Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

It’s gotten warm and spring-like around these parts, and little outbreaks of giddiness are occurring here and there. Last night, when I was driving home from work on the infamous 520 bridge, I briefly shared the misery with a bright yellow Honda convertible sports car with the license plate “FFFF00″. Before I was a blogger, I would not have known that those are the HTML hexadecimal code for turning text into exactly the color of the guy’s car.

It’s started me thinking that perhaps the world I perceive really is merely a gaggle of hex characters, and I’m looking at it through a cerebral browser. And maybe that guy’s license plate was really a piece of broken code, a chink in an otherwise seamless rendering that’s let me in on the secret. If I could, one night I’d sneak into the convertible owner’s garage, bolt on a license plate that read “FF0000″ and see if the car changed to this color.

Anyway, it was a bit of cleverness on the owner’s part that probably is appreciated in far greater numbers in Redmond, where I saw him, than in Seattle, where we were headed. And I can just see the license plate mullahs at the DOL rifling through their parchments trying to discover what filth or heresy the guy was trying to put over on them when he applied for the license.

[audio:A_Dodgy_0-fer_Strings.mp3]

OK, whatever sport you pick, I guess we’re the Washington Generals and they (Florida) are the Globetrotters. This was probably the turning point of the game:

Our guys never gave up despite being pummelled by a constant rain of 3-point baskets - think the battle scene in Braveheart where the English are showering the battlefield with arrows.

The rain held off, so I decided to walk home from the sports bar - up Queen Anne Hill, down to Fremont, back uphill to Chez Perils. It was a crisp spring night, with a full moon rising, and these sights served to soothe my mood:

About 3 1/2 hours to tip-off, and I think I’m going to bus down to the sports bar where the local Buckeye alumni are gathering to watch the Men’s NCAA basketball finals. I’m not all that optimistic, but it ain’t over til it’s over! Here’s some martial music from my OSUMB era to whet your appetite for the game:

[audio:BuckeyeMedley.mp3]

Includes a 3-song medley: I’m a Believer, (sorry about) Windy, Hang On Sloopy, plus Fight the Team and Le Regiment (Script Ohio Music).

We’ll be back to our usual level of erudition tomorrow. (cough)

I got one of those calls last night - you know, the kind you dread after a certain age, when neither the clock nor the calendar is your friend.  It came about 8:30, after the deadline for phone solicitations, and that in itself is cause for concern because almost no one calls our land line any more except importuning do-good organizations (we’re on the no-call list for commercial solicitations, and it seems to work!).  Mrs. Perils is usually kind enough to screen these calls for me, but when she walked in and handed me the phone, I knew some discomfort was in the offing.

And I was right.  It was one of my old PHS classmates calling to inform me that our 40th class reunion will be held this year, sometime in early August.  The guy said something about shuffleboard and a half-K marathon.  I’m thinking it might be fun.  The only other HS reunion I’ve attended was the 25th.  This one will more likely be the survivors’ reunion, more “how much do you take (in terms of prescription drugs)?” than “how much do you make?”  And if it’s a dud, I can still have a good visit with my mom.