Today a staff member wandered into our office desirous of IT mojo; she’d managed to forget the password to her central computing account and, as one might imagine, was hamstrung without the access it provides.

She broke the ice with preemptory self-deprecating humor, and I responded in kind. After the exchange of several witty and rather erudite comments, we had fallen into an amusing banter as she navigated the password change process. When she submitted some personal information to the system to verify her identity, an error message appeared on the screen, and she could proceed no further. She looked up at me inquisitively, and I glanced at the screen, then told her, "you know, you look remarkably well-preserved for a woman of your age".

All previous cameraderie was flung aside as she shot me a black look that unequivocally said "FUCK YOU". There was no mistaking it. She might as well have given me the finger. Before I could explain myself and save some shred of my nascent University career, I found myself instead ready to cringe, as her mouth pursed in what could only have been its preparation to emit some scathing excoriation and a demand for my summary execution. Then her eyes fell upon the information she’d just tried to submit, and she noticed her error, the source of my jape: her birthdate. June 17th, 1692.

And lo, all was laughter and rainbows once more. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t, if only for a moment, sure I was about to die under that withering mien. I swear, the woman could make basilisks scamper for cover.

Our offices are close to a couple of Life Science departments on campus. Specifically, Watershed Sciences and Wildlife, Fish & Conservation Biology. It’s kind of cool because the former has big windows on their ground-floor labs, and you can walk right by them and see people inside wearing white lab coats, peering into enormous microscopes and swirling test tubes around. You know, SCIENCE. Neat.

The latter is cool because there are labs with big vat-like tanks holding fish spawning experiments and photoreactivity whatsits and who only knows what else, and it seems like every other office has an awesome tropical fishtank inside it. Yay, more science! You can hear the pumps at all hours of the day, and the hallway smells—ever so faintly—of running water, with the slightest tinge of algae. Except for when one day I swear to God it smelled like fish and chips. Oh well, I guess even the failed experiments have their silver lining.

Today, though, the hallway had a really weird odor to it. At first blush it was mildly repellent, a malodorous funk, but as I made my way down the corridor, I detected clean, bright, and appetizing notes. I halted my perambulation momentarily to fill my puzzled nostrils with the scent, so that I might have more of it to judge it by. I can honestly say I’ve never smelled anything like it. If I had to describe it as quickly as I possibly could, I would say it was a… well, a sort of Lemon Musk.

I wonder what they’re doing in those labs now.

A judge in Germany denied a woman’s request for a speedy divorce from her abusive husband who beat her, stalked her after separation, and threatened to kill her. The judge’s reason? Because they’re from Morocco where that sort of shit goes on all the time, and because her interpretation of the Quran says that it’s cool. Never mind the fact that many Islamic scholars don’t agree with this. Never mind the fact that he was beating and threatened to kill her. Never mind the thought that if they’d been Christians or Jews this issue never would have arisen. Never mind the violations of German law committed by the husband. No accelerated divorce for you, says the judge.

WHAT.    THE.    FUCK.

This incompetent jurist has since been removed from the case (alas, sadly, not from the bench), but that still does nothing to erase the mindfuck this creates. I’m sorry, but this is carrying tolerance just a little too fucking far, don’t you think? If this judge’s thinking is an example of Western Europe’s vaunted sophisticated, cosmopolitan intellectual milieu, I’m quite happy to be thought of as the sort of horrible American barbarian cowboy these Eurofags turn their noses up at. If such idiocy is the end result of "tolerance and diversity", then fuck tolerance and the camel it rode in on.

If there’s one thing I know about art, it’s that I like it weird. I also like intricate pieces with lots of details to discover. For best results, of course, a piece would be both weird and intricate.

My current favorite for digital imagery and surreal Photoshoppage is J.K. Potter, whose twisted human forms I find mesmerising. For sculpture, a medium I have always held in awe, the incomparable Tom Kuebler and his fully three-dimensional menagerie of freaks, characters, and oddities.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible to top either one for sheer fascination value until I ran across the bizarre work of Joel-Peter Witkin, who, combines the media of both the previous artists (photography and sculpture, if you allow still-life installations to be a form of sculpture), but with a macabre twist: the human bodies and constituent parts depicted in his work are real. Not content to simply recruit and photograph real-life freaks, at one point he actually cut a deal with Mexico City’s morgue to use corpses and body parts of the indigent and unclaimed. Very strange stuff indeed. Too surreal to be outright horrifying, and yet the morbid foreknowledge of his subject matter still elicits a faintly creepy reaction. It’s worth a look.

One of our Apple reps informed us yesterday that the "highly anticipated" Security Configuration Guides for OS X and OS X Server 10.4 are now available.

Let’s see. OS X 10.4 has been out for almost a year, and 10.5 is close to shipping (supposedly available by June), and and only just now the security docs are getting published. "Highly anticipated" is just Marketing jargon for "long overdue" or "really fucking late", I guess.

If you haven’t seen the movie 300 yet, you’ve probably heard all kinds of hullaballo that’s been raised over it. It’s been called racist propaganda, a "declaration of war" against Iranian culture, and probably worse.

Well I ain’t gonna get into that mess, though a quarter of the way through the film I did start thinking about the comparisons one might easily draw between the broad history of 300’s subject matter (armed struggle between the West and East) and current events. On the way out of the theater I wondered aloud about how soon it would be before others made the same connections. I was quickly informed that said connections had long since been made, thank you very much, and, taking them a step further, that some wags had already been speculating as to whether or not the United States is represented by the Spartans or (no doubt with a provocative smirk) the Persian hordes.

The jape was only worth a snicker at the time, but it stuck in my mind. Eventually I realized that, if you’re going to draw parallels, the U.S. is actually split between the two: brave kickass fighting mofos in the Spartan mold… commanded by a hubris-ridden king with delusions of infallibility.