Best Dream Ever

I had a dream last night that the missus & I went on vacation to some city in Eastern Europe (think Prague), and the main tourist attraction there was that, in one section of the big river that flowed through the town (a la the Thames or the Seine) there was a shallow part, and a group of local housecats had trained themselves to hold their breath & overcome their fear of water.

This allowed them to walk into the river and sink to the bottom, where they would sit perfectly still, like turtles, occasionally coming up for air, and feeding on the little minnows that would swim by.  People would come from miles around to see the fishcats of Prague.

I like a dream that defies analysis.

Sabotage!

The house next door to mine (the haunted one) is for sale, some three years after both the occupants passed away inside it.  It’s been abandoned ever since, tended to by a charity that the former owners left it to.  Finally in the mood to sell, they’re offering it for $150K less than I paid for my house, or $400K less than a similar house one street up from us just went for.

I’m eager to have the house occupied, preferably by someone with a daughter the same age as the cupcake, but I’m not eager to see the value of my house drop by a couple hundred grand.  Towards that end every time I see prospective owners go in, I’ve adopted a strategy of standing in front of the place like the crazy old man from Friday the 13th (whom YouTube has informed me is named Ralph), and warning buyers that the place is haunted by a greek ghost who will kill anyone who pays less than $1,000,000 for the place.

Later, as they’re inside, I send in Emma wearing a white sheet over her head and yelling Boogie Boogie Boogie through the place before running in to the back yard and through a hole I cut in the fence between our property.

Vox Populi

I love that news outlets feel compelled to report a “man on the street” opinion in their stories, and that in the internet age that means ripping quotes from social media outlets like Twitter, or god forbid YouTube comments, which are universally peopled with idiots.  In the “John Mayer is a Racist” article on msnbc, we get the following quote: “wow if this stuff is true…John Mayer just lost a whole heap of cool points…and i really likes him too…” commented jnyfer on Twitter. It’s jarring in the middle of a mainstream media story to see quotes from some random moron, although I guess I should just get used to it.