So dad and I are driving to work when I come upon a huge billboard on the side of the highway that announces:

COORS LIGHT -- PLUS FROIDE QUE LA FILLE DE 24 ANS A QUI T'EN A DONNE 32

as far as my memory serves. If we pass by it again today I'll try to snap a picture.

Translates roughly to 'Coors Light, colder than the 24-year old girl you gave 32 of them to.'

I'm stupid. Are there a lot of ways I could understand that that DON'T involve that someone, apparently a man, fed a woman beer 'til death by alcohol poisoning ensued? Or is there sexual subtext I missed?

This has become glaringly obvious since this whole "Twilight" debacle started and I've had nowhere to run, no rest, no respite;I'm not sure how to proceed from here. I've been hiding it a long time. It's about time I outed myself, y'know, finally asked for help.

Hello, my name is Dalia, and I fucking hate vampires.

Progress Quest
Best. Game. Ever.

No luck on locating my '32nd of May' book, but I recently flashed back on another, and this one IS a success story.

The first time I went to Egypt as a kid I went with only two books, thinking I was going to be too busy to read. Nonsense; I learned those two books by heart, 'L'Amerloque' and 'Je dirais tout à Lilka', and while I've forgotten most of the details I figure the fact that I can remember the titles 12 years later is telling. After almost two weeks, my dad brought me to the only French bookstore left in Cairo to get something to keep me busy. I picked out two, based entirely on the covers. One turned out to be a fairly lousy vampire story, the other turned out to be a fairly lousy serial killer story.

I still have the lousy vampire book, but the lousy killer book never made it back from Egypt. When I opened up my suitcase it wasn't there.

It was years before I would suspect my grandmother of absconding with it, and we never found it among her affairs, but she vocally disapproved of little girls reading books featuring bloody men with shotguns and it DID disappear between her Cairo apartment and Montreal. Every few years I irritatedly tried to remember what book it was, for no other reason than IT WAS MINE AND IT WAS TAKEN FROM ME GODDAMIT.

Anyway, I just remembered the book was called "Corps Etranger", and I traced it through Google Images to a French translation of a John Saul book.

From checking out John Saul's bibliography, I get the feeling he wrote the same book over and over (Children? One hundred years? Why is this blurb on the back of every single book?) but my book was definitely "Brainchild" by John Saul.

It's reassuring to find this out, somehow.

Computer driving me nuts. Cannot run Word, Firefox, MUSHClient and MSN Messenger at the same time without the damn thing freezing, going black, and then POSSIBLY condescending to go back to work if the proper sacrifice of incredibly pained expressions is offered. Cannot believe these programs represent such an awesome expenditure of resources, would rather believe computer doesn't like the people I talk to.

(I'm willing to assume that the constant lining of colors on the screen just mean I need a new non-sucky screen, although it has specifically started happening since I got the new video card, but when accessing the verb editor in LambdaMOO crashes my computer EVERY TIME I TRY IT, a notion that BOGGLES MY MIND, it is time to consider the possibility of sinister intelligence at work.)

THIS DAMN BOX IS ALIVE, ME TELLS YOU.

I have been obsessed by a matter of much theological importance.

A friend has given me an adorable Nativity set of gaucho design, and it is enthroned on top of my computer desk between a much put-upon NRSV Bible and a dollar-store candleholder (the candle in the candleholder is very well-behaved and stubbornly refuses to drip wax everywhere, so I consider the emplacement safe). After much thought, I have decided that the most appropriate backdrop for the scene is a rolled-up bandanna of putative Navajo origin (The 'Made in USA' tag neither proves nor disproves this, although the colors are pure 1980s urban kitsch).

The question is this: who the hell is Joseph?

The set includes one baby in a cradle, one woman, and four men. The narrative identifies the baby and woman. The men, however, are a tougher proposition. One must be Joseph, which leaves three to be, most likely, the three errant kings (a bigger set might have included angels, but those are easy to identify, or shepherds, but there are no animals and the kings have priority in the story, so I feel safe discarding the possibility of shepherds. Anyway, they all look like shepherds).

My first conclusion followed from the fact that all the figures have little blue bands on them somewhere. The woman has it on her head, and three of the men have it integrated into their clothing, but one man also has it on his head. I presumed this pointed out Joseph. Now I am not so sure.

One of the figures holds up what could be a pile of gold, so king. One man is black, which while not 'canon' is common in Nativity kings, so king. But the last 'king' has nothing special about him, and my 'Joseph' holds a cane. The cane is not a gift, but it is an identifying mark, so perhaps he is meant to fit in with the kings.

This is actually worrying me more than incomplete late papers. Argh.

I learned a new word today; it's criminogenic. It means something that causes or produces crime. I know, not too far from the tree.

Bear with my glee, it's not every week I learn a cool new word anymore.

I soaked it up courtesy of a paper titled "The Satanic Cult Scare and Allegations of Ritual Child Abuse", the sort of thing I'll be reading a lot about over the next week as I allege and scare up yet another paper. Also on the reading list: such fun as 'Fundamentalist-Evangelicals and Antisemitism' (see what I did there?), amd 'Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust'-- different class, same hurried process.

What's funny is that I collected a dossier about legend-tripping (a practice associated with satanism scares that anthropologists were briefly interested in in the early 90s) while at John Abbott, that contains photocopies from all the same books that are in the recommended sources list. JAC actually had a better selection than Concordia concerning satanic panic and adolescent satanism. I knew my mild research obsessiveness would pay off someday. Who knew that all those times I skipped class to go skulk in the library basement were preparing me for university?

Actually, I kinda suspected.

Of all the fun things about CEGEP, I miss library-skulking the most. Abbott had a great library for skulking, Concordia's is too well-organized and well-lit. There is simply nowhere to hide, unless one takes the furthest cubicle from a door and then climb up on it, like a kid on a window-seat. At Abbott I tended to favor the children's literature section, which was not only a two-foot corridor between a shelf and a wall, but was also dark and largely unpatronized even by people looking for make-out spots.

Back to the take-home for Hebrew Bible class.

You know what I need? A window-seat. My next apartment is gonna have a window-seat. With cushions and blankets. And the window will look out on a busy street. Man, my next apartment is gonna rock. I'll have to kick visitors out of my goddamn window-seat.