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It is Friday, which is good, but it needs to be five and it is not, which is bad. I find that I am in desperate need of distractions. I want others to amuse me. I want to be elsewhere. I am just biding my time, trying not to bite my lip or the inside of my cheek, which I sometimes do when I’m nervous, which I sometimes get when I have too little to do. It’s been a difficult week, and I just want to go home, but those thirty minutes to quitting time suddenly seem like forever.

Spring is sprung, de grass is riz.

I wonder where dem boidies is.

I hoid de boid was on de wing. Ain’t dat strange?

I tot de wings was on de boid! — The Goon Show (??)

It seems like every year around this time, winter makes one last-ditch effort to impress us. After days, or weeks, of unexpected warmth, shortsleeved shirts and open windows, the temperature drops and the wind picks up. It’s as if all this time someone, somewhere, has been asleep at the wheel and has only now remembered that March is supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. So we bundle ourselves up, turn the heat back on, and try not to act too surprised when, after a month of almost-spring, it starts snowing again.

I don’t think I’ll ever learn to appreciate central Pennsylvania weather.

Cruciverbalists run amok? The New Yorker has an interesting story about crosswords and the people what love ’em:

Joshua Kosman, a classical-music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is a typical attendee. “The past fifteen years, for me, has been a process of sinking into, codifying, and coming to terms with the fact that this is what I do. That I’m a puzzle guy,” he told me. Then he cut to the chase: “Did you know that Britney Spears has signed a big endorsement deal with Pepsi? That’s right, it’s true, and we are all very happy about it. You see, ‘Pepsi-Cola’ is an anagram of ‘Episcopal’ and ‘Britney Spears’ is an anagram of ‘Presbyterians.’ ” He paused to let this sink in, but my reaction wasn’t quite what he had hoped for. “Yeah, I know,” he said. ” ‘Episcopal’ is singular, and ‘Presbyterians’ is plural. But we take what we can get.”

Found through Arts & Letters Daily.

The music on Dell’s tech support hotline seems to change every time I call, and the uninterrupted ’80s pop of Sunday night — yes, little friends, video killed the radio star — gave way last night to some strange blend of quasi-classical elevator music, interrupted every half-minute with a “thank you for your patience” and “all our representatives are busy helping other customers.” It could have been worse; they could have been playing John Ashcroft’s greatest hits. And I suppose there are worse things to find yourself doing than deleting the contents of your hard drive and then reformatting it, but if there are, I don’t want to know about it. Typing “format c:” and hitting enter is nerve-wracking enough for one evening, thank you very much. I think I managed to salvage the more important files before the big purge, although I lost a lot of digitial photographs and some of the software I need to upload them, and I’ll need to talk to my cable modem provider about what software I need to reinstall from them, since nobody there ever sent me a CD or disk.