New Toy

Well, it was time to go get a paper shredder, so I went to one of the big boxes and got the cheapest, smallest shredder I could find. Got her home and set her up on my desk, where I make all the magic happen. Let’s see what this baby can do. The opening was small, and a regular sheet of paper had to be folded thrice in order to fit. I put in a couple pages of one of those credit card solicitations I always get and they disappeared. Wow! Then I picked up the next closest thing, an old picture of my grandfather and general Patton in front of the sphinx during the Great War. Zing, it was gone! The box said it could shred cds and floppy disks, but was it true? I grabbed the nearest cd, an out-of-print Wilco album, and it was gone in seconds. What else could this baby handle? I wanted to try something a little thicker. Looking around I picked up my passport, shoved it in, zing, no problem. I grabbed my visa card from my wallet and it ate it up. But could it do two credit cards? I only had one left, which I doubled up with my driver’s license and library card and the machine shredded all three at once. Let’s see…here are some AAA batteries. With these, some encouragement was needed. With the aide of a plastic knife these were soon pulverized. Goodness me, will this thing not die? What about the box it came in, would that not give it a sense of liberation? No problem. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the Styrofoam packing to follow the path to enlightenment, but a laminated Father’s day card one of my son’s gave me last year went joyfully in to meet it’s true father somewhere in the great basket below.

Bedtime story

Personally I prefer "Sneetches" or "The Giant Jam Sandwich," but the boys insist on the disjointed narrative peregrinations of this volume of the Compson family saga. They never tire of hearing about Caddie, Dilsey, Quentin, Varsh, Roskus, and of course, the boys' favorite, the imbecilic manchild Benjy.

This just says it all

Sometimes somebody comes along and just hits the nail on the head. Thank you, Chall, for sending me this quote: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again, for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." -George W. Bush at one of his fake "Town Meetings" discussing social security.