Here’s a fairly useless but fun freeware application for OS X: Backlight from Freshly Squeezed Software. What it does is display a screensaver of your choice as your desktop wallpaper. (Technically, it’s just a window laid over your wallpaper, but the net effect is the same.) Way better than using OS X’s built-in wallpaper slideshow.

It only works on the main monitor in a multi-monitor setup, and it can’t show RSS screensavers, but the price is right at exactly zero simoleons, and it’s a surefire conversation-starter when you fire up the ol’ PowerBook down at the local caffeination station/wireless hotspot. I find that a noise screensaver is not nearly as distracting as most others. Your mileage may vary.

A good time might be when it’s screaming at you that going in to work is a bad idea. Like today. I woke up not just tired, but with that beaten-with-sticks feeling you get from a nasty cold that’s just getting started on kicking your ass.

I ignored the warning klaxon and drove to work under the spell of that languid sort of feeling that sometimes accompanies the onset of illness, the feeling that you constantly need to stretch out and just… close your eyes… just for a little bit… what could it hurt-the freeway is so straight…

Finally getting in to the office, I had to fumble my way through a mental fog of surprising viscosity. Shivering from chills and trying everything to fend them off, my hands locked in a death grip around a cup of hot tea, the ass end of my G4 turned around in the faint hope the heat from the power supply would ameliorate the withering cold that only I could feel.

Having ultimately soaked up enough caffeine to become lucid, and swallowed enough cold medicine to mask the symptoms of my impending doom, I rebounded in a fit of productivity. Though I finished my tasks at hand, it came at a price: I could feel the illness regrouping, creeping back in around the edges, biding its time until the chemicals wore away, ready to resume the inexorable slide into pestilence.

I ran like a scared little girl, cutting out a half-hour early from work. Somehow making it home without death, injury, or property damage—I don’t remember most of the return commute—I threw myself into bed and promptly went inert. I can feel the illness gathering its strength for a hammerblow, my resistance dissipated by my foolish insistence that one can simply ignore a bad cold.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The voices in my head like to sing along when I listen to music, but they don’t always get the lyrics right.

Sometimes their versions are much more amusing than the originals. This morning my clock radio woke me up to the strains of Bryan Adams’ celebrated quasi-ballad Summer of ‘69; snatches of this alternate version have been bouncing around in my head for years, but today it finally jelled and broke loose, free to run riot through the world of Man.

If only I had a karaoke machine.

Note: Feel free to sing it out loud, but be advised that doing so while at work may earn you a visit from HR.

It’s hard to say exactly what The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello is all about, but the trailer indicates that whatever the story is, it’s told with style.

When I was kid I loved Speed Racer. The adventure, the wacky hijinks, and, of course, the sleek automotive wet dream that was the Mach 5—what was not to love? I didn’t get to watch many episodes; for some reason it only appeared irregularly on whatever local station broadcast it (this was in the Elder Days, long before cable). I remember being absolutely transfixed by the few episodes I was able to catch.

I was eight years old.

Years afterward I managed to catch it on TV again. After mere minutes of watching, I was deeply disappointed. It was not entertaining. It was not cool (though I will admit the Mach 5 still looks as sleek and fast as ever). It was not funny. It was poorly-animated, badly written, awful. It was the sort of thing an eight-year-old would find engaging. Apart from its kitsch value, it’s just a crappy cartoon.

With that in mind, I’m bewildered by the adults who slap Decepticon stickers on their cars or are wetting themselves in anticipation of the upcoming Transformers Movie, which is just a retread of a 30-minute daily toy commercial originally aimed at the late-elementary-to-middle school set. I am willing to concede that the movie might actually have greater aspirations, but I doubt it. I think I’m witnessing the next generations’ Speed Racer.

I dug a mass grave in my backyard yesterday afternoon.

For reasons unknown, five of the seven fish in our tank chose to expire en masse the night before last. My best guess is that the "100% fish-safe" water treatment we added to the tank was actually only 28% fish-safe. I was afraid the kids would be upset by the loss, as kids are sometimes wont to be when a pet meets its demise.

Nope. Nothing. My inquiries on the matter, delicately and sympathetically posed, were met with shrugs. Indifference. Stone-cold not-carin’. It seemed that I was the one most upset about losing the fish, all fine, large specimens of Carassius auratus auratus and Hypostomus plecostomus. For no particular reason, I was rather fond of the Pleco, and was sorry to see his lifeless form bobbing on the surface.

I went into the backyard to dig a hole for the fish between three of our fruit trees. Waste not, want not, after all. I looked up as the screen door closed with a bang, my oldest son running towards me, saying he wanted to inter them personally. I think the lion’s share of his motivation was simple curiosity and the chance to actually handle the fish, but he surprised me by insisting on adding "soul dust" (white charcoal ash from the barbecue) to the grave before the fish were covered up. We shared a tragicomic moment when he dropped the largest goldfish, its rubbery body bouncing madly around the hole before finally coming to rest under the rigid corpse of the Pleco.

No words were said, no moment of silence observed as I turned the last shovelful of earth over the dead fish—these were just common aquarium fish, after all—but it somehow seemed our ichthyic former housemates had been given a proper sendoff just the same. I’ll miss the Pleco.