Klingon Teaspoon

I was having Raw Fish for lunch today (yes, some call it Sushi) and decided to have desert, which means Green Tea Ice Cream. I dunno if this is a widely accepted practice among all Sushi restaurants, but the place I was at today has these really vicious looking spoons for eating ice cream. I remember thinking that they looked a little like the sort of spoons Klingon's would use... if Klingon's used utensils.

Note: Yes... I am an X-Star Trek Geek. No... I'm not anymore.

Anyway, later in the super market today I was revisiting this thought in my mind and it occurred to me that the spoons are really too small to be entire spoons, but they are about the right size to be tea spoons. So I was eating with Klingon Teaspoons in the Sushi House Today.

On leaving the super market I started thinking about this Chatbot I have been half heartedly developing. I have two best friends from College. One of them has or had an acquaintance that spent all of his time developing a Quakebot. I think maybe he dropped out of school because of it. It made conversing with him pretty unplesant because he pretty much couldn't talk about anything else. So naturally this made me think about my friend, and social drawbacks to being obsessed with writing a bot. So I think I will cancel the bot project before it gets any further.

On the drive home, I decided to call my mother to tell her that I had eaten Ice Cream with a Klingon Teaspoon today. Then we talked about the olympics... and how well Australia is doing. Neither of us ever fails to take the opportunity to point out that Australia is always ahead in the per capita medal tally... even if it is only to each other. I am not quite sure why this is.

When I get home I chat on-line with my other best friend from college who is now working for a video game company in LA designing sound for a first person shooter. In a way, I am incredibly jealous. When I was younger I wanted nothing more than to work for a company designing computer games. Of course I was more interested in the more cerebral interactive fiction games of Sierra "[fill in the blank] Quest" fame. There is no money in that anymore, and I won't scoff at the Quake-esq games my buddy is working on. I estimate the sound on his games will be stunning. I'm really happy for him.

06. ruiner

Driving to work today I was reminded of a old friend way back from the days when I was the Chief of a high school tribe by the name of FRIZ (always spelled in all-caps). His name was and probably still is Nick Bishop. I was listening to track 6 on the downward spiral (which I suppose is always spelled in all-non-caps). Back in '94 or '95 I recommended halo eight to Nick, not because I had particularly good taste in music at the time, and more because I had found myself attached to the angry morbid musings of Trent Reznor, and would have probably recommended anything with the NIN label. I am always shocked and surprised when somebody enjoys something I recommended, so when Nick came back a few days later saying that he especially liked track 6, I was pleased with myself and filed the information away so that I could relate it to you ten years later.

Of all my over achiever high school friends, and I mean over achiever in the most annoying of all possible connotations, Nick was probably far and away the most brilliant. Probably the only peer I've ever known who could be fairly described as brilliant. He had an interest in aging and developing the technology to halt it so that he could... as he would often tell us... sell the technology to the fabulously wealthy. My best friend of the FRIZ days - "gUe" - would often joke with Nick that he'd work on the time travel device and Nick could work on developing a cure for aging. We didn't realize until later that he wasn't really kidding. If it can be done in my lifetime, Nick will probably be the one to do it, and he will probably become fabulously wealthy off of it himself.

When I was in high school, I thought Nick was cool. I found myself, not entirely subconsciously, picking up many of his verbal habits. I don't suppose Nick was a bad or evil person, but I don't think Nick is a particuarly nice person, and today I know he was not worthy of my admiration.

I don't really know what ever happened to Nick. I know at one point he was going to graduate school at MIT, because I sent an e-mail to him there, and I got a curt response. As I do with all my old friends I invited him to come visit me in New York, since he was so close, but I knew that he wouldn't even keep my contact information and that unless I kept tabs on him I would never see nor hear from him again.