Misc

- Up until yesterday at about 9:30pm, I wrongly assumed that the Taj Mahal was the Tajma Hall. Or at the very least, the Tajmahall. These are the things you learn while eating Indian pizza. (Which is quite good.) I had always thought of it as one of the several ornate halls of India.

- Over the past few weeks I've been working my way through all the William Gibson books. His first three are set at some point in the future and I like all his predictive details. For instance, people have little slots behind their ear into which they can insert little disks of information which he calls Microsofts. In the 80s, when the book was written, Microsoft was no where near the powerhouse it is today. He also uses the term The Matrix in roughly the same way the movie The Matrix uses it. Those kinds of things are cool. The next two books, which I originally read 5 or 6 years ago, are set 12 years in the future. Unfortunately they were written in 1993, which means they took place last year. I still like the stories, but now I have to get over the fact that he's just wrong about how the world turned out. Nobody lives on the Bay Bridge, California isn't divided up into two states (Northern and Southern, although it's not a bad idea), and nobody's building cities with nanotechnology yet. I've gotten past all this by pretending that both stories are set in the near future. It makes reading them a lot less distracting.

- Today was a medium grade holiday, which means that I was at work and doctors were not. That, in turn, means that we had nothing to do all day. (Our mattresses are prescription, so doctors have to be around to prescribe them.) Boredom coupled with the after effects of sleeping on a couch, and then an air mattress near a snorer over the weekend is making me crave climbing into bed.

- Flakey McOnion emailed me to say she was up for dinner tonight at 10:10pm yesterday. But since I got home late, went right to bed, didn't have time to check my email this morning, and don't have email access at work, I didn't get the message until 6:30pm today. If we're still using the whack-a-mole analogy, then it's like the mole has popped up after I've gone to ask the manager to refund my quarter.

- And finally, my dentist seems to be trying to sneak the full cost of my cleaning into my bill. They sent me a letter asking me to send them a check for $125 for "Balance Forward." After calling for a more detailed bill (i.e. a bill with ANY details), going over it for a half hour with a calculator and my insurance statements, and googling the term prophylaxis, I discovered what they were up to. Why not charge my insurance for a cleaning? After I get this straightened out I'm never going there again. If anybody out there is trying to choose a dentist in San Francisco, send me an email and I'll give you one to avoid.