EEEEEP!

Quick technical note; if you are seeing some old background yellow clinging to the mango at left, or anywhere else on the page, or if you are seeing the lovely flowers up top in green rather than, say, a rich teal, then you need to hit ‘refresh’ a couple of times to clear things up. There. That’s better, no?

IN BRIEF

1) Gamelan: Yes, we are now in the Gamelan orchestra. But is the gamelan in us? We found it a bit of a struggle to keep up in our first encounter. Although playing Gamelan music appears to be a slightly more sophisticated version of banging on pots and pans, it is, of course, much more difficult than it seems. Nevertheless, we will push on in our new little Tuesday Night Music Club at the Indonesian Embassy.


2) History: Here at Mango Pudding Blues, we are sometimes a little fuzzy on history, so we are thankful to have stumbled upon A Concise History of Conflict by Tobias Seamon over at 0 Format. Its conciseness is perfectly tailored to our sometimes flawed attention span.


3) Spring: It sprang here yesterday, with crocuses on Parliament Hill. Wonderful.


4) Facelift Feedback: From the mailbag, one reader who seemed happy about the recent Mango Pudding Blues face lift’s easing effect on the “squinty old eyes”, one reader (our brother) who misses the old look although he never thought he would, and one reader who hates it but admits a general discomfort with change anyway.

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MY CO-WORKER IS A CYBORG

She keeps her square-eyed face pasted to the screen and has those code-monkey nervous fast-twitch super-evolved fingertips that click and click and click. She parses out her screenspace in tiled windows simultaneously hyperchainrelay chatting with other cyborgs and combing long lines of code for infinitesimal irregularities with one eye while reading Slashdot with the other. Part girl, part machine. Pending the invention of surgically installed transparent eyelids, she has synched her blinking to the refresh rate of her monitor. This morning, in a rare attempt to interface with me, an actual human, she began using her human audio output to talk to me, but not wanting to miss a pixel of cascading information, failed to turn her head the 15 degrees it would be necessary to visually confirm my presence in our shared pod. I was not present, but did arrive a few moments later to find her talking out loud to no one.

Now she is setting up a Mango Cam so she can see via realtime digital feed if I’m sitting there, four feet behind her, before she addresses me again.

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WHY THEY CALL HER THE KILLER

From the mailbag, more instructions on how to open champagne. Possibly better instructions on how to open champagne. One apparently holds the cork in one hand and the bottom of the bottle in the other, and then twists the bottle away from the cork.

Well, we’ll try it. The reader also asked what occasion called forth the bubbly over here at Mango Pudding Blues. The answer is that we recently celebrated our third anniversary of hanging out with Killer, our fine female companion.

As a celebration of the Killer and her enduring patience, we have decided to make good on the promise we made some time ago to tell you about the time she almost went to battle with the driver of a mini-van. Don’t worry; unlike most of our anecdotes, this story is almost as short as the event it describes.

Killer’s killing instinct behind the wheel has been described elsewhere. What we have perhaps not said is that she is a slender, fine-boned, refined-looking woman who dresses mostly in muted modern blacks and greys and comports herself with classic manners, save for the occasional belch at the symphony. The point is, she certainly doesn’t look like the type to be involved in an incident of road rage. But one day we were idling at a red light about a half a mile from where we live. In front of us, a mini-van from the suburbs. Beside the mini-van, a parked car that was trying to get out of its spot. The driver of the van started to back up to make room for the chap in the parked car, and it became apparent that he had only a fuzzy idea of where his van ended and our sweet little sedan began. Killer, without missing a beat of the conversation in which we were embroiled, laid on the horn. It kind of went like this:

“I think if we leave at – hey fuckstick! {beeeeeeep!} – around 8:00, we’ll get there in time, honey.”

Mr. suburban mini-van took umbrage at her long honk and started yelling out of the window and waving his arm. I could faintly hear him, but I was concentrating on our conversation about when we were going out that night. So was Killer. This further enraged Fuckstick, who suddenly got out of the mini-van and, still yelling and waving his arms, stepped toward us.

Before I could think, I heard the kriiiiiick of the emergency brake going on, and before I could say, No! Wait! Killer was out the door. And, dear reader, so righteous was the rage on her face that this slim young woman caused big blustery middle age Fuckstick to turn and leap back into his mini-van and shut and lock the door and roll up the window so fast that I was still urging caution, still advising restraint, still begging her to cool down, while she was returning to her driver’s seat in sneering, glowering triumph. And she did not hear a word I said, but instead sat down and stared straight into Fuckstick’s rear view mirror with burning defiance until the light changed and he sped, whimpering, away, and then she turned to me and said, unflappably, “but if you’d rather leave earlier, that’s okay with me.”

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GOOD MORNING

We’re sporting a bit of a facelift this morning to boost you through the sluggishness, the brutal brain-killing fogginess, that comes the Monday morning after Daylight Savings kick in. We actually just meant to fix the type a little bit, but once we got in we couldn’t resist opening the windows and freshening the place up a bit. New visitors can, for a limited time, go look at the old style in the Archives, which we were too lazy to get to yesterday.

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CAUTION

Bit of mucking about in here today. Mind your head.

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