"When the chicken explodes, dinner is ready."
I turned around from the computer in some confusion.
"What?!"
"Or maybe it was the potato that blew up."
It's a hell of a funny way to cook, but dinner was excellent.
It's funny. I let lots of time go by and instead of having so much material to blog about that Jay throws up her hands in despair, all I have is a flat patch of memory with jumbled slices. Bah.
Indian guy and the Romanian were sitting with me at a round table at 0400 one morning, and the Indian guy asks me some questions about ICBC.
This is one (of many!) of those subjects that's better left unmentioned around the Romanian, since it starts him up on one of his interrupting rants that contains no information of any sort other than he feels that everything and everybody sucks and tries to rip him off.
ICBC is the provincial insurance company for British Columbia. If you drive a vehicle in BC, chances are it's insured through them.
Anyway, Indian guy had just read that ICBC had reported a large profit and was going to dump lots and lots of it back to its own managers as a series of bonuses. The CEO was going to end up with a bonus equal to 40% of his salary, for instance.
And he was asking me what I thought of that, rather than the profit being used to lower rates or make the roads safer for drivers.
And when they heard me say that it doesn't really bother me that some of the profit was being given as bonuses and incentives, they went off.
The trouble is, is that as far as I know (at work, couldn't look it up and I'm not interested enough to look it up now and rekindle the conversation with them) is that based on what my friends in other provinces tell me, it's actually cheaper for most people to insure through ICBC. Lord knows that the people I know that have gone to Alberta pay more. And others scattered across Canada say the same.
So if things are cheaper here, why would I worry that every scrap of profit they make doesn't get dumped into making the rates cheaper? It's not like driving a car is a right, after all.
And it's one of my pet peeves to see people with big ole cars or, damn them, mini-vans, driving around with only the driver in the car, and the rest of that heavy high-capacity vehicle empty. Wasting fuel for nothing, and dumping the consequences on those of us that will still be alive in twenty or fifty or a hundred years.
Not to mention those who drive to the next door neighbour's house, practically. :P
Actually, my parents do this. They like to shop at Costco, and so they drive over when it's time to pick up some groceries. And the regular supermarket where they get the rest of their stuff is across the street from there.
Except that you can practically see Costco from the front of their complex. It's two blocks away. And the supermarket is marginally closer.
"Why," I ask, "don't you just walk down, and take a shopping cart back? You can always go for a walk the next day and return it, nobody will care."
"I don't want people to think I'm a homeless person."
or
"We get too much stuff to push home like that."
A homeless person with $150 worth of groceries? And you can't just shop more often and get smaller amounts?
Granted, I'm up to shopping weekly now, but until a month or so ago I'd go whenever I needed some food and come away with a single bag at a time. Seems sensible to me.
Good thing nobody will ever put me in charge, because in addition to my rampant mismanagement, I'd require that x% of cars sold here be alternative cars (especially hybrids) and that if you are found on heavily congested roads during peak hours alone in your vehicle, you're subject to fines. Ditto for driving downtown. Take transit, it's good here.
Oops, went off on a rant there. Silly me. ;)
Other Indian guy has been asking me for vocabulary words most mornings. He has what looks like an adolescent girl's diary with words written in english in them, followed by descriptions in Punjabi. At first I thought this was something left over from when he was a schoolboy.
Turns out, they're words he writes down that he doesn't understand when he's reading, and he looks up the meaning later. In a Punjabi dictionary.
So that when I tell him that stint means a length of time spent doing something, usually of limited duration, he doesn't believe me. He tells me I'm wrong, and that stint means a cheap guy.
And won't believe me when I tell him that he's thinking of stingy. :P
There are lots of words like that. He asks, writes down what I tell him, but then says that I obviously don't know my english very well. And to prove it, he's started using words of marginal correctness, but people understand what he says anyway.
And it's very amusing to see him write on his daily report that he responded to an anti-plunder alarm. ;)
Other words he's asked about but not believed my definitions: meadow, flock, raven, insidious, lament, shear and rubble.
Incidently, he thinks that rubble is somehow related to french fries. Why? Because that's the sound the Hamburglar used to make in commercials, but this guy prefers fries to burgers. How am I supposed to compete with thinking like that?!
The past few Fridays (my usual day off, after I get home from work at 0900) I've been hooking up with a few people online via voice and pretending I'm a vampire in New York.
Nerdy? Certainly. Fun? Oh yes.
I've roleplayed on and off since the mid eighties, and yet I've usually made the same sort of character to play. Not the exact same character, but similar. Since I usually find that games are more fun when you're playing aspects of yourself.
This time I went differently. I'm a big bruiser of a guy (eight feet tall, pushing three hundred pounds) that preys on criminals, tortures them to get them to reveal where their ill-gotten gains are, and then rubs them out. And that was before he was a vampire. ;)
The concept (longer and more details than the thumbnail above) seemed interesting and possible, and fits fairly well with the character I built with the mechanics of the game, but it's hard going since this doesn't seem to be a reflection of any part of my psyche. That I'm aware of. ;)
Perhaps the major stumbling block is that I made my character an Australian. Or rather, a Tazzie, but I don't really know the difference. Ah well.
And we didn't even follow what the Storyteller had written for us yesterday - we went off on what should have been a minor diversion, and he went with it, and improved an entire evening for us. Entertaining, fun, and thoroughly cathartic.
I'm going to go get some breakfast. Perhaps more will come to me over my cereal.
Stay hard.
"What?!"
"Or maybe it was the potato that blew up."
It's a hell of a funny way to cook, but dinner was excellent.
It's funny. I let lots of time go by and instead of having so much material to blog about that Jay throws up her hands in despair, all I have is a flat patch of memory with jumbled slices. Bah.
Indian guy and the Romanian were sitting with me at a round table at 0400 one morning, and the Indian guy asks me some questions about ICBC.
This is one (of many!) of those subjects that's better left unmentioned around the Romanian, since it starts him up on one of his interrupting rants that contains no information of any sort other than he feels that everything and everybody sucks and tries to rip him off.
ICBC is the provincial insurance company for British Columbia. If you drive a vehicle in BC, chances are it's insured through them.
Anyway, Indian guy had just read that ICBC had reported a large profit and was going to dump lots and lots of it back to its own managers as a series of bonuses. The CEO was going to end up with a bonus equal to 40% of his salary, for instance.
And he was asking me what I thought of that, rather than the profit being used to lower rates or make the roads safer for drivers.
And when they heard me say that it doesn't really bother me that some of the profit was being given as bonuses and incentives, they went off.
The trouble is, is that as far as I know (at work, couldn't look it up and I'm not interested enough to look it up now and rekindle the conversation with them) is that based on what my friends in other provinces tell me, it's actually cheaper for most people to insure through ICBC. Lord knows that the people I know that have gone to Alberta pay more. And others scattered across Canada say the same.
So if things are cheaper here, why would I worry that every scrap of profit they make doesn't get dumped into making the rates cheaper? It's not like driving a car is a right, after all.
And it's one of my pet peeves to see people with big ole cars or, damn them, mini-vans, driving around with only the driver in the car, and the rest of that heavy high-capacity vehicle empty. Wasting fuel for nothing, and dumping the consequences on those of us that will still be alive in twenty or fifty or a hundred years.
Not to mention those who drive to the next door neighbour's house, practically. :P
Actually, my parents do this. They like to shop at Costco, and so they drive over when it's time to pick up some groceries. And the regular supermarket where they get the rest of their stuff is across the street from there.
Except that you can practically see Costco from the front of their complex. It's two blocks away. And the supermarket is marginally closer.
"Why," I ask, "don't you just walk down, and take a shopping cart back? You can always go for a walk the next day and return it, nobody will care."
"I don't want people to think I'm a homeless person."
or
"We get too much stuff to push home like that."
A homeless person with $150 worth of groceries? And you can't just shop more often and get smaller amounts?
Granted, I'm up to shopping weekly now, but until a month or so ago I'd go whenever I needed some food and come away with a single bag at a time. Seems sensible to me.
Good thing nobody will ever put me in charge, because in addition to my rampant mismanagement, I'd require that x% of cars sold here be alternative cars (especially hybrids) and that if you are found on heavily congested roads during peak hours alone in your vehicle, you're subject to fines. Ditto for driving downtown. Take transit, it's good here.
Oops, went off on a rant there. Silly me. ;)
Other Indian guy has been asking me for vocabulary words most mornings. He has what looks like an adolescent girl's diary with words written in english in them, followed by descriptions in Punjabi. At first I thought this was something left over from when he was a schoolboy.
Turns out, they're words he writes down that he doesn't understand when he's reading, and he looks up the meaning later. In a Punjabi dictionary.
So that when I tell him that stint means a length of time spent doing something, usually of limited duration, he doesn't believe me. He tells me I'm wrong, and that stint means a cheap guy.
And won't believe me when I tell him that he's thinking of stingy. :P
There are lots of words like that. He asks, writes down what I tell him, but then says that I obviously don't know my english very well. And to prove it, he's started using words of marginal correctness, but people understand what he says anyway.
And it's very amusing to see him write on his daily report that he responded to an anti-plunder alarm. ;)
Other words he's asked about but not believed my definitions: meadow, flock, raven, insidious, lament, shear and rubble.
Incidently, he thinks that rubble is somehow related to french fries. Why? Because that's the sound the Hamburglar used to make in commercials, but this guy prefers fries to burgers. How am I supposed to compete with thinking like that?!
The past few Fridays (my usual day off, after I get home from work at 0900) I've been hooking up with a few people online via voice and pretending I'm a vampire in New York.
Nerdy? Certainly. Fun? Oh yes.
I've roleplayed on and off since the mid eighties, and yet I've usually made the same sort of character to play. Not the exact same character, but similar. Since I usually find that games are more fun when you're playing aspects of yourself.
This time I went differently. I'm a big bruiser of a guy (eight feet tall, pushing three hundred pounds) that preys on criminals, tortures them to get them to reveal where their ill-gotten gains are, and then rubs them out. And that was before he was a vampire. ;)
The concept (longer and more details than the thumbnail above) seemed interesting and possible, and fits fairly well with the character I built with the mechanics of the game, but it's hard going since this doesn't seem to be a reflection of any part of my psyche. That I'm aware of. ;)
Perhaps the major stumbling block is that I made my character an Australian. Or rather, a Tazzie, but I don't really know the difference. Ah well.
And we didn't even follow what the Storyteller had written for us yesterday - we went off on what should have been a minor diversion, and he went with it, and improved an entire evening for us. Entertaining, fun, and thoroughly cathartic.
I'm going to go get some breakfast. Perhaps more will come to me over my cereal.
Stay hard.
posted by Rimmy at 06:58
3 Comments:
Storyteller here
It was all good going off on you're own last night. I was on my game too thankfully. Its always good when people include their back story in game in reflection of what they've done, and its always good that the characters have a side line to the story. Gives them more of a bonding instead of a throw together.
Good Work.
Hard as a Rock. :)
P. fucking S.
No worries about taking your word meanings wrong, he's going to be the guy that talks funny for the rest of his life :)
I'm a complainer at heart, but I do enjoy reading your long posts. You're like the James Joyce of blogging. God I hate that word. Blog blog blog. You can tell it was a bunch of nerds who thought it up.
Fictional - That, and you can do shit to us that probably doesn't have much consequence in the long run.
Mind you, we're all losing Humanity at a rate that makes me think we'll have to be building new characters soon, and hunting the bestial shells of our old ones. Hmph.
Jay - No worries, whatever comes out of my fingertips is more like voiding my mental bowels that any attempt at literary pretensions. Wait until I get into my Gibson mode. Wait! Here it comes:
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and yo'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the servie of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.
Sorry, did I make a long comment again? My bad. :*
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