New ancient traditions

So, Holiday Season 2007 is officially over, and we've got about a month and a half until the first Ontario Family Day.

Given that the two previous holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas cram a cranberry stuffed, tinsel covered, holly-jolly, passive-aggressive, mandatory two-ton football of family down our collective throat, I humbly suggest that it's high time that we reclaim Family Day from Hallmark and "big-family" go back to the origins of this ancient holiday, re-christen it "Chosen Family Day", and stay as far the hell away from our genetic antecedents as possible.

It was pointed out to me recently that we are presented with a unique opportunity this first Family Day, this is a new holiday and we, right here, right now, have the chance to come up with new traditions and observances. This is my suggested list:

• Group singing of "Everyday People" by Sly and the Family Stone
• Annual airing of The Family Guy Star Wars episode
• The traditional ordering of Chinese Takeout and the reading of the fortune cookies (postpended with either "...in bed" or "...between your legs")
• Mandatory participation in a game of Eat Poop You Cat
• Family Day Resolutions, in which New Year's Resolutions are examined, assessed and possibly redacted.
• Group re-gifting / swap meet.
  

These are great

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And now...

A Japanese man, playing Christmas carols on a piece of broccoli

Poing Gostal

So a while ago, around The Fifth Elephant or The Thief Of Time, I kinda fell of the Terry Pratchett bus. I don't know why, but it happened. Anyway, I picked up Going Postal on Saturday afternoon, and I'm almost finished it, it's great, and I think I'm probably going to get completely caught up over the next few weeks.

So in Going Postal, there are "the clacks", a sort of automated telegraph, it's a new high speed communication technology that was started by academics and engineers and is now being taken over by corporate interests who are sacrificing the health and usefulness of the network for their own greed and business interests. Man, it's a good thing we don't have anything like that in our world.

'[...] I think someone's found a way of sending messages that can damage a tower, sir.'
'That's impossi--'
Mr. Pony's hand slapped the table. 'How come you know so much, sir? Did you sit up half the night trying to get to the bottom of it? Have you taken a differential drum apart with a tin opener? Did you spot how the swage armature can be made to jump off the elliptical bearing if you hit the letter K and then send it to a tower with an address higher than yours, but only if you hit the letter Q first and the drum spring is fully wound? Did you spot that the key levers wedge together and the spring forces the arm up and you're looking at a gearbox full of theeth? Well, I did!'
[...]
'But somebody in a tower must press the keys that do all these... terrible things,' said Stowley.
Pony sighed. They never took an interest. It was just money. They didn't know how anything worked. And then suddenly they needed to know, and you had to use baby talk.

Important lesson learned.

If your moving around the stuff in your bathroom medicine cabinet, you should probably think about the fact that at some point in the future, you are probably going to want quick, easy access to your band-aids and polysporin, probably with only one hand, and possibly not your dominant hand, and therefore you should probably not put them up high, at the back, in a container with a hard to open lid behind a bunch of crap.

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