What's everyone up to right now?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Boru

[Rev. Rye]

Guess what finally came in the mail?



And it sounds exactly as good as I thought it would.

And now here it is in the pedalboard:



And today, I finally went to Ross to get a replacement belt. And I managed to find a full grain leather belt in my size for $8 (Axist brand.) And a canvas for backup.

[fredd bear]

Well,I just took my 92 yr old mum into town to have some new hearing aids fitted. By ' Access cab'. Bloody fantastic, they just load her into the back, wheel chair and all. Cheap too. Because mum is deemed to be a war widow, she gets a lot of stuff (such as the hearing aids) either free or very cheap; EG 50% off cab fares.

[Jackalope]

House is painted, it looks amazing and I got a hell of a deal IMO.

[WolfsChild]

i was building a treadmill just finished dinner now sitting on the sofa looking at what music to listen to

[*Deidre*]

I'm having a late lunch. How are ya'll doing?

[EgoDeath]

I'm getting ready to go out for the night. It's Friday and I have the whole weekend with nothing to do. Debauchery might ensue.

[Rev. Rye]

When I was at Columbia working on Prose Forms, my tutor noticed one major thread in my autobiographical work: understanding. I really want to know what the Hell is going on in the world, whether it's why humanity seems to be hurtling itself towards oblivion or why people don't like it when you wear hats in public places.

The weekend after 9/11, a mysterious man came into a motel near Seattle. He signed the guestbook "Lyle Stevik." There's no way in hell that was his real name because A) the name was the same as a character from a Joyce Carol Oates novel, and B) the man looked like a Latino version of Montgomery Clift - post car crash. On Monday, his body was found; he had hanged himself with his belt. He left no clues to his identity. Even the address he gave was to a Best Western in Iowa where nobody knew who he was. And in the intervening years, a group of people all over the Internet combed all the available evidence to figure out who this man really was. But for 16 1/2 years, people pulled out theories out of their asses (including a claim that he was one of the hijackers who didn't go through with the attacks), yet they still spent a lot of time trying to suss out the mystery; my personal theory was that he was a brilliant lad, possibly a med student, who had a nervous breakdown, dropped out of college, and eventually, he embarked on a path led him to that Washington motel room.





Eventually, they managed to raise the money to have someone analyse the DNA that still remained and managed to find a match to a family living in New Mexico. And then, it was announced that a match had been found, with a family with the same genetic markers who just happened to have had a son go missing around the same time Lyle killed himself, but, unfortunately, his family refused to release his name. The community was divided between those who wanted to respect the family's wishes and those who wanted their own closure on this mystery. Apparently, months after the announcement, someone managed to figure out Lyle Stevik's name, and some details about his life. Allow me to be completely unambiguous: I will not give you his real name (or at least the name they latched onto.) If you absolutely must know, a few minutes of Googling might trawl it up. However, there are some details I discovered that I am comfortable with sharing because they're evocative, but not identifying: he went to a pretty famous college and studied computers, and was a pretty good pupil. Unfortunately, at some point before he would have graduated, he had some scuffles with the law, being charged six times in two years. I do not know what crimes he was charged with because the court records site did not explain them. That said, this was in a state with a three-strikes law, so it's not likely these were felonies, or he probably wouldn't have been able to leave the state and may very well still be in jail.

At one point, I managed to stumble upon one of those background check sites, and I tried to take what I knew about Lyle's true identity and see if I could get a report. And then, while it was compiling information, one important question popped into my head:





Seriously, the man's family decided that they wanted to keep his identity a secret for a reason. It's not clear, but given that the people who've studied his life have linked him to 9/11, and that the man's autopsy/crime scene photos are all over the web, and how, apparently, there's a fear that some people might harass his surviving relatives (which apparently also happened to the parents of another unidentified dead girl who was recently identified.) And here I am trying to dig up dirt on him? Trying to figure out what bad things he did to get cited by the courts? This guy I had come to consider a Seymour Glass figure with some sort of prestigious potential and a face like Montgomery Clift whose potential fizzled out in a Washington motel just under the coat rack with a tower of pillows to hide his death throes? Maybe I should just chalk up whatever legal troubles he had to the sort of mental troubles that led him to that room. Maybe I should just follow Iris Dement's advice:

[Jackalope]

Just scored tickets and backstage passes to Trae Crowder.

[Angrboda]

Eating some Tom Klong flavored noodles for breakfast. Resetting the new posts pointers here so I can come back tomorrow without a zillion unread posts outstanding. I haven't been around in a while. I've got a trip to the library and a meetup on critical thinking this afternoon. And then this evening after a little relaxing, I'll run down to the Mall Of American to pick up a package at the Amazon lockers down there. That should give me just enough time to get my reading done for today. (The light rail trip is 30 minutes long one way.)