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ooh, burn
04/28/2007 = 06:35 AM

Someone sent Cosmic a chain email, with the prerequisite stale, regurgitated glurge that everyone's seen so often we can't decide if we even believe the word "hello" anymore, but this one was accompanied by an exhortation to get the original email sent out within six minutes or "something bad would happen."

It had the subject "You Have Six Minutes" and was festooned with the following picture:

Um, hello? Are you Cosmic's friend? 'Cos that's creepy and it strikes me almost as a little bit threatening. What, I don't send out your crappy old glurge and you're gonna set fire to my stuff?

I think not.

However, it immediately inspired me to turn it around on itself.

You Have Six Minutes

Everything alive is out of danger, but your material items are still in your place of residence. You have six minutes to get things out. The problem lies in, what do you rescue?

• You're wearing your most precious jewelry.
• Only one entrance is unblocked by fire.
• You have two pockets that will hold ten small items each. (By small items, I would say, about the size of an iPod, and yes, you can wrap the earbuds around it and call that one item.)
• Your bookcase is one minute away from safety. You can only carry five books at a time.
• Your family photos are one minute away from safety. You can only carry five photo albums (or boxes of photos) at a time.
• Your music collection is one minute away from safety. You can only carry one box (or drag one shelf) of CDs, records, tapes, whatever you have, at a time.
• Your clothing is one minute away from safety. You can only carry five full outfits at a time.
• Your other possessions (including any important papers and jewelry boxes containing any jewelry you don't wear on a regular basis) are one minute away from safety. You can only carry two items at a time. One box (of papers) counts as one item.
• Your computer is one minute away from safety. You can't move the whole computer at once. It would take you five trips. Which parts of it would you take and which parts would you leave behind?

Assuming that getting the items out and getting back in to get another item takes no time, which is physically impossible of course, but that's not the exercise here, so let's not pick nits — between which possessions would you divide up the six minutes, and what ten items would you have in your pockets?

So, this is pretty easy for me, but still an exercise.

I have a handful of family photos that haven't been scanned into my computer yet. They probably fit into one pocket. But, playing by my own rules: if I count each one as one, plus my iPod, plus my teensy little 4 gig drive with all my crucial computer stuff backed up on it, that's about twelve, but I'll take out two, of my nephew ('cos I have others of him and with luck, my sister-in-law should have other prints of them anyway) and that's ten pocket items.

I have two boxes of papers that are important to me. I have one CD case containing the rebuild discs for restoring my computer. I have my towel. I'm out of there. Everything else can be replaced.

Except the baseball cards.

Shit, when I think hard enough about how much I hate those damnable baseball cards, I probably set the fire.

Maybe this wasn't a useful exercise after all.

But at least you don't have to forward it to six of your friends. (Ooh, burn.)

New podcast is not yet up, because it's still being edited. We record later than normal because of cute babies. Get your shmoopy on for us, 'cos we love us some babies and we don't yell at them on the phone and call them pigs.

You can go catch up on the last few weeks whilst waiting, or go have a listen at the Reduced Shakespeare Company's podcast. It was Willy's birthday last week, you know.

Yes, we're still on the 'net, even though Andy called in last week and said something that rhymed with "happy flared nose" about twenty million times.

I maintain that this is because either The Listener™ or I are bound to have way cooler hair than Don Imus, and Andy himself — well Andy has a twenty year-old ponytail. (Really. He started it right before his junior prom. His tail is older than some of the bloggers I know. I find this fantastically funny.)

I don't necessarily want this product, but I love this person's blog about it. It sounds so poetic.

I am not so poetic about food.

While I love food and love writing about loving food, the end result is more an exercise in gluttony than one in good writing.

Example: Long winters of smelling dirt and salt from the sand spreaders, or just having my nose freeze when I'd take that first whiff of outside air, and then, this past few weeks when all I could smell was rain and more rain, and then the mildew outside, bleh.

That seems to be over, though, and it's done such a complete turnaround I am in awe.

I'm not saying you're going to find me on my hands and knees, grazing on the lawn with a bottle of Paul Newman's vinaigrette whilst the condo association shakes its head and takes a vote as to whether to keep me on and fire the current landscapers, or to call the law on me. I'm just saying that the air outside my house this morning was so springlike, so green, so fresh and leafy and intense I wanted to eat it.

Moo.

Tags: food; gadgets; springtime

drinking: diet coke plus
listening to: Spock's Beard, Here's a Man
want to save the baseball cards from the fire? go buy all of them from that man of mine. if you don't see what you like, contact me; i'll bet it's in my living room somewhere