FW: Digit Fables Draft

Excerpts from a book of Digit Fables

The Thumb Who Fell in Love with an Eyeball
 
-She was round, blue, and glistening. This was all he knew of her and all he needed know. The thumb had always been impetuous. Quick to stand in silly approval of things he never understood. Always lying down for a quick snap.
 
-He longed to plunge into the glistening roundness, but contrary to randy clichés and nursery rhymes, people rarely stuck their thumbs in anything.
 


The Sad Journey of the Index Finger
 
-Tired of life on the hand, he simply left one day. Not a word to the thumb or the middle finger who’d overshadowed him for so long.
 
-No one looked at him, but only where he was headed, as if he were always on the verge of discovering something
 


The Pinky Toe who Longed to be a Nipple
 
-True she was smaller than most, with just a tiny, impossible to paint nail, but it wasn’t just her stature that fueled her desire. It was a matter of sensation, or, in her case, a lack thereof. Callused from years of subjugation to the sandal a size to small, she felt almost nothing
 
-She’d hear talk of rare operations that turned ankles into knees, procedures that inserted parts of the stomach into the buttocks, but then she’d also heard stories of body parts removed entirely never to be seen or heard from again.
 
-She meant no ill will to the current nipples on her body. Would swap assignments with either if they were willing.
 
-“I could tell you that nipple don’t have it all that good,” said the wise big toe, “That they too, dream of being other, some even pinky toes, but I would be lying. The nipples in fact have a rather good lot. Truth be told, if I had my druthers
 


The Great Middle-Ring War

-Long before the tyranny of the hand, in the days when the fingers roamed free, legend has it that the middle and ring fingers were in love. Their names, of course, were different then, as  

-The thumb, whose name, like the devil’s, has always been the same, offered the couple a gift.
 
-But she would forever pay a price for winning this adornment, unable to stand or sometimes even move lest her onetime husband grant her permission.
 
-And so the former lovers remain forever joined, but forever severed.
 
 
 

Give That Googlebot a Bone!

Look there are ads to Dreamweaver MX in the Google ads at the top of the page! I'm so impressed with what the little bot can do. I can't help but see it as this little smiling robotic half spider half dog. Very earnest, very eager to please, a little on the simple side, but getting smarter every day.

I really think Google needs to market the google bot or spider or whatever as a soft and cuddly mascot. There could even be an animated sitcom spinoff.

I'd call it "Googlebot Saves the Day." The premise would have our cute and cuddly little Google bot traveling from town to town bringing people things that he thinks they really need, but it turns out are only loosely related to trivial matters they mentioned offhand in a recent conversation. The kicker is that these trivial items would always end up saving the day in some unexpected way at the end of the show. Then everyone would smile look into the camera and say -- [I challenge you to come up with our catch phrase because I've grown tired of this post]

Photoshop Eight Point What?

I just installed Photoshop CS on my computer at work, and I’m ready to say I’ve had enough. Does marketing know no boundaries? I mean we’re talking about software version numbers here. What’s next, using the source code itself as a branding platform?

Apparently Adobe is calling Photoshop 8.0 "Photoshop CS," because it wants to -- and I quote -- “communicate that, in addition to being available on its own, Photoshop CS is also available as a part of Adobe’s new Creative Suite,” but what about the people who just want to know whether or not this version is newer than Photoshop 7.0?

Do you know that when I moved back to using a PC after using a Mac exclusively for several years it took me months to figure out that Windows XP was actually newer than Windows 2000? It was full year before I fully grasped the concept that it was newer Windows ME (Late at night, actually, when I drift into that middle space between consciousness and sleep, I sometimes even have doubts about this, and I have woken sweat-soaked from several nightmares thinking that maybe I didn't have the latest version of the greatest operating system on the planet).

When I first started using Dreaweaver and went to buy a book on the program, I actually bought a book on Dreamweaver 4, thinking, “Oh, well, I’m using Dreamweaver MX right now, but I’m sure we’ll be upgrading to Dreamweaver 4 soon enough, and I want to be prepared.” What can I say? Maybe the Dreamweaver 4 book just looked newer than the Dreamweaver MX book. Maybe I’m just retarded.

Maybe I just wrote this post to see if ads for Photoshop and Dreamweaver will show up in the Google ads at the top of the page.

Google Toolbar Installed
Holy Crap! This thing is way advanced. It must be stopped.

Oh, one other thought: I'd like to see more web pages eschew "download now" in favor of "download the fuck out of this file." Yeth. Now for thome Coorvawtheeay. Mm-hm

What I Wrote on My Father's Father's-Day Card
by Gadi Ben-Yehuda

What man does not think himself,
on leaving his father’s home,
as Solomon—unversed in the goings
in and out but ripe with wisdom
and a fitting successor to his
warrior father?

What man does not want to build
a temple as a showcase for
his father’s Psalms?

Legend holds there once lived a man who could see three minutes into his own future. Unfortunately due to a childhood respiratory ailment that had temporarily deprived his brain of oxygen, the man was afflicted with a rare mental deficiency that robbed him of his memory of the last four minutes. Scientists, philosophers, and drunks debated what the curious combination of this gift and affliction meant for this man. Was his lack of memory somehow replaced by his vision of the future, meaning that he perpetually confused the future for the past? And if he gained three minutes from the future but lost four minutes from the past, what then became of the extra minute? Scientists argued that he mistook this extra minute of lost time from the past for the unknowable future itself since it was, from his perspective at least, the nearest minute for which he could not account. Philosophers maintained that the combination of conditions reshaped the man's very conception of time so that this minute stretched out into an unknowable infinity that became, for this man, an imageless and mysterious god-concept that he worshiped in primitive rituals rooted in fear and wonder. The drunks asserted, with little fanfare and no spilling of their drinks, that the legendary man actually must have mistook this minute for the present, the lost moment of now always slipping away somewhere after the future yet before the past.

There's more here I think, but I can't get to it now. Take a crack if your interested.

You Know Who I feel Bad For?

The doctors of all those medical miracles you hear about. The opera singer born with half a tongue who seems to slip into every conversation, "The doctors said I'd never speak like a normal child." Or the tap dancer who lost all his toes in a childhood tractor accident and constantly reminds you that the doctors said he'd never walk again.

The doctors.

I picture them hunched over cold coffee and Chinese food in some disheveled hospital lounge. Their pissed. I feel the need to give them a voice. So here goes:

"What were we supposed to say?" one of them says rising to his feet and tossing away a half-smoked cigarette. "We're talking about a little girl with half a tongue. I mean, I guess everything's a judgment call, but how did I become the bad guy here? Oh, sure, I guess I should be more open-minded. OK fine. The next time I get some old codger in here with a tumor the size of Texas on his lymphnode, I won't tell his family he's got two weeks to live. I'll tell them the human body is a miraculously complex instrument that we have only begun to understand. I'll tell them to go home, pray, pile some crystals on his bed, meditate, consult an authentic Native American Shaman, an acupuncturist, and the healing power of hugs. And I'll tell them if you try all that and after two weeks the codger still bites it, then I guess you just didn't try hard enough.

"And when the next half-tongued bitch I treat can't even pronounce her name after ten years of speech therapy, or the next toeless S.O.B who stumbles through my aggressive balance exercises still can't dance like the medical miracle I keep telling him about, well I'll just tell them it's their fault."