how to impress chicks?

In the chaos that is my mind at this hour —

Brain damage such as stroke can take away the symbolic processing ability known as language. I wonder: does the most obvious kind of sign-language, pointing and miming, go with it? And do Deaf signers so afflicted lose more or less of the naïve sign-language than the hearing do? In one sense these questions have no meaningful answer, because every stroke is different; but there must be interesting correlations.

Does stroke ever take away the ability to process conditional or relative clauses?

Argh. I just tried to back up my home directory folder to a DVD. When the burn was nearing completion, it aborted because Finder “cannot find data fork of file <unable to locate file path>”. Got that? Four gigabytes of files can’t be archived because one of them — which may not really exist, for all I can tell — is corrupt. And why didn’t this error message show up during the “Preparing data” phase, to save me from wasting a blank?

Later: It occurred to me that this could have happened because a temporary file was deleted between the preparation and the burn. So I closed all applications and tried again; no luck. Then I noticed on the packaging that these Memorex 8X blanks apparently cannot be burned properly by my 2X drive. (sigh)

Pillow has taken up hunting the human ankles that pass by. He’s quite the ankle tom.

I wonder what I did to deserve being blogrolled by Mutualist (Kevin Carson).

“What was it I wanted at Trader Joe’s? Oh, right, I’m on a diet.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them to name a product that. ‘Oh Right I’m On A Diet’ brand tofu chips.”

A surprising passage in The Adventure of the Dancing Men:

[Sherlock] Holmes hunted about among the grass and leaves like a retriever after a wounded bird. Then, with a cry of satisfaction, he bent forward and picked up a little brazen cylinder.

“I thought so,” said he; “the revolver had an ejector, and here is the third cartridge. . . .”

Were ejecting revolvers ever common?