shorts log day 8 -- coming to termz with language

star date inherently unknowable:

I've been having a hard time understanding my alien ship mates.

This is understandable because they have been bending our existing language for their needs, often to the point of breaking it, or adding new words to it that fit like a white wedding dress on a pig. Okay, maybe the dress would fit the pig, but would you want to put it on the pig unless you wanted the mud to symbolize your carefree days of hedonism before settling down to a steady stream of the goofy quirks of the same person that were so damn funny at first but now cause your stomach to clench up and those thoughts of murder to move to the front of the queue in your brain that was once organized into a nice, clean queue before the quirks began to torture and tease it into anarchy.

But, I digress.

Here's some translations of some of the alien speak I have heard lately:

• agnostic: now, everyone knows that when you spill egg nog, that it will make things sticky, but that's not what this is about -- unless you are floor-agnostic and just don't care about your new Italian tiles at all. Or, for instance, a program -- a program that doesn't care about the platform it runs on -- then you might be platform agnostic. But, using this word in a society that fears all other religions than their own, and fears those crazy people who believe that God is inherently unknowable due to the nature of subjective experience, is just plain stupid. Steer away from these rumble-causing words.
• organic: take the organs from 2 failed programs, preferably ones from the 90's that were spawned solely by the word synergy but didn't have a prayer(oops) of success, add a big handful of cheese, wrap the whole thing in not one, but two tortilla shells and deep-fry it until it decomposes, and you have a new, organic approach. Be sure to bury the remains...organic stuff spoils.

shorts log day 7 -- I'm missing my picnic, dammit

shorts log entry meh to the meh power

About half way thru my morning, I looked down at my half-covered legs and thought, "Picnic, when the hell is the picnic?" Previously, I could only wear the half-pants on days when free food was offered, and I was experiencing an echo of my old Pavlovian response: associate food and shorts and after a while the dog will start drooling at the sight of Old Navy cutoffs.

It was a letdown to remember that there was, indeed, no free food offered, and that I would have to forage for my own. At least hunting will be easier in the shorts. And, if I'm trapped in the building due to some unforseen glue that falls from the sky and makes all the exits impassible, so that my building mates and I first have our own version of "Lord of the Flies", followed shortly thereafter -- when the vending machines are all smashed and empty and Piggy is starting to look like his namesake -- by "Alive", I will at least be mobile and harder to catch in my short pants. The long leggers will be the tripping, falling, and trapped first victims, albeit they'll be harder to peel.