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Stasko arrived at the maintenance office thirty-seven minutes later. Wisric had no doubt arranged everything to give him a chance to chat with Corinda Blanch, though there was no guarantee she would be around. Since both Stasko and Wisric had been moved to temporary quarters in the agricultural wing, Blanch had coincidentally been in the area more often, usually for "strategic discussions" with Mot Jarvis, her counterpart and the man in charge of maintenance for the agricultural warrens.
Mot was a short, black-haired man who could be described using a number of adjectives that ended in -umpy. In general he had an ill temper. He had prominent muscles as a result of his fanatical weightlifting, a trait that had required a certain amount of adjustment in the years since he had lost his right arm during an ill-fated safari, as he put it: "Fighting a pair of alligators," which may not have been entirely true.
Nobody really knew the truth about his missing limb, and few entirely understood how he kept the agricultural warrens maintained so well with only one arm. But his resilience in the face of life's oddities had given him an occasional endearing quality, and Leonin visited him when he needed perspective.
Wisric, for reasons unknown to Stasko, seemed to cringe when Jarvis was around.
On this occasion, however, the commons around Mot's office was quiet; Mot wasn't waving his arm threateningly from the break table as he tended to do quite often, but his office door was open. A transmitter buried somewhere in the office was busily spitting out animated conversation.
In the doorway stood the hulking silhouette of Resfarl, one of the few who had managed the transition from Brush to Graevon. If there was one common thread among lunatics it was that they always seemed to prefer keeping the Atlas-types around.
Saunders slowed and took hold of a length of metal conduit near one of the terminals. “I’ll handle Resfarl; you guys go on ahead.”
Anya gave him an incredulous stare. “Have you lost your mind?”
Gregg paused in mid-step. He hadn’t expected an argument.
“Why in space would you want to split up at a time like this?” continued Rayleigh. “We have no idea what that Borius character might be planning.”
“Just go; don’t worry about Resfarl,” insisted Gregg.
“I’m not worried about Resfarl,” she stated flatly. “There is exactly one of him right now, and he doesn’t even have a gun.”
“I'll handle him! Find Graevon and stop him before he commits another act of genocide.” He made prolonged eye contact with her, trying to convey an inability to accept anything other than compliance.
It hardly made a difference.
“Skabs to that! What do you take me for?” She broke his gaze and gestured indignantly toward the other man. “Is this supposed to be some sort of idiotic macho act?”
He stepped back momentarily. “No,” he began, with marginally less certainty than before. “But this will give you time to--”
“Time to what?” she asked, clearly uninterested in any clarifying statements. “Worry about your misguided hide because you want to play the martyr while we're chasing down a madman? Fine.”
She fired two shots, one into each of Micco Resfarl’s knees. His legs gave way almost in unison, no longer coordinating their actions with the rest of his body, and with his weight unsupported he buckled over, clearly out of commission. “Have it your way. While you’re busy being irrational and clubbing him up with your new toy, the rest of us will be solving problems instead of creating them.”
Northern Lightning 
Social Squirreling
Posted by ooaverage in The Wonders of Technology, Through the Commentator's Glasses on February 13, 2012
If you’ve been unfortunate enough to catch blurbs on the news or seen commercials for the show that evidently airs on A&E, you’ve come to realize that the nation is suffering from a stockpile of hoarders.
If you’ve been unfortunate enough to visit the History Channel recently, you are no doubt aware that the entire world is about to be destroyed by the Giant Aztec Death Plague Comet, which was foretold by Nostradamus because he bribed the Freemasons into telling him their plans, thereby rendering any hoarder issues fairly moot. Aliens are certainly involved as well, according to numerous science experts with backgrounds in fields such as Recreational Substance Abuse and Psychic Botany. But that is another story, probably a two-hour special.
Anyway, if either the news or the commercials are correct, this country is currently littered with people who have been inexplicably compelled to turn their houses into privately owned storage facilities for old newspapers and on occasion several hundred cats.
We could debate all day about the effects of doing idiotic things such as producing television shows about people with psychological issues, but regardless, I now know why they hoard. Amazon told them to.
We recently ordered some cheap (yes, and inexpensive) new shower curtains to replace some grungy old ones. They’re shower curtains; after however many years, they were in need of replacements. The internet, being the giant creepy warehouse store that it is, one that would sell you human organs given the opportunity and the promise of enough money, had what we wanted.
For those of you who don’t take advantage of Amazon’s services, let me explain something. When you buy things from their site, it remembers. Like a disturbing Wal-Mart savant, it remembers it all. Every item you purchase is factored into recommendations that will appear on the main page on your return visits.
And there’s the problem. Now that we have purchased shower curtains, it has decided to recommend–of all things–more shower curtains. Scads of shower curtains. More shower curtains than a Holiday Inn would lose during a Compulsive Hitchcock Reenactors Convention. What kind of family Amazon thinks we are, I do not know. I do not want to know.
But my conclusion is that the internet, in addition to causing the loss of billions of man-minutes of labor every day, (there went another one) is also responsible for turning fairly normal people into rodents. Because by simply purchasing an item online these victims unwittingly begin a chain reaction that ends with the purchase of 50,000 universal remotes and enough copies of “The Pirates of Penzance” to implode a parking garage.
hoarders, shower curtains
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