The Cave Of Lascaux

While I'm at it, can anyone tell me why you shouldn't drink animal's blood that you could get at a butcher shop?

All right! Enough already! I'll 'fess up! It's not about me. It's about a character in one of my projects who thinks he's a vampire. He wants blood, and in our society how are you going to go around getting it?

Really! I swear! That's as kinky as it gets. It couldn't possibly be about me; I refuse to eat peas (still) and tomatoes that haven't been processed into some other form, such as pasta sauce.

Good Lord, no wonder writers hate asking questions for research. But I've got a million of 'em.

Why Public Television is so great (or, Why the market doesn't solve everything, Part CLXI): Darin and I are watching another installment of a wonderful Nova series about the evolvement of modern man from our distant ancestors, such as "Lucy." Did homo erectus spontaneously evolve into homo sapiens all over the globe, or did homo sapiens follow homo erectus out of Africa and supplant it everywhere? And who were the Neanderthals, and where did they go?

There was a wonderful segment about this anthropologist's investigation of the hunter-gatherer hypothesis. He determined that the early ideas of hunter-gatherers were based on modern African tribesman, always a bad idea. He went back to the bones and fragments they had found and wondered how ancient man could have fed himself. If the bones anthropologists had found weren't tools (and there's evidence they weren't tools, 2001 aside), how did ancient man eat? He did a thought experiment and determine that man couldn't fight off the lions and vultures to get to a dead animal. But man could use tools to break into the bones and suck out the marrow.

I thought the idea of this guy going out onto an African savannah and trying to figure out primitive man fed himself was great. As I said to Darin, if doing that experiment had been up to me, my conclusion would have been, Ancient man died out quickly because the idea of sucking out bone marrow was, like, too gross.

Today was just weird. I wanted to go out and get some gardening stuff, and Darin asked me to pick up some drill bits, long screws, and a 3x3 piece of plywood. (Hey, I don't ask; I just do.) I went to Orchard Supply, which had everything except the plywood. I went to Home Base, several miles away to get the plywood, and I ended up having to get a huge 4x8 piece of plywood cut down to 3x3.

Wheeling the 4x8 piece on a cart that had its own ideas of what direction it was heading completely exhausted me. Stuffing the resulting pieces of plywood into my car had me getting light-headed. (And one of the pieces ended up ripping a fair sized gouge into one of the sides of the backseat of my car. Grrrr.) I drove home and held the plywood while Darin drilled. In reading that sentence again I realize that sounds suggestive. It wasn't, trust me.

One thing I've noticed is that Darin and I are snapping at one another a lot whenever we have to do one of these housechores. It's not like we always sang arias together or anything when we had to do this in Cupertino, it just seems like we go to Defcon 4 a lot quicker.

Darin spent a long time on the phone this evening with Libby, a former co-worker. She moved to Arizona because of her husband's job. They spent some time talking about a contract that might be available, then about what a pain it is to move to hot locales in the southern US because of the spouse's job. Then they moved on to reminiscing about the good old days back at General Magic.

Which reminded me that Ceej is taking off to the Great White North (American version) tomorrow. It was supposed to be today, but there was something about socks.

And I am reminded once again that everything has changed recently. Time keeps moving on and people keep moving on and we can't ever go back to the way things were. There is definitely a period that I think of as the "Golden Time," when the large and boisterous crowd of intelligent, fun people worked at General Magic (or slept with those who did) and played together as a big group. Then they started moving on: leaving Magic, going back to school, going to other companies. It wasn't all at once, which is why it wasn't devastating at a specific point.

I'm sure if you'd ask me then, I would have said, Aw, all we do is hang out with the same people over and over. But I miss it, guys, I really do.

It's only devastating in hindsight.

All hell has broken loose on one of the diary lists I belong to. And I realize that I want to cuff people back to the Stone Age, but they're such morons nothing I can say could possibly get through their thick skulls. However, I've never let such a restriction stop me before, so here are Diane's guidelines for Net Behavior:

1. You are not allowed to post private e-mail without permission, any more than you can publish private mail with permission. The letter writer holds copyright, not the letter receiver. It's also just bad form to publish something private without permission.
2. When someone is rude to you, you have two options: you can ignore it, or you can respond. When you respond, you have two options: politely, or in kind. When you respond in kind, you have lost all credibility.
3. Given that the Internet is a public and open forum, people can say anything they want. You can't shut them up. Get over it. Now.

Yes, these are all about one specific situation.