8.14.05: The Daily Bog ‹ Blog « Without-Feathers.com

Would those of you in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.
John Lennon

The Daily Bog

August 14, 2005

If you’ve been sitting up at night, watching the clock and wondering where the hell I’ve been, I promise I have a good excuse: schoolwork. Ain’t nothing like a graduate course to suck up the best part of your life. My last assignment took me two months to finish; after revising the finished product about five times, I finally gave up and sent it in, thinking it sucked but just wanting to get it done and over with. So it was a very pleasant surprise to see my grade—86%, on an assignment where the average grade is 75%. According to the notes my teacher sent me, anything higher than 80% means that I have a natural knack for this work.

Welcome to Ego-Land, population: me.

Now that we’ve gotten the bragging out of the way, we can move on to other things…

You know what’s funnier than hotlinkers? Idiot hotlinkers. Not only does this girl hotlink, she doesn’t link back to the fanlistings—and, according to my referral log, she spends a lot of time trying to make my “Catherine, Called Birdy” code show up correctly on her page. Unfortunately, all she’s ever going to get is a broken image—it’s called “hotlink protection,” darlin’, and it’s not going away anytime soon, so find something else to do. Like pot, or the Packers.

This weekend, my neighborhood is holding their annual neighborhood bash, which is big enough to involve closing off major streets and shooting off fireworks every night. Every time the fireworks begin, I hit the floor like a war vet having a flashback—I should be prepared for the noise by now, but it always takes me by surprise. It also startles my cat, whose bladder is too weak as it is. If she ends up peeing all over the couch, I’m going to need the names of the festival organizers, so I can sue.

All the local shops are having sidewalk sales during the fest. I went out intending to browse through all the stalls, but ended up making a beeline for the bookstore and coming home with an armload of books. They were two dollars or less! Even the antique ones! And I likes me some smelly old books. I got a bunch of old books, including one on harem life and one oversized, battered book on the assassination of President McKinley. The only thing better than vintage lit is vintage lit about people who got whacked. It’s got all these funky illustrations of the Big Guy biting it, along with more details of his various bodily functions than I really cared to know. And there was a faded, waterspotted old photograph tucked in the cover—an old guy leading a horse around a paddock on a farm. Freaky cool.

I also found a great book on mummies and corpses—the pictures alone were well worth the $2. The text is good, very enlightening and interesting and filled with funny sentences, like “The Windeby Girl is one of a surprising number of Iron Age teenagers who ended up buried in bogs.” Was it some kind of trend? Is this what parents asked their kids back in the Iron Age—“If your friends all jumped in a bog, would you?” Would those teens then be known as… boggers? It boggles the mind.