Saturday, July 12, 2008

Mastication

Last night was a night of serious discussions about the importance of mastication. It all started with four of us in a SUV on the way to a sex toy shop, after dinner. Miriam was offering gum for the purpose of mastication. She's all, "Ya'no, that [masticate] is latin for `to chew'". Secretly, I knew it is actually English based on the latin word and I now know that it was derived from Greek, but I digress.

At that point, it was the word of the evening. Almost every other sentence made reference to mastication. We discussed the woes of over-mastication, including the threat of blindness. Also, the dangers of deprivation from under-mastication were brought up. Someone mentioned that mastication should be done in private, while another extolled the virtues of doing it openly in public.

Later in the evening, we relaxed at this other restaurant at an outdoors table. I'm masticating my second piece of gum for the night. I ordered Coke, and immediately realized I needed to demasticate it. The napkins where the fancy reusable ones, so I couldn't expel my gum there. Cor suggested that I demasticate it under the table, then he preceded to look under to see if others had already thought of this (and they had...yuk). In the end, the waiter brought out some restroom paper towels. I demasticated rapidly, to the amusement of both Cor and Miriam.

I can say that it was an evening filled with a healthy and open discussion regarding mastication. Someone should did a public service announcement on TV about masticating. Oh wait, they have!

Monday, July 07, 2008

Testing the Publishing Waters

Here's my start at writing and publishing on Amazon for the Kindle and Mobipocket for Palms and such:

Amazon: My Start as a publisher

Mobipocket: My books so far for Palm

Written times

Writing isn't coming easy to me right now. It's not for any particular reason, just that I've been doing a lot of it. Not on this blog obviously, but in other venues. So, even now there's nothing really on my mind. I mean, I had another pretty good weekend and all, but reading though my past entries, I find that I talk a lot about weekends. I don't think I will stop. Just not in the mode today for that. Other topics that interest me are being covered in other areas, such as my SolidWorks Legion website. It's been taking of much of my writing energy. Even now, I'm have a couple of article projects that are waiting to be penned on that site.

At this point, I'm mostly rambling, but then again, that's what a journal is for sometimes. As I write in this blog over time, I've discovered things about myself, and my writing style. I talk about myself a lot, but that's a given since this is about me. Also, I tend to write in contrasts. I'll make a statement, then mitigate or offset it with a "but". I wonder how many "buts" I've writing, not just on this blog, but in all my works, and even in my daily speech. As someone famous once said, "But, there be no buts." Not true here.

That's really all the thoughts I have today, other than to say this is likely one of the few truly personal thoughts diary-like posting I've ever made on this blog. Well the inner thoughts be surfacing here? Hmm...