Improv

I am drinking what must be known forevermore as a “ghetto mocha”. Its name gives it away, but in case you lack sufficient imagination to put it together, allow me to illustrate. Okay, you begin with Swiss Miss hot chocolate mix. You could use some off-brand crappy hot chocolate mix, sure, but Swiss Miss is even less cool than those, so you go with her. Then, and this is key, you take coffee that was brewed more than several hours ago, preferably something off the shelf from a grocery store (MJB, Folgers, whatever), and you reheat it in a microwave. The next step is the genius part. You put the Swiss Miss into the now-hot coffee. You see? You see how this works? Many people feel they have invented the ghetto mocha, but clearly such a thing exists in an ideal form à la Plato; hence, no inventing this sucka, only discovery.

Have fun, and remember to stir all the gritty bits into the liquid before drinking. A crust of gritty bits on the rim indicates you have failed to perform your ghetto mocha with its deserved gravitas.

Reading a reference to David Hume at InstaPundit just now prompted me to wonder about memes propagating and weblogs and all of that kind of thing. So InstaPundit is prodigiously popular in a blog kind of way, and the activities of a mostly-anonymous and self-selecting public are affected by posts posted there, right? Okay. Then here's what I want to know: Will some small proportion of readers of InstaPundit come to look up information about David Hume because of the reference there on InstaPundit? 'Course they will.

But how many? It's a flapping-butterfly-wing→storm-in-India situation, sure, but how many? Really, I want to know.

An important thing I've learned about editing: Any time the printer or network or whatever you're trying to use to do something doesn't work correctly the first time (which means, the way you expected it to work) you will spend a minimum of ONE HOUR (did you hear that? I said a MINIMUM of ONE HOUR) making the not-working element work. If anything else goes wrong during the making-it-work phase, you will spend another MINIMUM HOUR troubleshooting. If you are unsuccessful at the two-hour mark, that is, if you have not been able to make your desired element behave as you had expected it would behave when you began, I think you had best reconsider what exactly it was you wanted to get done, and whether what you have been attempting to make work has been contributing——. . . .

Here I was cut off by the inscrutable yet implacable forces of circumstance, those buggers. Viruses? Possible eating of memory by clipboards in MS Excel running under Classic emulation in OS X 10.2.8? Scanning .doc files for possible macro viruses? Oh, yes, these things and more we will not discuss here. Also, we will not discuss contracts or collation of contracts, but we will note our approval of the first person plural mode of address.

And we will sign off on this, our first post from our own iMac in our new house and job, with the fond hope that we may continue to post new and exciting information here at the Improv in future. Go along with you, you liked it!