I always win

DAY 4: I feel great. Felt great yesterday, too. Hopefully, I'm through the worst of the carb withdrawal. Dr. Dukan says it's all due to the ketones ... in some dieters, the effect can be euphoric. My system has also adjusted in other, um, important ways. Yesterday, I was beginning to feel a bit like Nibbler . You see, I was a day late starting the oat bran component of the diet. In last week's preparatory shopping, I couldn't find a product with milling & sifting properties listed in the book . Being prone to rule-following, I spent most of Saturday morning in a resumed search for oat bran. (It's why my first meal on Saturday was delayed.) From what I can tell by trolling the Web, I'm not alone. More on this in a future post. To summarize: I bought oat bran on Saturday, and "things" are better today. STATISTICS, BEGINNING OF DAY 4 weight 248.6 lbs (no change)

I'm still obsessed with LOLcats . I fight the urge to use kitty pigdin in every e-mail I send. In conversation, I find myself using "LOL" in situations where I want to convey something funny. It's completely out of hand. My embrace of anarchy is limited to the LOLcat grammatical kind. In most other aspects of life, I am a rule follower -- for instance, postal codes . Most of my American friends had never heard of the + 4 before I came along -- and I'm Canadian. As for my Canadian friends, I drive some of them crazy with my insistence upon the proper usage of the Canadian postal code . Did you know that hyphenating a postal code can interfere with scanning equipment, and possibly delay the delivery of mail? It's true . Punctuation should be avoided. Fixed-width fonts should be used. And never use the # sign. NEVER! This brings me to the FSA (forward sortation area) of the Canadian postal code. I want to live here, because it just might be the ...

when waiting for a guy to call, the frequency of trivial/annoying phonecalls from your mother increases your apartment is never cleaner than when you are expecting a second date "I would really like to see you again" translates into "I am going to ignore you for a week" "maybe we could get together on Labour Day for coffee" means "you're a monster; fuck off and die" it's all your fault for proactively following up with a phonecall on the tentative second date day the gods will punish you for viewing the world through refreshed, "I have a second date" eyes there is no such thing as a second date in your reality, so this list is shit

I don't like area code splitting. I think it's the work of the devil. EVIL! EVIL! I have a head for numbers--I remember nearly every phone number I've ever had--and I was pretty good at knowing which major North American cities were served by which area codes. Those days are long-gone. A few years ago, I saw an article in The Atlantic Monthly explaining the origin and planning of area codes. With rotary-dial phones, the easiest area codes to dial were the ones with the least amount of finger travel. Here is a picture of a phone in my office. According to Peter , I use it for "points emergencies." The biggest metropolitan areas were given the best codes. So, New York City got 212, the Los Angeles area got 213, Chicago 312... This of course means that San Francisco (415) was better than Toronto (416), and that Toronto was better than Springfield Missouri (417). * Eventually, area codes were expanded to include zero as a middle digit. Dialing zero on a rot...