Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   stuff left by ghosts
Wednesday, December 1 2010
Gretchen came back from a morning doctor's appointment this morning with the somewhat puzzling news that she was harboring an eight centimeter cyst on her thyroid gland. If that figure is correct, that's the size of an apple and it's difficult to imagine how it could be in there without either impacting important functions or protruding grotesquely (there's no evidence of it that anyone can see). It's possible, I suppose, that that figure reflects the incorrect placement of a decimal point. In any case, chances are it is benign (a word normally associated with tumors, neglect, and dictatorships, not cysts), though further investigation is necessary (but not considered urgent).

This evening I watched two episodes of a new reality show called Storage Wars. It's the story of people who bid on the content of abandoned storage units. If you rent such a unit and fall three months behind in payments, your stuff gets auctioned off. But it's not auctioned off in pieces; it's done at the granularity of the storage unit itself, and those doing the bidding can only look at its content from its entrance and make an educated guess. But a savvy storage unit bidder can glean a lot from product names on boxes and even evidence such as the amount of dust that has accumulated. The show ends up supplying all of the kick I get out of Hoarders, though in Storage Wars the unfortunate people supplying the drama are presented as a ghostly mystery, which kicks things up a notch. First we see their stuff, then we go through their stuff, but they themselves are entirely absent. As with the Etruscans, all we can know of them is what they left behind. The personal drama focuses entirely on the pillagers of these tombs, and the competition between them. It's great television. I just wish I had a long rainy weekend and A&E was airing a whole marathon of episodes.


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