black and gray

Break out your black for the poor and downtrodden (or for Johnny Cash, however you want to look at it):
http://blog.napster.com/napster/2010/02/wear-black-for-johnny-cash-day-this-friday.html

It's a gray and rainy day - all day yesterday, too. We got that sump pump in just in time, it's working regularly right now. :) Eor says there's still a couple of puddles in the basement, but I guess I've let it go for too long this morning and probably won't get down there to fill them with rock before I have to leave for work.

Phoebe's birthday party tonight, so I'm sure I'm not going to be on the computer tonight or much tomorrow morning.

As a brief update, I think I'll repost a few of my LJ entries for the last few days. Which means nobody has to read any more of this post, really, since the only person who reads it is Phoebe and she already reads my LJ:
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"I'm that Northeast bitch - a typical North/South interaction. "

The other day when I was in charge at the baggage station I happened to be the only one obviously in the area (all the guys were looking into bags), so this woman walked up to the fence and started insistently trying to talk at me. Now, I WAS actually working, maybe she thought I was playing solitaire or something, but I had a bag in the x-ray and when you have a bag in the x-ray you're really not supposed to leave the console. I am, however, nice - and curious - and I didn't want her to stand there braying "MEE-yahs!" all day, so I did put the x-ray on hold and went over to see what she wanted.

She waves something wrapped in paper at me, and I could intuit that it was probably syrup of some sort by the shape and the fact she was rambling on in her Southern accent about having had this in her carry on bag, so I interrupted her and told her she had to go talk to her airline about it. But that wasn't a good enough answer and she had to keep on talking to me about it, about how she wanted to throw it away.

I probably didn't even wait for her to get to the end of that sentence. "Garbage can, right over there."

"I didn't want anyone to think I was trying to dispose of something!"

I don't even know if I responded to that, I think I just turned around and walked off, just kind of fuming in my head about her pulling me away from WORK that I'm doing to ramble on to me about stupid shit I have no need to be involved in.

A moment later I thought, "Oh, wait, I was just rude, wasn't I?" And this is why I really almost wish the South HAD managed to secede from the States - they're just dragging us down. Slowing us down when we have work to do by asking stupid questions.
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"That's not tea"

Am trying to be good and avoid caffeine, but after two cups of rooibus I still feel like faceplanting into my keyboard. I had one cup of tea yesterday with caffeine in it, because I felt I 'deserved' (or needed) it if I was going to be in charge of a baggage screening station. And I found myself clutching that cup and trying to eke it out like it was pure black gold. My lifeline, my elixir. It wasn't a bad day, I had a good team and enough people to work with most of the time, and honestly not even that much work to do. We did a lot of talking about the U.S. educational system and how/why it sucks - turns out that one of our quiet coworkers has studied education and also done a round with Habitat for Humanity. We really do have such a varied group. Another coworker, Pez, told us about going to a Catholic school and how he would act up so he could be punished by being shut in the coat closet, because the coat closet was much more interesting than being in class. "Dances With Wolves" came up two independent times and we discussed why the white settlers would kill buffalo and take only the skins and tongue. I do think it's interesting how Pez will always preface comments about why it's asinine to do X with "I'm no treehugger, but..." He's obviously been in far too many places where caring about the environment or animals was sneered at.

We also heard, yet again (the 20th time for me, I think) Goldyboy's story about his cousin getting kicked in the head by the horse and having his eye pop out. (Don't worry, he shoved it back in and it was fine.) And I asked if it didn't leave a horseshoe shaped imprint, and he said yest it did, but a horse kick doesn't always, and he and the little blond horsey girl Lead who was there agreed that it could be possible to mistake a horse kick for a cudgel blow if it hit right, so Doyle may be vindicated in "Silver Blaze" after all. (My main talking point in my review of the episode I posted at GranadaSlash was that a horse-kick should be evident to horsey people.)

Okay, must pee, now. I'll leave you with my major time waster this morning: After the Fact, an E.W. Hornung story, predecessor to Raffles. Yesterday's major time waster was The Stroke of Five, also E.W. Hornung, a crazy little story and probably as dangerously homoerotic as could have been published in his day. Yeah, sure these guys are hanging out holding hands under the bridge for three hours... ETA: Warnings for non-con...?
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skip a few entries (boy I write dull stuff)

"tons and tons of gravel"

We don't know exactly how much weight, but Eor figured that the yardage of gravel he ordered for the basement was in the area of 12 tons (U.S.ian). He moved possibly half of the total amount, and the rest was moved mostly by the guy upstairs, some by myself and some by the guy who lives in the back unit.

It was a lot. And now it needs to be raked out onto the floor.

Eor's in bed, I think I'll go rub his back. I also went up to Friendly's and bought him (and me) a hot fudge sundae. :)
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The girl from China

I could have started telling this story on Friday, but I didn't feel as though I had enough information, yet.

Friday we had a girl from China who didn't have proper ID and didn't speak much English, and a variety of people got involved in the case. When most of us were leaving for the evening she was still sitting there with a cop and a translator who'd been brought in, and we were told Immigration had sent an agent. Last night we got more of an update from the cop, K-of-BBQ, who was involved.

Turns out her parents are in prison in China for having the wrong religion (we don't know what), and she escaped by getting hooked up with an illegal prostitution ring who got her to the U.S. She made some money with that in New York, but got arrested eventually. She made her bail and was given a court date to look into her request for political asylum, and until that date she's free to go anywhere in the U.S. If she doesn't show up they don't seem to have any particular plan to go out and get her - I'm sure they've decided she's not really any sort of threat.
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"bio-terrorism?"

I have to tell you all about the nastiest bag I think I've seen yet, in seven years of inspecting people's bags. One of the airports in DC sent it here, I have no idea why. Perhaps they just had no idea what to do with it. So, no passenger with it, and it must have been sent out onto the baggage carousel and sat there for a while because they decided to rescreen it. One of my coworkers ended up having to open it, and now everyone who even looked at it seems to think they might come down with some rare tropical disease.

There were several bricks of some type of food wrapped in leaves, bags of decaying vegetation, and mounds of black grubs of some kind (thankfully dead). They must have been in a bag to start with, but now they were all through the bag, thousands of them, each over and inch long and touched with yellow bits. And over everything were crawling live insects. Turns out the bag originated in Johannesburg, South Africa, and how it got by those beagles who are supposed to inspect for foreign plants and animals I really don't know. (Oh, the name of the passenger just popped back into my mind, too - Blessed Manzila.) It was even leaking some kind of liquid, probably from all the decay, and the airline had no idea what to do with it so they said they were going to bag it and toss it in the trash. I do hope that our manager took our worries into account and contacted the Department of Agriculture to pick it up and dispose of it properly, because a plastic bag is not going to keep all those delightful little South African bugs from getting out. They might just die in the Maine winter, but it hasn't been as cold as it should be.

People could not shake that one from their minds, after viewing it. I'll bet some had dreams about it.
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"Mack the Knife as a pirate!"

I did a little obsessing about the origin of the song "Mack the Knife," which was one of my favorites when I was a kid (okay, still pretty much is). I was surprised, a few weeks ago, to find that most people apparently don't associate Louis Armstrong with this song! That was the version my Grandmother had, and I always heard growing up.

Anyhow, Mack The Knife, as we all know, comes from The Threepenny Opera. The Threepenny Opera was a rewrite of The Beggar's Opera, a satirical ballad opera written in 1728 by John Gay. Gay also wrote a sequel called "Polly," in which Macheath (Mack the Knife) becomes a pirate and Polly gets sold by white slavers to a plantation owner in the Carribean, but escapes, dresses as a boy, and eventually marries a Carib prince. But this play was apparently so pointedly political that it was banned, and there's no indication on Wiki if there are still any copies in existence.

That would be SO AWESOME. Play it again, Louis!