Category: Strange World

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Well, I’ve finished The Illuminatus! Trilogy (the novel, at least — I’m still working on the appendices), and in honor of that dubious accomplishment, I present this photograph of the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel:

Pyramid-shaped federal building, Mt. Saddleback in the background.

Snapped last week while trying to locate the movie theater showing Donnie Darko, just down the road from Pepsi and Wolverine.

It really makes me wish we’d had the better camera with us, though. We got a cheap one we could leave it in the car and have it for unexpected finds like this, but the image quality really is pathetic.

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This tree's turning brown

One interesting thing about Southern California is that there’s far less difference among the seasons than there is in other areas. Sure, temperature may range from 40° F to 100° F, but it’s not enough for some imported trees. And so trees that, in their native habitat, will shed their leaves in the fall, may stay green halfway through winter.

Last Friday on my way to lunch, I spotted a number of trees like this one, that seemed to have given up figuring out when fall was, and decided, “Heck with it, I’m ditching these leaves now!”

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I’ve been meaning to post this for weeks, so I’d better do it now while it’s still timely.

Does anyone else find it odd that the Olympics are starting on Friday the 13th?

Actually, does anyone know if Friday the 13th has any significance in Greek culture?

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Last week I started to notice Eudora’s musical you’ve-got-mail tones, very faint, at times that I got new mail. This was odd for two reasons: my sound was muted, and I’ve long since replaced the sound with the “Message for you, sir!” line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I assumed it was just coincidence, and the guy in the next cubicle had his email set to check on a similar schedule.

Well, it seems that mute doesn’t actually work on my Win2k box, at least not if it’s muted when I log in. The volume icon in the taskbar says it’s muted, the checkbox is checked, but it still sends sound to the speakers. Unchecking and re-checking the mute box solved it.

Now I need to figure out why it reset the sound clip. I did install a new version of Eudora recently, but it kept the rest of my settings intact. My best guess is that I moved the file a while back and forgot about it (since it’s been on mute for months), and Eudora, unable to find it, fell back to the default.

If I hadn’t turned the volume down so far, it would have been obvious. And I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this.

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A couple of weeks ago, the landscaping wonks for my work building ripped out all the hedges in the parking-lot divider islands and heavily mulched the ground. They didn’t put anything new in until the middle of last week, when I noticed a slew of newly-planted birds of paradise on the exit side as we were driving out on Thursday night. This morning, the islands on the entrance side were stocked with nursery pots awaiting transplant. I’m wondering if I should start being even more suspicious of the lawyers in the building, or if I should wait to see if the thermostat starts creeping up…..

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I’m about halfway through The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and the most apt description is, if you’ll pardon the language, a mindfuck. Once the writing settles into a coherent structure (or perhaps once the reader is attuned to it), the mind starts noticing connections. Everywhere. It’s as if it was written specifically to induce apophenia.

The most insidious part of the book(s) is the frequent use of historical or other authors’ fictional sources. “Oh, there’s Emperor Norton.” “OK, we’re back to Buckminster Fuller again.” “Hey, that’s right, ‘Tekeli-li!’ does show up in both Lovecraft and Poe.” And this constant mixing of fact with fiction, familiar with strange, and things known to be true with things which seem implausible does make you wonder: how much of this did they make up on their own, and how much did they stitch together out of real events, prior works, and creative synthesis?

After all, if you had never heard of Joshua Norton, and one day heard the story of a man who declared himself Emperor of the United States, Continue reading →

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