Yuuuup

On June 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography4 Comments

On the marihuana

On June 5, 2014June 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics9 Comments

hqdefault Because that’s totally the more fun spelling.

Actually, personal health note first: got my bloodwork(*) back today. Everything was normal. So I’m… fine? I suspect the doctor is gonna fall back on stress as the cause, but I haven’t talked to her yet and, again, there’s nothing anyone can do about it because fuckit there’s only four days of school left.

So. That’s out of the way, let’s talk about weed. You have homework first. I’ve been involved in a minor Twitter kerfluffle about this article, which is itself about this article, which is made fun of even more in this blog post. Actually, “kerfluffle” overstates the point; it’s maybe eight posts back and forth between me and two other dudes and right now is entirely civil, but “kerfluffle” is fun to say.

You didn’t click on any of those links, so lemme sum up. Maureen Dowd, who writes for the New York Times and is therefore not very important, went to Colorado and bought herself, on purpose, a THC-infused chocolate bar. She ate a piece of it. Nothing happened, so she ate the whole thing. She then spent somewhere between eight and ninety-two hours begging for Jesus to save her from the flavor monkeys that were trying to share the couch with her. Turns out she was only supposed to eat a square of the candy bar, and she just hadn’t waited long enough for it to kick in. The candy bar had sixteen squares.

(WAIT. No, that’s not quite right. The candy bar was supposed to “be cut into” sixteen squares; I was picturing something pre-scored, like a Hershey bar. Not the case.)

Everybody else is making fun of Dowd. Whose name sounds like “Dowdy,” which means “fat and boring,” basically, so it’s like she got named just to get mocked for writing something inflammatory about weed. Basically Dowd thinks that, well, if we’re selling this shit, maybe we ought to put some labels on it or something.

“You dumbass,” everyone else is saying. “You should have done your own research on this before cramming sixteen times the safe dose of the marihuana into your mouth and brain-parts! Who doesn’t know to drink a lot of water to come down from a weed high, anyway?”

Here’s the thing, y’all. As much as I don’t like defending people who write for the New York Times, and especially as much as I don’t like defending people who are named Dowd… she’s kinda right on this one.

Weed is legal in Colorado.

Motherfuckers do not do research before they eat legal shit.

And a candy bar is a goddamn single-serving snack, and I will punch anyone who claims otherwise. If you serve me a candy bar and say “eat this to make things happen!” I am going to eat the whole thing. If I am expected to go to the entirely counterintuitive trouble of cutting my single candy bar into sixteen squares so that the weed won’t turn me into Ralphie May after a cup of Cuban coffee…

…well, then I’m not gonna have a good time, am I?

What’s going to happen now (what is already happening now) that Colorado has legalized weed is that a lot of people who might have otherwise never tried weed are going to try it, in some form or another. Candy bars are safe. I don’t smoke; I don’t know how. I know how to eat a goddamn brownie, though. Here’s how: eat the brownie.

Non Drug People are going to start making this mistake a whole hell of a lot if the dispensaries don’t start being very careful with how they package and dispense this stuff, especially comestibles. If it isn’t being sold as a single-use (I’m picturing, like, a Halloween candy sized piece; if I find out MoDo ate two pounds of THC chocolate I’ll retract this whole thing) then it needs to be really prominently labeled.

THIS IS ENOUGH WEED CHOCOLATE TO GET YOU HIGH FROM THE MARIHUANA FOR LIKE A WEEK IF YOU’RE A LIGHTWEIGHT. SNOOP DOGG CAN HANDLE THREE DOZEN OF THEM.

Just saying.

(Note: I am not a Weed Person; my experiences with weed are minimal and with other drugs nonexistent. I can totally imagine myself doing exactly what MoDo did here. I’m not going to do research before I eat a candy bar. Because that’s dumb.)

(*) Really, WordPress? You autocorrected “bloodwork” to bloodworm?

This isn’t going to work

On June 5, 2014June 4, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

I fully expect that by the time this pops tomorrow morning HBO will have DMCA’d the hell out of it and it’ll be gone, but here’s for hoping, because it entertains me. Oh, and Game of Thrones spoilers for those of you who think you can still spoil something that came out fourteen years ago:

On a year at WordPress

On June 4, 2014June 4, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek20 Comments

I started blogging in… 2004, I think, when a grad school friend of mine suggested that a bunch of us start sites at Xanga. That blog lasted five years of mostly-daily publishing through the first three or four years and then a slow decline over the last year. A year and a half or so ago I got dragged back into a new Xanga site at the suggestion of a friend I’d met through the first blog, and then Xanga exploded and I moved operations over here.

In six or so years of blogging at Xanga, I got around a hundred and twenty thousand hits. Here’s the traffic from my first year at WordPress:

…so I’m at half the traffic of six years of blogging at another site, in a year. Traffic’s dropped way off from wintertime but that’s because I’ve invested less time into babysitting the site; it’s starting to climb back up again lately and I’m fine with that. All said, nearly sixty-five thousand hits in a year is not something that I feel like complaining about. It’s awesome.

What? You want more nerd stuff? Okay:

I am down to mostly third-world countries, Islamist theocracies, and Communist strongholds as far as countries that I haven’t seen traffic from yet. And Kosovo. Seriously, Kosovo, what the hell is your deal, what did I do to you? I’ve had so much traffic from the rest of Europe that I’m starting to wonder if WordPress thinks Kosovo is a country just for this map but actually interprets traffic from there as being from someplace else. And somebody hitting me up from Svalbard island would be nice, but I think there are only seeds and ice there and I don’t think seeds and ice use the Internet.

One more, while I’m sharing numbers:

That followers number staggers me, even as I’m convinced that it doesn’t mean much– I had one random couple of days a few months ago where I inexplicably got almost a thousand page views in a day, but there are nowhere near three thousand people coming here even on a monthly basis, so I suspect the majority of those followers are bots or fly-bys. Still, though, when I look at most of the other blogs I read, three thousand seems like a lot for people who aren’t otherwise celebrities or well-known, and I’m certainly not that.

So, yeah. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in this place over the last year but I think it’s been worth it and it’s been a lot of fun. We’ll see how the next year goes. Hopefully Kosovo will show up so I can start shooting for Liechtenstein and Vatican City. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

(Actually, let’s not make that a three-word thing: Seriously. Thanks for reading. Y’all are awesome. I mean it.)

FIESTA!

On June 4, 2014June 4, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking3 Comments

Yep. One year. One of you, I don’t care which one, is honor-bound to go through my archives and read every single post today. There’s over 500 because I’m a lunatic so you may want to set aside a couple of hours.

Or you could buy my book as a birthday present. Slightly more expensive in terms of actual literal money ($2.99!) but it will probably take less time to read. 🙂

There will be an actual post later; I have to go have my blood drained first. Hoping to still have all my fingers a couple of hours from now.

If not me, who? And if not now, when?

On June 3, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Pairing famous quotes with wildly inappropriate pictures needs to become a Thing if it isn’t already. I saw this for the first time a couple of hours ago and I’m still giggling about it.

Live & Learn

Credits: Image – Jaimejustelaphoto. Blog Title: Mikhail Gorbachev (Russian President of the Soviet Union (1985-91)

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NEWSFLASH: not dead yet

On June 3, 2014June 3, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking5 Comments

I’mma start a Tumblr for this shit, guys:

I never get normal search terms around here. I don’t know what the hell is going on with either of those, although the real bullshit is that I know exactly which post both of them went to.

Anyway. Went to the doctor. She established the following:

I have not had a heart attack;
My blood sugar is normal.

Beyond that? Right now everyone is clueless. I have been ordered to not go to work for at least one more day and I have a battery of blood tests I have to go have done tomorrow. I’m going to call tomorrow afternoon for additional instructions after the blood testing. For whatever it’s worth, right now I actually don’t feel too bad other than the pervasive “I could just go to bed right now” feeling, but that’s been basically constant since Saturday morning. I did manage to have dinner without incident; that’s progress.

Tomorrow is my one-year blogiversary, by the way. I was planning on making a big deal out of it but that’ll have to depend on whether the vampires completely drain me or leave me alive tomorrow. I have, historically, not had great luck with blood draws; I have the veins of a 70-year old heroin addict. (True fact: the last time I had to have blood drawn, at a medical facility that basically only exists to do bloodwork for other doctors, it took four different nurses to hit a vein– and I damn near passed out in between the third and fourth nurse for reasons that even now remain unclear. Nurses hate my veins. I don’t know why.)

So… yeah. Not dead yet. Not much else to say, though.

Okay that’s enough now thank you

On June 2, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching10 Comments

So I’ve been sick since… Friday night? Saturday morning? Hell, I can barely even remember anymore. I’d tell you what was wrong but it doesn’t seem to be able to settle on anything, so take your pick: aches and pains, eye-popping migraine-style headaches, chills, sweats, intestinal/digestive stuff, sore throat, coughing, heart racing, out of breath, but like never more than two or three of those at the same time. I missed work at my other job Saturday night because it felt like my eyes were trying to leap out of my head and missed this morning just because of generalized suck. I have no sick days left and may be out tomorrow anyway. I don’t know what the hell’s going on but for once I’m going to actually make a doctor’s appointment; this shit has gone on long enough.

(My wife thinks, and I think I agree, that it’s entirely stress-related, and that I’ve been having mini panic attacks, thus the occasional out-of-breath moments. Which means that they’ll probably want to prescribe some sort of anti-anxiety medicine, which will take more time to kick in than there are days left in school. So… not gonna do that.)

I had a phone interview today. This should be a “Yay!” moment; I’m not expecting to secure a new job until fairly late in the summer, so even getting a phone call at this early stage is rather surprising. More surprising? It was with District Four. The interview was supposed to be on Friday afternoon initially and ended up getting rescheduled because some sort of hell broke loose at school; it was moved to today at 3:45. Which meant that I had to do a phone interview sick and in the “out of breath and heart hammering” stage of the illness. And in the fine tradition of District Four, it was standardized. The principal asked me several scripted questions involving hypothetical situations with kids who aren’t real, which makes the questions, at least for me, almost entirely unanswerable. I mean, hell, I said something, but… meh. The principal even had to inform me that he was unable to clarify or provide additional details on any of the questions, and at least once I could have used some clarification. Plus the whole thing was recorded and on speakerphone, adding that last little bit of alienation and distance to the conversation.

This is no fucking way to hire people, by the way. Watch; District Four is going to end up offering me a job after doing nothing right during the hiring process. I know nothing about this guy or his building; he knows nothing about me. Blech.

I’ve got another book review coming but I think this is all I can handle today. Maybe I’ll go to work tomorrow and maybe I won’t; we’ll see. I’d like my body back to normal now, please.