About a year ago I collected two years' worth of my Facebook status updates and published them as a single OS post.

I'm no master of aphorism (wouldn't that be an exotic handle?) in that my observations seem to center mostly on movies, food, and our cat, but for anyone who's really bored at the moment, here goes.

 Book manuscript finished. Whew.

Imagine a movie starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. Now pick a director, say, Jacques Tourneur, of Cat People and Night/Curse of the Demon fame, and a respectable horror writer like Richard Matheson. Now add Basil Rathbone. How could the result be anything but amazing? Well, it could be Comedy of Terrors, the kind of movie that you really want to like, but... It could have been much better.

Back online, after a week-long Internet out(r)age.

My wife has been listening to CBS Radio Mystery Theater from the 1970s, recorded with all the commercials. The best are the odd instructional ads from Budweiser. Here's what I've learned: Avoid old beer, unless it's been aging in beechwood casks. Pour your beer into a glass before you drink it. Pour down the middle of the glass for all that nice foam. Don't add ice. That sounds easy! I bet I could drink beer myself.

O cruel god Trafficus! Why do your ruby lanterns conspire against me?

I discovered my favorite pizza 25 years ago, at an Italian restaurant in Germany called Ristorante La Piscina, near a swimming pool. Tomato sauce, mozarella, garlic, prosciutto, and spaghetti tangled on top. I'd order it by whatever name it had on the menu and say, "with extra garlic." I was a regular: the waiter would respond, "Si, una pizza Americana." My friends called it a carb bomb. I made one tonight.

Haven't seen the cat lately. If he gets raptured and I don't, I'll have to rethink my lifestyle--oh, wait, there he is. Sleeping under the bed. Hmm...

Seen in a dialog box: "Word found 23 items matching this criteria." This is why I don't have grammar checking turned on.

Watching the birds at our feeders, I think I know the origin of the phrase, "if pigs had wings".

If you ever ask me how old I am, count on a pause of a few seconds during which I think of what year it is, subtract my birth date, and figure out whether I've had my birthday yet. (I suspect I kept better track when I was a kid.)

A relative has been doing work on our family tree, and I discover that along one branch I have a great-great-grandfather from Italy and a great-great-grandmother from Sweden. That accounts for my Nordic features, I guess.

A funny conversation with one of my Ph.D. students, who is blind.

Me: Do you know if the Web site is accessible?

Him: Don't worry, there are sighties around.

None of these things is quite like the others... 

You think you know Sunday drivers? How about Sunday drivers in a suburb of a southern town, the day after a tornado hits?

Rob St. Amant is watching The Third Man for the nth time, and just noticed that Holly Martins is sitting in the Cafe Marc Aurel near the end. Lovely subtleties throughout the movie.

Technical literature searches sometimes produce unexpected results. I'm looking at models of arm movement for pointing devices, and I come across a paper with this title: "Simultaneous Presentation of Tactile and Auditory Motion on the Abdomen to Realize the Experience of 'Being Cut by a Sword'". Wow.

Me on the phone: Would you have time to do it this afternoon?

Some guy: We're pretty busy. It would be maybe an hour wait.

Me: Are you busy on Saturday?

Guy: Thing's are pretty slow on Saturday, 'cause we're closed.

I laughed.

Fiddling with an uncooperative electrical cord this morning, I had to resort to a science fiction solution: I reversed the polarity.

In the morning, whenever I ask my wife, "More coffee?" it's followed (in my head) with "...Warden?" Sometimes she says it out loud. (Curse you, Firesign Theatre).

I've discovered that keeping the kitchen floor clean enough to eat off is not such a hard thing, as long as I'm willing to defer to the judgment (and experiments) of our cat.

Off a road near my house, the developers were apparently aiming for a pastoral Scottish atmosphere in the side street names: "Loch Highlands", "Kirks Ridge", "Hunters Bluff"... and "Donnybrook". Nice try.

In a TV commercial for ancestry.com, the spokesperson says, "And this little leaf [a green leaf-shaped icon on a name in a family tree] led me to all these records." Aargh, from an human-computer interaction standpoint: leaves stand for records? Aargh again, from a computer science standpoint: internal tree nodes marked with leaves? This causes me some pain.

Hans Christian Anderson, what were you thinking? Red Shoes capsule: Adopted girl wears new shoes to church, ignores service. Angel tells girl, Thou shalt dance. Girl dances day and night. Girl visits executioner, gets feet chopped off. God still mad, blocks girl from church with dancing feet-in-shoes (girl lacks churchy attitude). God and girl make up. In church, girl dies of happiness/heart failure.

Thinking about survival of the fittest among words: "Just over the 'flu, I took a 'bus to the picture show; it was a talkie." Some live, having adapted; others die.

‎"...so everyone called her Red Riding Hood." I like fairy tale conventions for naming children. "Blue T-Shirt, you'll be late for school!" "Reddish-Brown Hair, see what grandmother is doing." "No, Dirty-From-Playing-Outside, you can't go to that sleep-over."

Rooting through my desk at work for an aspirin, I came across a bottle of Dayquil. Score! Until I read the expiration date: July, 2004. I need to get more organized.

One of my favorite old books is Boys [sic] fun book of things to make and do (1945). Sample section headings: "Any Boy Can Operate This Novel String Telegraph", "Razor Blade and Safety Pin Radio", "Fun Aplenty with the Lowly Tin Can", "Cardboard Pistol Gives Realistic Machine-Gun Sound Effects", and "Five Stunts with Electric Currents".

What's the worst thing to discover you're out of at 6:30am? I nominate cat food.

I don't like being pretentious, so when I drop a French phrase into my conversation, I translate it into English first: "His writing has a certain I-don't-know-what." "Lana Turner was quite a fatal woman." "Would you care for a good-good?"

Just saw that great 1964 civil rights allegory on TV... Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.

Watching the Grinch last night, I noticed that they'd cut some scenes, presumably to make room for more commercials. There really is a war on Christmas!

I wonder how many people walked outside last night after the last call at the bar, looked up in the sky, and thought, "Wow, how much did I have to drink?" We were able to catch the lunar eclipse around 3AM. It was amazing.

If you're a fan of low-budget, black and white movies based on classic ghost/horror stories (The Haunting, The Innocents, Night of the Demon), Burn, Witch, Burn is not to be missed.

Standing in a hallway with a lot of people in gowns and funny hats.

My excellent French corkscrew doubles as a pretty good box cutter.

I'm grading a huge stack of exams at home, sitting by the fireplace, and my wife wonders, "Would all that paper make good kindling?"

I'm wondering how much American healthcare outcomes are affected by the stress of having to deal with insurance companies. On the phone today: "My supervisor and I can't figure out why the adjusters denied the claims..."

Needles, asses, cares, timelines. [ed: This was a list of words that become unrelated words if you add 's' to the end.]

Iconic movie dogs I probably would not like in real life: Asta. Benji. Toto.

Movie dog I love: Gromit.

Rob St. Amant is thinking that "the eponymously named award" is redundant.

My wife got a jury summons in the mail. Two parts stood out. First, you're paid on a sliding scale, starting at $1.50/hr, then $2.50, then $5.00 if the trial goes for more than five days. Second, no weapons are allowed: no scissors, knives, or knitting needles. Dangerous grannies, I guess.

Saw The Keep again last night, which I haven't seen since 1983. Not better than I'd remembered. You might expect a movie with Ian McKellen, Jurgen Prochnow, and Gabriel Byrne to be good. But you're forgetting the Tangerine Dream and McKellen talking with an American accent.

Fed the cat this morning. That is, I picked up his almost-full bowl, dumped it into the cat food container, and scooped out a "fresh" bowl. He was happy--cats are superstitious creatures.

Brain and brain! What is brain?

Watching William Hopper in a hospital scene in a Ray Harryhausen movie. Imagine Perry Mason's top operative shaking a patient in bed, shouting "Dr. Charmin! Dr. Charmin!" The suspense was significantly undercut.

Overheard in a bar: "She can't be that stupid. Am I the first black person she's ever met?" I had to laugh, even without any context.

On a closet shelf my wife just came across some British currency. On the reverse of the 5 there's a picture of Elizabeth Fry; on the 10, Charles Darwin; on the 20, Edward Elgar. I tried to imagine U.S. bills showing a prison reformer, an evolutionary biologist, and a composer, but I just couldn't manage it.

A friend explains how to tell if you're elite: People suspect that you know facts contradicting what they want to believe.

I know some people are glad that Sharon Angle lost her election, but I'm wondering what to do with all these chickens I've collected.

Waiting in line at a lunch counter the other day, I discovered that the protocol for ordering generally involves requests beginning, "I want..." or "Lemme have..." or "Gimme..." I lead such a sheltered life.

My wife's parents live in an alternative universe: they have told her that all the American monuments in DC were sold to the Chinese during the Clinton administration, and that the Eiffel Tower, which we visited together in 1988, has recently been disassembled for reasons unknown. What a world...

Some out-of-the-ordinary academic spam: "Do you feel scientifically isolated? Do you find yourself sitting on the side-line while others take the field by the nose and lead it? ... Can’t get those experiments published in any regular journal? Do you find that nobody is citing your papers? Haven’t published in your field for some time, but want to show that you are still a player? Well, no need to worry!..."

I was walking through a supermarket parking lot today, when a guy shouted to me from his car: "Excuse me!" "Yes?" I called back. "Do you know the theory of relativity?" "As it happens, yes." "What is it?" Without waiting further he mocked me and drove away, too fast for me to unholster my CV. I should have said, "What do you mean--special relativity or general relativity?" but that only occurred to me later. Bastard.

With all the acorns dropping onto the roof of our house, I sometimes feel as if we're living in a popcorn popper. I'm waiting for the pops to slow down to one every other week, so that I'll know it's winter.

One of my students told me today that a paper he and I had co-authored was mentioned (for reasons I find obscure) in comments on a blog "serving the intelligent design community". Not quite the kind of attention we were hoping for...

Sometimes when my wife and I are watching a movie on TV, I'm inspired to comment about our own lives: "If the world is ever overrun by zombies, we'll find a nice island together," or "I will never come back to haunt you as a ghost after I die, no matter what the circumstances." She does not always seem reassured.

If you shake your phone when you're done talking, even if it's the handset to a land line... you might be an iPhone addict.

Rob St. Amant awoke this morning from uneasy dreams to discover himself pretty much unchanged from the night before.

Descriptions that confuse me: If one thing is a mirror image of another, are the two things the same or opposites? If something is deceptively easy, does it look easy while being hard, or the reverse?

Why do I sometimes think I'm the deuteragonist in the story of my life?

On TV, the really smart people have two Ph.D.s. In real life...

Sometimes when I visit another country I'll see a sign in English and think, "Nice try, but..." I wonder what French visitors to the US think when they see a Chick-fil-A?

My favorite pair of shoes, currently, is from the Medium Design Group, or just Medium. Good branding: try to find a pair online using the search terms "shoes" and "Medium".

Cleaning your keyboard with Windex and a paper towel while your laptop is on produces interesting and unexpected behaviors.

Gnawing on a barbecued rib tonight, I was overcome for a moment by a sense of affinity with my caveman ancestors.

If people find weight loss contests on reality TV shows inspiring, I wonder what would happen if we saw teams of 200 people of all ages trying to board a plane in the shortest time? Underwritten by some local hospital ER, I guess.

That teenager sitting across the aisle, waving one arm and occasionally shouting to himself? No, he doesn't have Tourette's syndrome, just a gesture-based cell-phone game. I think he's casting a virtual fishing rod.

It's easy to start your day at 5AM--just take a plane ride two time zones to the west.

How can I call thee? Let me count the ways. 1. my land line; 2. my cell phone; 3. my wife's cell phone; 4. my wife's MagicJack; 5, 6, and 7. Skype on Computers 1, 2, and 3; 8. shouting very loudly. I'm surprised we're not talking right now.

A Catholic upbringing can have the unexpected side effect of increasing one's appreciation of horror movies.

I'm happy to see David Suchet playing Poirot again. Another entry in the list of fine TV adaptations of British detective stories. Suchet's Poirot even edges out Jeremy Brett's Holmes, Roy Marsden's Dalgleish, John Thaw's Morse, ... maybe.