tikaro.com

The webcam, today, shows the brand new [My employer] Oceanographic Institute, consisting of a MiniBow All Glass 5-Gallon aquarium given to my on my birthday by the inimitable Kate Smith. It’s filled with neon orange rocks (the garish color is reminiscent of miniature golf courses and tiki bars; unfortunately it doesn’t really come through on…

I take the six train uptown to work every morning, getting off at 23rd street. The train picks me up at Spring street almost empty, and stays that way through Bleecker and Astor Place. At 14th street, though, a giant rush of commuters gets on the train, rides one stop north, and disembarks en masse…

Dank! Schwaggy! 18,000-foot-view! In elementary school, I went to Deerfoot Lodge, a summer camp in upstate New York. It was a great summer camp, with all the standard trappings: fights for the individual boxes of Froot Loops in the morning (losers were stuck with Special K), plaster casts of deer tracks, and stories about the…

Ohio! Jumanji!! Strange Web movies of the moment: If you have some time to kill and a fast connection, watch this. Then watch this. For an aggregation of weird Web Flash movies (I’m sure this will be the syllabus for a course at UCLA, if it isn’t already,) go here.

Cats and ducks and geese better scurry Presented for your enjoyment: two cartoons created by my co-worker Genevieve Futrelle, the head in the back of my webcam. Genevieve is developing a body of work filled with menace towards small animals. EX-cellent! Genevieve’s great-grandfather wrote mystery stories and perished on the Titanic. A turducken is a…

It’s a sure thing, Gib! A sure thing! Alejandro Rubio used to work for me at [My employer], until he announced that he was leaving my team and applying for a year-long job in Antarctica. I gave him a reference with Raytheon; in a phone interview, I assured Raytheon HR that he’d do a great…

That apharesis machine is one bad motherf— (shut your mouth!) I gave leukocytes this morning, spending two hours on the two-arm donor machine. The two-arm machine takes blood from one arm, processes it, then returns it to the other arm, which makes it impossible to scratch your nose. The one-arm machine is more convenient —…

I got a call yesterday from the New York Blood Services Special Donors Unit, which has a nice paramilitary ring to it. Apparently, I’ve been selected as a donor for leukapharesis, giving white blood cells to a 13-year old girl with blood cancer. On the one hand, that’s great! I’m now an Elite Bleeder. On…

My God, we’re out of gin! New Years’ Eve is tricky — it seems to be the most-hated holiday, but you have to do something. Kate suggested that we throw a dinner party in my apartment, undaunted by the fact that my houseware consisted of a single steel spoon. She trucked up plates, silver, and…

Ze ladies, they love the bow tie.(But not the eye patch.) The [My employer] Christmas party was last night, held from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM in the lobby of our building. Now, I’m glad that [My employer] is not spending 1999 dotcom-boom-style dollars on a holiday party. However, I anticipated that the party was…