Daffnee

This just in from the Kingdom of Loathing:

Logovore cuts of foe's arm, "effectively violating his 2nd Amendment rights. You commie. You do 12 (+2) damage, Comrade."

Hee hee. I think I'm going to retire my Disco Bandit and be a Turtle Tamer.

It's headlines like these that make the Washington Post my Paper of the Year for 2006:

Hitting Kim Jong Il Right in the Cognac
U.N. Forbids Selling North Korea Weapons, or Anything Else the Dictator Really Wants.

Because let's face it -- we'd all behave better if we were denied jewelry and plasma TVs until we did, right?

The closer finals get, the more I want to screw around. This is the most serious case of senior-itis that I've ever encountered, even though I'm making something to the tune of negative $500 a day...

But at last count, I have gotten 5 friends to use their South Park personas as their IM icon. The joy spreads, albiet slowly. I plan to get an Xmas tree sometime in the next week to speed that joy-spreading process a tad.

My sister got inspired and made the following of my family:

Say hello to the Mod Squad...and friends.

  

Babies can be such cute little puke factories. E obviously doesn't have my stomach of steel.

Dust to dust...

I'm not really mad about this, though I have wondered why I don't have a jetpack yet.

I'm heading home to Vancouver tomorrow night -- not for American Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving is in October), but because my grandfather passed away Friday morning. He had a good life, from what I could tell. He was 94, was still doing his daily walk up until the day he died, and basically ate all kinds of unholy and unhealthy food up until last year. It's not a big shock.

But there's still a lot of things I'm sorry for. I'm sorry we -- my sibs and I -- never got the full story of how my businessman grandfather and peasant grandmother fled Shanghai with their 4 kids months before the Communists sacked the city. I'm sorry we don't know how they settled in Hong Kong and made an extraordinarily successful lives for themselves. And I'm sorry that I'll never know how that tight-knit family descended into estrangement, squabbles over money, and awkward displays of one-upmanship.

So I'm going home. And I guess my grandpa is too.

I love this guy. He's horribly disfigured, breaks down the 4th wall, and says great things like "I need help! And a pony." Plus, he's Canadian.

NYU is infamously known to be a suicide hot spot -- ask me sometime on my theory why -- but until yesterday, I had never known someone my age to take their own life. The recipient of that unfortunate distinction is Catherine Stevenson, who I remember as a brilliant and slightly cheeky biochem PhD I was interns with in Geneva.

We didn't keep in touch, of course. The news came through someone far better connected than I. But it's spooky, because I have my own highs and lows and hope to God that I never fall completely into that mental hole. I can only imagine a little bit how painful living must have seemed to her.