Adventures in Downloading

I sent an overly long e-mail to Miss Tomah this morning. I just felt long-winded, I guess.

Fecal matter! I totally forgot to ask for her phone #. Oh well. Later. Anyway, work is dead. Most of the department is out ill or otherwise not inclined to be here. This situation must be the case in other areas as we are getting virtually no problem tickets coming in at all. Everyone takes Friday off, apparently. This being the case, I'm bored shitless. I brought some CDs today and am currently listening to Songs From the Wood by Jethro Tull. Earlier I had on Deep River of Song: Black Appalachia. The song "Poontang Little, Poontang Small" never fails to amuse. Unfortunately, I haven't seen Miss Sarah around here today. Can't say I blame her. Being one of very tiny minority of young women who are not overweight, she must have all the guys ogling and hitting on her. Obviously she doesn't need some dork like me doing the same.

This morning started off well. I got a good night's sleep and stopped at Toad Hill for some java. I found that Ronaldo was there so I got to chat with him and The Caffeinatrix. As I was leaving, Moose walked in and I spent a short while shooting the bull with him. On my way to work, I listened to Air America's Morning Sedition program. Making the fatal mistake of paying attention to Mark Crispin Miller's rant while parallel parking meant that my car was to have some paint scraped off of it. Luckily it was near the area where there was already paint missing so I didn't feel so bad.

I had lunch with an account rep from my contracting firm as well as the other contractors here. The long-promised hiring of us sub-contractors has been delayed due to the company's acquisition of another company. And so benefits remain a dream. Count me among the however many millions of people Kerry kept saying had no health insurance. The rep said that our contract here was still set to run through March which runs counter to the conversation I overheard here that indicated we'd be let go shortly after New Year's once all the employees vacations were over. What a wonderful prospect: ringing in the new year by losing my job.

Yesterday evening I put in motion the downloading of several items. One of them is the The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. These are the mysterious broadcasts of numbers and/or words that are repeated, presumably for the benefit of agents of espionage by their taskmasters. Examples of these are to be found at the end of "Poor Places" by Wilco with the womyn repeating, "yankee...hotel...foxtrot" and at the end of "Even Less" by Porcupine Tree where a disembodied female voice repeats a series of numbers. I suppose I downloaded it more out of novelty than anything else but I may find a use for a track or two in a mix CD someday down the line.

Another ditty is the first CD of The Caedmon Poetry Collection: A Century of Poets Reading Their Work. Hopefully someone will post the second and third CDs but especially the third as it features T.S. Eliot reading "The Wasteland". I don't know whether he reads it in its entirety or not. If not, hopefully The Fire Sermon is included as I think it's fucking awesome. I also set it to snag a slew of Doctor Who related tidbits. No audio dramas, just compilations of the incidental music used in them and interviews with the actors and writers. One of them is a DVD about Paul McGann, who plays the seventh Doctor. Oh, I am also trying to snag the first episode of the Remembrance of the Daleks DVD. The rest of the downloads consist of TTC lectures, mostly philosophy. I'm such a hoarder.

Not too long ago I snagged Great Speeches of the 20th Century. It's really interesting to listen to famous words by their speakers as opposed to merely reading them on the pages of a book or website. Real primary source stuff! Ooh! I see there's a volume 2 out now!