Do you think there is a market out there for providing translation services to Spam senders?  There is clearly a need.

In my inbox this morning:

From: sharon daff [mailto:eshqe@]
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 8:58 PM
Subject: It isn’t late to make the right choice! 

All kinds of gamblings here! 

Our life is so shot, and everyone should find the opportunity to provide the adequate life level. And its opportunity’s name is KING DICE CASINO! Only it can bring in stable return. 

You invest only few dollars and win up to $2500, whether or no! Not bad, isn’t it?

[link removed]

I don’t really know what’s going on today, but I’ve been running in to some weird things I thought I should document.

The first sign something was amiss was the machine I found in my alley.

A Different Kind of Life Partner

Now, my neighbor gathers all sorts of cast-offs and sells them on weekends on one of the corners around 16th and Columbia, but this was a new one on me.

I was tempted, but too terrified, to open it and see what’s inside.

Things are still running summer-high here at The Shady Enterprise. (Yes, I know I’ve already mentioned it in the past month. I expect I’ll mention it at least twice more before the end of July.)

One of the unfortunate side effects is I tend to find myself spending too much time at the office and not enough time taking care of little things like grocery shopping, which frequently contributed to another unfortunate side effect I like to call “the drive-thru syndrome.” I tend to into a rut of getting home late, having a fistful of bourbon for dinner, waking up relatively late and starving, the obvious solution to which is hitting one of the fast food heavyweights’ drive-thrus on my way out to the office in West Virginia.

My preferred heavyweight is His Royal Highness because I just can’t shake an early childhood fascination with the Croissan’wich, but The Clown is so much more convenient to my path of travel that I often end up there instead. And, as a pawn in the great advertising game, the past several weeks have seen me develop into a disciple of The Clown’s recent attempt to horn in on Chick-fil-a’s corner of the chicken market. (Effn-a, if there were a Chick-fil-a with a drive-thru on my way to work…)

I should tell you right now that I deeply enjoy adding egg to my chicken biscuit. I like to think of it as “The Philosophical Conundrum Breakfast Sandwich,” and I number it among the more sublime delights of the morning meal. It is this joy of mine that leads me to ask you this question: is there some sort of taboo in any Latin American tradition against the commingling of chicken and egg?

Each time I’ve ordered the Conundrum at my local Clown franchise, the conversation went roughly like this:
“Number 5 with Egg and Cheese”
“Number 5 with cheese?”
“With egg and cheese.”
“Number 5 with cheese?”
“With egg and cheese.”
“The southern style chicken biscuit with cheese?”
“With egg and cheese.”
“With cheese?”
“With egg and cheese.”

I’ve ordered it on three occasions, and the two times it had egg on it, I had to talk to at least three people about it. The third time is why I talked to three people the other times.

Damn, fellas. I hate June here at The Shady Enterprise. Days just get to runnin’, and the next thing you know, you’ve almost missed your 48 hour deadline.

So, Tuesday poker came online for the first time in months (at least, that I’ve made it to) in honor of Mylephnt’s triumphant red-eyed return to the our Nation’s Capital. Duderino made gracious overtures to host AND make gumbo and whatever it is gumbo is when there’s no mammal flesh in it.

Things got started off at 730PM sharp, with me, El D, and Myl sitting there eating sausage and talking about sweaty thighs sticking to the leather couch. Now that I think about it, I guess we were about a mesh tanktop away from another Pride Parade.

(Aw, hell…I just realized I don’t really know everyone’s Ramblename. I’m making up my own.) HeadCold showed up in a fashionably late fashion and joined in on the sausaging. Then, we waited for a while and GollyWhiz popped in. The five of us drank beer until SweatyBetty and ShockofHair (red, like the fires of hell) finally dragged it in an hour and a touch late. (Really? An hour?)

We played a few hands. Chips were lost. Chips were won. There were a handful of nice/heartbreaking suck-outs (where’s my tanktop?); some were mine. Then, we ate some breaded shrimp and gumbo and baguette and saltines. All in all, it was a pretty phat spread of the finest gumbo from a box until SB’s lack of protein in his diet got him all fired up about playing cards instead of eating.

So, we played some more cards. Some folks got some things. Some folks got some other things. I vaguely recall a three-way hand I stayed in because I liked how the cards looked in my hand. I think I brought a pair of 4s to a double-straight party. (Wow. That’s the first straight party I’ve even gotten close to talking about in this, and it’s double-straight. I must be overcompensating.) Whatever.

So, I won $13 because I made the flush. I like to believe I took most of that money off of Myl because I like to take advantage of the jet-lagged.

But, that gumbo was pretty damned good, and did you see the moon on the way home?

Full.

Stunning.

Tanktop.

I still haven’t quite kicked this illness I picked up in the picturesque marshlands of coastal Georgia almost two weeks ago.

Most of the symptoms have subsided. The body aches are gone. The fever broke over a week ago. My gastrointestinal situation calmed down shortly thereafter. The only thing that is really hanging on this damned head congestion, and even that has been pretty well behaved for the past four days: no snot crust in the ’stache, no leaky faucet action in the middle of conversations.

Nope, the only persistent issues have been a speaking voice that is perhaps a bit huskier than usual and an unfortunate reflexive tendency to inhale sharply from time to time to clear the nasal passages. (The latter generally results in a sound akin to that of a grunting hog.)

Oh, and my left ear has been plugged up for 96 hours.

Initially, I figured this was the kind of thing that subsides on its own if one employs a little patience. “Sure,” I says to myself, “my head has been full of snot for a week. Give it a little time, and it’ll drain itself. Fit as a fiddle in no time.” After a couple of days, I started to wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t help things along.

First, I did a little reading about related topics and possible causes suggested by my non-health-care-professional colleagues.

Then, I tried some dubious home remedies. I put a towel over the back of my head and inhaled steam from boiling lemon water for a while. I fixed myself a hot toddy or three. I loaded up on vitamins and ibuprofen. I spastically waggled my head like a dog. I took a horribly overpriced herbal supplement that claims to promote sinus health. I snorted freshly ground pepper.

Nothing worked, although I did wind up with a wicked case of boogers au poivre.

Finally, I allowed myself to give in to the recommendation of my crazy health-nut uncle and bought myself a Neti pot. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the ancient yogic practice of nasal irrigation, you will find disciples of the practice who swear it has done everything from improve their athletic performance to save their marriage. A contrarian by nature, I tend not to believe such enthusiastic endorsements for anything. My natural tendency is multiplied by a magnitude of 10 or so by anything enthusiastically endorsed by Oprah ever since that show she did on autoerotic asphyxiation gone bad back in the late 80s.

But, the unnerving sensation and inability to hear in my left ear allowed me to put that all aside and give the nose bath a try.

It didn’t work. At least, it hasn’t yet. Oh, well. All in good time.

Maybe I should take a pointer or two from this guy who has managed to combine the Neti pot with two of my favorite things. (It gets interesting around the 2-minute mark.)

Like so many people out there in the nonvirtual word, I have been sick for about a week now. It all started last Saturday morning when I woke up in Savannah. As is usually the case when I wake up in that town, I had a mild hangover. I promptly hopped in the car and started the long drive back to Our Nation’s Capital. Somewhere deep in to the Carolinas, I noticed that my mild hangover was worsening and soon figured out it was not, in fact, a hangover but something much more flu-like.

I’ll spare you the details of how this mystery illness pretty well laid me out for three days after I finally made it back to DC, thus sparing you all my own contribution to The Streak Continues series which, based on last year’s exploits in Austin, would have consisted of having a hearty breakfast and lunch of 1792 Ridgemont Reserve, getting 86ed from Antone’s before the sound check, and various (alleged) incidents of public indecency and drunken confessions to past bad behaviors.

Instead, I was in bed at 845PM on New Years Eve with a pleasant wreath of generic NyQuil-equivalent wrapped around my head.

Alas, my penchant for generic NyQuil-equivalent is on par with my penchant for bourbon. I stopped at the pharmacy on my way home last night because I was out of generic NyQuil-equivalent. In the interest of turning over a new leaf for a new year, I wound up picking up some TheraFlu Warming Relief. I don’t know if it worked better or worse than my generic NyQuil-equivalent because I generally sleep through most of the part where the active ingredients get active.

What I do know, however, is that one should not mistake TheraFlu Warming Relief with a completely separate product altogether.

You’ve been warmed. Er, warned.