No news on the finger front, so you are all spared my tales of digital woe for a day.

It is a pleasantly sunshiney day out there in that big bad Outside place that I have heard so much about. And while I generally remain indoors as much as is feasible, it is still nice to look out my window and see the sun and the clouds and the blue, blue sky.

Right now, Ma Nature is providing a nice show of sky for me, with the top half of my view all cerulean majesty while the bottom half sports a tastefully draped cummerbund of thin, wispy white cloud.

Nature is a bitch, but that bitch knows art.

Today is April Fool’s Day, an occasion about which I have determinedly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I really do not like practical jokes, for the most part. Perhaps it is a part of my decidedly unusual and horseplay-deprived childhood, but practical jokes just seem like socially sanctioned cruelty to me.

Great for people who like to do mean things without the other person being able to get mad.

Like that asshole Ashton Kutcher.

But what I do like about this Day of Fools is the spirit of public silliness that it inspires in normally staid public institutions. I am all for the forms of silliness and jokery in which nobody gets hurt and people just let their hair down and have some fun for a day.

Like take Google’s April Fool’s entry, the Really Advanced Search

Anything which prompts the world’s biggest search engine (and possibly its only one, for all I know or care) to release a search form with entries like “words almost, but not quite entirely unlike”, or “calque or loanword origin” or my favorite, “this exact word or phrase, whose sum of unicode code points is a mersenne prime”, can’t be all bad.

Do not bother trying out some of the more intriguing entries, by the way. No matter what you input, clicking the Submit button just takes you to a Google search page for April Fool’s Day.

That’s too bad, because I was really intrigued by the prospect of being able to look up Cockney rhyming slang. That shit is confusing.

I wasfeeling pretty depressed earlier. Got feeling overwhelmed and inadequate and small and helpless and lame and pathetic and all the rest of the demon choir chiming in. So I summoned up all my courage, looked my problems square in the eye, and went the hell back to sleep.

That will show them.

And what the hell, it worked. I went to sleep feeling freaked out and desperate and trapped and bad bad bad, and I woke up feeling a lot better.

Sometimes, my best option is to just go to sleep and spin the mood wheel again. Sad but true,

I have been feeling more anxious and depressed lately. Obviously, this is primarily because of my health concerns. Being sick for a long time, especially in a gross and horrifying way, would make anyone feel kind of down. And when like me, down is your default position, it is no wonder that I have been feeling worse than usual lately.

But I also wonder if it has to do with my relatively recent lowering of Paxil dosage. Having a major long term stressor and a lowering of antidepressant dosage happen at the same time is probably a bad thing. But that is just the kind of thing life pulls on the likes of me. It never throws challenges or life events at me one at a time. Oh no. It is like rain in the desert… most of the time, there is nothing, but when it does rain, it’s Biblical.

This prevents me from ever getting used to it. It’s like psychological torture.

But what the hell. What does not kills us merely makes us a miserable wreck of the shadow of a human being. I trudge merrily forward through the sewage of my life.

On happier news, I came across this article about some simply breathtaking pictures taken of life in London in the 19th century.

Specifically, the 1870s. Photographer John Thompson set out with writer Adolphe Smith to document London life as it was at that time, and they made record of the images and stories of over 700 people. Each photograph was accompanied by a caption (presumable, that was the writer’s job) that summed up the information about that person.

Check out this one, presented with original caption. Click to enlarge :

Well, part of the original caption anyhow.

The clarity is startling. Either John Thompson was a photographer ahead of his time, or there has been some digital help in sharpening the image. Either way, for those who love that feeling of time travel one gets from history, this is mind popping stuff. It is like you are standing right there on the street in London of the day, but without the smell.

Oh, and one last thing I should tell you about before I go : Cooking with Poo.

Go on, I dare ya to click it!

Turns out, it is merely a cookbook written by Tha chef Saiyuud Diwong whose nickname is Poo – which is Thai for “crab”.

Well that settles it. If I ever have a pet crab, I am naming it Winnie. Winnie the… you get the idea.

Did I say Cockney rhyming slang was complicated? Maybe I was thinking of my own sense of humour.

Well, that is all for today. I mostly avoided talking about my gross zombie finger, and I am proud of that. I shared some fun stuff with you nice people, and I am proud of that too.

Because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.