Cleanliness is next to CH3-(CH2)n - COONa, and I'm next to The Crocodile

While I hate advertising, I like well-written advertising copy. Whilst shopping for a Periodic Table shower curtain (277,000 hits with Google), I encountered the following:

"This might not remind you what Laureth is (it's a contraction for lauryl-ether, made from the sulfation of lauryl alcohol, but you knew that), but it's hard to deny the Periodic Table Shower Curtain's usefulness." (Italics are mine.)

Let's not pretend. One does not purchase a Periodic Table shower curtain because it is useful. That's what your business-card sized Periodic Table is for. And perfectly functional plain curtains can be had for a fraction of the price of the covetable Periodic Table shower curtain.

Why, then, you might ask, would I be shopping for a Periodic Table shower curtain? Why, for my new apartment, of course. There's a nifty little studio in Belltown, miraculously in my price range, that I'm hoping to move into around the end of the month. It's right on 1st Ave, comfortably bikeable to/from the Hill and the U-District. Maybe I'll get it settled in time to have another New Year's Eve/Housewarming party.

By the way, CH₃-(CH₂)n - COONa is soap. But you knew that too. r dr r.

Charmed, I'm Sure.

I'm starting this blog at the suggestion of a friend, who flattered me by saying other people would want to read my observations. He also said it would save him having to search through his e-mail, so clearly it was not an entirely altruistic suggestion. I, on the other hand, recently lost my phone and realised how the social networking sites the kids keep talking about could have made recovering my contacts easier. If I'd joined the rest of the world in sucking on Rupert Murdoch's saggy teats, I could have simply "MySpaced" everyone I know to get their number back. Or I could have skipped that entirely, since I never called most of the hundred-odd people in my contacts list, but might have been able to work up the motivation to follow a link to their MySpace page. But I hate MySpace. I especially hate the usage of "MySpace" as a verb.

Instead, this blog is part of the Google "cloud," mankind's first corporate-sponsored attempt to store all the information in the universe in a computer smaller than and contained within the universe. Google was accepted as a verb more quickly than you can say "Fuck you, Jeeves, and the Aston-Martin you rode in on." But instead of finding this usage irritating, I find it endearing. As Blaise Pascal said, "There's no accounting for taste." ("La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.")
The discovery of this project with the most damning consequences to number theory is that despite thought experiments about the nature of infinty involving monkeys, typewriters, and the works of William Shakespeare, nothing even approaching English, let alone classic English literature, has yet been produced by the vast number of monkeys posting on /b/.

So here is my blog, which is designed to save me effort while allowing me to expound the little and bigger points that tickle me. Like how I'm totally getting off on all the news that compounds the devaluation of the dollar and the imminent recession that newspapers are finding it harder not to acknowledge. (Mr. Bernanke: Instead of lowering interest rates more, why not try printing more money and giving it away free to stimulate domestic spending? Or edge out the Euro by buying them all and selling them back to the world at a much lower price, thereby devaluing them? Maybe because those are also stupid ideas? Crikey.) Or the sad lady I saw at a Safeway in Bremerton on Thanksgiving, wearing a Navy sweatshirt cut into a halter top, making her preteen kid hold her rack of PBR Light while she strapped her infant into the cart. In a very real way, she is the ultimate inspiration for this blog.

Incidentally, it may entertain you.