I don’t know how I stumbled on this one, but I found a transcription of an old Mormon pamphlet advising readers how they can "overcome" the ill-defined but doubtless evils of masturbation. While the fellow that posted this enlightening item was a particular fan of suggestion number 19 (tie one of your hands to the bedpost before you go to sleep), many of them are amusing. In particular, I surmise that it must have been critically important to implement all nine steps of its guide, as well as the 21 suggested practices, because cherry-picking (no pun intended) might yield undesireable results.

For instance, if you chose item 6 from the Guide to Self-Control list along with suggestions 3 and 17, you’d end up being a fat loner who apparently suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome. It logically follows from suggestion 15 that Mexicans and Indians must be inveterate self-abusers. Guide points 3 and 9 seem diametrically opposed to each other. How are you supposed to know you’re hanging out with a fellow victim of carrot-shuffling if you don’t talk about it? Not that it’s usually a topic of conversation anyway — "You know, Dave, I just can’t stop jacking off; it’s a real problem" is the sort of statement that gets an icy stare at best, and is more likely an invitation for an ass-kicking.

Guide item 4 is just really sort of strange. I don’t know about you, but I doubt very many people get aroused by looking at their own bodies. The sort of people who get turned on by their own perceived hotness to the point where using their own hand is its own reward probably aren’t going to change their behavior based on the instructions in a pamphlet.

People are so weird about sex.

There is a hallway closet in my house. The doorknob sticks. While it’s never previously been much of a problem, It made me just about soil myself in surprise and alarm the other day after I returned home from work.

I arrived home in the afternoon to find that the back door had been left unlatched, likely because the boys are wont to traipse in and out of the backyard every chance they get. Despite the fact that I live in a tranquil neighborhood, my paranoia was aroused. No sooner had I opened the door to allow the breeze to air out the kitchen than I heard a thud and crash coming from one of the bathrooms.

The aforementioned paranoia quickly decided 2 (an unlocked door) + x (the noise) equalled 4, so I warily crept down the hall to investigate the matter. I poked my head into kids’ bathroom to find, to my great relief, one of our cats had knocked over a basket of tub toys, and was staring back at me with the "what are you looking at?" sort of expression that cats manage to convey so very well. Feeling much less paranoid and slightly foolish, I walked back down the hallway towards the kitchen.

Just as I reached the hallway closet, the doorknob, which had likely been stuck in the open position since the kids had left for school in the morning, decided it could resist its spring no longer, and snapped back into the closed position. Since the bolt had never fully engaged, the door hadn’t been completely closed, and was barely ajar. Just open enough, in fact, so that the curved face of the bolt hit the curved lip of the strike plate, glancing off of it, and opening the door a couple of inches further.

This dispassionate description of mechanical events does little to convey the thrill of sudden terror that flooded my brain and body as the closet door, which a cursory glance showed to be closed, sprang open as the knob turned with lightning speed. Just as I walked right in front of it. "Oh shit!" doesn’t even begin to describe the reaction to the farrago of adrenaline, fear, confusion, rage, and various potential tactics that simultaneously jammed themselves into my neocortex. I was sure as hell ready to do something as soon as the door either opened all the way or I saw someone or something coming out of it. Whether that something would have ended up being a desperate fistfight, uncontrollable defecation, or running the hell away, I have no idea. I suppose it depended on what came out of the closet.

Needless to say, nothing came out of the closet. The cat wandered down the hall, nonchalantly sniffed the jamb, and rubbed its face against the door as is the habit of cats, casually tossing me another "what the hell is your problem?" look. After a quick inspection of every other room and closet in the house, I ended up having to take a walk around the block to spin down; that adrenaline packs quite a wallop, and I needed more than a few gulps of fresh air to help swallow my heart back down into its proper place in my ribcage.

When I returned, I made sure that door was as unstuck as humanly possible — I got a screwdriver and a wire brush, then proceeded to disassemble and clean the thing, then applied amounts of lubricant to it not usually encountered outside the Castro district. WD-40, gun oil, Astroglide, you name it, I sprayed, drizzled, and dabbed it on the worky bits of the doorknob. As rousing as a squirt of adrenaline is, I really have no wish to recreate the experience anytime soon. That goddamned doorknob is now is as unstuck as doorknobs can possibly be. One nice bonus is that all my sweaters and jackets now sport the refreshing scent of aliphatic petroleum distillates.

I’m also finding coathangers strangely erotic now, but can’t imagine why.

I don’t really have much to post right now, because I’m busy working for The Man. Yes, I do some actual work every once in a while. You know, I like to keep up appearances by expending a modicum of effort for my corporate overlords every so often.

But, hey, you didn’t come here to read about my dodgy plan to defraud millions of shareholders out of my annual salary. I found this web comic that uses Half-Life 2 to tell its ridiculous story. It’s not exactly the highbrow sort of entertainment you’ve come to expect from this site, but I found it an amusing distraction. Warning: If you never played Half-Life 2, some jokes may be lost on you.

I took a recent stumble down memory lane the other day when I discovered the Killer List of Video Games. Though I did have fairly regular access to an Atari 2600 when I was a kid, the dimly-lit dens of iniquity known as video arcades was where I cut my teeth on videogames, like many a child of the late Seventies and early Eighties.

This is the most comprehensive list of old arcade games I’ve seen to date. I was happy to find an entry for Sea Wolf; a few years ago I unearthed an old composition book from the fourth or fifth grade in which I gave the game high marks. I clearly remember fogging up the viewpiece of the periscope for as long as my exasperated father would keep feeding me tokens. I was also delighted to find M-79 Ambush, which I had completely forgotten about, until the screenshots took me back to ages past.

Never having been one for Pac-Man, Asteroids, or some of the other games commonly considered "classics", I seem to have gravitated towards games involving robots: Blasted and Escape From The Planet of The Robot Monsters were two that I remember sinking uncounted quarters into. From this perspective, my deep distrust of artificial intelligence seems to have germinated just after I graduated from high school.

This site is definitely worth a browse or two. Not only does it go back quite a way, it also contains really weird gems like Knock Out!! that was produced by a company with the provocative name "KKK", as well as games that I don’t remember, with interesting names like Homo, Irritating Maze, and Tinkle Pit. I can’t imagine why those never caught on.

A while ago I visited a dermatologist’s office to get a medical opinion on a couple of bumps I thought might be ominous. I say "dermatologist’s office" and not "dermatologist", because I visited the office three times in the space of as many months, and never once saw the actual doctor, even during a biopsy.

Earlier this week I had an appointment to review the results of the biopsy. Throughout my earlier visits, the place had been nearly deserted, but suddenly the lobby was standing room only. It seems they’d massively overbooked appointments. Some people had been waiting in the lobby for two hours or more. One elderly man had to cancel his appointment and go home because his supply of life-sustaining oxygen was about to run out. I’m not making that up.

After about an hour of waiting, during which time the harried desk clerks were explaining that the overbooking was due to the doctor having only just returned from his vacation (three months? Some vacation!) I was finally shown to an examination room where I stared at posters of stage III melanoma for another half an hour. At this point, I was entertaining the notion that there really was no dermatologist, that he was an entirely fictional construct created by the nurses and assistants to enable them to open their own collective office. The truth was somewhat more disturbing.

Eventually, I heard a man’s voice in the hallway, and heard the sound of my file being noisily extracted from its bin hanging on outside the door of my cheerless and chilly examination room. The knob turned, and I met the doctor. Or, at least, what was passing for a doctor.

It was a hobo.

It was the two-week-old neckbeard, exactly the same length as the stubbly hair on his shorn head, that was the first visual anomaly. The second oddity was his peculiar half-lidded expression and marked tendency to close his eyes and turn his head away when he spoke, his voice a sort of buzzing mumble. Still, I listened intently to what he was telling me about the initial results of the biopsy, reading his lips closely, because I couldn’t always make his words out clearly. Nonetheless, I was perfectly prepared to accept this man as a bona fide doctor of medicine as he explained my prognosis. Nothing was really out of the ordinary.

Then I saw his hands. Since he looked to be in his early to mid-fifties, the appearance of age on his hands was not unexpected. The appearance of filth, however, was an entirely unpleasant surprise. About half of his thickened, yellow, badly-trimmed nails had the sort of black, compacted material underneath them that one might easily expect from trades more commonly associated with axle grease and sparks, such as mechanics, machinists, oil rig workers, and tow truck drivers. His hands in general were the sort of manipulative appendages one would find on a man who has toiled at hard manual labor his entire life, had you just caught him mid-shift. Mind you, this man was supposedly a dermatologist.

At this point, I actually began to wonder if he really wasn’t some wino the staff had picked up off the street to impersonate a doctor, and so continue their ruse undetected. When the "doctor" made some forgettable joke about melanoma indicators, I naturally gave him a pro forma chuckle. He responded in kind, though a tad more heartily than I might have wished, for I got to see a glimpse of the inside of his mouth. The good "doctor" was missing several teeth, and those that were present were, shall we say, not in a state that my dental hygenist would find at all pleasing.

I didn’t think I lived in the sticks, but it turns out he’s the only dermatologist in the entire county. Convenience or no, I think that filthy hands, strange mannerisms, missing teeth, and a three month vacation (jail time for a "Drunk and Disorderly" citation at the shelter? Who knows?) all add up to looking elsewhere for any future professional dermal attention. I hear there’s a couple of guys who sleep behind the dumpster of Pete’s Beer & Wine who say they’re doctors.

This one is only for Mac OS X 10.4+. If you’re exclusively a Windows user, well, sorry. Go read something else today.

So check this out: I found this little gem of a widget called iClip lite. What it does is act as a clipboard organizer for up to 20 items- text, images, files, folders, whatever. Not only will it store 20 different things, it keeps what’s stored in each iClip slot across user sessions. Log out, log back in, it’s still there. Shut the computer down for the night, and tomorrow iClip is still holding whatever you gave it yesterday.

It’s free (there’s some sort of paid version that does other stuff, but I didn’t even bother to look at it), it’s hugely useful, and it’s just plain awesome. Say goodbye to fatal copy-and-paste fumbles!