Archive for December, 2008

Madoff investor commits suicide

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

Holy cow. From the BBC:


A French investment manager who put $1.4bn (£1bn) into Bernard Madoff’s fraud-hit scheme has killed himself in his New York office, police said.


Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, 65, was found sitting at his desk with both wrists slashed, New York police spokesman Paul Browne said…



(Here’s the rest of the story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7798533.stm)




Am I a terrible person for thinking that it’s a good time to not have had any money to begin with?

Joel Roberts Poinsett versus weird guy on Boylston

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

On my walk home tonight, I was just minding my own business when this guy jumped out of nowhere and tried to hand me a rose while being all “happy Christmas!”


So I was all “oh, no, that’s OK, you should give it to…someone. Else.”


But he was all “no really, take it, I have extras, ” (which, by the way, is totally irrelevant in my opinion) “happy Christmas!”


So I took the rose, and the guy jumped back into nowhere and I kept walking and grumbling to myself about the price of eggs or whatever. But then I started wigging about about why exactly that guy was so insistent about giving the rose, and then I started wondering if maybe it was because it’s a poisoned rose or something, which would extra-suck because the first thing I did was stick it in my bag of groceries.


On the other hand, did you know that poinsettias are poisonous? I believe they are, at least for cats, anyway, so maybe a poisoned Christmas rose isn’t really a big deal.

You epididymis is showing…signs of wear…ing socks

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

One side effect of wearing winter footwear (for me, anyway) is that I take off my tight, high boots and my thick, high socks and find that my feet and calves are imprinted with the pattern of the socks I’ve been wearing on a given day.


This is OK on days when I am wearing something benignly-patterned, like argyle or polka-dots. But I think it probably looks a little weird at the gym when I am wearing cropped pants and have recently removed my nifty socks that have the different kinds of bugs embroidered on them.


Maybe I should be more careful to only wear argyle or polka-dotted or sporting equipment-themed socks on regular days, and save my bug socks for cold winter days when I am going straight from work to my no-pants-allowed entomology internship.








p.s. Hee hee “Here’s what bugs me” – get it??

That skirt’s too high, Jean

Friday, December 12th, 2008

You should always wash your hands before preparing food, even if you think you’ve just showered, because otherwise you might end up with a salad that tastes like lotion.




















Also, has anyone ever noticed the way that, when it rains, it kind of smells like mouthwash outside of the Hynes T station?

Effing protein deficiency…

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

The contents of my proverbial cupboard presently consists of vegetables and oatmeal and not a lot else of substance, so I’m eating cashews dipped in cream cheese. Have I said before that I’m good at feeding myself? I hereby take it back.

Does anyone really know how hard is hard enough to kill a moose?

Monday, December 8th, 2008

My friend told me two nights ago that over the weekend, his ipod was stolen out of his coat pocket in a bar in New York (where he now lives). At the time of the theft, his coat had been lying in a coat pile on a bench at the bar, and someone else’s cell phone as well as two other coats were stolen, too.


After he and I sorted out all of the obfuscating nuances of Gchat, I understood that my friend was, as he put it, both upset since his ipod was robbed and slightly insulted that the thief decided his jacket was not steal-worthy.


A part of me felt that this was the kind of conclusion I’d have liked to post here, and I considered taking it (with his permission, and giving him credit). But then I felt that it would be equally entertaining to note that he should be more than just “upset” about someone going up to his ipod and demanding its wallet and its watch and its Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals.






















Sorry, Sam, for making fun of you about that once live, to your Gchat screenname, and then again on the World Wide Web. Everyone else: also over the weekend, Sam did that “how hard can you punch?” punching bag arcade game at Cheap Shots in the East Village, and he broke the bar’s record.

‘So much for strategy’ & other tales

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

WOW, there are a LOT of fun things to learn from studying my blog traffic of yesterday! Here are a few:


- It don’t seem right: In a search of “rachel axelbank blog,” this bad boy is not the first but the fourth result. (Hee hee I bet not anymore.)


- I tried doing a Google image search for “bananahammock tattoo” and did NOT find my way to this blog. Weird. So much for strategy. (Yes, I know this is not learned from studying my blog traffic. Shut up.)


- Someone appears to have Googled my name from an IP address that’s registered to “HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND” which does not really fit in with my idea of what those people who run around in Revolutionary War outfits do when they go home at night.

It’s snowing

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

Blaaaaah the woman who just called into ‘Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me’ is totally calling from my teeny-tiny hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina!!!!




OK that isn’t really what I was planning to post; it was just what was fitting in the moment that I opened the ‘post’ window. Also, the woman just won, and I am thinking I should call her during the work day so that I can hear Carl Kassel on her home answering machine.






Anyway.


I woke up this morning to the first snow of the season, which means that it is time to start my annual regretting not having bought those fur-lined boots when they were on sale in May and also to start being extremely hyped about my new Gmail ‘theme,’ which in fact successfully notifies me of the weather in Boston with its dynamic background images. One problem with it – and perhaps one of you, Rick or PG or Snew or someone, wants to look into this? – is that I think it combines current weather conditions in Boston with current time in California, so that when I here am about to venture out into a very rainy evening, my Gmail indicates that I’ll find a downpour and a bright and sunny afternoon.

Flakes and clusters

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

Does anyone ever have that feeling that something is very wrong but you just can’t seem to put your finger on what it is, and then you realize that you’re eating your cereal with a fork? Me too.




















Also. Does anyone think I should maybe think about giving cereal its own blog tag? We could call it, like, Cereal Dating or something, haha.

The late _______, may he rest in peace

Monday, December 1st, 2008

When I got home tonight, there was a mouse in my trashcan.


The mouse was dead, and I was pretty sure that it was the same mouse that my roommate and I have been seeing around the apartment and subsequently come to refer to as our third roommate, intending of course to name him eventually.

We never got around to naming him, though, or at least any closer than the time my friend suggested calling the mouse Joe Lieberman, to which I said that if we really wanted to be in keeping with this friend’s feelings toward Senator Lieberman (I-Connecticut), we should probably reserve that name for the rat that I hope never moves into my apartment. But it occurred to me when I found the little guy tonight that we should have named him Waffles, or maybe just Waffle, because of the time that I dropped some waffle crumbs on the floor and he came after them.


Anyway. Then I took the empty box that the real, comestible waffles came in (yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve taken out the recycling) and started fashioning a perfectly fitting little coffin for him.


By the way, it’s not totally clear how he died, but I suspect that he somehow climbed into the trashcan and then could not climb out, the obvious implication of which would be that he starved…


…But my roommate sometimes puts a little bleach in the bottom of our trashcan, so I’m thinking it’s also possible that he [insert past tense of verb meaning "to pass away due to bleach exposure"].


In mulling this over with my other friend, the friend was all well is the mouse white? and I was all no he’s definitely grey and the friend was all ok so then he probably wasn’t bleached to death and then AT THE SAME TIME we were both all unless he used to be black…


THEN my friend pointed out that I can’t just name something posthumously – a name defines a creature’s essence in life, he said; the referent of the name is the life lived – and that what I should do instead is mark the mouse’s body with a big question mark in all the colors of the rainbow* and put it into the waffle coffin and send it to the Census Bureau.


That was a little bit hilarious to me – even more so than the idea of sending it to Cornel West or someone else who might agree that the grey mouse is problematic – but I still said no way, this is a strictly EPONYMOUS coffin.
















___________________________________________________________
*This would most definitely be possible, as I recently acquired a Roy G. Biv set of Sharpies.