let me know what you think.

Bored at work:

Well, I know I'm often bored at work, but this is even more so than usual. Our server is down. Completely and totally. For my computer, that means I have Internet and email access, but I cannot access the main drive that everything is stored in. I also can't check voicemail (not that I ever get voicemail anyway) and the only people who can reach me are the people who have my direct number, a select group of people that doesn't even include my mother.

So I did a couple of things that didn't require the drive and I've got about six files to go copy and then that's it. The good thing about this is that I probably wouldn't have had much to do until my boss gets back into her office and emails me some stuff, so now I have an excuse.

But until then, I'm bored. It's too early to call anyone, there's only so long one can spend on the internet, and I've already heard every CD I have here five or six times. Help.

Nuala O'Faolain on Ireland:

"Ireland distracted me. I was shocked by its plainness. A road sign would give the name of the next village, which would turn out, when I'd managed to translate the Irish words into their meanings, to be a lovely name. The Mill of the Stranger. The Fort of the Dun Cow. THe Bright Swans. And then would come the dull reality--a wide street of two-storey houses of gray plaster and gray brick and a single big gray church and a couple of plain pubs. All the history of the place was in the language. There was hardly a building or artifact from centuries of social life to be seen on the ground. Ruins of abbeys and castles. Then nothing. Then things from my grandparents' time [ed.--Compare Yeats' "grey eighteenth century houses"].

"I kept going back in my mind to my days on The English Traveller, when I used to marvel at the villages of England. Villages tucked away at the end of hedge-lines roads into valleys, with low-windowed cottages and mossy stone paths between cottage gardens, and streams running down to the ponds in the village greens. Low stone villages up on moors. Villages with little ancient churches, obdurate as barnacles. The paths to villagesthat led through beech-woods hiddne in the ravines between sloping meadows. And the plain Queen Anne rectories, and the roofs of the squires' fine places thorugh the trees, and the schools of golden stone that the squire built. The rose-covered dispensaries, the gift of Lady so-and-so . . . I used to read the names on the war memorials. I used to imagine it--the landlord and the laborer carried in their coffins through the same lych-gate. And the gleaming, mellow pubs--The Plumed Feathers, The Coach and Horses. I couldn't get over being in a country where all the different classes lived in villages together. Those villages are jewels, I said to myself now. But Ireland was robbed. Ireland was stripped and left bare."

And marriage:

"Do you know what I see now, Miss Leech? I see why there is marriage. It is the only arrangement designed to include the whole of the person and the whole of a life.

"Yes, she said. You might as well have been a good Catholic from the beginning. The solutions the great religions propose to the dilemmas of human existence are basically very sensible."

And the Famine:

"I'd thought about that for a while-- what it would have been like to live in those holes, where the sand is silky but bone cold. Babies and children in there under branches, maybe, laid across the top, and the mother out on the grass trying to boil potatoes in a pot in the rain or the wind over a fire of sea-sodden sticks. But picturing a scene wasn't the same as feeling it. Yet the Famine and the destruction of rural Ireland had been experienced only a few generations back. There were people alive whose grandparents had lived through those years. The trauma must be deep in the genetic material of which I was made.

"I cannot forget it, I thought, yet I have no memory of it. It is not mine; but who else can own it?

[...]

"Our own forebears were part of the system too, you know. None of the gentry around here died. But you can be sure that our ancestors weren't out among the cabins of the dying any more than the gentry were. If you and I are sitting here in a warm room having a nice talk, we have to ask ourselves how our own people survived? What did our people do at the time, that you and I came to be born? Anyone who had a field of cabbages or turnips put a guard on it to keep off the starving. We were those guards."

20 minutes in Windsor:

Wow, I couldn't believe that a few of you hadn't heard this story, but apparently I didn't manage to tell the whole world about it.

Two years ago, I went on the Scav Hunt road trip. We went to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Flint, Cleveland, and Detroit. Detroit was a bit of a problem. See, while we were in Detroit, we remembered that one item on the list had been Kindereier, which are difficult to impossible to find in the US. So we figured that while we were in Detroit, we would just pop across the tunnel to Windsor and pick up some there.

Getting into Canada was no problem. We showed our driver's licenses to the immigration officer, she smiled and said "Welcome to Canada."

Finding Kindereier in Windsor was similarly no problem. We drove through the dingy streets lined with sketchy clubs designed to appeal to Americans between the ages of 19 and 21 if you get my drift (I wasn't exactly impressed by Windsor; it's apparently in the yucky part of Canada) until we found a drugstore. Greasy Alex from Shorey got out, went in, and came back to the car with Kindereier.

The problem came when we tried to get back in the US. We handed the immigration agent our driver's licenses. She looked at them for a moment, then looked back at us. Alex and Laundry Boy were in the front seat and did all the talking.

Agent: How long were you in Canada?
GAfS: About 20 minutes.
A: Why did you visit?
GAfS: We're doing a Scavenger Hunt. We needed to buy some Kindereier.
A: This is another country. You can't just come across to buy some candy. You have to realise that this is another country.
GAfS: We're sorry. The Scavenger Hunt is really important.
A: Do you have any other form of ID?
GAfS: No, I'm sorry. We weren't planning to come to Canada.
A: You-- you can't just do this. There was a terrorist attack on our country on 9/11 and you can't just do this.
GAfS: Yes ma'am.
A: The terrorists had driver's licenses, and the terrorists had Social Security cards, but the terrorists didn't have passports and they didn't have birth certificates.
GAfS: Yes ma'am.
A: We're going to have to search the car. Pull over.*

Alex pulled over. I started to take a mental inventory of the car. A box of 2-day old Skyline Chili. Four heads made of chicken wire and garbage bags, one looking uncannily like a cross between Richard Nixon and a chicken. A pretty expensive video camera. A giant container of red Kool-Aid and a bag of gummy fish. A VIP card to a casino made out to Chunk. A Blues jersey with "Red Wings suck. Yzerman swallows." taped to the back on cardboard. A can of sardines. Of course the Kindereier. Walkie-talkies. A pile of Polaroid pictures including one of an old man in the Chixon head. And then I wondered if we would have to play the video. The footage of Laundry Boy in the Chengwin head running away from the guy at the dog track in West Virginia. Alex oxidising the pennies at the Andy Warhol Museum. Us dying the reflecting pool in Pittsburgh with Kool-Aid.

Oh, God. I don't think the immigration agent would have found this amusing at all. Luckily for us, the guy sent out to search our car took one look at us and waved us on our way. Just some dumb kids over to drink in the Windsor clubs.

*The dialogue is slightly altered. This was a year-and-a-half ago, and I don't remember exactly what was said. But this is pretty close.

Education:

I've got two posts somewhere in the works about education. One about single-sex classes, currently being tried at King Middle School in Atlanta and one about school accountability/ testing, which has been a disaster in Georgia. Just giving you something to look forward to. Or avoid, whatever.

Puppy:

Sometimes I hate people.

Kids are cute:

My colleague brought her three-year-old granddaughter to work today.

Colleague: What letter is that?
Cute little girl: B
C: What names start with B?
CLG: Bailey. and Bonnie.
C: What else?
CLG: Butt starts with B.

Cemetery:

I was at the cemetery in Appleton last week (a side note, I was knocked out of the county spelling bee in fourth grade on cemetery, so I can always spell it now). We buried my grandmother next to my grandfather, his parents, his sister who died as a baby, and my uncle (their son) who died in Vietnam.

This plot is in the Irish part of the Appleton cemetery, and walking around afterwards, I saw graves for Dolan, O'Connor, Butler (a good Irish Protestant name), and of course McCarthy. Joe McCarthy's grave is about a quarter mile from my grandmother's near the river. In case you want to visit or something.

Afterwards, I started thinking that I likely never would go to Appleton again. Though I have some second cousins there, I had never met them until the funeral and can't really imagine going to visit them. And I can't really think of any reason to go there except family. It's an unexceptional midwestern town that looks like a suburb, so there's little enough to recommend it.

So that was good-bye not only to my grandmother but to a city.

Cicero, Dante, and Vichy France:

I just finished reading Iain Pears' Dream of Scipio, a historical novel about a fifth century manuscript. In it, Roman Gallic aristocrat Manlius writes the Dream, a work of essentially Manichean philosophy sort of based on the Cicero work of the same name. Olivier de Troyen, an early Renaissance poet seen as the precursor of Dante, finds and copies the manuscript and tries to understand it as an orthodox work since Manlius is revered as a saint in Provence. And Julien Barneuve, a French classicist and collaborationist tries to reconcile the historical Manlius with the saintly bishop through this work in 1944.

This book had everything I love in a book: different time periods, some interesting philosophy, not entirely sympathetic main characters (Manlius massacres Jews to assure his place as bishop of Vaison, Olivier betrays his master who had always been good to him, Julien is a collaborationist and probably a coward). Somehow, I didn't enjoy it as much as I should have. The plot was strong enough, but I didn't buy the character's motivations and I found several central actions (this is a book with three climaxes) unconvincing. The characterisations seemed a bit off.

Pears raises interesting philosophical questions about love, betrayal, and security/order, and the book is worth reading for that, as well as for an interesting plot that nicely blends three different time periods. But it could have been so much more.

Back online:

Bellsouth finally came out to fix my internet connection today. It took the guy a long time, apparently both our modem and the USB port on the computer were fried. I've got no idea why my father was using USB for the connection, since it's slow (this computer is not exactly USB 2.0 compatible-- it has a Pentium-II chip) and unreliable, but whatever. We're hooked up through Ethernet now though. Anyway, I fixed the directory permissions on the archives so the permalinks should work and I'll update the sidebar as soon as I finish this post so the archives should be up and running again soon. I have missed UNIX.

I also got my laptop so as soon as our wireless is back up I'll be able to use the internet while watching TV. That sounds so decadent to me.

(Almost) security cleared?:

I met with the background investigator for the State Department today, who showed me his ID when we were walking in like the FBI do in movies. Pretty cool. The meeting went pretty well. He asked about foreign travel, drugs, and the vast number of addresses I've had over the past three years.

Foreign travel was fine. Over the time period he asked, I'd been to Italy, the UK, and Canada. He asked for the name of the program I went to Italy with and the name of the guy in charge, which I couldn't remember. For the UK, he wanted to know who I went with and how long I was there for. The Canadian trip was the twenty minute excursion to Windsor for Kindereier for ScavHunt. He wanted to know what Kindereier were and why US Immigration didn't want to let us back in the US. Like the immigration agent, he didn't find the story very amusing.

The address thing was no big deal. They'd messed up apartment numbers and the addresses didn't match the addresses on my credit report since I didn't change my address when I moved within the U of C. And I explained it was a dorm, so I moved every year.

Drugs, again no big deal. But let me tell you, talking about marijuana use with a federal agent is uncomfortable. And he wanted the name of the boy I was with, which I felt vaguely bad about giving. Not that they're going to track him down or anything, but still.

Anyway, he told me everything looked OK to him, and he'd send the stuff back to Washington. I should hear pretty soon, I hope. My boss here would love to know when I'm leaving, and I would like to be able to make plans.

A modern odyssey:

Well. I went to Appleton on Wednesday and flew back yesterday. Coming up, we flew into Milwaukee and got a ride from there to Appleton (a little under 2 hours, maybe 120 miles). But going back, I flew out of Appleton so that I could come in to work this morning.

When I got to the Appleton airport, Northwest couldn't find my reservation. I called my father who had made the reservation, but he wasn't there. Finally, about thirty minutes later, I got through to him and got the confirmation number. It turned out the reservation had been made for the wrong day, and Northwest in its infinite wisdom (and despite the fact that this was a refundable ticket) cancelled the whole reservation and wouldn't give me a dime on the ticket. The man offered to make the reservation for $500, but the flight was through Detroit and the power was out.

So I went to the Delta counter and got a flight with a forty minute layover Cincinnati (which never lost power) that got in an hour before the NWA flight. The flight was 15 minutes late landing in Cincinnati and I had to take a bus to the terminal, but I made it with ten minutes to spare. I heard all Thursday evening flights into Detroit were cancelled, so it probably worked out for the best.

I got home and my new computer and a book from Amazon were waiting for me. And I might be the only person ever who got sunburned at a funeral. I think they're a bit suspicious at work. More later, and by later I mean Monday. I still have no DSL at home. It sucks.

Incommunicado:

I'll be away from email from about 2 pm today until Friday morning. So don't expect any responses tomorrow.

Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport:

The New York Times has picked up a story I reported first. I said most of what I wanted to say in the earlier post, but I'd like to respond to one point made in the article.

The argument basically goes like this: they tore down the terminal Hartsfield built and replaced it with a new one. Therefore the airport doesn't look like it did when Hartsfield built it, so it's not really his legacy anymore. No, I'm not buying it. Though the physical structure is different from Hartsfield's day, Hartsfield lured major airlines (Eastern. anyone remember them?) to Atlanta at the time that the hub-and-spokes structure was establishing itself. Airlines looking for a southern hub ultimately had to choose between Atlanta and Birmingham and thanks to Hartsfield's incessant lobbying, chose Atlanta. There's a pretty good discussion of this in The Temple Bombing, a compelling book about anti-Senitism and 1960s Atlanta (the book's title event occurs in Driving Miss Daisy also) which has the added virtue of being written by the mother of a girl I went to high school with).

Jackson couldn't have done this. Not because he wasn't a great leader, not because he wouldn't have wanted to, but because it was 20 years too late. By 1980, airlines had decided where their hubs would be and they generally weren't willing to move them to another city in the same region. After all, why would they spend all that money and hassle when they oculd just stay where they were?

If it weren't for Hartsfield, Jackson's state-of-the-art terminal could only have been built for a commuter airport and Birmingham would be the heart of te "New South."

Gory details:

One of the things I do at work is answer the phone. Usually, I just transfer the person to whomever they wish to speak with (try writing that sentence so that it doesn't end with a preposition-- it makes me sad), and often I have to transfer them to voicemail because that person works out of her home rather than our office.

Sometimes the person on the phone seems to think that giving me the gory details of the case will make me actually transfer them. For example: "I've got a guy who got all his teeth knocked out, and the roots are still attached to we need to get him to a dentist post haste" or "This gentleman has burns over 60% of his body and he's in the ICU." Did I need to know that? I'm a frigging file clerk, I'm not a nurse. And the district manager doesn't work out of this office.

A calamity:

So no DSL at home right now. The line is down, and since we'll be gone the end of this week, the technician is coming on Monday. I still have internet access from work, but for reasons I don't understand, I cannot access either telnet or SSH from my work computer. So I can't fix the directory permissions for my archives, so the recent permalinks will continue not to work. I'm sorry. If I go over to the library, I will fix them there, but I doubt I'll have time.

No more spam?:

I imagine Will wiil appreciate this article. The basic idea is to charge minimal postage for email, the fee for which will be collected by the owner of the inbox. I have no problem with this plan (indeed, with the amount of spam I get, it might even make me rich) but I wonder how effective it will be. It costs about 20c for a company to send me a piece of junk mail through the post, but I get about 4-5 pieces most days. Charging for email may cut down a bit on the number of Viagra/ breat enhancement ads I get, but I doubt it will eliminate all of the credit card with incredibly low APR offers that I get.

PeterBlog:

While it's not technically a blog written by the illustrious Peter, wouldn't this blog make Peter so happy? Maybe it would even make him do a little dance.

Piracy:

So, if anyone missed the thing on the History Channel where they taught people to fight like pirates (also known as the most awesome thing I saw on TV about two weeks ago), they're rerunning it this week. It's called Conquest, and I think it's on Wednesday, but I'm too lazy to go to the History Channel website and look it up. But you should watch it. If you going to be on my pirate ship that preys on cruise ships (my newest career plan-- I'm so getting a parrot, too), you have to be able to fight like a pirate. And you know you want to be on my pirate ship.

I admit, I don't quite know how this is going to work. What with the Zamboni driving and the pirate ship, how am I going to have time for the tequila shack in Mexico?

Unnecessary Rudeness:

I was at Johnny Rocket's last night, picking up some dinner to go. The family in front of me were some of the worst behaved people I've ever met. The woman tried to pay with a check. When informed that the restaurant didn't take checks (this is a small place, basically a counter which serves sandwiches, burgers, and shakes, so them not taking a check is hardly a surprise), the woman proceeded to get angry at the cashier. "But they told me you took a check. I came in and asked. They said you took a check." The cashier: "No. We've never taken checks."

Then the husband starts getting into. He gets up in the cashier's face, pointing his finger and saying "you told her you took checks. I know she's not lying because I waited outside while she went inside." The cashier responded "well, who did you speak to?" The woman doesn't know. Now, there are about five people working here. She (and the employee) remember that she spoke to an employee about whether they had booster seats, but she "can't remember" whether she asked her about the check thing. Um, what? The guy really starts going at it now, pointing and yelling. Did I forget to mention that he's holding his crying baby, who can't understand why Daddy's so upset?

Anyway, the cashier got permission from the owner to take the check, and they finally left.

Now I see two possibilities here. Either the check was bad, and they just wanted to make enough stink so that the place would take it, or the woman went in to ask about the check but forgot to ask. Now, ordinarily I think that lying through your teeth about this sort of thing is a bad idea, but the husband was scary enough that I didn't blame her if that was the case. I hope she wasn't going to go get hit when they got home.

It did sort of make me wonder. Why is it that people believe that when being on hte other side of the counter enables them to say anything they want to you? Working at the movie theater, I had people say some things to me that I considered to be beyond rude. After telling a woman that I couldn't give her any popcorn (since, you know, the concession stand was closed and all the popcorn was in the trash can. Honestly, I'd have given it to her, but I was afraid that all the cleaning products on it would have killed her and I'd have gone to jail for involuntary manslaughter or criminal negligence or something), I was told, "well, that's why you work at a movie theater." Leaving aside the fact tht I was 17 years old, what the hell gave her the right to say that to me? Maybe my family's on welfare and I'm trying to earn enough to get us off. Maybe I'm mentally disabled and can't find a better job. Maybe I like the job. Is it any business of hers? Another time, a woman accused my manager of "smoking pot upstairs." This was a woman who came throught the employees only door (clearly marked) and up to the office after we were closed because she'd lost her purse. I told my manager she should have pressed charges against the woman for trespassing.

My solution: the Involuntary Service Corps. Rather than a military requirement for all citizens, everyone must spend the year after their high school graduation working at some crappy customer service job. Whether they must answer phones as a tech support person, work behind the counter at McDonald's, or sell clothes at the Gap, no one will be able to buy his way out. And they'll have to work for the wages that people usually make at these jobs. Oh, technically it's probably unconstitutional and unworkable and so on, but wouldn't it make people nicer to everyone in customer service?

In a very good article about the shortcomings of the Good Friday Agreement, Harry Browne writes: "the 'peace process' in Northern Ireland, held up repeatedly in the last decade as an example for other conflict zones to follow, has less and less to show for it--unless you quite legitimately count a bomb, bullet and body count that remains negligible as a major achievement." While I, like Browne and I imagine many families in the north of Ireland, do believe that this absence of violence is a major success of the peace process, I think this lack of violence will ultimately doom the attempts for peace.

I think the reason the peace is holding despite the inherently sectarian nature of the Good Friday Agreement (and despite the fact tht nothing has really changed in the north of Ireland in the last five years) is that the people of the province are tired of violence. It's hard to say that after ten more years of peace, the same will be true. It took fifty years after the end of the Anglo-Irish War for violence to erupt in Belfast, but erupt it did. Now, fifty years of peace is better than fifty years of violence, of course, but it's hardly a permanent solution to Ireland's problems.

The GFA will fail because the groups in it are still acting at cross-purposes. The Nationalists still want a united Ireland and the Unionists still want union with Britain and these are mutually exclusive. I don't see any way around that.

Locker Rooms:

OK, this is a bit of a weird issue, but here goes. When I was at the Y last night, I went swimming. After I can back, I went to rinse off in the showers, figuring I could take a real shower when I got home. I rinsed off in my bathing suit since I was about to take a real shower.

Everyone else in the showers (and there were probably close to ten women) was naked. Not only that, but several women were walking around naked. Before this starts to sound too much like a teenage boy's fantasy, let me tell you that most of the women were from a water aerobics class that had just let out and water aerobics is not usually a sport practised by the svelte.

Usually, when I'm in the locker room (both in high school and at U of C), most women try to stay covered up, changing quickly. In fact, I remember watching some crappy movie (maybe Road Trip?) and seeing a scene set in the women's locker room in which the women walked aound naked and laughing about how that was just how men imagined women's locker rooms, not the real deal.

But have I led a sheltered life? Is this really what women's locker rooms are like?

I felt like a prude in my swimsuit. But what else could I do, get naked for no reason (Tim, don't answer that)?

MI-5:

Well, I don't usually blog about TV because I'm embarassed by the quantity of trash TV that I watch (every episode of Joe Millionaire, some Jude Judy... I think I'll shut up now), but MI-5 is something else. It was originally broadcast in Britain under the name "Spooks" and has been on for three weeks here on A&E, Tuesdays at 10, 9 central.

The hero, Tom Quinn, lives with a woman who does not know he works for Five, the UK's Secret Service. Five seems to be kind of like the CIA but with authority within Britain. In the past three weeks, he's defeated an American anti-abortion bomber, a businessman who tried to foment race wars in Britain, and most recently Kurdish rebels who were helped by a man who wanted to sell the names of every agent who worked for MI-5, MI-6, and the SIS.

Like every other show of this type, you know he's going to win, the question is how and who the show will kill off on the way. Since the show was originally made for British TV, about ten minutes have been edited out for American commercials. Usually, this just makes the show even more tense, without a second of extra footage, but occasionally it does seem to omit something important to the plot.

MI-5 is 24 on its best days. You should watch it.

I am so broke:

Georgia had a sales tax holiday this weekend (no one had to pay state or local sales tax on all items of clothes under $100, all computers under $1500, and all school supplies under $20). I figured I should take advantage of this while also helping the economy. So I bought a new computer.

For those of you who care about such things, it's a Dell Inspiron (for some reason I don't fully understand, if you're buying a Dell with the education discount, you have to pay the sales tax; otherwise, you don't, so it's probably cheaper to not buy from education generally since the discount is only 5%. But I digress) 600m with an Intel Pentium M 1.3 GHz processor, 384 MB of RAM, 30GB Hard Drive, CD-RW/DVD Drive, b/g wireless. Three year warranty, which I can apparently upgrade to four for free. We shall see. Win XP Home, but I'll upgrade to Pro. WordPerfect, but I'll install Office as well. And if anyone needs a USB 2.0 PC Card (works in notebooks only and is ridiculously faster than USB 1.1), email me. I've got one to sell for cheap.

After buying this, I decided I hadn't spent enough money, so I went to the mall on Saturday to buy clothes for London. I think I'm tempting fate a little with this since I still don't have a security clearance, but God knows I need decent-looking clothes, and I can always return them if I don't get to go. I got a gray suit, a snazzy black dress, a blue and kahaki skirt with a sweater, and a skirt and herringbone jacket in brown.

So there goes more than half the money I'll make this summer. And I still need a purse and some shoes.

The perfect job:

So I think I have found the perfect job for me for next year. Location scout for The Amazing Race! I would get to travel around on someone else's dime, looking for cool places and things to send the racers on. I wouldn't be in a particular hurry, so I'd get to wander around exotic places just looking for anything that would look nice on TV. I would even be willing to work out the scheduling so there are enough flights, trains, whatever at good times. I think I'd be pretty good at that. I love planning things out. And somebody probably has to go and do all the tasks to see how long it takes. I volunteer.

Unfortunately, I imagine there's a line half a mile long of people who want to do this and Lord knows I don't have any particular qualifications for it. Goddammit.