Gus: Fiona, I did miss your note in Natter. The sins of skipping are many and dark.

billytea: Gus shall henceforth be known as Dark Skippy. He is Legion.

Polter-Cow in Natter:

I have now earwormed myself with new lyrics to the badger song:

Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty
(Birthday! Birthday!)
Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty
(Birthday! Birthday!)
Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty Lilty
(Birthday, birthday!)
Joooob! Quit your joooob! Aaah, quit your jooob

Daniel C. Jensen in Bitches:

You know you are a geek when you go to a garage sale, pick up a Yoda Pez dispenser marked for a nickel, and play puppet with the head, mimicing out loud, "Buy you I will."

Damn it, Nicole!

(sulks as Nicole plays Lance Armstrong to my Jan Ullrich, beating me to Daniel's high-snerk quote)

Beej, talking about when it's 'clutter' and when it's over the top:

After an adventure a coupla years ago, I'll never, ever judge anyone for their stuff-keeping.

I live on Capital Hill (DC), a neighborhood thickly carpeted with 'characters'. One such, Dick, had been a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a radical activist for free press and an all around intellectual powerhouse. We knew him as the cranky guy who loved arguing more than breathing, and who could outwit the sharpest of minds. He'd hold court every day in the park across the street from my house.

Exactly 2 years ago, the fire department carried his body out of his studio apartment directly across from me. He'd died from the heat, age and goodness knows what else. After they removed the body, the fire guys broke down his door. I was confused.

Next day, I went over and saw why.

The rubbish, and I mean literally garbage, was over my head. I'm 5 feet and I'd have to say the trash was at least 7.5 feet high. Dick would push open the door about 10 inches, climb up on the mountain and crawl into the corner to sleep.

It took me and 4 other volunteers 8 days to excavate the room. Under all the trash (notebooks, letters, newspapers, books-a-million, 50s porn--"Backdoor Betty" is one title that stuck in my mind, women's pantyhose in plastic bags--don't ask, candy wrappers and unopened tins of tuna, mostly) we found a bed, Barcalounger, dining table, 4 chairs, a tv and book cases. It took me three days to free a fan I found because the cord was so deeply imbedded in the trash.

In one corner, a water leak had literally composted the trash into dirt over the years.

It was an amazing thing watching different people's reactions to this poor fellow's mental illness. Some were sad, some bewildered and some actually outraged. Everyone had a deeply personal experience of it.

At one point, standing on the pile, after we'd gotten it down to the lounger, I tried to imagine the moment at which one simply says, "Okay." and let's the stuff take over. It's impossible to say, but I still wonder.

Anne in Bitches, on the Kafkaesque qualities of cats:

I swear that Jeeves goes into an existential funk whenever I run his food bowl through the dishwasher. It's as if he's thinking "I do not see my food bowl. Therefore, I must not exist."

in Movies:

Sean K: Nutty, I love how you can say that the movie needed more realistic motivations in one sentence, and then say that the realism in the movie wasn't as sexy as a big explosion later on in the same paragraph.

Sometimes it seems like the demands you put on movies must leave the poor movies confused and frustrated, wondering how the night could have turned out so badly, and at just which point it all started to go south.

Nutty:

1. Telephone manipulation has its place; but front-and-center as the chief elements of moving the plot is not it.

2. While I do like the telephone, and the freedom it has given the modern thriller plot, I am not so enamoured of ear wax that I must witness lots of it.

3. If you are a serious movie about foreign policy unrest, you may use the telephone, but you may also be required to be directed by Costa-Gavras, or else take place in black and white. (See Paragraph 31-B for regulations involving documentary exposés.

4. If you are a not-serious movie about foreign policy unrest, shit must blow up in a regular basis, unless you have received Intimate Fight Scene Exemption #2, or Silly Chase Sequence Exemption #3. Please see Appendix Q for forms to apply for these exemptions.

JoeCrow: So moved. All in favor, glare menacingly at those not in favor. All opposed, get with the program.

In Natter, erika teaches us a lesson in Black Drollery:

erika: Almost everybody I went to grade school with is dead.

Hec: Yeesh. On the other hand, you'll win all the prizes at the reunion.

erika: Except for...um, "Changed the Most".(And I don't believe I typed that.) small class+aggressive muscle diseases=not very many alumnus events.