P'tuesday Ponderances

1. I could bitch about the economic cluster-fuck with which we're now stuck, but what's the point?
   
2. Whatever happened to the little croutons I used to be able to buy?  Now all I can find are these giant "restaurant" style hunks of bread which, frankly, are tough to chew.  I miss the little bite-sized ones.
   
3. I took this picture early last year of the first flower I ever noticed on the hibiscus bush just outside my door; you ought to be able to read about it here.  Thanks to the "expert" landscaping services contracted by my landlord, the bush now has a grand total of fifty-four leaves, nineteen of which are yellow and will soon fall to the ground.  Three cheers for the manifold and manifest benefits of imported labor.
   
4. While I was going out to the mailbox I kept stepping on all the little green acorns which are now falling from the trees right onto the pavement.  As they made tiny, satisfying crunching noises beneath my feet I though "How futile, shedding your seed all over an impermeable surface."
   
5. That reminded me of the way some (most?) fish procreate, spewing sperm and eggs into the water and hoping they somehow meet in the middle.
   
6. That reminded me of an article I read a few years ago, probably in Scientific American, about how some idiot thinks that life on land should be properly viewed as an attempt by the oceans to colonize dry land, thus all we really amount to are little, mobile columns of diluted sea water.  It's days like this when I begin to wish fervently for the utter collapse of civilization so that idiots like this will be forced to either fend for themselves or die trying.  Maybe after this guy has become a powerful warlord then he can turn his attention to promoting his "Ugly Bags of Mostly Water" philosophy of life.  If he has enough guns, then who's going to argue?  And if he's dead, then who's going to care?
   
7. That reminded me of another idiotic article I once read about how the human race has been domesticated by the wheat plant, seeing as how it used to be found only in the Middle East and is now grown all over creation.  These people have way too much time on their hands.
   
8. Why won't my desktop and laptop show up together on my network?  I can ping from one to the other.  I can search for them both from the other.  I can transfer files between them.  The IP addresses assigned by the DHCP server are in the correct range.  My router certainly recognizes them both.  I even forced my desktop rig to be the default Master Computer Browser.  My laptop's shared files show up, but only on my laptop.  Nothing at all shows up on my desktop, and they both tell me the list of servers for the network is unavailable.  What the hell am I doing wrong?
   
9. I hate it when I end up with funny-tasting milk.  Not about-to-go-bad tasting, just funny-tasting.
   
10. To hell with ten.  Nine is a nice, odd number.

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